A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review   

Todd Pierce

This wouldn't have happened except for John. For him, and his bass boat, and the trouble he'd fallen into with his wife. You see, John got himself transferred to Florida not long before I moved there: he had a job with the Forest Service; his wife, Sam, with a local high school. They'd married young, had trouble off-and-on, and the previous year, when they were both thirty-nine, tried to start a family, an arrangement that did not turn out so well. She had two miscarriages, leaving them sad and lonely, desperate for whatever satisfaction might come their way.




Todd Pierce grew up in Santa Barbara, California, a place he still considers home and which serves as a backdrop for much of his fiction. For the past seven years -- he is now 30 -- he has been in graduate school, "working on my craft as a writer and gaining skills and knowledge that will, I hope, serve me well as a teacher." He has earned an MA, an MFA, and is presently completing a Ph.D. In recent years, his work has been accepted by several journals, including The Literary Review and The Greensboro Review. His non-fiction has been including in the textbook Rethinking How We Teach Creative Writing (NCTE, 1994) and in Nimrod: The Australian Literature Issue. In the past year, he has been award two prizes, an IAP Award for Short Fiction and a Humanities Grant to help him continue his work. "Aside from writing fiction," he says, "I still play basketball when the opportunity arises. My long-time girlfriend and I -- she is studying to be a vet -- raise African chameleons, which we occasionally sell to local pet stores. After graduating I hope to find a college-level position in Southern California."

Todd Pierce, from Smoke

This would be the place to start. With my marriage. Or rather, with how it ended. My wife's name was Taylor, and she worked as an accountant for Hodgeman-Alexander. She was a tall, slender woman who had a stubborn streak. I had loved her for six years, three of which we'd been married. It is not easy to say why we separated, but I do know this: it had to do with Jeffery Branch and perhaps other men at her company. I do not believe she had an affair: she was a loyal woman, though also committed to her own idea of a good life. Just what this good life included, I did not fully understand, but sensed over time that it might not include me. Once, four months before our separation, she told me: "It's not like I haven't had opportunities to be with other men."

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