Country Love Song

I'm going to submit my favorite short story to Glimmertrain. I know it's a really long shot. I need to build a list of published stories to put on an author bio. I should submit it to something less prestigious where I have a good shot at acceptance, but I can't let this one go.

The story works for me because it's so real. I rarely write about me and this isn't autobiographical, but in a way, it is mine. I am often around country songwriters, both successful and attempting. I have been in many, many song circles. There are overriding themes: strong family, love, values and religion, all reinforced by the notion one has to live in the sticks and have roots going back generations to understand the meaning of family.

Bullshit.

My mother and her family immigrated in 1948. I was truly blessed to be born into a strong, close extended family. My mother has forty some-odd cousins, scattered throughout the world. My dad has about a hundred, all in the US. I know way more of my mother's family than my dad's. Family was simply more important in the first generation world.

My husband has had little contact with his extended family. The first time we took a trip to NY, all my aunts, uncles and cousins kept getting together at a different house every night, because they all wanted to host us. And each other. That was the part that amazed him. Everyone kept getting together because they wanted to, not because they were supposed to. I think he was a little shocked at the mayhem he married into, and very pleased.

So I suppose it's no wonder that I wrote a love story about a young New York couple: a wannabe country musician looking to live the stories in those songs, and finding it in the warm, noisy, extended immigrant family of his girlfriend.

Country Love Song written in verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. It may not mean anything to anyone else, but I know why I wrote it.

Wish me luck.