Bill Hemmig

Hi, I haven't posted anything on here in a while, and I thought instead of giving you another snippet from one of my short stories, I would give you a peek into the backstory behind my novella, Brethren Hollow. This is part of Read Furiously's One and Done series. It's actually number three. They're up to like maybe eight or something now, but you can see it's dinky. It's a little tiny cute little book, and you can stick it in your pocket and take it with you on your commute and read it in less than a day. So anyway, when I was living in New Jersey, I lived across the road from an abandoned little one-room church that had a cemetery behind it. And one day I was wandering around in the cemetery, and I found this tombstone way back in a far corner. And on the front was an etched portrait, a very realistic-looking portrait of the deceased, a young woman. And it had her name and her birth and death dates, and it also said underneath Beloved Daughter and Sister. So this is interesting. So I wandered around to the back of the tombstone, and on the back of the tombstone I was surprised to see the inscription shot in the back of the head by her husband followed by his name. And anyway, the entire story of Brethren Hollow came from that tombstone. So if you're interested to see what I did with that, pick up a copy. And anyway, thanks for listening.

Hi, so here I am with a few more sentences from my short story collection, Americana Stories, as soon as the glare goes away, there it is, published by Read Furiously. I thought Winton was getting too close to the falling debris and called down to him. Lord and Taylor, he replied calmly and backed away. Winton had played delivery man who has one line which he delivers off stage. Winton decided early on to communicate solely with that line for the duration of the production and actually managed to express himself quite accurately most of the time. And that's it for this evening, thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time.

Hi, this is Bill Hemig reading a few more sentences from my short story collection Americana Stories published by Read Furiously. What if none of this is real? Did the truck driver remain distracted? Was there a head-on collision back there? Am I now smashed and contorted between my dashboard and the seat, the steering wheel in my chest, the airbag smashed flat, left in unimaginable, unendurable pain? If so, my mind has shut my senses down and has chosen as a frantic grasp at endurance to put up a world around me in which I am driving home on this two-lane route number with too many suburbs and too many traffic lights and left-turning vehicles, and all of it choreographed and anticipated and tranquil. Thanks for watching. I hope to see you next time.

Hello again. So a few more sentences from my short story collection, Americana Stories, published by Read Furiously. Your sociology professor mentioned the Oranta in passing one day, but it was enough to send you to Wikipedia to learn more and then to recalculate the rest of your life. Now you're lying naked in a tattoo parlor having the Oranta cosmology imprinted on your body. The artist enters his task with celebration because the body art of the Central Australian Oranta is not your everyday tattoo. It is kaleidoscopic with circles and circles within circles, dots and dots within dots, tightly masked parallel lines, wandering masses filled with dots and circles and vegetation. And that's enough. Thanks for tuning in and I'll see you next time.

Hi, so once again here are a few sentences from my short story collection, Americana Stories published by Read Furiously.

The glow in the wall forms itself into a young girl with a permanent scowl. She is the heroine, inappropriate label for such a negative creature, of get me out of this family, except that she's human, not ink and watercolor, and looks a lot like Emily circa age 10. She glares at Kevin and speaks to him at length. He can't hear her because of the sitcom theme songs that are now running amok, snatches of both of them flow together with a faster tempo, tin ticka tin ticka tin, and they keep modulating into the relative minor and back again, as if the themes are mocking each other. The sour girl must know that she can't be heard because suddenly she's wearing a backpack and brightly colored comment blocks start popping out of it. With each one, she soundlessly speaks the words and jabs a dinner fork in my direction. Get me out of this family.

Okay, thanks for watching.

Hi, my name is Bill Hemmig, I'm an author of short fiction and for my first post here I'm going to read a couple sentences from my short story collection, Americana Stories, recently published by Read Furiously, an independent publisher. So here goes.

Dude is in fact quietly brilliant. A maverick philosophy professor who does fine woodworking as a hobby and drives around in a 69 VW bus, moss green, with seven identical Jerry Garcia bobbleheads lined up on the dashboard facing out. He never dresses up. He writes dense and hallucinatory books marrying Thoreau and Foucault that awful people in celebrity chef restaurants pretend to have read, but that I in fact have read.

And that's it for today. If you want some more information about me or my work, I have a web page at www.bucksarts.org. And I hope to see you again.