Category Archives: Jendi’s Fiction

“Waiting for the Train to Fort Devens” Now Online at The Rose & Thorn


My flash fiction piece “Waiting for the Train to Fort Devens, June 17, 1943”, is now online in the Winter 2010 issue of The Rose & Thorn, a quarterly journal of literature and art. This story was inspired by an archival photo of young men from Western Massachusetts going off to World War II, republished in the Florence Savings Bank calendar. The photo’s owner, Sharon Matrishon, whose father is featured in the image, kindly allowed us to reprint it on The Rose & Thorn page. Here’s the opener:

This photograph was taken right before forty boys turned into soldiers. In fairy tales, transformations are sudden, painless. Seven brothers lift up their white arms in unison and become swans. Forty comical thieves peek out of fat-bellied oil jars. But these forty men waiting for the train to Fort Devens will have a long way to go before they all become the same.

They line up, as if for a yearbook portrait, beneath the slatted wooden balcony of the old Bay State Hotel, which must have been a cheap hotel because its front porch is only a dozen feet from the railroad tracks. A place for salesmen and card sharps, or girls who thought they needed to make a quick getaway from their parents’ sleepy fireside. Some of these boys might have taken a girl to the Bay State Hotel after a night of confused carousing, hooked up by an elder brother who offered a knowing wink that both annoyed and excited them. Some of these boys have never had the opportunity, and are distracting themselves from thoughts of German bullets by imagining the grateful softness of French girls in a farmhouse where a single candle burns in a wine bottle. These boys kissed Mary Sue or Ethel in the back seat at the drive-in and promised to wait for her, and she might have unhooked her bra even though she knew waiting was powerless against male hormones and the U.S. government.

…

In other writing news, my prose-poem “Possession” won the 2009 Robert J. DeMott Short Prose Prize from the journal Quarter After Eight. My poem “What Dora Said to Agnes” (a feminist response to David Copperfield) tied for third place in the 2009 Caesura Poetry Contest. Caesura is the literary journal of the Poetry Center San José.

Fiction: “Bride of Christ”

My short story “Bride of Christ”, an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, was published earlier this year by Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression, and has now been released for reprinting below. Here’s the beginning:

Brides under archways of creamy white flowers. Black and white at the ballroom window, in soft cinematic light, pressing a pensive hand to the rain-streaked glass. Ballerina blondes, black prom queens who wore their ambitions as tastefully as a string of pearls, but also the average girls, those normally afflicted with plump torsos and ethnic noses, now lavished with the same beautician’s care, grateful for their single day of admission to the pantheon. A democracy of brides. And what of their accessories, the grooms? Banished to the back pages, in the cheesy honeymoon-suite ads. Whatever the magazine, the progression was as scripted as the parade of dignitaries at a coronation. First the gowns, then the housewares, then the mothers and girlfriends in their coordinated pastels, and finally the happy couple taking a bubble bath in a giant champagne glass in the Poconos.

It was a ready-to-wear fairy tale Laura Sue Selkirk could share with her students at Greenbriar Academy, the boarding school where she’d worked as a guidance counselor for the last five years. Some instinct in them ran deeper than the cheerleaders’ rhinestone Playboy belts or the bookworms’ genderless flannels. Girls were girls. The genes said babies and wedding cake, and you denied them at your peril. How different from the models in Julian’s magazines, stacked on the other side of her coffee table, which until recently had been the main object of her girls’ fascination. The women her brother photographed for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar were hard, untouchable beauties. They drifted from Rome to New Orleans with no ballast. They never smiled, as the brides did, in anticipation of a future where they wouldn’t be the only one in the picture.

Read the entire story as a PDF here.  

Cyclamens and Swords Journal Launched, Another Novel Chapter Published


Israeli poets Johnmichael Simon and Helen Bar-Lev have just launched Cyclamens and Swords, a new online journal of poetry, prose and artwork. They are also offering a poetry contest with prizes up to $300, and a self-publishing service for poetry chapbooks.

The title of the press is taken from their poetry book published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2007. Read excerpts and ordering information here. The book is illustrated with Helen’s luminous watercolor landscapes of Israel, whose tranquility forms a counterpoint to the authors’ poignant explorations of their beloved country’s political strife.

The first issue of their thrice-yearly webzine includes work by Magdalena Ball, Doug Holder, Zvi Sesling, Rochelle Mass, Ellaraine Lockie, Susan Rosenberg, and many other writers from around the world. Among the fiction offerings is another chapter from my novel-in-progress. “Career” is a flash-fiction piece in which Julian recounts a formative childhood memory. Here’s the opening paragraph:


It was one of Daddy’s happy nights so he was driving too fast down the hill that came after the school but before the golf course, with me and Carter strapped in the back seat screaming like we were enjoying ourselves, because that was what we were supposed to do. The air in the car was bourbon, it was the heaviness of the clouds before rain. We opened the windows and let the wind slap our faces, we yelled out like dogs.

Read the rest here.

My Story “Dinosaurs Divorce” Published on The Writing Site


My story “Dinosaurs Divorce”, an excerpt from one of my novels-in-progress, won an honorable mention in the 2007 Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction from The Writing Site, an online resource for fiction writers, and is now posted on their website. (For reasons that are not evident in this early chapter, this post is not actually a departure from our “Pride Month” theme…) Here’s the opener:


We were gypsies, we were grifters, we were untenured faculty. After I was born, my mother left her beloved Manhattan and we embarked on the wandering life of an adjunct poetry professor, which as you might expect is about as lucrative as it was in Chaucer’s day, adjusted for inflation. “And where are you from, Prudence?” Mrs. Litwin or Barone or Vasquez would chirp as I stood up before yet another elementary-school class, and I’d proudly recite, “New York and Cleveland and Durham and Lackawanna and…” I must have sounded like a train conductor.

I probably didn’t appreciate how little money Ada had. I thought we were traveling light because it was the cool thing to do. Freebird! Even her weird side jobs, I chalked up to research. Weren’t writers always supposed to be gathering life experience? (That excuse didn’t work too well when Freddy Herkimer and I cut fourth-grade math to sneak into the junior high sex-education class, however.) The most normal job my mother had was being a bank teller. She told me her hero T.S. Eliot had also worked in a bank. I was about seven then, so we must have been in North Carolina, and at first I thought she was talking about Eliot our pet parrot. He must have had an interesting life for a bird, but how could he process the deposit slips without any fingers? Ada thought this was really funny and told all the girls at the bank, which annoyed me, and annoyed her even more when they didn’t know who T.S. Eliot was. The next year we moved to Buffalo and she signed up to sell bootleg T-shirts at Goo Goo Dolls concerts.

When winter put an end to the concert season, Ada somehow managed to get a job in the university chem lab, although she knew nothing about science. The professor was this old Southern guy who was always licking his lips and smoothing his hair back. I think he liked her legs. I grew to associate the smells of acetone and lab gloves with my mother’s goodnight kiss and the stories she told me at bedtime.

Read the whole story here.

Videos from Spring Open House at Writers in Progress

Last week I read from my novel-in-progress with several very talented women who were fellow alumnae of Dori Ostermiller’s Writers in Progress workshops in Florence, MA. My husband taped the performances on his new “Flip” camera, which are linked below for your viewing pleasure. Each segment is about 10-15 minutes, except for the intro, which is shorter.

Introduction by Writers in Progress workshop leader Dori Ostermiller:


Dusty Miller recounts a budding attraction between two young feminists, one of whom has a terrible secret:

Jendi Reiter reads her prizewinning story “Julian’s Yearbook”, a tale of erotic awakening at a homophobic high school:

Jendi Reiter reads her prizewinning story “Julian’s Yearbook”, a tale of erotic awakening at a homophobic high school:

Kate Kahn reads a poignant short story about a young woman in a 1950s trailer park who hopes for a better life:

Kyra Anderson relates the comic mishaps of a family trip to Mexico with her young son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome:

Kyra Anderson relates the comic mishaps of a family trip to Mexico with her young son, who has Asperger’s Syndrome:

Stephanie Faucher reads from her forthcoming young adult fantasy novel about a girl who discovers a magic book:

“Julian’s Yearbook” Wins Chapter One Promotions Short Story Competition


Marianne Moore may have wanted imaginary gardens with real toads in them, but what’s even better is imaginary friends who earn you real money. “Julian’s Yearbook”, a chapter from one of my two novels-in-progress, has won first prize of 2,500 pounds in the Chapter One Promotions International Short Story Competition. In this episode, Julian grapples with first love and homophobia at his Southern high school, while taking steps to launch his career as a fashion photographer. Here’s the beginning:


Desire smells like acid in the dark. Its face is a hundred faces, rising out of the stop bath, materializing on grey paper like ghosts. Your ghosts and mine; you knew them too. The football heroes joshing in a group shot, a chorus line of manly awkwardness. There’s the clown, the golden boy, the dull and violent sidekick. You’ve got to remember that snub-nosed blonde with too much school spirit, whose mascara you almost forgot to clean off the backseat of your daddy’s car. Memory kisses her lips back to pink, repaints these black-and-white yearbook photos in the streaked denim and poison green we wore when Reagan had his finger on the big red button.

Everything’s digital now. Hollywood no longer needs a thousand sweating extras to watch a gladiator die. It’s amazing that clients still fly me to Milan or Los Angeles to photograph an actual shoe on someone’s foot. I’m a Southern boy so perhaps I romanticize inefficiency. But I miss the days when you put something more than your eyesight at risk for a picture. I wonder how many of us went mad as hatters from the darkness, the fumes, acid seeping under our rubber gloves, the tension of this hurried intimacy with a masterpiece we had only one chance to perfect or spoil.
…

The story will be published in Chapter One Promotions’ 2008 anthology, which you can order here.

“Grateful, Thankful” to Literal Latte


The online journal Literal Latte has just posted their current issue, containing my story Grateful, Thankful, which won second prize in their 2006 fiction contest. This excerpt from my novel-in-progress finds Prue coping with the competing pressures of teenage sexuality and academic achievement. (Sex in bathrooms is becoming the King Charles’s Head of this book; it just seems to find its way into whatever I am thinking.) Here’s the opener:


I could have avoided all that trouble if only I had remembered the capital of North Dakota. Normally I took schoolwork seriously, but it had been a late night at band practice and I decided to give myself a pass on memorizing stupid places I would never live. I couldn’t see my mother moving us anywhere shotguns were more popular than cappuccino. I dropped my regulation #2 pencil and bent down to fetch it, so that on the upswing I could skim a peek at Ryan McFarrell’s test paper. He winked at me, those blue eyes wide under streaky blond surfer-hair (he’d just moved to Boston from Santa Barbara and hadn’t perfected our cold-weather scowl yet), and moved his elbow to give me a better view. His dimbulb generosity would’ve been enough to blow our cover, but what really tipped off Mr. Hollister was that we’d both spelled it “Bizmark,” like a corporate logo. That’s how my first moments alone with Ryan were spent on a bench outside the principal’s office. It started as a “meet cute,” but it didn’t end that way.

Read the whole story here.