Hi everyone,

My first published piece is in print!  The Iowa Review just announced the arrival of its Spring 2014 issue, containing — at last, at last! — a memoir of my thirteenth summer, “Falling Off the Roof.”  Never mind that I first submitted it three years and three months ago;  I have outlived the waiting period!

I hope those of you who are interested in reading this kind of thing will take a look.  I’d love to know what you think!  TIR is offering opening snippets of some of the Spring issue pieces  on its webpage —  to whet the appetite of potential purchasers, I suppose.  But they’re not offering a snippet of mine.  So they probably won’t mind if I do it myself.

Here are the first two paragraphs of “Falling Off the Roof” — just to get you going:

Back then you knew, even when you were very little, what you were going to do when you grew up. In the nineteen-thirties only daddies went out to work in the morning; the mommies all stayed home and kept house. A woman went to business, said my mother, only when there was no one else to put bread on the table.

Later, the movies to which she took me almost every Saturday evening confirmed this fact of life: after the heroine and hero met “cute” and experienced a series of silly misunderstandings, all was eventually resolved by a proposal, after which the credits rolled to a surge of triumphant music and that was the end. There were also the stories that appeared, three per issue, in the ladies’ magazines she bought at the corner newsstand every month and I devoured before she had time to sit down and enjoy them. Sometimes the heroine was deeply in love with a foolish man distracted by a flirtatious and superficially glamorous competitor until he came to recognize the enduring worth of the heroine’s goodness, virtue and purity. In other stories another sort of heroine, with an overabundance of suitors, had to learn, during the course of the narrative, how to differentiate between Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong. (Mr. Right was the one who loved small animals and children, just like she did.) But it all came to the same thing in the end. Will you marry me? Oh yes darling yes.   I could polish off all three stories before dinnertime….

The rest of it — it’s about 10,800 words — is available at www.iowareview.org.  Alas, the price per print issue is $9.95 plus $2 domestic shipping.  However, you can have it instantly for $4.99 from Amazon at the Kindle Store, if you don’t mind reading on a Kindle. (Or an i-Pad, or a tablet of any kind that takes the Kindle App.)  Just be sure to specify: Iowa Review Spring 2014.  (An earlier issue is also available on Kindle.)

You’ll be getting much more for your money than just me: two other pieces of non-fiction, six stories, two book reviews, and a lot of poetry.  [I told you this post would be shameless self promotion, didn’t I?]

And if you do decide to spring for it, please don’t keep your opinion to yourself.  Speak up. Don’t be shy.  Use the Comment section with abandon. Get full value by making yourself heard.  We’ll be waiting to hear.

The rest of you, thank you for your patience with the marketing.  Back to regular blog stuff next time!

NRM