A Trip to Borders

Time Spent: 2 hours.

Just as I said in Saturday's post, we were in STL yesterday (incidentally, missing the tornado that swept through Springfield, wrecking the Southwest to East part of town - I should post pictures we took on our way back from Decatur today. It's a mess here, but as far as I know, no casualties, thank God!) and I went to Borders out by Galleria. This might not seem newsworthy to you, but all we have here in town is Barnes and Noble (which may be closed for a while, depending on the extent of storm damage). So this was my first Borders trip, in a completely different city to boot.

Very productive. They had twice as many writer's resources as B&N - including a copy of River Styx, which I'm visiting next week. YAY! I can actually read the journal and be prepared for the trip, which is all I did today.

Reading print journals has been a good experience for me, helping me to really open my mind. I think I've mentioned that these aren't the sorts of things that I would normally read. Most of the journals say in their submission guidelines that they don't publish genre fiction, which is more in the realm of what I usually read. I have read all the journals I've bought from front to back (well, except for the poetry, I haven't read all of it - I don't want to think THAT much) and there is some really good work, but honestly, I think River Styx is the best one I've read. I got one of the 2005 issues (probably the last one of the year), and there is a story in there about a college dropout who befriends a teenager in a small MA town, and together they explore the little town. It doesn't sound so exciting from my summary, but it was a very good story.

So this was good preparation for my visit to River Styx. I'll be able to say that I have, in fact, read the journal, and that it's good! I may dig through it again for a close read and see if I can come up with some really good questions about "why this particular story?" or "why this author?"