Showing results by author "Joyce Thompson" in All Categories

Young Brian believes the narrator is a close family friend, an unofficial "uncle". Does being a sperm donor entitle him to claim paternity? A sad and funny story about love and second thoughts.

The story of Element Elmer Oxygen takes children on a colorful journey and explains how oxygen travels throughout the body and benefits man.

Carrie unravels her life the way her grandma used to unravel the sweater she was knitting, to make it again, better and more meaningful. A ghost story with politics and blue bunny slippers.

In this wickedly observed story, an 11-year-old with literary aspirations learns from her best friend's famous mother how to dress, how to move, and what to say to become a cultural celebrity.

Urban magic is afoot when a sleek white Impala follows a runner along her course, an automotive reminder of mortality and a telescoper of a lifetime in a few sweaty miles.

In this magical tale, Great Aunt Faith invites the kids to choose their "own" trees in the ravine below her secluded house. Most of Faith's lessons are about birds and animals, but this one has to do with mysteries of life and love.

"You" go to the party. "You" see your drunken father fall into the Christmas tree. To escape the teasing of the other kids and your own shame, "you" learn to dissociate from "I" in order to survive.

Hearing an old lover’s song on the radio while she’s taking her daughter to kindergarten carries the narrator back to her complicated affair with the singer, and to a meditation on what is, what was, and what might have been.

Every girl has a vision of what it will be like to surrender her virginity, but it doesn’t always work out according to plan. Choosing whom you will love first is a way of choosing who you intend to become.

When this month’s Playboy centerfold looks like your daughter, confusion and confession ensue. A father-daughter hike to an abandoned copper mine becomes a rite of passage for both.

This wickedly observed family story starts funny and turns harrowing as everyone’s secrets come up from the basement, where Emmaline lives, and sit down together for Thanksgiving dinner. The ghost in this story lives inside a vodka bottle and haunts us all.

Ten years after the fall of Saigon, a tentative friendship blossoms between a Portland writer and the Vietnamese woman who sells her morning coffee and cigarettes, framing a powerful and original meditation on class, gender, and the power of storytelling to heal the wounds of war.

When single mom Lizzie tells her best friend Ted she's decided to go looking for action among the recently divorced, hoping to be someone's "first lover out", the results are funny, hair-raising, and redemptive in equal measure.

What begins as a deliciously wicked portrait of a midcentury marriage, filled with pork chops, cinnamon rolls, golden shoe string fries, and mashed potato mountains crowned with lakes of butter, quickly transforms into a food story on acid, eating its way to the heart of a loveless relationship.