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Recent and upcoming appearances in journals and anthologies: "The Art of Opening Up," essay on Southern storytelling and writing, in OXFORD AMERICAN Southern Literature Special Edition "Miracle at the Spotted Cat," in OXFORD AMERICAN September, 2008 Gulf Coast Issue Selections from Elysiana,a novel, forthcoming in HABITUS Magazine, Fall, 2008 "The Black Carpet," a story about a young man whose was "lucky" during Katrina, in CALLALOO, the Katrina Issue. ( Spring 2007.) "Ice Garden" in NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH, THE YEAR'S BEST. 2007 from Algonquin Books. Edited by Edward P. Jones. "Fever" a story about a man who loses everything but gains a new life in New Orleans, in WIDE AWAKE IN THE PELICAN STATE,edited by Ann Brewster Dobie, foreword by Ernest Gaines. Louisiana State University Press, May, 2006 Selections from the novel, "Elysiana" in: New Orleans Review. Volume 31, Number 2. Spring, 2006. ON THE WEB: Articles about New Orleans and the Flood: "The Wall and the Door" and "We Are the Pod People" Alternet, and Beliefnet. Reviews on The Short Review, the International Website for Short Stories. |
RECENT WRITING, STORIES AND BOOKSExcerpt from the novel in progress, ELYSIANA, in HABITUS Journal, Fall, 2008.
More about Moira Crone's ELYSIANA soon. "The Art of Opening Up," and "Miracle at the Spotted Cat."
What Turns Southern Talkers into Southern Writers? Read "The Art of Opening Up," in the "Writers on Writing," section of the current (September 2009) OXFORD AMERICAN "Miracle at the Spotted Cat" in Fall, 2008 Special Gulf Coast Issue. OXFORD AMERICAN "Why did you come back and stay?" Someone asks me. I say, 'Good question.' We are all sitting around talking about how after two and a half years, a lot is not going well, when we notice an ancient man in the doorway. He looks ninety, easy, in a suit, a tie, mirror sunglasses, a vest, a bowler. His shoes are sharp-pointed as his chin. The music: eight men--a bass, two guitars, a trombone, a clarinet, a cornet, an alto, a washboard. They are called the Palmetto Bug Stompers. They do funky swing jazz, not Dixieland---dizzying. You could about park a car on the dance floor of this club--a sedan not a wagon. It's the Spotted Cat, on Frenchmen Street in New Orleans, in January, 2008, or as we count time here, thirty months after the storm, two weeks to Carnival. On the walls, paintings R. Crumb would have made if he lived in New Orleans and went through a blue period..... I am sitting with old friends next to a Japanese couple we just met. First time in the US. The boy has burnished dreads, the girl wears her night-out jersey dress. They want to know if New Orleans is back. The patient is still one the table, we say. When crime rises and rises, when redevelopment plans fall through, when we ride down old streets and see sign after sign, for sale, for sale, for sale, when the few politicians we trusted confess to bribery, when we realize how many have given up on coming home, we ask ourselves why we didn't go too.... What Gets Into Us: Stories
"...WHAT GETS INTO US is a complex and remarkable book that deserves to be read slowly and re-read meditatively. Like the works of Flannery O’Connor, this collection transcends the genre of “Southern Literature” and probes deeply into the paradoxes of the psyche and the zeitgeist of modern America. Despite our prosperity, advantages, education and seemingly boundless opportunities for personal success and fulfillment, we remain a peculiarly unhappy people who spend $538,000,000 a year on self-help books to fix what’s broken inside of us. The reality is, as the classic song by the Eagles astutely observes, “We are all prisoners… of our own device.” That certainly holds true for the characters in What Gets Into Us, trapped in an emotional solitary confinement, isolated, alienated, blind to the truths that would set them free and unable to help themselves or others except by rash, irrational and sometimes violent acts of desperation. Crone has the lyric touch of a poet and the visionary spirit of a mystic, conjuring images that are both disturbing and startlingly beautiful. The reader will never forget Claire McKenzie’s last memory of her mother or Sidney Byrd’s symbolic dream about her dead friend Pauline or Lily Stark’s stunning vision that closes this collection. Though Crone provides no easy way out for the tormented individuals of Fayton, North Carolina, there is redemption in this book. Like her characters, the reader just has to have faith in the midst of darkness and look for it. — 15 August 2006 from the review by PHOEBE KATE FOSTER, in POPMATTERS FROM WRITER DORIS BETTS: “Fayton, N.C., has here its own Sherwood Anderson as Crone interweaves four decades of a town's dreams and secret sorrows. Her skill at plot and suspense so magnify each story that together they interlock and become a complex and satisfying novel. It's like watching a magician pull from a hat a giant, astonishing rabbit who fills the stage while discussing reality and beauty in rich, literary language. All the parts of these fictions are wonderful, but their sum is a spellbinding whole..” Dream State
From The New York Times: The sensibility embodied in Ms. Crone's energetic fiction owes little to Faulkner, or to Flannery O'Connor or to John Kennedy Toole.. I'm happy to report it is uttery sui generis... ALSO: A PERIOD OF CONFINEMENT A NOVEL A young artist, Alma Taylor, discovers the potentialities and struggles of early motherhood, in a novel that PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY CALLED "a shimmering tale." |
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