Month: June 2022

The New Yorker Fiction

One of my favorite magazines is The New Yorker.

The section of the magazine that I appreciate the most is the fiction. The magazine regularly includes a short story. They are something I look forward to each week.

I’ve made a table with links to the stories organized by publication date. Most of the time, the online copy of the magazine also includes an interview with the author and a podcast where the author reads their story. The table includes links to those as well.

The page helps a reader find to the different stories if they want to go back and read an older story.

It’s interesting to notice the authors who have published more than one story since I started tracking them. These include Lauren Groff, Souvankham Thammavongsa and Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.

The table is available is in this blog’s menu as “The New Yorker Fiction“

Hats and coffee mugs

In the summer, I forget what it is like to be chilled and cold. The rain is the closest I come to that. I avoid the rain mostly unless I can wear a hat. My wardrobe of hats isn’t very fashionable. I’ve got some baseball caps and some knit stocking caps. Even though I want to keep my head dry, I don’t use them.

I got one of my hats when we were working with Macromedia to make the Flash library work with our screen reader, Window-Eyes. At GW, they complained that I never gave them the swag that we got.

The Macromedia hat is a kind of trophy. When I was at Purdue, I took a computer graphics class. One project was to simulate a 3-d moveable arm. The memorable part was that I did it so well that they gave me a special Megatek coffee mug as a prize. I feel that it is one of my favorite trophies. I still have it 35 plus years later.

I get chilled also when I get stuck working on a project and it seems like I am doing it wrong. This week I’ve been really devoted to a computer program. It is going well. I didn’t get very far but I am getting close. With all the effort that I am putting in, I’m glad that it is coming through.

It is a good day and I want for tomorrow to also be good. If I see people, I could be glad for my striving for a better life.

Alone Tomorrow

I’ll be alone tomorrow.

My friends have found the truth.
I have said it aloud; now I’m in shame.

I thought they would forgive me.
I wanted understanding and acceptance.
Instead, their judgment was unanimous.

Will I be stuck as an eternal “I”?
“We” and “our” are foreign words now.
I know that I have made a grievous error.
With no one to share with, I began to despair.

The days have been passing slowly.
I cannot expect freedom again.
The world around me is black.
I can wish for friends, but it will be in vain.
I will be alone again and again.

William Wayne Smith

One of my worries had been that I do something bad and lose a friend.  My imagination can be vivid so that I can compound simple conflicts into a lost friendship.  If I can’t forgive myself—why would anyone else?

This poem takes that fear to new levels.  Not only have I made a mistake, it is so severe that everyone abandons me.  They reject me because some secret sin had been revealed.

If I am alone, I cannot use “we” and “us” again. This is as if one mistake would be a dead end for my life in the world.

I make mistakes all of the time.   They do not mean that I am unworthy of the caring and friendships that I cherish.

This poem paints a bleak outlook on reality.   I don’t embrace that perspective, but my imagination could bring it forth at times.

I published the poem initially at Alone Tomorrow. The image It takes a lot to give, to ask for help is by 10 Mix licensed with CC-BY-NC 2.0