Readers and writers blog

Scattered crumbs, trick mirrors, guilty murderers — all right, that’s what we’re talking about. Two new submissions to our Works section, each from sources one might think unlikely. But that’s the magic of writing, friends.

One submission — our first contemporary work of fiction — is a short story about a murder or two written by a kindly grandmother from the Midwest. The other submission is experimental poetry from a young military officer in southern California.

Thus, in the poetry section of Works, we present “Trick mirrors” and “Crumbs scattered around the terminator of the cortex,” two experimental works by Jason Gregoire using unorthodox grammar, structure and linguistic imagery.

In the fiction section, we present “Presumed Guilty” by Marjorie Pagel of Franklin, Wis., a short story narrated by a convicted murderer’s sympathetic pen pal.

We couldn’t be prouder. This was our original idea, before we became Readersandwritersblog.com, back when we were Readers-and-writers.com. The premise was that writers would write and submit their work for readers who would read and, if they cared to, comment on the writing, possibly leading to feedback from the writers, and there would be, as our subtitle says, an interactive universe of the written word.

At first, we got a few submissions, and we were delighted. But then, everything stopped. We’re not sure exactly why, but we suspect it’s because the Internet is such a tangled web that a site can stay lost for months, maybe forever, hidden from sight from readers and writers who might make use of it.

That’s really why we seek out weblogs that we consider well-written and post them on our blogroll. Because we know in many cases how hard it was to find them in a blogosphere bloated by chitter-chatter, celebrity and fan diaries and political and religious rants.

Anyway, two more writers have found us, and again, we’re glad of it.

Marjorie Pagel has been writing since the age of 9 when she self-published a book of poetry for her grandmother. For 10 years, she was a reporter and feature writer for Community Newspapers, a chain associated with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and continues to write a weblog, “Meet Me at the Corner,” published by one of the chain’s online affiliates, HalesCornersNOW. She also teaches college writing at Concordia University in Mequon, Wis. She and her husband have two grown children, three grandchildren and an English cocker spaniel, Annie.

Jason Gregoire is in his mid-20s and, when he is not busy with his military duties, dabbles in experimental fiction and poetry. His current experiments, in his words, “attempt to mesh stream-of-consciousness, surrealism and science fiction. The writing’s nebulous and occasionally esoteric assembly requires patience and imagination but, with effort, provides the reader a cipher key to the underpinnings of the message.”

Thank you both. And may we also recommend the other writers who have shared their words in the nonfiction, fiction and poetry sections of Works.

– Sid Leavitt