Fiction, Poetry & Me

(Visit my Fiction Portfolio here.)

The first piece I ever had published was a poem, “Hideway,” in Red Cross Magazine.  I was 8 years old, and from that experience I inferred that getting published is what happens when you write something, a magical idea that I’ve never quite outgrown.  I kept churning out and publishing stories and poems for the next five years and then I got an illustrated book on the PBS kids show ZOOM, and then, due to misguided parental pressure to become an oboist (?), I stopped writing.

Ten years later I quit the oboe and took up writing again.*

Today I write short stories and short novels and, very occasionally, poems. I also write narratives that editors categorize as ‘creative nonfiction.’  The older I get, the most arbitrary the divisions between fiction and creative nonfiction appear to me. I always draw on aspects of real life (my own and other people’s) when writing fiction, and I always edit out and condense events when I’m creating a nonfiction narrative. For this reason, I like works that don’t bother to hide their creative seams — Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five or James Salter’s A Sport and a Pasttime or anything by the French writer Annie Ernaux.

John Updike signs my copy of "Rabbit Is Rich" at the Key West Writers Conference

I’ve studied with some remarkable writers and poets who’ve prodded me to see writing in new ways:  David Leavitt, Jill Ciment, Sidney Wade, Padgett Powell and Michael Hofmann (University of Florida, where I got my MFA); Carole Maso (Bennington Writers Workshops); John Updike and Harry Mathews (Key West Writer’s Workshop); Robert Olen Butler (Miami Book Fair International Writer’s Workshop); and Elliot Figman (Poets & Writers Workshops). To you all:  ’Thank you’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

 I’ve also received a boost now and then in the form of a grant or an award from some literary organization.  These gifts (monetary and non) have meant an incredible amount to me psychologically, as they do for any writer.  Two awards in particular that kept me on the writing path were an Individual Artist Grant in Fiction from the State of Florida and a Tigertail grant from the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council, which funded my first workshop experience in Key West. 

My stories have appeared in various literary magazines including  New Delta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Red Rock Review, and Portland Review.  In December 2004, the Ocala Star Banner asked me to write a Christmas story for them, and I managed to pull it off.  The newspaper even commissioned an original illustration to accompany the story (a la Boz), which made me feel even more like Charles Dickens. 

My short novels and longer works of creative nonfiction have come close to being published in book form but not yet, which means they’re up for grabs.  (Hint: Publishers and agents, you can contact me here.)  These works include Embouchure, which was a finalist for the 2006 Low Fidelity Press Novella Award and the 2007 Quarterly West Novella Award, and The Girl Scout Variations, which was first runner-up in the 2004 Robert J. De Mott Prose Contest, sponsored by the ‘zine Quarter After Eight.

To read three of my recent stories, ”Town & Hillock,” ”How to Marry a Southern Man” and ”11 Postcards from Peru,” please visit my Fiction Portfolio. 

– Barbara Drake, August 2010

*I didn’t give up being a musician entirely after I quit the oboe.  A friend gave me an Irish penny whistle, which I have played since then in concert and on three recordings of Celtic rock music.  A Peruvian journalist interviewed me about it last year.