Friday, 9:30 a.m.
Cris Mazza is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections of fiction, including Homeland. Her memoir is Indigenous/Growing Up in California. She also edited Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit 2. Originally from San Diego, Mazza now lives west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Mazza read us selections from the novel Homeland related to an incident in the narrator's childhood when father, mother, son, and daughter were hunting gamebirds and something terrible happened.
"... the outlaw deed now done, to kill a songbird or heron or raptor...."
"... but who was screaming, wasn't someone screaming...."
"We were the only people on the face of the earth...."
"Cactus apples... about the size of a small fist and extremely juicy...."
"... taking only the hearts from the waste...."
Hunting is "an activity you did as calmly and quietly as possible...."
"We were the bird-dogs...."
"The dark meat slid easily from the little bones...."
"The swell of dusty heat...."
"Not guilt, not exactly, maybe some twinge of adolescent sigh...."
"... just sucked the sound out of us and dispersed it...."
"... so a cast iron skillet was necessary equipment...."
"... giving our mother time to fish in a rare hour of solitude...."
"... the blood of his fish still on his arm...."
"Our angry boots kicked dust from old sleeping tents...."
"... a hiss like a long sigh...."
"Hear the fire's breath?"
"Is fire alive?"
"We screamed. Kept on screaming. But there was also an awful silence...."
"... which means none of them were bigger than a fist...."
"... something burning, something rotten...."
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