Synchronicity, the bad kind

By Anne Chudobiak

1. The day my e-mails bounce back from the archives of a small Caribbean nation, I pick up my New Yorker and turn to the fiction: pirates (Karen Russell, “Accident Brief,” June 19). And I thought I was being so clever.

My story would rise to the top of the Canadian slushpile where readers would say, “Pirates, now that’s a literary convention you don’t hear about anymore.”

2. While my imaginary-sister/Communist-milestone story, “My Irish Twin,” sits patiently at Maisonneuve, logged, but unread, the summer issue arrives at my doorstep. Page 59, “My Hungarian Sister” by Patricia Robertson. An English girl has an elaborate fantasy in which she and her family stand to gain from the Hungarian revolution.

“Zeitgeist,” says my husband.

Apparently, I’m very tuned in, more so than I’d like.