In trying to write Culture Shock for this week, I’ve felt like J. Alfred Prufrock: “Then how should I begin ... and how should I presume.” In most respects, I think I’m a bit more realized and less fearful than T.S. Eliot’s cautionary creation, but these lines kept coming back to me as I started to write this, my final column as arts and literature editor.

The Vortex takes on Chekhov

It seemed like a good idea, a happy confluence of events.

Short stories long on ambition

Three minutes. No poems.

Those are the rules at DimeStories—a prose-only open mic trying to gain traction in Albuquerque’s poetry-dominated reading circuit.