Letting go & letting a four-year-old do her thing

Love this story about artist Mica Angela Hendricks collaborating with her daughter on some pretty fantastic illustrations. Hendricks started with faces of old movie actors & actresses, and upon seeing her mother's beautiful new sketchbook, insisted that she get to draw in it, too. So Hendricks' daughter drew dinosaur and bug bodies to go with the heads. The result is whimsical and astounding. Hendricks is selling prints & cards here.

Ghosts in the walls

My flash fiction story "When Flowers Bloom at Night" grew out of a collaborative challenge with another artist, my uncle Curt Schroeder, an abstract painter from Milwaukee, who along with my young cousin developed a list of 32 titles and challenged me to write short stories for each of them. I'm not quite at 32, but I've written a few including "Flowers," which was honorably mentioned at the Lakefly Literary Conference in Oshkosh. So I reversed the challenge. I came up with a list of titles for my uncle, challenging him to paint art to match the titles (any interpretation). The titles included "Food Fight," (cats scrapping over a bowl of food, top) "Gutter Ball," (a man has a one-man party to scoop out his gutters) "Ghosts in the Walls," (a swath of paint on drywall) and "Bus Stop Circa 1953" (bottom). My uncle flipped the challenge yet again -- I'm supposed to write a short story to go with one of the paintings. I'm leaning toward the moodiness of "Bus Stop." We'll see what kind of trip we go on...

Bloom

Earlier this summer I was honorably mentioned for my flash fiction story, "When Flowers Bloom at Night" as a part of the Lakefly Literary Conference contest. Scroll down to the bottom to read this short shorty.