David Sheridan

David M. Sheridan (he/him) teaches writing and design in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. He holds an MFA (fiction) from Western Michigan University and a PhD (English) from Michigan State University. His work has appeared in Story, The Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other places. He is working on a collection of poetry entitled 52 Missing Poems, in which every poem is cut out of a black 3"X5" card.

Ghost Notes

You don’t know me, but if you’re of a certain age, it is very likely that there is a connection between us — a way in which I am a part of you. I want to tell the story of how that came to be, how some amateurs messing around in the backroom of a low-rent novelty store ended up producing a brief national sensation. This is the story of a band from the Detroit suburbs called 24 Radiant Green Umbrellas. This is the story of their accidental hit song — “Strike Anywhere” — which crept onto the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1989. And most of all, this is the story of a drum fill that occurs at precisely two minutes and thirty-five seconds into the song.