“Neighborhood Narratives,” a series of short true-stories that take place nearby, is a new project that’s been percolating in Devra’s brain for a very long time. She has long been accumulating notes about the quirky people and places in her vicinity — mini portraits, slices of life. Nothing that would shatter the earth or save the world, just simple vignettes without a home.

Devra takes as her model these opening lines from Walt Harrington’s introduction to his beautiful collection of portraits from everyday life titled “At the Heart of It: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives”:

“Journalists are always talking about how they write to inform the public, to defend democracy, to champion the little guy against the corporate mogul, to create a better world. I began my career 20 years ago, holding these high-minded rationales. But over the years, as I turned to writing about the everyday lives of people, it dawned on me that these explanations had become props: I no longer wrote stories in order to right wrongs or change the world. I wrote stories, as poet Rita Dove says, in order to feel.”

Whether SnapSizzleBop will be a permanent home for Neighborhood Narratives or just a half-way house has yet to be determined; it is, however, a place to start.