Monday, September 2, 2013

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...



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