Read "Vaya con Heuvos" from Willow Springs 58
Read "Bleeders" from Willow Springs 55
“Uniforms” is an excerpt from Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a novel that will be published by Dzanc Books in September, 2009.
Kamby Bolongo Mean River started as a short story. I liked the voice and thought it could be sustained for something longer so I returned to it at some point and wrote another ten or so pages but had to put it away when life interceded. Another year passed and when I had the next chance to work on this now longer story the sentences poured out and it turned into a novel. Everything I’ve happened to write comes from language and in this case I started with the line, “Should the phone ring I will answer it.”
Samuel Beckett’s Molloy changed the way I looked at language, sentences, and what a narrative can include and exclude. I’ve said before that reading Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” made me want to write a story and reading Raymond Carver made me want to be a writer. I haven’t re-read Carver in years. I might take something off the shelf and skim a few pages, that seems to be the extent of my attention span lately. I do the same with Leonard Michaels, Grace Paley, Borges, Wallace Stevens, many others. I hope to start reading and re-reading again in earnest soon. I do read friends’ work and that I always enjoy.
Robert Lopez is the author of Part of the World. His fiction has appeared in dozens of journals, including; Bomb, The Threepenny Reivew, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Indiana Review, Denver Quarterly, Willow Springs, etc. A new novel, Kamby Bolongo Mean River, will be published by Dzanc Books in September, 2009. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University.
