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The Drum

Issue 2. June 2010

Drum Archives: Now Available Through Audible

While everything on The Drum is free to download or listen to on the site, our older material will eventually go into our archives, which you can find on Audible.com. Click here to see our materials on Audible--so far, our first six months' worth of audio. You can hear a brief sample of each piece on our site by clicking its play button.

ETHAN GILSDORF Loving the Momster

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In his essay “Loving the Momster,” Ethan Gilsdorf recounts his childhood after his mother’s 1997 death, specifically the childhood after his mother suffered an aneurism in 1978. Gilsdorf revisits his mother’s mercurial moods and changed attitude, and his own altered childhood, through emails from a childhood friend who only knew Gilsdorf’s mother after her aneurism. Despite the fragmented nature of his mother’s life, Gilsdorf is able to find and preserve a sense of her identity. (:37)

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essaymediumfamilyrelationships

CELESTE NG Trick

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A Halloween dinner with her estranged father and his new wife exposes tensions and fault lines in Claudia’s world. A single mother with a young son, she tries to preserve the spirit of trick or treat against her father’s wishes, until finally the stressful meal veers towards a new and alarming direction. (:33)

about the author

short fictionlargefamily

LAUREN GRODSTEIN This Truth I'm Telling

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The narrator of Lauren Grodstein’s “This Truth I’m Telling” was a bartender in the World Trade Center. At a jobs convention for workers displaced after 9/11, Martin thinks about the life and the people that he has lost. He wonders which is truer: the optimistic exhortations of the jobs speaker, or the resignation he feels. (:38)

about the author

short fictionmediumcrisis

LYNNE GRIFFIN Sea Escape, Chapter Two

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In the second chapter of her novel Sea Escape, Lynne Griffin writes from the point of view of Laura’s mother, Helen. It is 1951 and Helen has just watched her boyfriend, Joe, depart for Samson Air Force Base. During his absence, she finds a new independence through work, despite her father’s wishes. (:44)

about the author

novel excerptmediumfamily

BEN PERCY The Neighborhood

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In Ben Percy’s “The Neighborhood,” economic stress leads suburbanites to rather sinister acts against one family unable to keep up appearances. The Petersens become the focus of neighborhood concern, and their house becomes the target of a destructive communal activity. (:29)

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short fictionsmall

MAUD CASEY Fugueur

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At the turn of the 19th century, Albert wakes to find himself penniless and paperless, with no memory of his travels and the time he has been walking. In this excerpt from her unpublished novel, Fugueur, Maud Casey writes about a man caught in a fugue state, lost in time and place as he walks through France from town to town. (:35)

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short fictionmediumcrisis

LYNNE BARRETT Macy Is The Other Woman

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The narrator in Lynne Barrett’s story “Macy is the Other Woman,” is the other woman, conducting an affair with a softball teammate whose girlfriend she doesn’t want to hurt. Over a warm July 4th weekend in Washington, Macy comes to terms with the affair, pondering the complicated entanglements of infidelity and friendship. (:40)

about the author

short fictionmediumrelationships

MICHELLE HOOVER Our Little Bertha

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Michelle Hoover’s essay “Our Litter Bertha” recounts her discovery of her great-grandmother's journal, the document which she later used to inspire her novel, The Quickening. Hoover ponders the stories of her Midwestern family found in diaries and letters. She contemplates her upbringing and the consequences of her relocation from Iowa to Boston. The essay is a vivid study of the connection between identity and place. (:36)

about the author

essaylargefamily

LYNNE GRIFFIN Sea Escape

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Lynne Griffin reads from the first chapter of her novel Sea Escape. After working a 12 hour nursing shift, Laura takes her two young children to visit her mother on her 77th birthday. But while she prepares to bake a cake for the occasion, Laura receives a phone call that could alter the course of her life, of her mother’s life, and of their rocky relationship. (:35)

about the author

novel excerptmediumfamilyrelationships


theme: comedy

theme: crisis

theme: relationships

theme: family

genre: essay

novel excerpt

short fiction

poetry

under 10 min

under 20 min

under 30 min

under 40 min
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