impoverished artifices

Playing around with the Google alerts for cream city review [the RSS for the blog "link:http://..." went mysteriously blank a few weeks ago...], i started poking around with variations of "cream city review" - which inevitably led to me googling myself. Who is more interesting than me, right? Partly due to my name and partly due to a lack of curiosity (and content), I've largely avoided the suisearch.

However, today I found a brief review of my story, "Anaphylaxis", at the Emerging Writers Network, which is founded by Dan Wickett, who also does the really solid Dzanc Books.

Short Story Month - Anaphylaxis by Jay Johnson

Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2009 found Matthew Derby's great new story "January in December" in Guernica, and two other efforts from this great online journal found their way into the Notable Works list in the back of the anthology. Which had led me to check back every few weeks to find their new work published.

The latest is Jay Johnson's "Anaphylaxis." The editors at Guernica are continuing their 2008 roll. "Anaphylaxis" is broken up into four equally sized sections, each headed by a word, and its definition. The words in question being: Anaphylaxis, epinephrine, histamine, and angioedema. If you happen to look up those four words and start the first section off with the line "The bee stung Maddy thirty-six miles south-by-southeast of Soweto, as the Steppe Eagle flies," you might just understand how Johnson is able to create an incredible sense of tension and maintain it right on up to the end, while never being forced to write about a big incident that would be the cause of the tension. It allows his writing to be a little distant, especially when considering what it occuring in the story between the father telling the story, and his daughter that has been stung.