About Dona McCormack
I love stories. I love them so much, that when I was a little girl, I couldn’t keep my face out of them. It started with elephants. My mom tells me that when I was a year old, she took me to the zoo, and my delighted, toothless little mouth somehow spit out the word, “ephadant.” And I told my parents about those floppy-eared pachyderms for the rest of the day because, well I could, and well, it made my audience squeal and turn pink. And if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s using my words to turn people pink. No. Not like that. Well, maybe sometimes...
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I am betting you also love stories. Welcome, welcome, because you are in a good place. In this place, you will find not only information about my services and writing, but about the magic of stories.
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Below this bio section, you’ll find what I’m working on now and what I’ll be working on next. On the Dona Writes page, I’ll provide links to all my free fiction and nonfiction, as well as any work available for purchase. The Dona Edits page will give you all the details, restrictions, and expenses associated with my for-hire editing. The Dona Talks page is the project blog, where I’ll post updates about ongoing writing projects. And the Find Dona page will reveal all my hidey holes (contact details).
My Latest Projects
License: CC0 Public Domain
American Animals
Terminal Tower
Dona has completed her masters thesis and is now finishing the last story in the resulting collection of literary fiction, realism and fabulism, American Animals. Each story features a uniquely and diversely American cast of characters interacting with any of a menagerie of creatures, from orb weavers to alligators to earthworms. Satisfy your curiosity and read the included story "Coyote," published in May, 2019 on the Saturday Evening Post website, or "Scales," published in November 2019 by Bourbon Penn. If you visit the Dona Writes page you'll find links to other American Animal tales such as "Sick at Work" and "Crows Remember."
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Update: It's November and Dona graduated! Some fool thought it was a good idea to WAIT THIS LONG to give this amazing person her Masters in English and Creative Writing! American Animals, at 53,000 words, approaches completion. The final pieces -- a series of animal themed flash fiction pieces and a novella -- involve everything from clown fish as marriage therapy to earthworms as ear worms.
In 2020, Dona will begin research on Terminal Tower in Cleveland, Ohio, one of the city's oldest standing 'scrapers and for the first time in history inhabited by people who are not two extremely wealthy, old railroad baron brothers. The tower will serve as the setting for Dona's second collection of short stories, this one a compendium of Weird and New Weird tales with distinctively Ohio characters.
DonaWritesFiction (at) gmail.com