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I’m not sure whether I write to drink or drink to write. All I know is they go together like—how does the song put it? “Love and marriage, they go together like a horse and carriage?” That’ll do, to position my writing and drinking. One before, one after—with “one” left unspecified. How’s that, Doctor?…What do I think? Well, you know what I think. I just said I don’t know. But maybe this will help…I recall—although it may not be a memory at all but a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, I’ll say I recall, rather than, y’know, “I am going to tell you a story I just made up about a very famous writer”—a playwright, actually. A therapist, I understand let’s say, in order to avoid the apocryphal issue, a therapist, I understand, once told the aforesaid playwright—he was in therapy at the time, you see, for various addictions—and well, his therapist said—granted, I am improvising here—“I can cure you,” she said. “Really?” said he, in that, y’know, Southern drawl of his? I know it’s hard to drawl “really,” but imagine a drawled, “Really?” And you know what the therapist told him? “Give up writing.” So, why do I tell you this? Well, because I know that the time will come—after five or ten or fifteen sessions—but the time will come when you are going to say to me, “You know what I think?” And I will look at you dumbly, as if I don’t know, and after what in the trade is called a pregnant pause, you will say softly, sagely, perhaps even with a coruscating nod, “You need to give up writing.” And I will leave here knowing full well I cannot or will not or should not walk in the light or toward the light but…I will walk against the light, at night, and you don’t want that under your blight. Wouldn’t you prefer, say, possibly A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie?
After retiring from a career teaching philosophy, Vincent Barry returned to his first love: fiction. His stories have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and abroad, including The Saint Ann’s Review, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, The Broken City, The Fem, Dual Coast, The Fiction Pool, Subtle Fiction, FictionWeek Literary Journal, Ariel Chart, Star 82 Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Children, Churches, and Daddies, The Blotter Magazine, Terror House Magazine, Cerurove, and Caveat Lector. Barry, whose work was nominated for Best of the Net 2017, lives with his wife and daughter in Santa Barbara, California.