Reality is such a confusing and unlikely experience that it is often best described by its opposite. In other words, if you want to describe real life, your can often do so by describing things which could never happen. The stories of Elizabeth Stamford flirt with this sense of unreality, without ever crossing the line into fantasy: steeped in dreams and symbols, these stories tell tales of violence, jealousy, and deaths both accidental and deliberate. They are the quintessence of unlikely stories: they are almost plausible, and highly unsettling.
Elizabeth Stamford has recently thrown a career teaching high school to the wind to pursue writing. In addition to teaching high school she has taught English to immigrant adults (mostly Russians) worked as a plant technician (taking care of plants in office buildings) and temped in a variety of different industries. She has lived and worked in Africa, South American and Europe. She now resides in the Bronx.
Stamford’s fiction has been published in Quarterly Black Review, The Dakota House Journal, Art Times, Beginnings, Not One of Us, Snow Monkey, and Pittsburgh Quarterly and is due to appear in Thunder Sandwich. Her nonfiction has appeared in Abroad View, The Paumanok Review and the South American Explorer.
In January 2003 Cracker Ingenuity will appear on the shelves from St. Martin’s Press. Co-written with PT Elliott, (the author of the acclaimed "drinking book" 100 Proof, Dutton 2000), Cracker Ingenuity is non-fiction, a how-to/humor book cataloguing, illustrating and explaining ingenious redneck inventions. The book will tell you how to make hot tubs out of car radiators, motorboats out of kitchen tables and apple pies without apples. For more information, or for any other reason, write to Elizabeth at lizlo_01@msn.com (lizl0_01@msn.com).
Elizabeth's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2002:
Glowing Barrel
Johnny Ray
Gugusi