strannikov

About Me

A mere provincial, I began posting flash fiction here late in 2011: work appeared earlier @ Delicious Demon (archives closed), then @ Language Is a Virus (archives closed).
2010 and 2011: work appeared @ Gone Lawn Journal/Gone Lawn Excavation Project and @ Metazen (archives closed).
February 2012: @ Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
March 2015: @ The Miscreant.
June 2020: @ Literati Magazine.
March 2021: @ Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
January 2022: @ The Earth Journal. September 2022: @ The Bookends Review.
July 2023: @ AZURE Literary Journal and @ The Raven Review. August 2023: @ APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. October 2023: @ Wilderness House Literary Review.
January 2024: @ The Montreal Review. October 2024: @ Oddball Magazine.
March 2025: @ Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Took to verse unaccountably in Spring 2016.
October 2020: @ Chiron Review. November 2020: Pushcart nomination for "Bruegel days, nights by Bosch" courtesy of Amantine B. and Literati Magazine.
March 2023: @ Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. September 2023: @ Oddball Magazine. December 2023: @ Oddball Magazine.
January 2024: @ The Courtship of Winds. October 2024: @ Mantis (Issue 22).

February 2024: Episode 28, "Translating the World" podcast with host Rainer Schulte (CTS Founder and Director) @ the Center for Translation Studies, University of Texas at Dallas.

Why do you write?

Flannery O'Connor answered as well as any: "Because I'm good at it." Naturally, I don't write as well as Cousin Flannery, but that's her fault, not mine. While she mastered the short story to get the ordeal of writing over as promptly as possible, flash and verse often offer more immediate relief.

Mottos and maxims:

"The text, the text, the text."
"Once a writer, always an editor."
"poetry is steak: / in the center always rare, / even served well-done."
"Applied technology giveth and applied technology taketh away: blessed be the name of applied technology."
--Oh, and: "A 'strannikov' a day keeps anomalocaridids at bay." (This constitutes my enduring promise to my readers: if you read one tale or set of verse or essay by strannikov each day, you need never fear being attacked, assailed, or assaulted by any anomalocaridid.)

Any favorite authors? Books?

Authors: Homer. Juvenal. Lucian. Dante. Villon. Machiavelli. Marlowe. Burton. Vico. Swift. Poe. Gogol. Dostoevsky. Maupassant. Twain. Bierce. Saki. Akutagawa. Čapek. Bulgakov. Kharms. Faulkner. O'Connor. Simenon. Ionesco.

Books: in addition to those represented by the folks above, some recent reads and re-reads: Jules Barbey D'Aurevilly, et al./French Decadent Tales (Romer, tr.); Louis-Ferdinand Céline/War (Mandell, tr.); E. M. Cioran/The Trouble with Being Born (Howard, tr.); Eugène Ionesco/The Bald Soprano (Allen, tr.); Georges Simenon/Act of Passion (Varèse, tr.).