The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Bonnie ZoBell's "What Happened Here"

Excerpt from Dear Sam,

Edgar here, from the old neighborhood. I can’t stop eyeballing the TV, searching for some kind of answer. My body feels about dead on the couch. We’ve had another plane crash in San Diego, and it’s all over the news. Not right here in North Park but a few miles up the coast. Close enough it’s hard to stomach after what we went through in ’78. I don’t want it in my head anymore, but I can’t stop watching.
I got your new address a few years ago from Mrs. Jawarski down at Jubilee Seniors, where she’s staying now. I’ve been meaning to write, but can’t seem to sit down and do it. Guess it’s always the ladies who keep track of these things. You probably heard Betty passed on. I’m alone now.

This selection comes from Bonnie Zobell’s collection What Happened Here, available from Press 53. Purchase your copy here!

Bonnie ZoBell won first place in the 2015 Next Generation Indie Press Award in the Novella category for her linked collection with Press 53, What Happened Here: a novella and stories. Her fiction chapbook The Whack-Job Girls was published in March 2013. She’s won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction, the Capricorn Novel Award, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She’s received fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, Villa Montalvo, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. She has an MFA from Columbia University, currently teaches at San Diego Mesa College and is working on a novel. Visit her at www.bonniezobell.com.

Sarah Einstein is the author of Mot: A Memoir (University of Georgia Press 2015), Remnants of Passion (Shebooks 2014). Her essays and short stories have appeared in The Sun, Ninth Letter, PANK and other journals. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Best of the Net, and the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She is also the prose editor for Stirring: A Literary Collective and the special projects editor for Brevity Magazine. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.