Hey, check it out! I have a short story up in LitnImage. It’s called Flatten, Poke, and Blow. Excerpt:

Judith’s parents’ barn is full of wooden spools. There are dozens of them wound with rope as thick as tree branches. Being in the barn is like being inside a giant sewing kit.

Our moms told us to play out here because it is Judith’s birthday and they’re setting up for the party. I know Judith from Sunday school. Every week after church, our parents take us to brunch at Adele’s diner, where they put paper umbrellas in our Cokes. Judith and Julie, our parents always say. Judith and Julie.

“My boyfriend is this one,” Judith says.

Read the rest here.

Is there a gender bias in literature? I don’t know, although there is some pretty damning evidence that something is amiss.

Tawni O’Dell wrote an essay on her experience with this subject, and her argument that there is a gender bias is convincing:

It wasn’t until many years later, … that I would feel the sting of gender bias in an area of my life where I least expected it: the publication of my first novel.

“Back Roads” was set in the coal-mining area where I grew up and was a dark, gritty portrayal of a family in crisis told entirely in the male first-person voice of 19-year-old Harley Altmyer. My publishing house was over the moon about the book, proclaiming me brilliant and tossing around phrases like “formidable talent” and “pitch-perfect prose.” The book was so good, as a matter of fact, that they thought it would be best to conceal the fact that it had been written by a woman.

I was informed over the phone one morning that Tawni was a “biker chick name” and no one would take the novel seriously if we used it.

I was stunned, not only because I had naively thought art was one area where sexism didn’t exist but because standing in my coffee-stained bathrobe in my suburban Chicago kitchen handing out juice boxes to my kids, I could hardly imagine anyone mistaking me for a biker chick.

My editor went on to inform me that they had decided to publish the book using my initials. That way they wouldn’t actually be lying and claiming I was a man but since the book was written in the male first person, everyone would assume it had been written by a man. Pretty sneaky.

Oh, it gets worse. Wait until you get to the part where she goes to a photo shoot and they ask her to get naked and pretend she is a wood nymph.

“… I heard a few gasps as I crunched barefoot through the snow, wrapped in yards of sparkling gauze, with my butt hanging out, and wondering to myself, Did John Irving ever have to do this?”

I bet not.

Read the essay here.