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	<title>Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary NonfictionBrevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction | Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction</title>
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	<link>http://brevitymag.com</link>
	<description>Brevity: The journal devoted exclusively to the concise literary nonfiction.</description>
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		<title>Issue 43, May 2013</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/issue-43-may-2013/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/issue-43-may-2013/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 12:59:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dinty</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured on Homepage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1887</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Issue 43 features sharp, challenging new work from Hope Edelman, Brian Doyle, Marcia Aldrich, Sarah Wells, Laurie Lynn Drummond, Robert Vivian, David J. Lawrence, Sonya Huber, Sheryl St. Germain, Randall Albers, Cheryl Diane Kidder, Kim Adrian, Melissa Ferrone, Jia Tolentino, &#38; Patricia Park.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<item>
		<title>Review of Tracy Kidder and Dick Todd’s Good Prose</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-tracy-kidder-and-dick-todds-good-prose/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-tracy-kidder-and-dick-todds-good-prose/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 12:14:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>BRENDAN O'MEARA</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1834</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I had the privilege of being edited by Richard Todd. It was my MFA manuscript for Goucher College, and to give you a sense of how massive that stack of paper was, it cost Todd $6.35 to mail the manuscript priority mail to my house. It weighed more than a Chihuahua. Stuck to this Leviathan are dozens of Post-It notes scratched by Todd’s black ink. I wrote the word “flabbergasted” into the manuscript, as in “When I told people I was working on a horse racing project the first question anyone would ask me was, ‘Oh, do you ride?’ I would always say, nope, never. They would look flabbergasted ….” Todd wrote in the margin “Too much?” Of course it was too much. Six paragraphs later, I wrote trees were “swollen with leaves.” “Too much?” Of course it was too much. There were dozens of questions that weren’t questions, just his Toddsian way of saying “Change this.” And you change because, really, who are you? And in these notes I felt, if only for an instant, like I was the young Tracy Kidder portrayed in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction (Random House, 2013,) a green reporter clawing at the wall [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-tracy-kidder-and-dick-todds-good-prose/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Old Habits</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/old-habits/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/old-habits/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 15 May 2013 12:12:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>LAURIE LYNN DRUMMOND</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1725</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Almost midnight at ToyJoy, a funky, noisy, toy store swathed in twinkly lights and geometric neon in Austin, Texas. Leila, Burke, and I wander the aisles, shuffling sideways past other late-night wanderers and finger glow-in-the-dark armadillos, hula girls with cowboy boots and tattoos, oversized spiders that hiss and spit. Two men argue near the front door. Their clipped words grow in volume then shift to longer vowels. The words are less important than the tone, and I know the underlying tone well: violence is not far away. Something buried deep clicks on; my attitude, attention, body language alters. I drift toward the front, eye the men carefully. They are in bantam cock position: chests puffed out inches from each other, chins up. A Hispanic: early-twenties, no facial hair, well built with a slight stomach, wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a white t-shirt, maybe 5&#8217;9&#8243;. His hands are loose by his side, but the jiggling fingers give him away. And an Anglo: slender, freckles, mid-forties, short reddish-blonde hair, about 6&#8242;, wearing a button-down shirt, pleated linen pants, polished leather shoes with tassels. A too-thin woman stands behind him with a helpless look; her tightly permed hair trembles. I move closer, assessing. [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/old-habits/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>8</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>A Creative Nonfiction Class Interviews Brian Oliu</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/a-creative-nonfiction-class-interviews-brian-oliu/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/a-creative-nonfiction-class-interviews-brian-oliu/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 13:32:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JILL TALBOT'S CNF CLASS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Craft Essay]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1853</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Inspired by Dinty W. Moore’s anthology The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Flash Nonfiction and my own struggle with the flash form, I chose to make my Advanced Creative Nonfiction class this semester all about the flash. Along with the anthology, we are reading T Fleischmann’s Syzygy, Beauty (Sarabande, 2012), Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books, 2009), and Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2011). When I told Brian Oliu we were reading his work and writing imitations, he offered to answer questions the students might have. His responses to a selection of their questions appear below. Brian Oliu is an instructor at the University of Alabama and the author of So You Know It’s Me, a collection of lyric essays that he posted on the Tuscaloosa Craigslist Missed Connections board over the course of 45 days; in accordance with Craigslist policy, each essay automatically deleted after 45 days. He is also the author of Level End (Origami Zoo Press, 2012), a collection of lyric essays based on videogame boss battles, and the editor of Tuscaloosa Runs This (Broken Futon Press, 2011), an anthology of Tuscaloosa authors. Q:  In your essay, “State of Flash—Flashes of Truth,” [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>What’s the Point? Five Writers Offer Lifelines for Post-MFA Despair</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/whats-the-point-five-writers-offer-lifelines-for-post-mfa-despair/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/whats-the-point-five-writers-offer-lifelines-for-post-mfa-despair/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 13:29:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>BRYAN FURUNESS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Craft Essay]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1850</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A weird thing happened the other day. A writer-friend contacted me to say that she felt lost and low and miserable about writing. What’s the point? she wrote. Why the hell am I doing this? In and of itself, the note wasn’t so strange. But consider this: I’ve gotten two other notes like it in the last month, all from writers a couple of years removed from their MFA programs. Most MFA grads know about the rough patch that often hits the first six months after the program. You feel burned-out and disconnected, and you have to adjust to life without deadlines and mentors and all that esprit de corps. My pastor-friend calls this a “coming down from the mountaintop” experience. For a lot of grads, this is the end: they never write again. Many of the writers who slog on find themselves in another trough. Somewhere between two-to-four years out of your MFA program, you realize that no one is reading your work: it’s either not getting accepted for publication or it’s landing in obscure lit magazines that few people read. You get tired of answering your super-supportive Uncle Frank, who, every time he sees you, says, “How’s that novel coming along?” which is like every two [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/whats-the-point-five-writers-offer-lifelines-for-post-mfa-despair/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>20</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Ankle Bone’s Connected to the Memory Bone</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/the-ankle-bones-connected-to-the-memory-bone/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/the-ankle-bones-connected-to-the-memory-bone/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 13:28:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>BARRIE JEAN BORICH</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Craft Essay]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1845</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I start with a confession about my body. I have a trick ankle. Say I’m walking in heels, or sensible shoes, it hardly matters which, and everything’s fine, I’m moving forward, until in less than an instant I find myself on the ground, a sharp pain shooting up my right calf. The first time this happened I was twenty-one, and I fell after stepping into a hole in front of the broken-down storefront office where I worked as a community organizer. This was the day before I was to take a twelve-hour train trip from central Illinois to Minneapolis to visit a lover who insisted he was not threatened by the news that I’d taken a new lover—a woman—and yet kept calling, at all hours, to tell me he could not sleep through the night unless I promised to move north to be near him. So I dragged my throbbing ankle onto Amtrak in an attempt to figure out what I thought—about Minneapolis, about him. But once I arrived, I was in no mood for wooing, distracted by my ankle, purple and swollen to twice its normal size. Ever since that time, thirty-two years ago, my ankle wavers whenever I [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Review of Lia Purpura’s Rough Likeness</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-lia-purpuras-rough-likeness/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-lia-purpuras-rough-likeness/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 13:27:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>DEBBIE HAGAN</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1842</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So what animal would you be if you could come back again? I cringed every time the teacher asked us this question. I never wanted to be an animal, except maybe a sacred cow in India, free to wander the streets, showered with treats, and totally loved. Short of that, I’ve always felt that animals (particularly wild ones) lived like fugitives, twitching, looking over their shoulders to see if they were about to become someone’s next meal. However, if pressed, particularly by the teacher’s impatient scowl, I’d blurt out: flamingo. No one else had thought of it, and it struck me that this bony bird, covered in feathers, wouldn’t be particularly appetizing. Plus, I’ve always thought the flamingo to be a bit magical with its long hooked neck, dazzling pink tutu body perched on pointe. In contrast, writer and poet Lia Purpura tells us that she’d come back as a buzzard. I bet no one in her class thought of that. “I know, coming back as a crow is a lot more attractive,” she writes in her first of nineteen essays in Rough Likeness: Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011.) “If crows and buzzards do the same job—picking, tearing and cleaning up—who wouldn’t [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Review of Peter Trachtenberg’s Another Insane Devotion</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-peter-trachtenbergs-another-insane-devotion-on-the-love-of-cats-and-persons/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/book-reviews/review-of-peter-trachtenbergs-another-insane-devotion-on-the-love-of-cats-and-persons/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 13:24:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>JENNIFER OCHSTEIN</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1830</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[After several years of marriage, I woke one day, looked at the man lying next to me and asked, “What was I thinking?” I’ve done this twice. The first time happened when I couldn’t get husband number one to have sex with me. This was particularly troublesome when he came home one day and admitted he was sleeping with someone else. My response: her or me? He chose her. After all, he said, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever loved me, leaving me wondering if he only married me because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings by breaking it off. I suppose I should’ve known when he was a half hour late to our nuptials three years earlier. It happened again during the natural course of my second marriage, along about the eighth year, when I was so focused on myself that I wondered whether I’d be better off alone. Husband number two said he wanted me to think more about him. Turns out he meant he wanted us to have more sex. My response: Sex? Pshaw! Sex distracts from all the student essays needing grades and graduate school work I ought to finish. Where are your priorities, Man? [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>4</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Craft Essays</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/featured-on-homepage/craft-essays/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/featured-on-homepage/craft-essays/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 10:03:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dinty</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Craft Essay]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured on Homepage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=50</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In our Craft section, Barrie Jean Borich explores the connection between body and memory, Jill Talbot&#8217;s CNF class interviews Brian Oliu, and Bryan Furuness and some writer friends discuss &#8216;What to Do When Facing Deep Writerly Despair.&#8217;]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Book Reviews</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/featured-on-homepage/book-reviews/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/featured-on-homepage/book-reviews/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2013 05:23:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Dinty</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Featured on Homepage]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=184</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Our Book section features reviews of Lia Purpura&#8217;s Rough Likeness,  Peter Trachtenberg&#8217;s Another Insane Devotion, and Tracy Kidder and Dick Todd’s Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction.]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Field Guide to Resisting Temptation</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/field-guide-to-resisting-temptation/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/field-guide-to-resisting-temptation/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:53:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SARAH WELLS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1760</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Do not send song lyrics to Facebook or post YouTube music videos or listen to any songs about love gone wrong or one-night stands or anything on country music radio. Okay, no music at all. Tell him no more, you are done, you are disappearing, removing him from your phone and from your Facebook and from your e-mail, and when you’ve said all that, mean it, don’t re-add or spy or stalk. Don’t search for him on Facebook again to see if he’s posted any more YouTube music videos that you listen to and Google the lyrics of and then know he’s still thinking about you late at night so that your finger itches the mouse and you almost click “Message,” almost click “Poke,” almost click “Add friend.” Whatever you do don’t send him a meaningless text or ask what he’s doing or how things are going. When you think of something funny, text it to your husband. When something makes you angry or upset, text it to your husband. When you think of texting anything at all to anyone else, text it to your husband. When you want someone to tell you something beautiful and romantic and sexy and [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/field-guide-to-resisting-temptation/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>11</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>How to Leave a Room</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/how-to-leave-a-room/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/how-to-leave-a-room/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:52:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>MARCIA ALDRICH</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1763</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When you leave a room, my mother taught me, leave no trace behind. She trained me to be in a room without making it dirty. And yet, to my confusion, she wore lipstick, applied in a thick style that changed little from year to year, a signature of sorts. In the bathroom she had her own sink, mirror, and cabinet. Out of the top drawer of the vanity she’d pull her single tube of lipstick—Revlon’s Mercy, a buoyant shade of red, a bit shrill. Leaning in close to the mirror, she puckered her lips and applied her Mercy, careful to stay inside the lines. At the end of the application, she’d brusquely rip a tissue from a nearby box and blot. And there would be the telltale red imprint of a kiss. Now I have my own favored lipstick, a shade called Black Honey, more stain than matte rouge, and it is one of the mysteries about me my daughter cannot unravel. She belongs to a different generation, one addicted to all manner of exotic lubrication for the lips, carried in the pocket of the jeans, flavored in mango, and applied copiously. But she resists lipstick as cosmetic. The motto [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/how-to-leave-a-room/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Alouicious</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/alouicious/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/alouicious/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:49:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>RANDALL ALBERS</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1769</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[“That, son, is the unluckiest man in the world.” Bill nodded toward the foreman passing down the shop floor for the fiftieth time that day. The summer before starting grad school, I’d landed a factory job where he and I spent all day rolling towering racks of plywood in and out of a kiln hotter than Dante’s ninth ring, laminating wood to be cut, shaped, and polished for handles to Ecko paring knives. The foreman—I’ll call him Alouicious—was a dour man, with a face like he’d been baked in one of those kilns—leathery, road mapped with wrinkles and scars like the hired hand I’d known back on our Minnesota farm who’d fallen off his tractor and been run over by a disk. Even on the ninth ring’s hottest summer days, Alouicious wore a flannel shirt under his overalls, and he walked with this swaying, stiff-legged, cob-up-the-ass gait, barely glancing up from the clipboard perpetually nestled in the crook of his arm. In his presence, I made as if I were eager to please, but after he’d pass by, I’d delight the other workers by mocking his walk. An outsider trying to belong. Bill, a hulking factory vet with a wild [...]]]></description>
		<wfw:commentRss>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/alouicious/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>2</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>All-American Dread</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/all-american-dread/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/all-american-dread/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:48:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>ROBERT VIVIAN</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lyric esay]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1776</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Somewhere out across the roads and highways of America there’s a pair of headlights trying to run and track me down, headlights that know me better than I know myself which will one day light me up and scatter me into a thousand drifting dust motes. I’ve felt them coming for years now across this hardscrabble land of wasted dreams where I’ve ended up in central Michigan like a rolled-up newspaper on somebody’s back porch, the driver behind their high beams inscrutable, indecipherable, faceless as a water board or a stone you could throw far out into the night with no hope of ever hearing it land or hit anything. Somewhere these headlights are picking up speed and getting brighter with every passing mile all the way from El Paso and Santa Cruz or the Baja peninsula hauling a whole nation’s hopes and fears as the needle of the speedometer clips eighty and keeps right on going, and I know I’ll never be able to escape the glare of those halogen rays and the way they’ll x-ray through my skin and body and my life in a klieg light reckoning or the Valhalla of a peculiarly American flash point, Jackson [...]]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Cut</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/cut/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/cut/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:45:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>CHERYL DIANE KIDDER</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Baby’s crying again. I know the baby’s crying again. Maybe if I had a little help, maybe if he’d stick around after the sun goes down, maybe if I was somebody else in another body this would be easier. The baby’s been crying for two weeks and nothing I do helps. All I want is for him to come back now. I know the baby’s crying. I’ve wrapped myself in my big thrift-store wool coat, right over my nightgown, that’ll keep me warm. I forgot shoes, doesn’t matter. The baby is OK. The baby is in her bed at home, she’s fine. I just have to find him. If I find him everything will be OK, I’ll know better what to do, I just can’t do it on my own, just not right now. No shoes, I forgot shoes. Sidewalk’s cold, it’s late, dark, did he take the car? He didn’t take the car, I can catch him if he’s on the bus I can catch him. Car won’t start, too cold. Got it. Finally, now we’re going. I’m sure the baby is all right. Just follow the bus route. He must have caught the Geary bus, I know exactly [...]]]></description>
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		<title>Sachiel the Tailor</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/sachiel-the-tailor/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/sachiel-the-tailor/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:43:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>BRIAN DOYLE</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1781</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Another time I was talking to Sachiel, the tailor in Boston whose shop on Chauncy Street was essentially a door with a vast and impenetrable space behind it, a wilderness known only to Sachiel, who never moved from his stool by the door during working hours, and we got to talking all metaphysical, as he said, about his work. Now, what you see of my work is tactile, he said—pants, jackets, buttons, zippers, the occasional nice shirt, although not in your case, your shirts are a despair to me and probably to your poor mother. Whereas what I sometimes think my work is, is holes, do you know what I am saying? A young man like you comes to me because a seam has burst in his jacket, and well it should burst, such shoddy workmanship I have not seen since I was a boy. I repair the hole—I vanish the hole, you see? So my work is vanishing holes. Holes present themselves, like that hole in the breast pocket of this awful shirt you are for some reason wearing today, what is that, Egyptian cotton? Why does someone wear such a thing? Maybe that is good for a man working in [...]]]></description>
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		<title>I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/i-wish-i-could-write-like-russell-edson/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/i-wish-i-could-write-like-russell-edson/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:41:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>KIM ADRIAN</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1783</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I wish I could write like Russell Edson because then I could show my husband standing in the kitchen like a tree that lost its leaves all at once. Or like a rock in the living room that doesn’t notice the lichen. And my daughter would be a bird in the tree, and my son would spend hours climbing on the rock, inspecting the lichen and watching the bird. In this scenario, I might bake some cookies and spread a picnic blanket in the living room and lean against the rock, which might or might not moan, and when the children weren’t looking, I’d tell the rock how much I missed him. Also, if I wrote like Russell Edson, I could show the family I grew up in, in one of the houses I grew up in, which would be a helium-filled environment, which would explain why three of us were forever floating several feet above the ground, but which wouldn’t explain why the forth one, the one that produced all the helium (a toxic variety), never floated, but instead forged a deeper and deeper relationship with gravity. At least, from up there, we’d be able to see the part [...]]]></description>
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		<item>
		<title>A Day in the Grammar of Disease</title>
		<link>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/a-day-in-the-grammar-of-disease/</link>
		<comments>http://brevitymag.com/current-issue/a-day-in-the-grammar-of-disease/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2013 16:39:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>SONYA HUBER</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Current Issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Issue 43 / May 2013]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nonfiction]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://brevitymag.com/?p=1785</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If pain is a language, I have the accent on my tongue. I do not yet dream in pain, but a three-year immersion has stripped my skeleton’s previous fluency. Now I am a child in this land without good parking spaces. (10:30) Today my husband and I talked about my calcified hip and aching hands, the awkwardness of a threesome with pain. We parked outside my therapist’s office, claimed the flowered couch and spoke about those ball-and-socket hips: so essential for knocking socks. The words came small, with squinting, like picking lice. A hundred geese cursed and laughed from the glinting marsh beyond the open window. The therapist, who emails me pictures of her baby goats, asked me to describe the pain as a number. They never ask the pain’s name, which could be Fucker or Bunny. Then: Do you think you are the pain? I crunched my forehead to agonize in Venn Diagrams: Am I coterminous with my disease? Overlapping? It appeared that sex runways would have to be reconfigured, sex flight patterns remapped. The therapist smiled with optimism about the daunting industrial project of transferring a teenager’s habit onto this irritable bag of Tinker Toys. * * * [...]]]></description>
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