Archive.org

One of the downsides to publishing online is that sometimes websites go defunct, without warning, and your work is lost. But not always lost forever, as I've pleasantly discovered. I first found the wonderful Internet Archive from its vast library of live music recordings, but only recently learned that it also archives old web pages. So here are two lost stories of mine that I rediscovered yesterday:

"Guaranteed", in Spillway Review: Spillway was a New Orleans-based journal that managed to survive Hurricane Katrina. In fact, I sent them "Guaranteed" before Katrina, but after the storm I just assumed the journal was no more. I was pleasantly surprised to hear from them months later, and the story was published in 2006. But the journal has since disappeared. Reading this early story, I now realize that my work had much more humor than now. Maybe I'm getting old and serious.

"Have a Pleasant Commute on Metra", from This Is Grand: Chicago literary impressario Jonathan Messinger (featherproof Books, The Dollar Store, etc.) once ran this site, which collected true stories from CTA trains and buses. Somehow I managed to convince him to take this brief Metra piece, one of my earliest publications which first appeared in 2004. I later sent in another Metra piece, "So Much On My Mind", but when the site went black soon after the piece was orphaned, and I published it here instead.