Collection of Short Stories:
The Woman Who Never Cooked (April 2006)
The Woman Who Never Cooked is Mary's collection of linked short stories. The secret of this book is that it is the story of one woman who hides inside the stories and is fully revealed through this tour through her life. Her publisher describes the book this way: Take a dizzying tour of life's betrayals in this tightly linked collection of stories. Rejected by a lover or a husband, having lost a parent, a sibling, some of the characters go a bit mad, make up an imaginary lover, are driven toward sex, toward adultery. All are obsessed with what can be hidden and what cannot because all have been betrayed. And all of them cook as antidote. But what if the woman hidden at the heart of this book discovers one day that she no longer can cook?

• Winner 2004 Mid-List First Series Award for Short Fiction, publication April 2006.
• Grand Prize, Santa Fe Writers Project 2000 Literary Awards, August 2000 (for a smaller group of the short stories); web site: www.sfwp.com; “The Burglar,” previously published in Chelsea, reprinted on this site.

• The book has also been chosen by the American Library Association and is available in libraries across the country.

Unpublished Novel:
Mary has also recently completed a novel: That story is told by Robert, Lila’s husband, as he attempts to understand her affair with Isaac, an affair that he has become aware of after her death. He imagines the story of his wife and her lover. Robert the narrator is trying to know himself in the story he is writing as he tells his imagined version of his wife’s betrayal. The story becomes a paradoxical tale of his own undoing that he comes to realize by telling it. In the epigraph to the novel, Robert says, “Life has a way of raveling. Story discovers how it happened. That is the fiction.” This is the reader’s first introduction to Robert’s persona, a man who must control the world he inhabits. The telling of the story as he imagines it, reveals more than he would have wished and as this occurs, his telling moves into real time, for there is no way for him to deal with what he discovers except to report what is actually happening versus what he has imagined.
• “The Fire,” excerpt from completed novel, Chautauqua Literary Journal, summer 2006, review of The Woman Who Never Cooked also appears in this issue.
• “The Fire,” excerpt from novel second prize for prose Tall Grass Writers Guild (Lee Martin, judge) and publication in Falling in Love Again, anthology, Outrider Press, September 2005 (book in print and on sale earlier at the Chicago Book Fair, June 11-12; Mary L. Tabor, featured reader at TallGrass Guild/Outrider Press event).
• “The Fire” excerpt nominated in January 2005 for Pushcart Prize XXXI by Joan Connor.
Semi-finalist, 2004 James Jones First Novel Fellowship under former working-title Controlled Burn.

“Riptide”

Electric Grace: An anthology of short fiction by Washington, DC area women

Richard Peabody, editor

Paycock Press, 2007

“A Conversation With Lore Segal: Thinking About Virtue”

Interview with Lore Segal, author of Shakespeare’s Kitchen, Her First American, et al

The Missouri Review, Vol. XXX, Number 4, 2007

“Guarding the Pie”

Chautauqua Literary Journal, summer 2004

“In Search of a Sleeve-Board” (essay)

Image, Issue 38, spring 2003; in special section on the artist and the community

Nominated January 2004 for Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses

“Madness and Folly”

River City, Vol. 23 #2, summer 2003

Nominated January 2004 for Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses

“The Woman Who Never Cooked”

Image, Issue 36, fall 2002

Nominated in January 2003 for Pushcart Prize XXVIII:

Best of the Small Presses by Pushcart Prize Contributing Editor Melanie Rae Thon

“To Swim?”

Mid-American Review, spring 2001, Vol. XXI, Number 2, pp. 42-56

Winner Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize

“The Burglar”

Chelsea, Vol. 67 (December 1999), pp. 153-169

“Sine Die”

Hayden’s Ferry Review, Vol. 25, fall-winter, 1999-2000

Winner Prentice Hall Fiction Contest

“Proof”

American Literary Review, Vol. 10.1, 10th anniversary issue, spring 1999, pp. 59-79

“Her Place at the Table”

Antietam Review, Vol. XVIII, spring 1998, pp. 63-70

Winner AR’s Literary Award for Short Fiction

“Losing”

Jewish Currents, Vol. 53, No. 11, December 1999, pp. 12-14

Honorable mention OSU 1998 Haidee Forsyth Burkhart Award in Creative Nonfiction

“Holy Days Begin in the Kitchen”

New York Jewish Week, September 6, 1996, p. 29

“My Mother’s Rugelach”

Washington Jewish Week, September 12, 1996, p. 48

“Emotions a Gift Candelabrum Evokes”

New York Jewish Week, September 18, 1987, Other Voices, editorial page, p. 38