Junk Journal Week Eight

Since starting the 100 Days of Creativity project I seem to be producing iterations of an apple collage.

One of my reading goals for 2024 is reading short story collections on a regular basis. Usually I read one or two stories everyday. Flannery O'Connor and Jamel Brinkley are both alums of the Iowa writer's workshop and both devoted quite a bit of space to issues of race in their stories, but the two collections -- A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Witness -- are quite different. Brinkley's stories are all set in a mostly Black but gentrifying section of Brooklyn and are not comic stories. O'Connor's stories are set in rural Georgia and, at least in my opinion, are comic stories that often involve the grotesque.

Sheila Heti's book is a collection of ten years of the author's journals arranged in alphabetical order by sentence. I found the book endlessly fascinating.

Hands and Not an Easy Win are both middle grade stories about a young black man about 12 years old. Hands is a compact book about a young man trying to figure out how to use his hands, quite literally. Not an Easy Win is about a young man who has been expelled from his school who discovers a local chess club.

I read two graphic novels. Breathers is a post apocalyptic dystopian story where everyone must wear a breathing apparatus to go outside. That Texas Blood is something of a noir murder mystery; I thought it got better as I kept reading. My friend Rand, who reads a lot more comics than I do -- he even sings about them -- recommend both titles.