A Character Sandwich

A Character Sandwich
By Robin Layne
myspace.com/robin_layne

This is a collection of short pieces of fiction, and by golly are they ever short. None of them is more than two pages, and the shortest is just over one hundred words. That’s short!

The pieces were mostly written, and the zine made, for classes given by Write Around Portland and the Portland Community College. I don’t think I could republish anything I wrote for school, as I’m sure it is all awful. I recently reread the final history essay I wrote (on the history of Canadian comics) for my degree, and wow, I thought the writing in that was pretty terrible. Time passes I suppose.

As I said above, most of the pieces (Layne calls them sketches) here are really short. Too short to really get a handle on, or even see how competent Layne is as a writer. Some of them seem like they could be interesting and lead into larger works, but I won’t be checking them out, as the longest piece in here is four pages on how Layne found god as a child and great religion is. Anyone with a world view like that isn’t someone whose work I’m actively going to seek out.

I did like the table of contents though, which referred to different parts of writing as different ingredients in an actual sandwich. Cute.