A non-story is a story with no climactic moment and no point, usually told with gestures of great enthusiasm. It’s what happens sometimes when writers become happy: their forms fall apart and they must find new ways of expressing this strange and uncomfortable way of feeling. They turn to epistolary tales fraught with bunnies in teacups and live puppy webcams, lyric lab reports chronicling taste bud experimentation, sestinas that invoke “divine fascia” and “tangerines,” all manners of ill-advised white space and perverse line breaks, one act plays about blonde-haired ponies. They become obsessed with discovering the fourth-person point of view, convinced it is some sort of cosmic perspective to unite all in one, one in all.
Illutration by Amanda Nazario
CURRENT PROJECT
Some Really Disgusting Essays About Love: A Guidebook
This is an instructional book about writing. It does not, however, contain any instructions for writing. In a perfect world, instructional books about writing suggest no exercises and outline no rules but instead offer up possible solutions for the problem of writing, which, I think we all can agree, is a quite a problem. And so this instructional book is really a book of solutions, or a book which chronicles the quest for solutions, or a book-y type thing which kind of tells about a foolish and impossible digressive meandering toward the idea of solution or perhaps toward the idea of happy oblivion or maybe toward just being able to be cool with the way things are. Whatever this book is about, Ive included a great deal about cats, which I hope you enjoy.
EXCERPTS
" Space Tacos " in Little Village
" Themes," "Forms," "The 4th Pereson Point of View" and more in Fugue
" Mothers Without Babies " in Barrelhouse
OTHER SELECT PUBLICATIONS
" Arizona's Lonely " in Necessary Fiction, anthologized in Best of the Web 2010
" Story Per My Therapist's Request by Rachel Yoder " in Wag's Revue
" Monkey House " in The Collagist
" Shark " in Kenyon Review
" I, Cougar " in Nerve
" Strung Out On Love... " in the New York Times
" The Thing at the Foot of the Bed ," radio essay in The Missouri Review .
Illustration by Matt Marro
In an effort to save their marriage, the Swede allowed the girl to inflate him in the park where they had been discussing the unfortunate circumstances of their faltering marriage. Read more of "The Distended Swede."
Listen!
- McNally Jackson Books
Co-founder and Editor, draft: the journal of process
draft: the journal of process, is an educational literary journal which features stories, drafts, and interviews about the writing process. Our mission is to emphasize the importance and diversity of the creative process, especially for new writers and students in writing classrooms. Launched in 2011, we publish two issues a year. We also have a snazzy blog .
Senior Editor, Defunct Magazine
An online magazine which features writing by authors who interpret defunctness in their own often idiosyncratic ways and have brought back the dead, salvaged the past, and revealed their obsessions as writers do. New issues appear in April and October.
Former Managing Editor, Alligator Juniper
A publication of Prescott College, Alligator Juniper features contemporary poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and black-and-white fine arts photography. AJ has won the AWP Directors' Prize in Content for Undergraduate Literary Magazines three times. Read the review of the 2008 issue, the most recent prize-winner.
Listen to Defunct editors talk about the days of yore on Iowa Public Radio.
"Also exceptional is this issue's Special Feature titled Genre Blur, introduced by editor Rachel Yoder, who asks us to 'expand or abandon' our ideas of categorization."
- from NewPages.com review of the 2008 AJ Issue
e-mail me at racheljyoder at gmail dot com
or write me a little note in the boxy things
I put my almost empty yogurt cup on the floor and the fat one sticks its head all the way in, pushes the cup into a wall, and just stays like that.
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©Rachel Yoder 2011
