Mary Krakow, long-time Redmond resident, will host a party at Redmond Senior Center on May 17 to celebrate the release of her chapbook Fat Quarters: A Patchwork of Stories for Quilters. A chapbook is a small collection of poetry or short stories no longer than 50 pages.
When Mary retired from teaching kindergarten in 2015, she finally had time to follow her dream. She’d been working on a novel on nights and weekends, belonged to Central Oregon Writers Guild and was a member of a critic group. She read about the writing craft and submitting work. During that first year of retirement, she joined a flash fiction Facebook group. It provided weekly prompts and a place to post stories up to 500 words. That group gave the structure and discipline she needed to hone the flash fiction form. She produced nearly 200 unique stories over four years. A recurring theme of quilts emerged. That’s when she decided to bundle a dozen of them together in Fat Quarters: A Patchwork of Stories for Quilters.
Everyone seemed to have a quilt story. Champion was inspired by her niece’s experience with a homeless man. Heirloom Quilt tells of a friend’s struggle to retrieve a treasured quilt from the family home after a parent’s death. Other stories are complete fabrications. In Monkey Wrench, an oft-misunderstood forty-something mother follows her professor’s advice “Great Art makes a statement.” Unfortunately, he misses her point entirely. In Empowered, a child psychologist reflects that “quilting is much like psychology. The practitioner takes broken fragments and finds a way to make order out of chaos.”
And that is what Mary Krakow has done with Fat Quarters. She has taken fragments of lived experience, her own and others, combined them with snippets of overheard conversations, and stitched them into a patchwork of stories. Some of the stories in this collection are personal, some imagined, but all of them are pieced together with a scrap of truth at their heart.
Please join Mary to celebrate the publication of Fat Quarters: A Patchwork of Stories for Quilters at 3:00 on May 17, at Redmond Senior Center.