Writings

The members of T3 are interested in a wide variety of literary works, including textual and visual narratives, poetry, artists' books, broadsides, comics, etc. Below are some samples of the type of work we do and the kinds of things that will be appearing in Little Bang.

Interlude with Starlings

By Benjamin Chandler

Wayside Flowers

By Jill Summers

Walking at a pace that would be considered quick by anyone asked, her eyes round and brown, her buttocks immense and full of movement, a woman who hated the heat more than most made her way toward the train. Her name was Merkle, as her mother's was before hers and as her grandmother's was before her mother's: a long and fertile line of solitary women who had passed their given and Christian names on to their bastard daughters, one Merkle Hattersfield after another. They'd had plenty of boyfriends, but no husbands and certainly no fathers. But unlike scores of other single women and bastard daughters that find themselves alone in Chicago and the world, the Hattersfields, the russet-eyed, pear-bottomed Merkles, liked it that way.

Just a block away, Harvey Butman sat too close to an elderly woman on a bus stop bench. With virtually sightless carob eyes, slivered almond nose, and strawberry slice lips, he was barely forty but unfailing conjured Pepcodent and hard candies. He was meticulously dressed, his trousers pressed and his oxford shirt crisp. His thighs and belly had over the years expanded within his neat clothing, but a man of high, if not precise, self-esteem, he noticed not the stretching seams nor the increasingly taxed pockets. He was a lonely and cautious man. He had simple needs and modest hopes, and deep beneath the polished cotton covering his breast, beat a heart with a murmur and dream to fall in love. Harvey's stomach growled loudly, and the old woman looked at him sideways, licked her index finger, and turned the stiff page of her book. Harvey squinted and smiled at her nebulous form apologetically as the bus labored up to the curb.

Every single Hattersfield had been a drunk. They considered it a genetic allergy. The first Merkle was blond-haired and blue-eyed, slight and fair, with an unquenchable weakness for pressing her pale flesh fiercely and intimately against darker skin. Infused with the genes of the hard faced men that carried in the strong lines of their jaws the weight of an unfair world, each successive Merkle had kept the proclivity but become progressively less soft, less blond, less fair, and less slight. In this current incarnation, Merkle was handsome if not delicate, tall if not lithe, and broad as a barn door with ample breasts and thick legs tanned by the exotic lovers of her fore-mothers. Presently, she riffled through her notably large handbag for a train pass and cast a scornful glance at the parents that guided their children loudly through the turnstile ahead of her.

Merkle, as it happened, could not remember where she had left her car. She'd seen it last on Friday when she'd parked it down the street from the library, where she worked on the third floor in Inter-library Loans, pulling requested materials for libraries across the City, tagging and bagging them for the distribution service that came in for pickups once a day. After parking her car, she had looked up at the library's delirious pediment, and gone instead to the South Loop Club for a martini. She woke up on Sunday morning, still in her work clothes, minus her pumps....
You can read the rest in the first issue of Little Bang