Susan Taylor Chehak

"It's Not About the Dog"
My younger sister Daisy lives in New York City, and big whoop. You can tell she thinks that fact makes her special, like she believes she's risking her life just by getting up in the morning every day. She's an actress, but nobody that I know has ever heard of her... Read the rest at www.guernicamag.com

"Apocalypse Tonight"
New Year's Eve, A Knee-binding Tight Dress, High Heels, Two Martinis, A Bookcase, and The End of the World

Or, What Happened to My Face


Twenty of LA’s best playwrights and fiction writers come together for Doublewide’s 2nd book.
Each writer is represented by a story or play, accompanied by an author’s essay about what leads to their work in general, and the selected piece, specifically. A great book for writers, readers and teachers. Includes stories by Susan Taylor Chehak, Francois Camoin, Diane Lefer, and Rob Roberge and plays by Leon Martell, John Steppling, and Sharon Yablon, among others.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ANNIE D. (formerly "The Story of Annie D.")
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

In the little town of Wizen River, Nebraska, a woman called Annie D. lives out her widowhood in a kind of peace, tending her beloved garden and observing the world around her like people do everywhere. There was a time, when Annie D. was a girl, when Wizen River was about the simplest, most innocent place a person could live. But even small towns change – and not for good. In Wizen River folks have taken to locking their doors at night for the first time ever.
Annie D. can't help but wonder and remember and search her soul for a key to what's long buried and forgotten. And the things she has to say could fill a book…

HARMONY
This novel of love and adultery recounts the story of Clodine Wheeler and the small Midwestern town where she was born and raised. As Clodine tells of her upbringing, courtship, and marriage, her narrative circles ever closer to the troubling secret and shocking death that stand at its center. It is a tale of passion and domestic violence – and their incalculable consequences. No one knows exactly when Lilly Duke, wife of a convicted killer, arrived to seek refuge in a cabin on the shore of Harmony Lake, but her arrival changes Clodine's life forever. At first Lilly finds no friends except Clodine – and Clodine's wayward husband, Galen. But after her child's body is found drifting on the lake, the town crowds to Lilly's aid. Still, no one can explain what Lilly was doing when her baby crept out of the cabin.

DANCING ON GLASS
This novel is a tale of illicit passion, transgression, and retribution, set once again in the very heart of middle America. Bader Von Vechten's marriage to Katherine Craig unites the leading families of Cedar Hill and promises to heal the wounds of three generations. But when Bader commences a love affair with a beautiful young man, Katherine is goaded to the desperate act that will change their lives irrevocably, setting in motion the series of tragic events that will play themselves out over two generations. Only twenty-five years later, in the wake of death, murder, and disgrace, can Bader, changed almost beyond recognition, return to Cedar Hill. There a chance encounter affords Bader his last hope for human contact - and redemption.

SMITHEREENS
Set once again in the heartland of America, this novel pairs two unlikely friends in a dark tale of seduction and murder. It is May Caldwell's sixteenth summer, and life couldn't be more dull in Linwood, Iowa. Vaguely suicidal and haunted by half-remembered scenes from her early childhood, May is a girl waiting for her life to happen. And happen it does with the unexpected arrival of Frances Anne Crane, a.k.a. Frankie, a girl with too much past and nothing to lose. Together they seduce an older man as Frankie awakens all that May has been holding inside: the mystery of her uncle Brodie's illicit past, the painful truth of her grandparents' slow dissolutions, and her own emerging sexuality. Where Frankie leads, May follows, and what's left is a murder no one can pin, a family's buried past resurfaced in a wild night of mayhem, and May's safe world blown to smithereens in this unforgettable of betrayal and desire.

RAMPAGE
Madlen Cramer has come back home with her two young children to be reunited with her childhood friend Rafe, the sexy drifter who has abducted a four-year-old girl from an abusive foster family, leaving the parents for dead. During this hot Iowa summer, the past will refuse to stay past as painful truths begin to emerge: about Rafe's own foster family; about Madlen's marriage, whose bonds had begun to unravel in the months before her husband's tragic accident; and about her beautiful self-absorbed mother, whose passions bring about the devastating entanglement of two families in an embrace that cannot be undone until Rafe has gone on the rampage that will destroy everything in sight.

DON QUIXOTE MEETS THE MOB: THE CRAFT OF FICTION AND THE ART OF LIFE
"Fiction – what is it? how does it work? and what is its place in the world, for the writer and for the reader? These are the questions that I want my students to explore with me not by merely reading and analyzing others' works of fiction, but by writing and coming to understand our own – finding ways to render the 'real' world of perception and memory and time, translating experience into words, capturing character in narrative, and heightening emotional and material awareness with techniques of point of view and voice. We write, and then we write some more, and it is by way of our writing that we learn about our work and our world and ourselves." Weaving together stories from life with down-to-earth instructions on how to write fiction, DQMTM searches for a workable theory of fiction, covering its basic technical elements and offering insight and inspiration on the subject of revision, before going on to examine the place of the fiction writer in the world and of fiction in the fiction writer's life – including world-view and self-image, research and personal relationships, and braving the critical storm.