An After-Christmas Gift From Julie
Julie Showalter: Unpublished Writings1
Most of Julie’s fully edited and buffed writings are already available on this site at Julie’s Writings. I have hesitated to include her other pieces I’ve found on her computer or in her office that range from workshop exercises to story fragments to projects set aside to finish at a later day to work that appears, at least to me, to be fully as polished and effective as her published stories.2
Beyond casual conversation (her mention, for example, over dinner of a conversation with an editor who planned to use one of her stories), I was not routinely privy to the status of her writing projects until they were accepted for publication so the extent to which Julie was or was not satisfied with most of these efforts is unknown to me.
In the past month or two, however, I have read and re-read these unpublished pieces and have found some moving and wonderful, and so, fully acknowledging that I am hardly an unbiased critic, I have decided to share a few.
Aunt Mona is the first of these offerings from the “Unpublished Julie” portfolio.
To view Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter in manuscript form, click on this link:
Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter– View
To download a PDF version of Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter, right-click on the next link, and choose “Save Target As …”
Download PDF of Aunt Mona by Julie Showalter
Footnotes
- Julie was my much-beloved, fiercely smart, extraordinarily sexy wife, who died in 1999 from cancer diagnosed the week of our wedding nearly 20 years earlier. She was also a prize-winning writer. This blog includes many other posts about her and the unlikely but true story of our romance (See Julie FAQ) as well as several of her short stories and other pieces. ~back~
- As might be expected, some of the documents in this section, especially those not subjected to proofreading or revisions, have more grammatical and spelling errors than Julie’s published work, and many are incompletely processed as literature. I chose to include each piece as it stood, warts and all, rather than subject it to my uneven editing. ~back~
