Cooking Up Home Made Pie & Sausage

The cover is here! The cover is here!

Yesterday I received a copy of the cover of Windchill: Crime Stories by New England Writers from Level Best Books and the galley for my short story Homemade Pie & Sausage. What fun!

I think the cover is absolutely beautiful but then it is in my favorite colors - periwinkle, violet and soft blues. Reading my short story in galley format was exciting. Somehow, when you see the galley, the fact that your baby - this creation that you have birthed out of your own head - seems terrifyingly real. What if it goes out there in the world and nobody likes it???

What makes Homemade Pie & Sausage different from almost everything I’ve ever written is that I wrote it specifically for this collection and I had a long, frustrating process trying to come up with a story. Usually the stories are all inside my head cracking the whip and vying for my time and attention.

Last year when Riptide was being prepared, Skye Alexander who is one of the principals in Level Best and also a friend, suggested I submit something. I had written Asa some years previous and, since there was definitely a crime involved, I polished it up and sent it off. It was accepted. But this year when Skye said to be sure and enter again I was baffled. What could I submit?

I had recently read an article by Stephen King. Stephen King is a writer whom I admire and appreciate even though I don’t always like what he actually writes. He said that the most horrifying things are the everyday kinds of things turned horrible - a dog, the family car, etc. I was thinking about that and somehow the notion of pie came into my head (well, pie is never really very far from my thoughts). How do you make pie horrifying? That’s where I began.

I grew up in the Allegheny Highlands of Pennsylvania and my father and brothers hunted and fished all the time. Every fall when they brought home a few deer, my Dad would get a pig to butcher and we would all help with the sausage making. I always loved the whole process. Now I think about the actual butchering of deer and pigs and I get a little queasy but back then it was as natural as baking bread or canning tomatoes.

As the story began to unfold in my head I was somewhat astonished at how naturally I could write such a thing. What was the big deal? When I asked a few people to read it and they responded with total horror and amazement I was a little surprised at how truly horrible it seemed to them and how un-horrified I felt about having written it. Within the parameters of the story it seemed quite natural to me.

That bothered me a little.

The other galley in the package I received was for Mark S. Williams’ short story Imprisoned In Maine which is also included in the anthology. Mark is the lobsterman whose non-fiction book F/V Black Sheep I have been editing. This is his first published story. I’ve been working with Mark for over a year now. He is a big, tough-looking, muscular Gloucester fisherman with a soft voice and a quiet low key manner. It will be interesting to me to see how he handles making public appearances with this book. That’s something that a lot of writers find difficult. I know Mark well and he can seem very full of bravado and swagger but I’ve seen the shy uncertain side of him, too. This is a man who wrote a 120,000 word book while sitting in the cab of his truck on various wharfs and piers around Gloucester.

Anyway, the book will be out in October.

Thanks for reading.