NEWS

My new collection of short stories, Magpies, was published  Sept. 2011 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and has won the Gold Medal for General Fiction in the Florida Book Awards.  For more info., please go to my new website:
www.LynneBarrett.com

Publishers Weekly review.
"Barrett portrays adult lives with minimal flourishes and a powerful command of setting. Florida is electric with the tension of "all that can happen"--hurricanes, sinkholes, and a boom-and-bust history. It becomes as eerie as it is richly imagined..."

My piece on The Story Prize blog.

About Magpies:

"It is entirely impossible to predict what you’re going to get when you start a Lynne Barrett story: a taut tale of adultery and murder, a wry evocation of romance amid the dot.com bubble, a gossip columnist who spits toads. What you do know is that you’ll keep reading—for the vibrant prose, the keen insights, and the remarkable depth of feeling. Magpies is a stone cold triumph."

            —Steve Almond, author of Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life

"Lynne Barrett belongs in the top tier of short-story writers in America today. Her unforgettable characters, poker-face wit, and sly plots make for an intensely enjoyable experience. The title story should be snapped up by anthologies. Barrett’s male characters are every bit as believable as her female characters, and the breadth of detail is both natural and mind-expanding. You want to read her work: it’s hilarious-funny and sophisticated-funny and moving-funny, and withal shines a clarity that comes from the subtle beauty of her sentences."

            —Kelly Cherry, author of The Woman Who

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I guest-edited a volume of Tigertail, A South Florida Annual, which focuses on flash forms: prose poems, flash fiction and flash nonfiction. The collection came out in October. More on Tigertail: Florida Flash on the Tigertail website.



An e-book version of Delta Blues, with my story "Blues for Veneece," is now available.












The Review Review published my essay, "What Editors Want," and it "went viral." As editor Becky Tuch reported in their weekly newsletter: "Over at The Review Review, things have been more than a little insane. For one thing, Lynne Barrett's article ... "What Editors Want..." spread around the globe and back, earning us coverage in the L.A. Times and The New Yorker. Yeah, we were pretty excited."


"Black Velvet" is in the inaugural issue of  The Written Wardrobe, which is housed within the Modcloth website.  I got to attend  the  launch party at Chef Ike's Mambo Room, during the AWP in Washington, D.C.


"Alchemy," a short short from a series I'm working on, all set in the same slightly magical neighborhood, has  been published in the online magazine Pig in a Poke.

My reading of "Macy is the Other Woman" is in the  great audio literary magazine The Drum

"The Borges Cure" is online at Night Train Magazine.





Kristi Peterson Schoonover blogged about the story here.  (Best to read the story first!)

          "Blues for Veneece" is included in the Tyrus Books  anthology Delta Blues, edited by Carolyn Haines, with an introduction by Morgan Freeman.     A percentage of the receipts for this book go to assist the Rock River Foundation in its work for literacy in Mississippi.

Oline Cogdill named Delta Blues one of the best mystery books of 2010.

 Great review of Delta Blues in the Mobile Press-Register, with attention to  "Blues for Veneece."

The launch weekend included a reception hosted by the Delta Writers chapter of the Mississippi Writers Guild, and an awards ceremony for  a writing competition for high school students where the winners were thrilled not only with their awards but with the presence of Morgan Freeman.

I sang a couple of numbers with the authors' blues band, The Blues Muse, as well as being a Boomette backup singer  at the launch for Delta Blues,  March 27, 2010 at Ground Zero Bl

ues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi.  One number is now up on YouTube.

Billy Howell's interview with me about my Delta Blues story and the anthology, as well as coverage of the launch events,  at the Clarksdale Press Register.

Emily Bingham of U. South Alabama interviewed me on writing and my story "Blues for Veneece." The interview  is online. 

Sun-Herald review of Delta Blues here.

My short story "When, He Wondered" appeared in  March/April 2010 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. 

My poem "The Preservation & Vice Tour" is  in 6¢, the sixth issue of Cent Journal from the Miami Poetry Collective.

The Southern Women's Review's Summer/Fall 2010 issue includes my poem "Hatteras Bride,

Knitting."











 "How to Make a Crazy Quilt, 1906-1917," appears in their Winter/Spring 2010 issue.  SWR issues are  downloadable as beautiful pdfs  at http://www.southernwomensreview.com/

Lynne Barrett

 

 

Photo by Suzie Dugan, Lady in Pink Photography, taken at the Sanibel Writers Conference.

 

August 23 at 5:30 I'll be speaking at the Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor, ME.

November 5-8,  I'll be among those teaching at the Florida Gulf Coast University Sanibel Island Writers Conference, held at Big Arts on beautiful Sanibel.  Read here for more on  the Sanibel Island Writers Conference.

Recent events (a sampling)

My workshop "21st Century Ghosts," Oct. 20th, 2012, was held at Books & Books and sponsored by the Florida Center for the Literary ARts.

The International Women's Writing Guild annual conference, this year took place at Yale University, New Haven, CT

Grub Street's Muse & the Marketplace, Boston, May 2012

Info here.

July 29-Aug. 1, 2010, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, CA.  Coverage
in

the San Francisco Examiner.  I had the pleasure of teaching a master class in revision, a class in flash forms, and giving a keynote address on the last night.  And I got to see whales spouting off Point Cabrillo.

In April 2010, at the Associated Writing Programs Conference, in Denver, I was on a panel on plot and form, "Plot as Ritual Not Representation,"  with John Dufresne, Debra Monroe, and Antonia Nelson.  Tamara Linse blogged the session I was part of at the 2010 AWP: "Plot as Ritual Not Representation." And the Lavademon blog covered the panel in detail.

Jan 16-17, 2010  Workshop and Master Class in Structure, Geneva Writers Group, Geneva, Switzerland. 

Geneva Press Club 

Saturday class: Fundamentals of Narrative Structure (morning) and Creating a Strong Story Structure for Your Novel (afternoon). 

Sunday Master Class.

  

Alice Baudat of the Geneva Writers Group did this watercolor of Lynne teaching in Switzerland in April 2008. 

Bits & Pieces

Some nice words for "Blue Vandas" and A Hell of A Woman. More from Booklist Online.

You can read my reviews at

www.floridabookreview.com

Teaching

At Florida International University, I teach graduate  and undergraduate workshops in fiction and creative nonfiction, and  graduate seminars.   In recent years I've taught classes in Fiction,  Creative Nonfiction, Plot,  Mystery & Suspense, and other subjects and  I'm directing MFA theses: novels, story collections, memoirs.  I also teach at writers' conferences and travel to lead master classes for smaller groups.

                          

Recent and upcoming publications by former students

Lots of info. about the achievements of my current and former students is at

http://www.lynnebarrett.com/teaching.html

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