Smokey Mountain Breakdown

"Rosanne Griffeth employs potent visceral language to create the emotional energy driving her four short-shorts. The characters in Griffeth’s stories, while often gritty and mean and stubborn, are also hurt and lonely and capable of tenderness."

~Newpages Review of Keyhole #3

My head is getting so enormous, I need a wheelbarrow to lug it around in. My experimental piece about eating disorders and childhood obesity, Because Magicicadas Have No Mouths, got picked up by Pank today. That will be coming out in print in January of next year. I'm doing so well with my acceptances that Duotrope has decided to ignore all of my data because I seem to have an unrealistic acceptance rate.

It's a drizzly cool day here on the mountain. I like days like this with how moist the air is. It feels like drinking cold milk. I put up more pears this morning. I left them to simmer on the back of the stove all night so they were nice and translucent this morning. I woke up to the smell of lemons, ginger and pears. It's a beautiful smell. Like someone's grandmother who wears vanilla extract or orange flower water as a perfume. It's a smell that cries out for lace and crocheted antimacassars.

I must start writing new material. The illness, pain and my bitterness about my treatment threw me. I expect a spate of evil Tennessee doctor stories will soon emerge. Tennessee, thus far, has an unusually high ratio of prickish m.d.'s. Most of my work that has been accepted came out of the July flashathon on Zoetrope. I have really fine pieces still circulating, but I need to get back into the swing of dividing my time between subbing, editing and new work. Perhaps now that I'm not spending as much time mad with pain, like a dog contemplating chewing its leg off, I can once again focus on my work.

I am shell shocked by the $700,000,000,000 bail-out thing. Are we all not saying WTF?! And the thing is, I have so little confidence in the truthfulness of anything our government says that I don't believe for one moment it will work. It just seems like a last ditch effort to pay off big business--one last hurrah--before Bush, Cheney & Assoc. leave office.