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“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
-Pablo Picasso.
I saw this (Ma Jolie – Pablo Picasso) at the Indianapolis Museum of Art this week.
I read the quote.
I like things that are thinking, not seeing. I like to ponder the reason of these shades of green.
Congratulations this week to Ethel Rohan whose remarkable short story collection (yes, I’ve read it suckas) Cut Through The Bone, will be published in December 2010 by Dark Sky Books. This is richly deserved and when the book is available for pre-order, you will want to get on that. There’s more Ethel:  her  stark yet moving Basophilia graces Divine Dirt Quarterly and she has another  story at Night Train. You may also recall that we are publishing a book of hers, Hard to Say, in 2011.
Congratulations, also, to all the PANK contributors who will be serving on panels at AWP in 2011. E-mail us and let us know what you’re doing so we can put together an awesome PANK writers cheat sheet for the Writer Prom, I mean, conference.
American Short Fiction’s Mr. August is Gabe Durham, with three more fun camp shorts.
Aaron Burch’s How to Predict the Weather is now available for pre-sale from Keyhole Press. Get this book.
At Everyday Genius, the luminous Scott Mclanahan’s The Football Bastards. Read this, immediately, then come back here. Also, though, check out Melissa Broder’s Mail in the same magazine.
On the Clock: Contemporary Short Stories of Work is now available and includes stories from Matthew Salesses, Matt Bell, Sean Lovelace, Tania Hershman, Nick Kocz, and Steve Himmer. You can order the anthology here.
It’s the beginning of the month which means new issues. In decomP, Alexandra Isacson, and Eugenia Tsutsumi.
The Nashville Review includes Tasha Matsumoto.
Celebrity is the focus of the new issue of The Northville Review which includes writing from Greg Gerke, Steve Himmer, Corey Mesler, Garrett Socol, and Melanie Browne. Garrett also has a story in Drunken Boat 12 where he is joined by Chris Tarry, Eric Bennett, Bruce Cohen,
Kill Author will kill you so damn good. That magazine’s assassins this month include Jennifer Spiegel, Andrew Roe, Rae Bryant, Lauren Becker, and Sheldon Lee Compton.
The August issue of elimae includes JA Tyler, Ryan Ridge and Barry Graham. Really though, you want to read the whole issue, and especially the essay by Tiff Holland that is extraordinary and Gravity by Ryan Griffith.
Kirsty Logan instructs on How to Be a Writer (Part 1) at Metazen. She also writes on Beauty at Annalemma.
Noah, by JA Tyler, is part of Staccato Fiction. He is followed by Katie Jean Shinkle with her story Alfresco.
The August issue of Hobart is pretty damn good and includes fiction from the one and only Lauren Becker whose story will make you recall, fondly, late night excursions to Walgreen’s and Kristine Ong Muslim.
Issue 34 of Right Hand Pointing includes poems by Sheldon Lee Compton. He also has work at Fried Chicken and Coffee, Fractured West, and The Linnet’s Wings. Also in the debut issue of Fractured West, you’ll find a story by Kyle Hemmings. That magazine, by the way, is co-edited by our very own Kirsty Logan. We’re quite excited about this magazine and you should be too.
Jason Jordan is interviewed by Ravi Mangla at Recommended Reading. Jason also has a book out soon called Cloud and Other Stories. You can buy it at Amazon.
Are you reading Third Face? Do you like demolition derbies? Read something magnificent by xTx.
The year is 1567 for Brandi Wells.
Issue 6 of The Lumberyard is dedicated, in its entirety, to Nickolas Butler, a forthcoming contributor.
Aaron Burch is interviewed by BL Pawelek for Flatmancrooked and he talks HTTYA, HTMYA.
Capture, Escape by Rae Bryant is up at Willows Wept Review, which has a new home.
Hulkster Mel Bosworth has some manly fiction at Bull.
In the new issue of DOGZPLOT flash fiction, Shannon Peil has a little story about good clean fun. Or something.
Michelle Menting climbs in Ascent with her poem Soundtrack for Fall & Forgetting.
Forthcoming contributor Annam Manthiram has a story in the Camroc Press Review.
Hush by Meg Pokrass is featured this week at Bananafish.
The Smell of Money is the subject of Elisa Gabbert’s column at Open Letters.
David LaBounty’s poem Commission is up at Clutching at Straws.
Ryan Bradley’s poem, Bare Knuckles, will change your life.
From ages six through 13, I spent most summer days at my father’s garage in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He purchased the place from his family in the late 80s, and there wasn’t much to do at C. Pane Body Shop for a dorky young boy. I was too small to help my father actually work and no matter what I did, I inevitably ended up oil-coated and dirty, much to the continual annoyance of my mother. My partner in crime was my dad’s guard dog, a German Shepherd named Max who absolutely adored me. We used to play in the back lot and his chief trick was picking up a spare tire in his jaw and running back and forth across the gravel, kicking up dust clouds in his wake. In winter-time he’d repeat the trick, only with the added danger of frozen puddles and oil slicks. But my favorite thing to do with Max was run up to one of my dad’s buddies and cry out in mock pain–then Max would flip out, start barking, and chase the old geezer down. The thing about my dad’s shop was there was always people there, my dad’s buddies and especially my deceased grandfather’s pals, Scrantonian old timers who talked my ear off. These guys paid me special attention, asked me how school was going, who I liked in NASCAR—I said the rainbow warrior Jeff Gordon just to piss everybody off—and would take me with them in their beater trucks to pick up lunch for my dad and all the other C. Pane regulars. There was even an annual Christmas party where my dad cooked deer stew right there in front of the frame rack and served everybody on folding tables and chairs.
What I loved about those old guys is that they never dumbed down their conversations for me. They spoke like adults. They called people out. They cursed. They spat. They scratched themselves. And it was here I first learned to really appreciate dialogue, how people all sound unique. I never said much. I’d mess around with a floor jack and listen, soak it all in, let the music of their grizzled old voices wash over me.
Sometimes my dad gave me tasks. I never got to work on the cars—except one time when I clumsily took apart a bumper—and instead was given all the crap jobs, pulling weeds and painting walls. The worst was one summer when my dad showed me a pile of rocks, handed me a shovel, and told me to turn it into a hole. A few days later, when I finally finished, he nodded approvingly and told me to fill it back up. At the time, I wanted to chuck the shovel at him and tell him to go to hell. But now, it’s clear that this was all part of his strategy to make me hate the garage so I’d never get sucked in like he did and end up working with my hands, something my parents made it clear they were against.
When I wasn’t working—which was most times—I holed up in one of the customer’s cars and read. I tore through the entire collection of Bruce Coville books, pulpy things about island kids trying to build artificial intelligence or precocious young boys abducted by aliens to decide the fate of the human race. When that got boring, I played the revamped Donkey Kong on GameBoy. When I got older, I spent most days writing short stories or drawing comics. But for the most part, I’d wander around the garage and the lot outside, Max trotting by my side, and play out stories in my head. It was the first real time I thought I was training for something, training to spend an inordinate amount of time in my own mind with fabricated characters.
My father’s selling the garage this month. He’s moved onto a new career with Defense Services Two painting vehicles for the government, and soon I’ll be returning to Scranton to help him clear the garage out. I’m glad for the time I spent there: I got to be with my dad, read a ton, write a ton, learn the way honest working people talked. Like most only children, I hated not having somebody my own age to pal around with during those hot summer days at the garage. But now I see how vital they were in preparing me for long days spent in front of the computer with nothing but Microsoft Word and my often distracted imagination. The garage was where I first figured out that people could live inside their own minds. It was where I first began to consider what it meant to be a writer.
I recently read a statistic (from a source I have since misplaced and so can’t cite here) stating that Los Angeles has the highest percentage of freelance, temporary, and contract workers of any city in the country. Â While this is a vague and uncited statistic, it fits with my impression of L.A., that work of many kinds here is improvisational, provisional, hard to define and hard to depend on. Â Certainly of all the many places I’ve lived, Los Angeles is the one where a restaurant is just as likely to be full on a Tuesday morning as on a Saturday afternoon.
“Don’t you people have jobs?” I often fume to myself as I look for parking at the shopping mall on a weekday afternoon, all the while conceding that I too am a freelancer, and I too run errands at two o’ clock on a Wednesday.
The advantages of freelancing (or rather, of working from home, something not all freelancers do) are many and obvious: no commute, no dress code, no cubicle.  But one of the disadvantages is a lack of community.  Though this always comes out utterly trite at job interviews, it’s true: my favorite thing about all my past jobs has been my coworkers.  I liked talking with them, joking and commiserating with them, gossiping about them after they quit or were fired.  I liked after-work drinks, company Christmas parties, and sad little office birthday cakes.  Coworkers are a sort of second family, if often a dysfunctional one.  Freelancing is lonely.  Most of my “coworkers” are virtual ones, often hundreds or thousands of miles away, in many cases people I have never met face-to-face.
It is for that reason (among others) that I do almost all my work from coffee shops. Â Or specifically, from a pool of two or three coffee shops where I am a regular, where I see the same freelancers and their laptops every day, where I check in much as I used to do at the office, to ask how someone else’s script is going, or how their website is shaping up, or whether they’ve heard back from their agent. Â Without a real office, these non-traditional workers and I have nonetheless built a community.
The coffee shop that I go to the most often is a Starbucks. Â I support local businesses as much as I can, and there are several local coffee shops I love: Intelligentsia in Silver Lake for its outstanding coffee; Swork in Eagle Rock for its friendly vibe and demarcated free-for-all children’s play corral. Â But Swork and Intelligentsia are a drive away, and Starbucks is only a very short walk, so Starbucks wins out more often than not.
My local coffee shop and its staff are major parts of my life.  It was the first place I took my new baby outside of the house.  I make everyone who works there fudge for Christmas.  They know my order and have it all written out on the cup before I have to say a word, and they know my husband’s too (though not his name, leaving them to mark our cups rather charmingly as “Summer” and “Summer’s Husband”Â).  They ask after my daughter Beatrice when she isn’t with me, remember my parents from their frequent visits, and notice when I’ve been out of town.  I’m friends with most of the staff — even Facebook friends with one barista whose son is a little older than my daughter and who dispenses been-there, done-that advice on teething along with my iced lattes.
In the way that vines overrun a concrete wall, the neighborhood has reclaimed the Starbucks, turning what was once a generic chain store into an authentic community hub. Â I’ve overheard job interviews, conference calls, and more than once, what sounded like a sales pitch for a pyramid scheme. Â There are also families, students, and a group of about a dozen elderly Armenian men who sit on the patio all day playing backgammon.
(One time I arrived at Starbucks on my way out of town shortly after their 5:00am opening time.  “I must be your first customer,” I said to the barista.  “No, they were here waiting for me to open the doors when I get in in the morning,” she said, indicating the backgammon players.)
Like coworkers, my fellow customers are a heterogeneous group that was randomly assigned to me through proximity and it is through proximity that I have come to enjoy seeing them every day.
Now that I am considering moving to a different neighborhood in Los Angeles, I have started feeling sentimental about my local coffee shop. Â Of course I’m only planning on moving a few miles away, but Starbucks is sufficiently ubiquitous that there will be maybe a dozen closer venues than the one I currently think of as my office. Â Happily, as L.A. is a city of freelance workers building communities on the fly, I’m sure I’ll find another thriving professional coffee shop scene wherever I go.
–by Tracy Lucas
Because you know you have to know.
There are lots of publishers out there with some nauseating stuff, but we’re not talking about Elmo or (god forbid) Spongebob paperbacks and coloring books.
So sick of those. Ugh.
Anyhow, not them.
No, what we’re discussing today, boys and girls, are some supremely messed up, real-life books for kids. These books exist. They are not photoshopped gags–I checked.
Most are even available on Amazon.
First, I give you Bedtime Stories Gone Awry, featuring such awesome titles as I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, The House that Crack Built, and Does God Love Michael’s Two Daddies? for starters. (And um, no, they boldly predict He doesn’t. Of course. Barf.)
In a similar vein, check out 12 Bizarre Books You Won’t Buy. It’s hilarious. Personally, I think my favorite title has to be It Hurts When I Poop… though Where Willy Went: The Big Story of a Little Sperm is a close second.
But don’t just take my word for it. (Cue Levar with some bad-ass synthesizer music. Sport that banana-clip, Gordie!)
Check out those two links above, because there is cover art to be seen. Oh, yes there is. Some if it you can’t unsee.
Incidentally, researching for this post has quite inspired me. I mean, if people will buy this crap, what wouldn’t they shell out good money for?
I’m browsing this list for my next bestseller. (Okay, it’s the first. But who’s counting? I’m only joking a little bit. Watch for me soon with a picture book at your local Barnes & Noble.) Sample nuggets from the list include You Were an Accident, Grandpa Gets a Casket, Some Kittens Can Fly!, and How to Become the Dominant Military Power in Your Elementary School.
And if you’re still not quite disgusted/amused enough (you’re not!?), check out Cracked’s version of books that should–but thankfully, don’t–exist. And believe me, they get rough. You’ve been duly warned, you sick puppies, you.
Click on the covers to buy.
Congratulations to Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz who is the recipient of the 2010-2011 ArtsEdge Residency at the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania. Aptowicz plans to use the ArtsEdge residency to work on a non-fiction book about the life and times of Thomas Dent Mutter, founder of the Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum. This is a well-deserved recognition and we cannot wait to read that book.
There is a massive double issue for the 28th issue of Smokelong Quarterly featuring Jenn Gann, Kyle Hemmings, David LaBounty, Michelle Reale, Laura Ellen Scott, Eugenia Tsutstumi, and last but not ever least, xTx. There also interviews with these writers and you can find links on the front page. David also has work in Four Paper Letters.
Teresa Milbrodt has a fine, fine story up at Guernica.
Tender Buttons, a collaborative work including PANK contributors Amy McDaniel, Reynard Seifert, Eric Beeny, and Desmond Kon, is up at Titular.
At Sleep Snort Fuck, Shannon Peil muses. There’s also a great little thing from Ani Smith.
James Tadd Adcox offers good reasons for biking in Chi-town. Tadd’s The Artificial Mountain was also shortlisted for 2010 DIAGRAM chapbook contest.
The tenth installment of You Must Be This Tall to Ride includes a story by Andrew Roe.
1565 is the year in question for J. Bradley.
Nick Kocz is included in Pedestal 58.
The first chapter of Shane Jones’s The Failure Six is live at Dark Sky. In their weekly interview feature, Ethel Rohan interviews Matthew Salesses.
A new piece of Craigslist fiction by Ben White is up at Staccato Fiction. He also has a story in the Thirsty First Bird Review and you can buy the debut issue of that magazine here.
Five shorts from Gabe Durham are up at Monkeybicycle.
Excerpts from The New Adventures of Harriet The Spy by Jen Michalski is up at This Zine Will Change Your Life.
The debut issue of Rick Magazine (formerly The Mississippi Review Online) includes work from Clay Matthews and Meg Pokrass.
JP Dancing Bear has poetry at Improbable Object as part of a pre-launch for Intersections. Got it? Good.
Are you reading the fine fictions William Walsh is posting to Necessary Fiction?
In the first Funny Women short at The Rumpus, Summer Block shares some e-mail from Lorin Stein.
Bonnie ZoBell writes about the Tin House writing workshop.
Foxes, the story not the movie, by CL Bledose at the Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette.
Robb Todd writes about traveling to Nicaragua for the New York Daily News.
Union Station Magazine features two poems from Ocean Vuong.
Trapeze Magazine interviews Desmond Kon.
“Tell me there will be beaches in my future.”
Peter Schwartz, “Tell Me”
There are so many ideas that come to mind with this line. Some linear, some not so much.
– my wife and I will have out beach house one day on the Pacific
– I have never really lost anyone close to me. When it happens, I am sure it will be crushing.
– There is a line from a Radiohead song … “Maybe you’ll be president and know right from wrong.” I tear up when I hear it and think of my kids.
and while we are talking about futures … “My future’s so bright …” but this is horribly dark.
I read a tweet a few weeks ago that “most people who claim to be at the cutting edge have no idea where the cutting edge even is”Â, so it’s always interesting to check out things that claim to be new and exciting to see just how original they are.
Philistine Press claims its works are like nothing else. Rob Sherman’s  Valve Works is a collection of poems, each one about a part of the body and accompanied by a beautiful woodblock-style steampunky drawing of the part in question by artist Sarah Ogilvie. Given the title, I was expecting the body parts all to be membranes or places of exchange, which they generally are (though the big toe sneaks in as an extremity).  The poems themselves give little sense of being about exchange or permeability, the flow in and out of the body of, well, stuff, whatever that stuff may be.  Which is even odder given the introduction that proclaims, like a manifesto of human sensual existence:
We are like chimpanzees struck by lightning, gazing in smoking wonder at our throbbing erections, struggling to hold the words we want in our recessed brains, but, in the end, just wanting to fuck something… to discharge the electricity.
Rabble-rousing stuff, promising a fascinating entry into the body-morphology cannon that includes J G Ballard, Jeanette Winterson, David Cronenberg and no end of contemporary Japanese art and cinema. Not to mention at least two generations of theorists who claim that when we write we are simply recreating our bodies on the page, so that when we write actually about bodies we are holding up all kinds of interesting mirrors to ourselves and the societies of which we are part, carefully dissecting ourselves to reveal how much we are prisoners of our desires.
So I was surprised when I started reading the poems themselves by how playful they were. Playful and rather fun, picking up the cheeky humour at the very end of the introduction rather than the politics of the rest of it.
The poems take the form of addresses (elegies, odes — it’s all very Keatsian) from Sherman to his body parts, in which he outlines the role that each plays in his life through various metaphors and similes. To his heart he says:
You look like a dog’s head, panting, repeating noise
Whilst to his teeth he proclaims
You are a display case of flint tools and iron arrowheads,
A doddery, crooked, Easter Island of relics,
There is no doubting Sherman’s deftness with language nor the tightness of this collection. This is most definitely not a selection of poems thrown together; it is an author looking at the parts that make up himself, one by one, examining each with an identical eye (which sees, as he notes in a wonderfully acute phrase “but all through water”Â).
And this is how, I can’t help thinking, this collection should have been packaged. It is wistful, nostalgic, intimate, tinged with the deep sadness and realisation of approaching old age. It’s Alan Bennett, it’s Prufrock, it’s Prospero throwing away his books. But it’s NOT Ballard or Cronenberg or Tetsuo. Likewise the artwork is old, it’s drawn like woodcuts from a 19th century how-to book. Which is another strand of slight confusion. Each poem is surtitled with a quotation from a medical dictionary, making it clear this is in the grand tradition of how-to books and encyclopedias. This is possibly the most interesting (and it’s very interesting) point Sherman has to make — that we love to look outside ourselves for self-knowledge, even when what we’re looking for knowledge of is inside. But it does muddy the waters again as to what Sherman THINKS he is doing. Â Which wouldn’t matter if it was clear that he wasn’t actually thinking anything but was simply putting things down on the page and letting us draw our own meaning — but the introduction dispels that.
All in all, Â Valve Works is a very good collection of poems by a very talented poet, accompanied by exquisite illustrations. But it should be happy to be that, because it is most definitely not at the cutting edge of body writing. Compare it, for example, to Marc Nash’s Feed Tube, with its strung out lines and pools of words simulating the membranes and real and artificial tubes through which a heroin-addicted mother slowly poisons her child.
I have to add that I like what Philistine Press are setting out to do. Bringing writing to the public that the mainstream would not, and doing it for free through ebook technology, is something I believe in completely, and am trying to do with Year Zero. What Philistine possibly need to learn, though, is that there is a wealth of brilliant material out there failed by the mainstream — work like this — but very little of it is cutting edge. But the fact that most of it is not cutting edge is nothing at all to be ashamed of. Much better to package it for what it is.
–
–by Tracy Lucas
Sending my kid to daycare by himself that first day was hard.
I could easily have shouted directions at the (very capable) teachers for longer than the school day.
How were they going to know what he meant by his nonsense syllables? What if they cut his food the wrong size? Would he go to sleep for them without a fight when they didn’t know the phrases we use to get him settled? If he choked on his lunch, would they snatch him up in time or be distracted by the roomful of other kids?
What if he came home with a bruise, and I didn’t know how it had gotten there, and we ended up in the emergency room with some kind of internal hemorrhage?
Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch. Doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.
And I wholly trusted this daycare. It’s the only one in town, out of twenty or so contenders, that my husband and I felt at peace with in the first place.
But I had created this kid from scratch. That’s a hard feeling to explain to someone who doesn’t have children, but that’s what happened. I married a guy, and just because we did the dirty one particular night, an entire person popped into existence.
This micro-person couldn’t do anything at first. I always thought that babies were nonverbal and slow to walk, but could pretty much do everything else. Unh-uh.
We had to show him not to scratch his eyes out with his little baby fingernails. We had to help him poop a couple of times. (Trust me; you do NOT want to know.) We even had to teach him to swallow; anytime we fed him pureed whatever, he would open his mouth in shock at the new texture and let it all dribble down his slimy, drooly little neck.
And apparently, for the longest time, and we’re talking months, babies don’t have enough motor control to grasp. To grasp! I didn’t know that going in. All the pictures of the infant tenderly curling her fingers around the mama bear’s pinky? Well, yeah, happens occasionally. Hanging on to things that are useful? Nope. Not this baby. He would fly into a violent rage in hopes of procuring his pacifier (we call it a “plug” at my house) and alerting us that it had gone missing. Most of the time, we found it. In his hand.
Many of our early conversations went like this:
Me: “Here ya go, buddy. Hang on to it this time.”
Him: (greedy sucking-sucking-slobber-slobber)
Me: “Let’s just go over here and see if…”
Him: (caterwauling like a buckshot banshee)
Me: “Oh my God, calm down, it’s okay. Where’d it go? What happened?”
Him: (screaming, puffing, huffing, choking, red, pissed, raging psychobaby)
Me: (frantic pacing, tearing apart couch cushions, head verging on combustion)
Him: “AAEEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEaaaGGGHHHooooAAEE!!”
Husband: “What’s his problem? What are you doing to the pillow stuffing and the cat?”
Me: (crying, sure of my failure as a parent) “WHERE IS THE FUCKING PLUG?! HELP ME!”
Husband: “Um. Yeah. It’s in his left hand again, goober.”
At least, that’s how I remember it.
We literally taught this child everything. He came out as a GI tract with attitude, and we worked on him daily until he turned into the walking, talking, dangerously adorable, smartass, veritable child that he is today.
It was baffling to think of dropping him off for eight hours and let someone else be me. Because that’s what it was; it wasn’t that I didn’t think other folks had cool things to show him, it was that the daycare workers were my real-world replacements. They were going to do everything I was used to doing for him, and it was guaranteed they weren’t going to do it my way. There’s no way they could! They had only known him for mere hours, and now I had no choice but to trust them to keep him alive and return him in safe condition.
He was going to have experiences I couldn’t fill him in about later, and memories of things I had never seen. He was going to fall and I wouldn’t be able to reach him; he’d get comfort elsewhere. He was going to learn words I didn’t teach him, try snacks I hadn’t made him. I was going to miss some major firsts.
He was going to live without me.
That’s the real fear for any parent; that our child will do just fine on his own, exactly as we’ve intentionally raised him to.
Releasing a piece to an editor is not so altogether different.
We want to send a five-page cover letter explaining that Mom isn’t really like that, it’s just a piece of fiction, and by the way, we were drunk when the piece was written, so if some things sound a bit stupid, please be gentle. We want to qualify our work with bio credits and educational abbreviations, and make sure editors know we are the experts we pretend to be.
We know our writing better than anyone else ever could.
We were there the day it came into being, and we know the thousand other ways the ending could have gone, the phrase we didn’t pick but almost did, the names and where they came from, why they mattered. We want to qualify our decisions, so the editor will see things our way and make them the way we would.
It takes an editor two seconds to delete a line you made with your blood.
You send off a poem or a story and hope for publisher approval, but what you really want is just that: flat approval, not criticism or reworking. You want it to be the best, most perfect thing ever and to wow the publisher in charm and wit. After all, if it wasn’t perfect, you didn’t send it, right?
It’s hard to let others show up out of the blue and insert themselves. The piece changes. It’s almost always an improvement, if you can look at it objectively, but of course you can’t (well, not without some serious practice.)
The problem with change? Even when changed well, things which are changed are never the same. That’s so obvious, so self-defining to say, yet we fight the concept all the way. It’s a hard thing to step up and be edited, and I’m not gonna lie, it hurts to take your hands back off of something you’ve fashioned from clay. Sometimes a lot.
But is the piece—is my baby—better for it in the end?
If you’ve done your job well, it’ll stand. If I’ve taught my kid enough about how the world works, he’ll make do and form his own relationships with the new folks. It’s the broader sphere the writing/child has to exist in, not the creator’s own.
Yes, letting go is hard as hell. It’s terrifying.
But that boy came home from daycare yesterday singing “Wheels on the Bus”, which I’ve never taught him; talking about Dora, which we’ve never watched; and asking for marshmallows, which I’ve never fed him for fear of choking.
And he was smiling all the way.