Short Stories

Fiction

Snow Labyrinth

follows Eva’s move to Alaska, to a homestead in its forbidding interior.  In her effort to salvage a teetering marriage, Eva discovers herself and the possibilities she didn’t realize the frozen north could provide.

Please find the story in the 2014 back issue of Cirque Journal (Vol. 5, No. 2)

https://issuu.com/burwellm/docs/cirque_10_-_full

April Supermoon

appeared in 49 Writer’s “Writing the Distance”, an on-line forum for Alaskan writer’s responding to the current Covid pandemic and its impact on our distanced life.

https://49writers.org/writing-the-distance-birgit-sarrimanolis/

It was also aired on KTOO’s “Community Connection” Juneau afternoon in April of 2020. Please follow the link for an author reading of “April Supermoon”

https://www.ktoo.org/2020/04/29/community-connection-birgit-sarrimanolis/
 

Keramida

is about a son’s return to his homeland of Greece after a long absence. When he is summoned back after his father’s death, Kostanis must resolve his internal struggle of having left the island of his childhood for America.

This story was listed as a finalist in the 2020 Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association contest and published in Issue Forty-One, Winter 2023, of Shark Reef Literary Magazine. Please find the link to the story below:

Birgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis 2020 Finalist @2000x

 
 
 
 
 
An Ice Road to Kushwitna
 
When Anna relocates to a small town in remote Alaska due to her father’s military reassignment, she is wary of making new friends. She has been uprooted so many times before. Then she meets Vincent, a native to the northern landscape. Intrigued by his skills as an ice sculptor, she allows herself to be drawn into a friendship. Through him she begins to see the frozen North differently, but their cultural differences present obstacles to overcome.
 
Writer'sDigestWinnerCertificateScreenshot
 
 
Please follow the link to read “An Ice Road to Kushwitna” in the June 2022 issue of Five on the Fifth, an online literary journal that publishes five stories on the fifth of each month.
 
 
 
 
Elpida
 
takes place on a Greek island where tragedy occurs and is redeemed. Elizabeth returns alone to Skopelos to confront her own demons and searches for herself in a place of tradition and togetherness.
 
The story can be read in Issue 6, Summer/Fall 2022 of Medicine and Meaning, an online literary journal of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
 
 
 
 
Christian
 
grew up in Germany during the Second World War. A youngster full of life when the war crushed the life out of so many, he never questioned the occurrences that surround him. Until he meets another boy with whom he establishes a fragile friendship.
 
The story was published in Clackamas Literary Review, Volume XXVII, 2023, an annual anthology available on Submittable and through your favorite online bookseller.
 
 
Denali
 
sees a doctor in Alaska listening to his patients’ stories of trial and determination as he reflects on his past and a love now gone.
 
Please find the story in Volume 23, No. 2 (Spring of 2023) of Euphony, produced biannually at the University of Chicago.
 
 
 
Monastery Dog
 
Daphne holidays on a Greek island to try and escape her worries, but she cannot escape her own body.
 
The story was published on October 27, 2023 in Fiction on the Web, the UK’s oldest short story website on the internet. Please follow the link to read the story.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Non-Fiction

Transplanted: A Memoir

is about Alaska and the challenges and uplifts in life that living in its interior afford.  It is also about my struggle with leukemia, my bone marrow transplant and the life “transplanted” that I have lived.  Unfolding along its northern setting, it is a story about being uprooted and finding balance again.

Transplanted was released and is available on Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Transplanted-Birgit-Lennertz-Sarrimanolis/dp/B0BL2XD2WL/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2A4ZGPNJFLEXG&keywords=birgit+lennertz+sarrimanolis&qid=1667433945&sprefix=%2Caps%2C188&sr=8-1

 

The Commission of the Bruges Madonna: Michelangelo and the Mouscron 

Was the Bruges Madonna a commodity that Michelangelo produced merely for economic gain?  The unclear history of the beautiful sculpture, which today stands in the Bruges Cathedral in Belgium, results from scant documentary evidence and even misleading information from primary sources.  The works commission originated in the relations between the Mouscron, a Flemish merchant family and Michelangelo, an art patronage that developed as an extension of commercial, political and social ties.

(M.A. Thesis, Washington University in St. Louis, 1992)

Rules for Reading:  A Cross-Cultural Interpretation of Art Education

Can persons of one culture correctly interpret artworks from another?  Multicultural approaches to art have advocated aesthetic pluralism, the acceptance of multiple, culturally based sets of viewpoints from which one interprets art.  While not rejecting that cultural conditioning filters into interpretation, Rules for Reading proposes an alternative perspective to art interpretation, based in the fields of semiotics and the study of signs and symbols, investigating what, minimally, “reading” artworks has in common for everyone.

(Ph.D. dissertation,  The Ohio State University, 1997)