On "Cotton" by Lydia Copeland Gwyn (266 words) *****

Copeland's so magnificent sometimes. Like another piece of hers I highlighted a few years ago, this one sings with the night (of a new love, cast against an old). I don't know that it's a story so much of a remembrance, a brilliant moment, or set of moments, impressed into the page--or the screen, since you can read it here at New World Writing.

On "Christmas Tree" by Lydia Copeland (469 words) ****

Here's another nice flash piece by Copeland, the wordsmith. Here, we get a rundown on a niece's life, on an aunt she adores and on moments made weird by new members in the family (something that I myself have always felt a little odd about when meeting some girl's parents or hanging out with her family--me this relative stranger her might one day be a part of the family, though not from birth).

As for the aunt, I remember my own precious aunt. She didn't let us get away with things like smoking or drinking. In some ways, she was more strict than my quite strict mother. My mom cleaned the house twice a week; this aunt cleaned it every day. My mom let us play in the living room, as long as we put our toys away. This aunt didn't let us play anywhere but in the bedrooms. But what this aunt let us get away with that my mom would never have let us get away with was putting sugar on our cereal, and what's more, eating cereals like Fruit Loops, deemed unhealthy by my parents. We were limited to Shredded Wheat, oatmeal, Grape Nuts; if lucky, we might get honey on the cereal from time to time. Looking back on it, however, I'm glad my mom wasn't into letting us have so much sugar. Read the story here at Menda City Review.

On "In the Air a Shining Heart" by Lydia Copeland (1204 words) ****

Sometimes writers get on a rant. They string together sentences and images in pursuit of an object, a word, an emotion, a thing. I think of the first half of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground. Admittedly, I'm not a big Dostoevsky fan; I tend not to go for maximalism, not to go for those huge books that throw everything into them including the author's grandmother's underwear and the shiny snowglobe the cat knocked off the dresser at age three. But for those fifty or one hundred pages in that first half of Underground, Dostoevsky proves entirely interesting. He's a man with an attitude, and as a reader, you're certain to know it.

The few short pieces I've read of Copeland's each draw me toward them in their own way. Copeland's a writer of great skill and style, able to evoke a moment or scene with just a few chosen words and to do it so well that you think, for a moment, wait, you stole that from my memory (and then wait, that isn't one of my memories!). But here, Copeland's tops even herself. This is a piece that makes me want to go out and write something, that makes me want to scream its words out in public, on a stage, in a concert. Like a really good song, it makes me want to live. Read the story here at Night Train.