I’m thrilled and humbled to announce that the editors and judges of the Bartleby Snopes 6th Annual Dialogue Only Contest chose my short story “Everyone Smiles” as their second place winner. The story will be available online and in the semi-annual print magazine in January 2015.
“Everyone Smiles” was a first for me–a short story entirely in dialogue without even speech tags.
The seed for the story was planted two years ago when I made a return visit to Lake Lure, North Carolina, infamous as a filming location for the 1987 film Dirty Dancing. I had originally been to the area when I was a young teen, and I have a photo of my sister and me standing on the green-carpeted outdoor steps to the hotel. As I sat in the car on that second visit in the pouring rain, I squinted through the foggy windshield, trying to recapture the excitement I’d felt on the previous visit years before, but it just didn’t look the same. Oddly, I couldn’t get over the fact that the hotel had removed the green carpeting. It was in that moment of incongruity between what I remembered (or perhaps what I had created in my memory from that photo) and what I was seeing, that the story “Everyone Smiles” came to life. It would take another two years, though, for me to make that kernel of an idea into something resembling a story, and it took the Bartleby Snopes challenge for me to put it all together.
I’m excited to announce that my short story “At a Loss” was recently published in the 
Amy Morris-Jones 