Just One Thing with John Jodzio

Have you read John Jodzio’s “Our Tap Water Usually Tastes Like Hedgehog” in our September issue? This flash has everything: garage fires, God’s plan, hibernating bear blood. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“Most of my stories start with a bizarre first line and flow from there and this one is no different.

’Our tap water usually tastes like hedgehog, except in the spring when it tastes like snake.’

I came up with this line after attending a water tasting in Minneapolis (think wine tasting but with water). They had collected different water from towns all over Minnesota and you tasted them and compared the differences. My palate seems to not to be able to tell the subtle differences between water that comes from a limestone aquifer versus a glacial sands aquifer, but my brain definitely wanted to figure out some way to incorporate this experience into a story."