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About
the Author:
John Shea was born in Rome, the son of a Foreign
Service Officer.
He graduated from Columbia University, then
earned a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. There,
he won Penn’s awards for playwriting and for poetry.
After that,
he worked at Penn for many years as an editor and
writer. He
may be the only person to have published stories in both
Partisan Review
and Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
His story “The Real World” received an honorable
mention from
Writer’s Digest, was published in
Columbia Magazine,
and was later performed as part of Writing Aloud, a
program of InterAct Theatre Company of Philadelphia.
He won second prize in the
Philadelphia City
Paper fiction competition with a story set in
Colonial Philadelphia; it included witchcraft and a
cameo by B. Franklin.
Other stories have appeared in
The Twilight Zone
Magazine, The
Café Irreal,
Literal Latte, and elsewhere.
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Excerpt
from the Book:
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Behind the Scene
Inventing a literary form, besides
giving one a bear of an appetite, is a heady experience,
one that I share with only a handful of visionary
people. For
example, there’s Petrarch, who, I gather, invented the
Petrarchan sonnet; the Provençal troubadour Arnaut
Daniel, who came up with the devilishly clever sestina;
and, closer to our time, Rich Hall, who gave us the
sniglet.
And now, the “tale from Webster’s.”
What is it – a poem in prose, a short (very
short) narrative, a verbal arrangement?
That question may be impossible to answer
conclusively, but there are others.
Where does it come from?
How did this ingenious, often challenging form
originate?
The answer lies in the mists of time . . . or at
least more than 30 years ago.
As it happened, I was working on a project
completely unrelated to the tales.
I believe the word I was fishing for at the time
was monstrance, but I cannot remember whether I
was consulting its derivation or verifying the spelling.
At any rate, I opened my dictionary – a
well-worn, jacketless copy of Webster’s New World
Dictionary, Second College Edition (World Publishing
Company, 1970) – and ran my eyes down the columns on
page 922.
Sure enough, there was monstrance.
But what immediately seized my attention were its
neighbors, arranged there so suggestively: monster,
mons pubis, monsoon, Monsignor.
Pay dirt!
I knew it at once.
For did this not seem a story in miniature, a
veritable tale of temptation and passion, involving
characters clinging to organized religion while adrift
in the chaos of emotion?
Indeed, the notion of chaos itself was important:
For what I had detected – purely by chance – was a kind
of hidden sense within the apparent randomness of the
universe.
True, there was – there is – an order
(alphabetical) in my Webster’s and yours; but that order
is much less exciting than what I had stumbled upon.
Yes, the “tales” that link these seemingly
unrelated words together may not be evident – but that
was precisely what appealed to me as a writer who
manipulates words, or is manipulated by them.
In fact, the Monsignor-to-monstrance
sequence seemed to show more of its hidden drama than
most imaginable sequences.
After all, I had checked my dictionary on
countless other occasions without being rewarded with
that flash of insight.
But having had that fortuitous eyeful, I
determined to examine other sets of words in the same
way. If
there was a tale folded inside these five mere words,
were there not other tales elsewhere in my deceptively
plain Webster’s?
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