"Midge Raymond’s stories are a revelation and a delight...Prepare yourself to think in Chinese, to start over, to reveal your worst crime and discover you are a stranger to yourself, born again into a world where all things become wondrous and new, terrifying and possible.”
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and Sweet Hearts
— Melanie Rae Thon, author of First, Body and Sweet Hearts
Forgetting English
January 2009
In this collection of stories, Midge Raymond stretches the boundaries of place as she explores the indelible imprint of home upon the self and the ways in which new frontiers both defy and confirm who we
are.
From a biologist navigating the stark, icy moonscape of Antarctica to a businesswoman seeking refuge in the lonely islands of the South Pacific, the characters in these stories abandon their native landscapes only to find that, once separated from the ordinary, they must confront new interpretations of who they are, and who they’re meant to be.
Download an excerpt from one of the stories in Forgetting English. Click here for the Reading Guide.
Journals & Magazines
TriQuarterly
45th Anniversary Issue - Spring 2010
The Color Blue
"Sometimes it’s dark — an inky, almost-black. Other times, it’s light, like the deepest part of an iceberg. But the color follows me everywhere.
My therapist calls it synesthesia. When a color gives you a certain feeling. The way some people see the letter A and think of red, the way they hear C sharp and think green."
My therapist calls it synesthesia. When a color gives you a certain feeling. The way some people see the letter A and think of red, the way they hear C sharp and think green."
Freight Stories
No. 6, March 2010
Crossroads
"Liz had never wanted to work on children’s books, but I suppose, at twenty-eight, we’re both past realizing we can have everything we want. I still can’t recall having read those books as a kid, but the choose-your-adventure idea seems even more foreign to me now. Books for adults are not constructed that way. In the books we read now, one page follows another, and we turn them in the expected order, with no thought to the story having more than one ending, and no recollection of ever having done it differently."
The Wanderlust Review
Winter 2009/2010
The Gospel of Thomas
"He closes the file, leaving the computer on. Beth waits until she hears the shower running, then sits down and begins to search. She finds a folder titled Works in Progress and skims the file names. She opens them, one by one, until she finds it. The first paragraph is a beach scene, and it reads like an instant replay of the weekend. Tom has written down everything verbatim: their conversations, their arguments, what they ate, what Beth wore."
American Literary Review
Fall 2008
Twin Falls
"It was astonishing to her that she’d forgotten about the ring, which she discovered in a long-sealed box while cleaning out the storage room a few months earlier. It was even more astonishing, and somehow thrilling, that after more than twenty years of life with Ethan, she was about to tell him a story that he’d never heard before."
Roanoke Review
Summer 2008
Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean
"Landing the nanny job gave me a little hope, with the mother being an actress and the father a producer...The irony is that I am acting, every day. I’m a housewife who never got married, a mother who never got pregnant. I’m playing a role, but they don’t give SAG memberships to nannies."
Bayou magazine
Summer 2008
Santorini
"She could see the moon in his eyes when they left the club and walked to the beach. As she pulled off his shirt, she scanned his shoulders, his arms, his chest, looking for scars or birthmarks, landmarks to guide her. She found nothing."
Crab Orchard Review
Fall 2007
Water Children
"I was born twenty minutes after Bee...And I still feel that we're floating around in the same primordial place, breathing the same liquid air, battling for space despite having outgrown our environment."
Passages North
Winter/Spring 2007
Floaters
"Words I've always loved; books give me a place to disappear, pulling me deep into forests of bleached paper and ink. I'm most comfortable with people in this form — characters on pages, whose lives touch you without your touching them."
Bellevue Literary Review
Fall 2006
Translation Memory
"This is what he remembers: the day he and Julie met, five years ago, at an outdoor jazz festival on Boston Common, ten minutes before a thunderstorm sent them into the lobby of a boutique hotel. He remembers martinis in a dim lounge, emerging later to a clearing summer sky."
West/Los Angeles Times magazine
July 16, 2006
Aftershock
"Associated Press picked it up, he said. He handed it to her. It was just a small weekly for the coastal cities, but there it was, on the back page. It described her as twenty-four years old and brunette, and it didn't mention him at all. She was actually only nineteen, and blond."
new south (formerly gsu review)
Spring/Summer 2006
Forgetting English
Winner, 2006 gsu review Fiction Prize
"Paige gazes across the street at the neon lights, the blinking red characters over restaurants, on billboards. She studies them hopefully, wondering if one day she might be able to decipher them, to translate the jumble of her own life into something coherent. As she waits, she practices the numbers, repeating the strange words — yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi — over and over, softly, as if murmuring a prayer."
The Ontario Review
Spring 2006
The Ecstatic Cry
"Often when I watch the penguins, I forget I'm a scientist. I become so mesmerized by the sounds of their purrs and squawks, by the precision of their clumsy waddle, that I forget that I have another life, somewhere else — that my life now is only as good as my next grant, and that when the money dries up, I'm afraid that I will, too."
Indiana Review
Winter 2005/2006
First Sunday
Winner, 2004 Indiana Review Fiction Prize
"He lives in his mother's house, with no electricity or hot water, yet somehow he always has a ready supply of condoms. The notion strikes me one night as he rolls away from me and gets out of bed."
North American Review
Summer 2004
Most Likely to be Remembered
Third Prize, 2003 Kurt Vonnegut Fiction Prize
"Ruth-Ann listens to the CD with headphones — The first rule about cancer, the author says, is that there are no rules. Ruth-Ann tries to take comfort in this, but she knows, deep down, that there is only one rule about cancer, and she has broken it."
Pearl
Spring 2003
Sam
"Strange things began to happen after we befriended Sam: Clothes and homework went missing, food and drinks disappeared from the tiny fridges in our rooms, yet we spoke of mental clumsiness and too many drugs."
The Baltimore Review
Winter/Spring 2003
Cleaning House
“Ky pretends she’s one of them. She tries on cocktail dresses and riding clothes, accents and attitudes…But eventually she retrieves the clothes she came with, smelling of cleaning fluid and other people’s dirt.”
Other Voices
Fall/Winter 2002
The Day the Dogs Returned to Earth
"Up ahead, a white mass poured out from between the mountains...She heard a deep rumble, like thunder, and clouds of ice-dust billowed up as a section calved into the sea. She watched the newly formed icebergs surf gently toward the boat on a shallow wave, and for a moment she felt as aimless and frozen as the drifting ice."
The Improper Bostonian
September 2002
Two Lies and a Truth
Winner, 2002 Short Fiction Contest
"'I served coffee to Matt Damon yesterday,' she says. 'He had a nonfat, decaf, no-whip white chocolate mocha.'"
River Oak Review
Spring 2002
Blood Orange Mimosas
"She sat up in bed and watched the shadows of the trees grow tall and thin, like gawky teenagers, their long limbs stretching forth like fingers pointing expectantly into their bedroom."
Witness
Spring 2002
Anodyne
Winner, 2002 Short-Short Fiction Contest
"It began pouring rain, Faye is saying, and we went to a lounge bar, where a blind man was playing the piano. I kept going up and giving him requests, and then my date came up — I think he was jealous — and he says to the man, 'Do you want to touch her face? Don't blind people like to do that?' And the blind man says, 'I only touch the faces of women I sleep with.'"
Inkwell
Spring 2002
This Is What the Guides Are Telling Me
"'People come here to ease their pain, to be comforted,' she said. 'You should always tell them that they need to be patient, that things will be okay.'
'But then you're not telling them the truth. Isn't that what they came for?'
She said, 'They always get what they came for.'"
Red Rock Review
Summer 1999
Under Limestone Cliffs
"She was obsessed with cats. That was the third thing I learned about her. Her mother had always fed the cats before feeding the human members of her family."