This one goes out to all the major Lit Nerds. It’s A Word Portrait of Gertrude Stein in the Style of Gertrude Stein’s Word Portraits, a biographical piece on that giant of Modernist Literature and woman who invented new ways to play with words. If you’re not familiar with her Word Portraits, go find some online. A word portrait is a “little prose vignette” or, as I describe it, an experimental biography.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

My own word portrait is both homage and fanboy imitation. Of all her writing, it’s these prose vignettes I turn to again and again for their charm, wit, and ironically vague exactness. It’s my hope that my Lit Nerd homage would at least please this patron of the arts. I know that it pleased Zak Block and the others at Squawk Back. It’s a good feeling when you’ve written something that you know needs to live up to that which it’s making direct nods to and someone believes in it enough to print it when they certainly could have published anything else. So thank you Squawk Back for believing my own Word Portrait to be of literary merit, even if it’s only homage and imitation of the literary giant I’m writing about.

The whole issue is free to read online, so go check it out to discover some of the coolest writing out there on the net.