“But as much as I love New York, New York refuses to be loved. Whenever I’m all warm, fuzzy and ready to give the city a carefree, trusting bear hug, it repels me with some crazy, only-in-New-York type of crap to deal with–like our cab, suddenly speeding up and swerving from lane to lane as though we’re being chased. And I think we are.” And so opens the short story Billy the Kid was Born on Allen Street on a new site of NYC-inspired short fiction, Chronicles of New York (CoNY). Everyone has their NYC story – what’s yours?
“If you look close enough at New Yorkers and their interactions, you can take a good guess at what each one is moving toward and what it’s like for them to run into each other on the way there. All the elements of a good story are under our noses everyday,” writes founder and editor Willow Duttge on her site. “And hopefully they will be shared by myself and others on this blog.”
Everyone has at least one New York story. You don’t even have to go to NYC to have a personal story about this city. Its tentacles of psychic reach are one of a kind. Paris may be pretty, but New York will come visit you, in some way, shape or form.
Imagine all the fiction writers who came to New York with ideas for novels that were never written, because NYC’s stranger-than-fiction face-slaps prevented them from being written: what started out as distractions became too good to ignore. And the city took over the prose. CoNY is a butterfly net of these moments, of these fueling distractions and unforgettable detours.
Willow, a beloved, chill, talented, funny, sweetheart of a tenacious reporter, formerly of the now deceased Conde Nast Portfolio, founded CoNY as a way to work on her own fiction. (She is a Sarah Lawrence grad, after all – they get all tweaked out if they’re not writing).
Some of the writers on the site are media veterans: journalists, editors, fact-checkers – witnesses to a changing industry who can never lose the need to create.
If you have a fictional story inspired by NYC, submit your story ideas to Willow Duttge.