I’m both thrilled and honored that Prick of the Spindle, a fine literary magazine, has published my short story “Mrs. Marple and the Hit & Run.” In it, an aging woman is the victim of a hit & run, and her reflections both on the accident itself (and the fall-out from it) and on her own relationships with various men in her life (father, husband, son) prompt her to undertake a daring mission: to save the driver of the car that hit her. For many reasons, this is one of my favorites among all the stories I’ve written. It began as a very, very long (overlong and rambling) draft, and then I decided to take it apart and put the pieces back together in a very different structure — a modular structure, as Madison Smart Bell calls it in his study Narrative Design, a textbook I didn’t know at the time I struggled with all this but that I now use in all of my own fiction workshops (and which came in handy as well for my wife, Tara Laskowski, with a story she’s recently revised and had accepted for publication). Despite some fleeting interest here and there, “Mrs. Marple” has had difficult finding a home. I won’t belabor the process-behind-the-story any further, but do want to thank Tara for her patience with all the times I’ve talked about it and the editors at Prick of the Spindle, especially Laura Ellen Scott, for finding it interesting and worthwhile.
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