The Fourth River
Chatham College
Woodland Road
Pittsburgh, PA, 15232
Thomas Eaton
PO Box 871
Cape Girardeau, MO 63702
Nov. 29, 2004
Greetings,
Thank you for considering my submissions, Treehouse Daddies’ Club Minutes and The Last Story Brandy Read for publication in The Fourth River. I believe the stories, totaling 22 pages, meet your goal of “carrying on the conversation” in terms of natural world and identity intersects.
The larger story (16 pages) comes from my second completed short story collection: A Safe Place for the Boys. This collection focuses on men and their self-destructive natures as they emerge against a backdrop of rural America and the more technological world they live in. This particular story shows the rage of a father forced out of parenting roles by a legal system alien to the rural American man.
The shorter story (6 pages) is a stream-of-conscience piece from my first collection Cathouse Red. This collection deals with rural American men of the post-Korean Era and how they handle evolving social change including the loss of the family farm and divorce. This story still remains one of my favorite pieces of all of the work I’ve completed.
My publications include being a four time literary award winner from Southeast Missouri State University’s Journey Magazine for poetry and fiction as well as short story publication in Outer Darkness Magazine, The Scavenger’s Newsletter, and the Westering Magazine. In 2001, I won fourth place in the National 2004 William Faulkner Short Story Competition. I have also served as a guest presenter for the Heartland Writer’s Guild and have led a community non-credit creative writing course for Southeast Missouri State University for two years. I have also completed two novels besides the short story collections, currently under consideration with the Evan Marshall Literary Agency, New Jersey. These too deal with the consanguine American man in a modern world. I am currently marketing my completed poetry collection Fishing in Estrogen but my primary focus is, and remains, the novel.
I am looking forward to hearing from you. I hope you enjoy these stories.
Sincerely,
Thomas Eaton