About the Contributors:




C.B. Adams is a native Missourian who lives and writes in the St. Louis area. He has been a newspaper reporter, advertising copywriter, magazine editor and travel writer/photographer. Adams is currently a part-time graduate student in the Master of Arts Creative Writing Program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His fiction (including "Private Parts") has appeared in the Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial 1994, Forest Park Review, and The Distillery, Artisitic Spirits of the South. He pays the bills as a freelance writer and is currently working on a novel, The Jesus Transport System. He can be reached at chasline@aol.com.

Brenda Buttner, a former Rhodes Scholar and broadcast journalist, is currently editor of a motorcycle magazine and writer of short fiction.

Giselle Gautreau is a painter living in Charlottesville, Virginia. She is a member of the McGuffey Arts Center and has shown works in juried exhibitions in Virginia, Maine, and Vermont.

David Gilbert's writing has appeared in many small magazines. His books include, I Shot The Hairdresser (Detour Press, St. Paul, MN) and Five Happiness (Trip Street Press, S.F. CA). He is currently working on a mystery called Crazy Legs.

Steve Libbey has published in Clifton Magazine, Mind in Motion, Imminent, and EveryBody's News, among other magazines. He currently serves as editor in chief for Evil Dog Magazine, and spends his offline time as singer/guitarist for the band Snowblind. He is at work on recording an EP and/or single with the band, finishing up some weird stories, and starting a novel about the last days of the Emperor Hadrian. He and his current magazine can be emailed at evildog@aol.com.

D. Navarro talks just like the protagonist of Key of F.

Eva Shaderowfsky lives in Rockland County, NY. Her short stories, poetry criticism, and essays have been published in anthologies, magazines and journals over the past twenty-five years. This is her second publication with us and hopefully not her last.

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1990 Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award, the Chicago-born author has appeared in over 200 magazines and anthologies. Sward's Four Incarnations, 1957-1991, was published by Coffee House Press (Minneapolis). His novel, The Jurassic Shales, was published by Coach House Press (Toronto), 1976.

Donna Trussell is a native Texan, now living in Kansas City. She has worked as a tour guide, newspaper editor, nanny, radio producer, film critic and phone solicitor. Her writing appears in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest and other journals.

Marion de Booy Wentzien is a short story writer who lives in Saratoga, CA, with a variety of formerly abandoned animals, a tolerant husband, and four adult children who drop by for occasional meals and advice.





About the Stories:

Fishbone was first published in TriQuarterly, 1989. Since then it has been anthologized in Fiction of the Eighties, New Stories From the South 1990 and Growing Up Female: Stories by Women Writers From the American Mosaic. In February 1994 "Fishbone" was read by an actress at the Dallas Museum of Art as part of their Arts & Letters Live series. The story is being translated into Polish for inclusion in an anthology of American fiction. TriQuarterly, Northwestern University, 2020 Ridge Ave, Evanston, IL 60208.

The Man With One Leg appeared previously in Clifton Magazine a while ago, a year before the author was hired as editor in chief for that magazine. He can't remember exact dates very well, so we didn't ask him to. Clifton Magazine, University of Cincinnati Communications Board, 204 Tangeman University Center, ML 136, Cincinnati, OH 45221.

Private Parts was a winner in the 1993 Missouri Writers Biennial competition, sponsored by the Missouri Arts Council. The story was published in a limited-release anthology featuring the work of the winners, edited by Elizabeth Alexander and produced and printed by Greg Michalson and other staff members of the Missouri Review.

My Dancing Girl Father was a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project selection, broadcast by National Public Radio on "The Sound of Writing," Program #83. Series #8. This is the story's first appearance in print.

Taking Toll was published in Seventeen in March of 1989 and in the San Francisco Chronicle of September, 1989.

I Shot The Hairdresser is the title story of a collection of short stories, (ISBN: 0-938979-39-6) published by Detour Press in St. Paul, a program of the Minnesota Project for Contemporary Language Arts. Detour Press, 1506 Grand Avenue, #3, St. Paul, MN 55105.

The Handy Man and The Key of F are seen here for the first time.



Click here to return to the titlepage.

Click here to go to the next story.

Click here to go to the previous story.