Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

All Hallow’s Eve is almost nigh and I’m enjoying seeing the spooky decorations in our neighbourhood and the trees losing their leaves fabulously. I’m also charmed by the fact that there over 8000 new folks reading Strange Pilgrims in just the last 3 months! Thank you so much for your readership, all 35,800 of you as of thi…

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

Below you’ll find the winner of October’s Micro of the Month challenge, the theme of which was GROTESQUE. We read many cool interpretations of this single word, some on the nose (quite a few), others looser but still penetrating to the core of what this can conjure, and still others that felt at first as far from the theme…

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I write with some beautiful tidings and recommendations. A lot of you lovely souls have been delightfully pestering us about merch and I’m so happy to share that we do finally have some limited-edition Halloween-themed Strange Pilgrims merch! (are you losing your mind!! please do!! it took a while lol!!) These will be on sale only until Oct 31st, and will never be sold again. That’s what Limited Edition means, right?

come to mommy (ahem, buy merch)

Alright, now that you’ve gone and bought one of each (because you realllly want to support an indie, ad-free, ai-bullshit-free, literary magazine amiright), remember this post:

A lot of you have also been asking when we’re going to a part two and the answer is because we have a kid, a mortgage, full-time day jobs, are trying to write our books and not lose our minds very soon, we promise!

But, in the meantime, I have a bite-sized and strange sweet treat below, dig in dear ones!

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

Some scattered thoughts today:

• someone emailed us saying we publish too many weird stories and should consider more literary work to be taken seriously as a literary magazine

• my response is, quite simply, this essay by the great Ursula K. Le Guin wherein she argues that fantasy is a “perfectly rational undertaking.”

• a reminde…

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

Before you dive into Justine’s critique below, I’m delighted to share we’re open for free submissions for just one week, but it’s gotta be a review or a critique. Our general guidelines remain as usual, but I’d like to reiterate that please for fuck’s sake don’t send us AI-generated slop because if you do I will stab my eyes out and you will be responsible for my death and then I’ll come haunt you it’ll break my heart and waste my time, and I don’t get paid enough for this shit and just…it’s fun to critique stuff, for real, or review something you love, or like Justine’s doing below, respond to what others are saying in a way that functions as hybrid critique-review-essay, but all you all human.

We pay $50 for short-form reviews and $200 for long-form. And response time is generally 4 months but I’m going to try to be quicker about it this time.

I’m particularly hoping to get reviews of books and movies no one is talking about or not a lot of people have started conversations on, I’d also love to read cool list-form reviews and recommendations. For critique, tackle subjects as controversial or crazy or contentious as you like. Be free my sweet birds, my dear pilgrims. And submit!

take me to the submission portal!

Submissions will close in one week, on Oct 22nd midnight.

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hello fellow strange pilgrims,

I want to point you towards the audio recording of today’s piece. I mean, yes, it’s amazing hearing author’s in their own words, but I also want you to note that our recordings will now live at the top of the post. I was informed last week that the way we were uploading our recordings from writers to accompany their work w…

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

I know there are many anti-AI pieces out there, so I want to start this post off a little perhaps controversially. This is not exactly one of those kinds of anti-AI diatribes. I’m not sitting in your rooms or your hearts or your lives, I don’t know who you truly are or where you’ve been or why you might feel the urge for any such things that we as humans in this strange world feel the urge for, sometimes things that are not exactly good for us, that do us great harm, and worse, that do great harm to others.

I’d like today to turn our collective attentions towards compassion to ourselves and others. And let us work to offer the side of light, a choice for the other thing that may be slower, harder on the surface, but will inevitably enrich us in ways we cannot imagine.

Below I’ll share with you five common reasons I’ve come across that folks not much different from you or I might feel the need to turn to AI. Do remember, it is now everywhere and will only continue to burgeon into our lives. So the ease with which we reach for it or might feel forced to reach for it will grow more commonplace and sooner or later it might even feel like the only choice.

But it is never the only choice. AI-fueled creativity is a pale veil of a mirage in comparison to true creativity and the power that lies in it. And the process, the road taken, to get there is perhaps even more powerful.

1.

You vs. the blank page

Whether you look upon a blinking cursor in a digital white sea or you’re holding a pencil or pen that won’t quite sit right on a seemingly infinite page before you, the blank page is a worrisome predicament. We are, each of us, beings of wonder and magic in our own unique ways, and there are depths within us that we can plumb and share beyond what even we can conceive of. But sometimes, that’s just too damn hard to get started with. So, perhaps we feel the urge to just blurt everything out to the robot and ask it to bake a sweet little cake of our ideas and thoughts and feelings and humanness. Easy-peasy?

No, unfortunately. Sleazy-oozy, more like it perhaps, sorry.

Solution: Free-writing.

Here’s an excellent description about Free-writing from our favorite free encyclopedia:

2.

Don’t know what form my writing should take

Some are blessed with a very particular kind of skillset, one that fits into a very particular form, be it long-form prose or poetry or perhaps the delightfully niche ability to write showstopper poems in the shower-fog that no one but you and perhaps the gods of water and wind will ever see. Others, though, among us, might struggle to find the exact form our stories should take. Should we pen a memoir, or a personal essay, or prose poems, or should we write a fairy-tale retelling, a horror, a sad literary autofiction, or hell a weird surreal comedy. Or, gasp, screenplays. PLAYS!?

Solution: Read this book, then write your own version of it:

This book is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. So, take your story, a scene from it if it’s long, a section, or if you’re daring then the whole darn thing, and write it as it would be written in different styles. And think beyond the conventions of genre. Write it as a police report, a series of receipts, found texts, an interview. And then find the body your story wants to live in best.

3.

Can’t figure out dialogue

Yes, indeed it might seem silly to resort to a machine to help with human dialogue, but many writers do this, and I’ve seen across socials and irl people relentlessly mocking this behavior but seldom offering alternatives. Mocking might be one may to help correct “bad” behavior, but as the child of a parent who loves this particular method of “correction”, I’d rather not engage in it, certainly not excessively and without any other recourse offered. And dialogue can be horribly difficult to master. Some writers outright hate the damn thing, and will use it sparingly to begin with. One must wonder if they too banged their heads against their typewriters and inkpots and just said fuck it, we’re doing interiority all the way through.

Solution: Eavesdrop OR if that makes you feel creepy, then LISTEN to these films:

4.

Need to research something connected to your plot or character(s) & it has to be accurate

One might assume that this doesn’t need to be broken to anyone at this point, but it does. AI has not cracked the highest heights of research and no great zenith has been reached. The thing is, I’m positive this is actually possible. In a hypothetical, alt-world scenario, I think it’s absolutely at the very least plausible for AI to get to a point where you can reliably use it for research. Do I think we will see this materialize in our lifetimes? No, absolutely not. Maybe some semblance of it. But the corporations behind LLMs do not care about your niche research interests or about any kind of integrity or ethics behind sourcing, acquiring, compiling, and conveying such facets of research. Part of the reason a PhD takes so long is because a factor of arguing your thesis is backing it up and the way to back it up, one way, is verifiable research, but something folks often miss, that the way to even develop a thesis worth arguing also requires research. Research is not a straight path you choose to chart with a map in hand and a “You are here” sign extending outwards along a dotted line and a clear X marks the spot. No, rather, research is a way of being. Even in it’s name, repetition, and the great whorl of infinity in knowledge is implied. Your are searching and then searching again, and indeed you are searching even for that which is to be searched. So:

Solution: Google it, but first:

Turn off the annoying and mighty useless AI Overview “feature” with an extension like this. Most of the things you might want to research for a FICTION text will be easily google-able or wikipedia-able and cross-checked with a couple other sources. If you’re writing nonfiction, I’ll tsk-tsk a bit and say you should know better, dear one. JSTOR, library access, asking actual reference librarians, Google Scholar, and finding authorities in the field is your safest, best, and brightest bet.

5.

Finding an audience for your work & building a content + marketing strategy plan to promote it

One could dedicate an entire Substack to this and of course I say this a bit tongue-in-cheek because many a Substackers (and content-makers, and vloggers and bloggers and other -ers) have done just that. As tempting as it might feel to be AI-forward in your strategy and planning here, there are real humans out there who have a far keener and more observant and useful finger on the pulse of culture today. If you desire to apply a more methodical approach to the more market-based aspects of a writing career (that often we might not have the luxury to opt out of) then there are many great resources.

Solution: Study the greats & learn from the best. Some favorites to learn from right here on Substack (in no particular order):

Sub Club

Submission opportunities for creative and professional writers.

Link in Bio

A newsletter about working in social media.

By Rachel Karten

Attention Economy

honest advice about making a career as an author today

By Leigh Stein

Pine State Publicity

Pine State is a newsletter that offers chatter on publishing, DIY publicity advice, and as much fun as the Hokey Pokey for writers & readers by Cassie Mannes Murray of Pine State Publicity

By Cassie Mannes Murray

Pitch Your Novel

Up-to-date publishing advice to help authors thrive and succeed

By Karin Gillespie

Before and After the Book Deal

Real talk about the writing + publishing industry from an author who doesn’t want you to feel confused, bewildered, or alone. Plus: craft tips, reading recommendations, writing support + solidarity (unless you are a jerk to people in the comments).

By Courtney Maum

Book Publishing Brick By Brick

Strategies for publishing and marketing your book from an in-the-trenches publishing professional and published author. Always an emphasis on doable takeaways and fostering literary community.

By Jeffrey Yamaguchi

Craft by Vera Kurian

Thoughts on the craft of writing and publishing from a deeply analytical writer person

Delivery & Acceptance

Publishing, demystified (and commission-free)

By Alia Hanna Habib

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

Devon Halliday

writer, editor, teacher, & former literary agent offering advice on publishing, craft, & the writing life

Hmm That's Interesting

Culture thoughts of/for/by the Chronically Online, from that girl you may have seen on Instagram or TikTok (alas). Essays, pop culture, interviews, and literature.

By Clara

Maya C. Popa

Writing on the inner conditions of sustainable creative work

How to Glow in the Dark

Book publishing advice and community for authors of fiction and nonfiction, written by the agents at Neon Literary.

By Anna Sproul-Latimer

Publishing Confidential

News and analysis about the book publishing industry that you won't read anywhere else.

By Kathleen Schmidt

A Writer's Notebook

Home of Essay Camp and The Book Supplement.

By Summer Brennan

Just Reading All Day

What does a literary agent do? Thoughts on book publishing & advice for writers.

By Danielle Bukowski

Write or Die Magazine (Forever Workshop)

Making sense of the writing world.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

It’s that time of the month again when we send out our theme for our free micro writing challenge!

Remember, the rules are simple: the piece must be 300 words or under, it must respond to the month’s theme (however loosely, however strangely), and it must be submitted within by October 3rd midnight ET1. We’ll reply to everyone within 2-3 weeks (before we announce and publish the winner, of course). Winner gets $30 USD + publication + eternal bragging rights.

October’s theme: Grotesque

* Submit Here *

We’ll announce each month’s theme when the window opens — or just before — so you’re not planning weeks in advance. We don’t want you to overthink this! Just let the writing flow.

✷ April Winner | Theme: THE FOOL

✷ May Winner | Theme: RABBITS

✷ June Winner | Theme: LOVE & SEX

✷ July Winner | Theme: CULTISH

✷ August Winner | Theme: UTOPIA

✷ September Winner | Theme: MARRIAGE

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I’m delighted to share this month’s Micro of the Month writing challenge winner below. The theme was “Marriage” and we ended up getting 896 submissions! I think this is our highest (or second-highest) yet for the micro challenge. There was such a wide variety of takes on the themes, some folks wrote about marriage straight up while others wrote about divorce, a day in the life of a spouse, polyamorous love, betrayal, witches marrying cryptids, some folks took the micro into wonderfully surreal directions while others wrote rooted in realism. All in all, the choice was tough. But I am certain you will fall in love with this month’s winner below.

Next month’s call opens on October 1st and the theme will be revealed very soon!!

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Because what’s the point of it all, when after so many years together, so much sneaking and hiding, so many decisions, particularly the one to spend the rest of your lives together, to work overtime to afford the stamp duty payments, the sworn translations, the bus and train tickets to Frankfurt, never telling the clerk why you needed your certificates of birth, civil status, and residence, exchanging currency at a terrible rate, google-translating the correspondence with the officials, setting the ceremony date, picking two second-hand white dresses, getting them all crumpled during the journey, hours of exhaustion, then another bus to the registry office, spending all the euros for more stamp duties, checking how to say yes, I do in German, all of that to obtain the certificates of marriage issued in a language in which you cannot pronounce I love you, unrecognizable in your own home country, in which you are still just two individual adults sharing an apartment, barely leaving it to avoid disapproving looks and occasional insults, it’s easier to stay inside, safely wait for something that might never happen, and when after legal battles between higher and lower authorities, after endless appeals by artists or sportswomen or other married pairs who dared to leave their apartments, it happened, the bureaucracy is compelled to allow transcriptions of same-sex marriages, and actually starts doing so, and you can do it right from home, just need the sworn translation of that useless foreign marriage certificates, a few online forms and stamp duty payments, and her signature under all the documents, just a few scribbles of her beautiful name, only for her to look you emptily in the eye and utter blandly that she doesn’t feel like it?

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Contributor’s Note

Until May 2026, Polish administation did not recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other EU countries, which resulted in a legal paradox, where some LGBTQIA+ couples would be married in one country and single in another. But did they love each other in either one? I wanted to tackle this sensitive topic to underline the tangled, ever-changing nature of love and how it intertwines with marriage, no matter if it’s homo- or heterosexual.

Huge thanks for Miłość Nie Wyklucza (mnw.org.pl) for providing approachable guides for transripting a foreign marriage certificate and marrying abroad as a same-sex couple in Poland or other EU country that does not register same-sex marriages!

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, thank you for taking some time out of your busy lives for loving literature, and not just literature of the past that has survived the decades and centuries, but literature being created and written today, literature that is staggering in its beauty just as and sometimes more than the classics (gasps all around, yes).

I love the classics, I love fairytales, I love good books of yore or even a few years or decades past. And yet, isn’t there a special kind of beauty and wonder that comes with engaging with minds alive right now, their stories born of experiences that you too might have brushed up against?

I welcome you to dive into Margaret’s beautiful story, one that blends time and narrative seamlessly and invites you in from the very first line. Do remember that we have audio that accompanies most of our fiction and nonfiction here and usually in the author’s own voice, as today! Enjoy, dear ones!

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Time bends when the princess pricks her finger. Suddenly overcome, she lays down on the bed of cool silver. As she falls into slumber, time slows to a still. Yet for the realm, it accelerates. Before her blood dries on the spindle, the ocean begins to boil. A great wave rises. It shatters ships, smashing hulls against the shore. Seawalls crumble. Fields turn into rivers. But the princess’s tower stands strong. And soon the destruction ends. The water recedes and life sparks. Saplings rise to giants—pines, elms, oaks—with branches so thick they block the sun. Plumes of aspergillus and bristly creeper vines climb to the tower’s highest windows and cluster in the tree canopy, surging to catch the last glimmer of light as the forest enshrouds the lonely spire.

Years pass and singers and travelers carry word of the enchanted damsel to every corner of the land. Upon hearing the tale, many a knight swears he will hack through the woods, scale the ramparts, and save the princess, lifting the curse with a kiss. But none can penetrate the wilderness. A thousand try and a thousand die. The growing darkness lusts for blood. Diamond-sharp thorns pierce armor, bore into flesh. Creepers strangle throats until twisted necks snap.

Seasons cycle, dynasties decay, kingdoms fall. The stories stiffen into legend, told by winter fires. Whispered horrors breed nightmares—grave beetles swarming over rusted remains, helmets rattling faceless skulls, eaten to bone by time.

The princess has no control, the spell sets the parameters—the start, the end. Who knows if the break will come after a hundred years? It might spin for a thousand centuries more. She could wake to see the stars have shifted, the moon has shrunk like soap. For though she is bound to the planet, to the berth within the vaulted chamber, she is unbound by time, caught in the short-circuit of a night’s dream.

Lori knew she was not a princess, though she lived on the Paradise Coast of the Sunshine State and slept in a turret, with a fairytale castle nightlight, which cast orbits of suns and moons above her bed. She knew the stories her mother told did not follow the words in her picturebooks. She knew too that something was wrong with Mom, and it had to do with story-time getting shorter each night. Lori could beg to hear more, but her mother would not finish the tale of the sleeping princess. Because Mom had a new rule. Never speak the words THE END.

Lori’s father did not respect this rule. He objected so strongly that when he joined them for dinner, the rule was the subject of great argument.

“Don’t tell me I can’t say it’s the end!” he shouted.

“We have a child!” her mother shouted back.

“I’m not talking about her. Lori is separate.”

“You can’t separate Lori. And you can’t separate what’s happening to me.”

Lori felt she existed already in a separate world, since her parents acted like she was invisible. Though she was sitting right there, in the middle chair along the ocean-view side of the long dining table, while they yelled from opposite extremes.

At least there were advantages to not being seen. When Dad pulled out his phone, said he’d just be a minute and tried to sneak out to the beach, only to be blocked by Mom, Lori scurried upstairs to her turret. No one noticed she’d left and hadn’t touched her food.

There were disadvantages too. Either her parents weren’t aware or they didn’t care that their voices soared to the ceiling beams, ricocheting off the shiny steel appliances and sharp-edged granite countertops. Mashing a pillow over her ears couldn’t muffle the sound.

Late into the night, she heard her mother plead, “You know what the doctors said. I need you, we need you. Here.”

“I’m here as much as I can,” her father answered. Then came the slam of the front door and the screech of his sports car peeling out of the driveway.

Mom broke into sobs, stepped out of her heels and shuffled down the hallway to the oversized bedroom that was never intended for a single adult. Not to sleep, but to lose herself in workout videos, travel shows. The pounding of her feet and the bass-heavy soundtracks rumbled through the house until dawn.

Then it was finally safe for Lori to sink into dreamland. But before she did, she slipped out of bed and looked down from the railing outside her room. The rosy light coming through the clerestory windows gave the pendant lamps hanging below an electric pink sheen, the same color as her walls. And beneath them, on the dining table, the remains of their meal seemed suspended in time—forks stood in humps of steak, a serving spoon crusted in the risotto. The table was driftwood. Sanded and polished, it’d once been the side of a fishing boat wrecked in a storm. That was her father’s story. Her mother’s version: Long ago it was a Spanish Galleon, a section of the hull. The ship sank to the bottom of the sea, weighted with stolen gold.

One night the yelling stopped yet the front door did not slam. Curious, Lori padded down the floating stairs. Guided by moonlight from the high windows and static sparks from her socks on the carpet, she crept along the hall. The door of her parents’ room was ajar. An amber shaft lit the toothed leaves and fishtail patterns at the rug’s edges. Unlike other investigations she’d conducted when Dad followed Mom into the room, she heard no thumps from lofted shoes or phones. Could they be asleep?

There were murmurs. Gasps. She scratched on the door. Were they hurt? The noises were so strange, she couldn’t tell. Snorts. squeals. She scraped louder, expecting an angry hiss: Go back to bed! But instead she heard a whelp. Then a howl.

Lori had to know. Were they cries of pain? Crunching her hands into fists, she looked. Sheets, clothes, pillows had been flung to the walls, and on the platform bed were arching, clawing beasts. Not her parents. Not anymore. The man-monster’s ears were tipped, erect, covered with black hair. Grinding snarls slipped through his long, glinting teeth. Smoke coiled from the woman-creature’s gaping mouth, and when her eyes flicked open, unseeing, Lori saw luminous yellow. Slit pupils glistened. Snake-like.

Lori ran so fast she almost fell. But she made it to her room. With the door closed, panting, she curled under her blanket, too scared to sleep. Then she felt a queer caress. She sensed channels opening. In her mind. Glowing filaments pushed up from the floorboards, swarmed over the sheets. They licked her ears and cheeks. A thousand soft-tongued mouths told her to go back downstairs. Not to spy on her parents. To escape.

Only snores came from the hallway. Lori felt no fear crossing the kitchen to slide open the glass doors to the deck. Under the gibbous moon, she hopped from paver to paver, dashed through the gate, and out onto the beach. On her back, in the wet sand, sea foam lapping at her toes, she giggled while papillae poked up around her. Silver strands rose from the lazy waves and glinted in the pale light as they stretched to carve grooves in her ears. So she could understand the secret languages. A sacred quiet settled as the tendrils worked into her brain, weaving patterns in the sclera of her eyes—spells and formulae. Suddenly, she could touch the peaks and valleys of the moon, hear the strum of the stars. She dropped from the ground and fell into a fathomless darkness.

A period of peace spread out for the family. They ordered pizza and watched TV. Then Mom and Dad went to bed early to transform, and slept, even her mother, till noon. In fact, Mom never quite seemed awake, just stumbled in a dreamy stupor. Lori was grateful for this calm, for it allowed her new desire to grow. The desire to steal time. The tendrils sang: Steal the night while others slumber. For only in the dark will you see the true shape of things.

Looking back when she was older, Lori wondered how long the peace lasted. A month, maybe. Long enough for her to feel buoyed by hope. In school, she stepped out of her usual sleepwalk and volunteered answers, even demonstrated on the whiteboard how to solve a multiplication problem involving fractions that stumped the other students. But soon arguments at home erupted again. More violent than ever. Mom yanked a hot dish of lasagna from the oven, whirled toward Dad and threw it at his feet. He jumped in time to save his toes. “This is the end,” he said. Then he got in his sports car, drove away, and did not return the following day.

After that, there was no more quiet, at night or at any time. Mom had entirely lost the ability to sleep. This meant the TV blaring 24/7 with ice-skating competitions, cooking shows, and rom-coms. Mom shouting and cursing at them. Lori returned from her last day of third grade to find half-eaten tubs of pistachio gelato melting on the countertops as Mom screamed at her phone and threw it against the glass doors over and over, until a long crack split the view of the sunset over the sea.

Strangely, the crack released something. That night was magical, the best time the two ever had. Lori wanted it to last forever. They ate twenty-seven cupcakes with silver sprinkles. They watched nine princess movies—with Mom live-altering, rescripting every scene. They swam in the surf and danced on the beach, then made sand angels while they sang to the stars and counted as the dawn pinched out each one. Only when the sun burned high did Lori finally fall asleep.

She thought she woke up wrong, or in the wrong world. In the searing light, her father held her tight to his chest as he carried her up the driveway. He put her down gently on the lip of the sidewalk, and when he was sure she could stand on her own, rested his arm like a mantle on her shoulders. It took a minute for her eyes to focus. She saw spinning red lights but it wasn’t until she heard screams slurring into gurgles that Lori understood her mother was strapped to a gurney and being loaded into an ambulance. Dad told her the proteins in Mom’s brain were folding wrong, the result of a genetic jinx. There was no cure and her treatment was no longer working. “It’s a blessing she had the stroke.” He smoothed Lori’s hair. “We need to let her sleep.”

On the drive along the causeway to the island where Dad and Evil Stepmother lived, Lori tried to blind herself to the glittering sand and white-capped turquoise sea. The mirrored lenses she pressed to her eyes were the darkest they had in the pro shop. (Stepmother demanded they stop there to buy Lori clothes and equipment for Tennis Camp.) Lori wanted protection from the brightness because it brought her back to the hospital, to the body that had been her mother. Swollen from sepsis, mucus-yellow vines encoiled its arms, accordion-ridged snakes bore into its throat and mouth. Blips from the hyper-bright LEDs overhead shone in its sightless, staring eyes.

Lori’s new room, a former attic storage space, was on the top floor. She was happy about that. It was what she was used to. But she didn’t like the flat ceiling. It wasn’t a cone like her turret, so her nightlight’s moons and suns didn’t spiral into infinity anymore, just shifted from left to right. And she loathed the color. Instead of the electric pink she’d requested, it was painted a pasty grayish-blue. The same as the waiting area in the hospital.

“It’s more calming,” said Stepmother. “So you can fall asleep.” But Lori couldn’t sleep at night, even when dinners ended with fresh mango sprinkled with pomegranate seeds and Dad tucked her in. Even when Stepmother set the climate control in the attic for sixty-six degrees (though it was summer and the air outside a humid ninety-two). Stepmother’s goal was clear. Lori must be shut in a low-ceilinged refrigerator and weighted down with quilts and comforters so Stepmother could impress her will. Shape the wild girl into the young lady she should want to be.

Lori resented this, yet she might have surrendered had she not snuck out and seen the mangroves. Through the late hours they shimmered with bioluminous plankton while night-fishing pelicans beat the air with heavy wings. Not even the rising tide of mosquitos made Lori turn back inside. She watched until shining fingers tore through purple clouds and let loose the sun. Then her eyelids unfurled like petals, and she slipped into golden slumber.

Stepmother found her asleep on the beach, in only a t-shirt and underwear, tangled hair filthy with seaweed and sand. Stepmother’s face tightened and reddened. She shouted that it was Day One of Tennis Camp and Lori must be washed and dressed and delivered on time.

Nicholas, the houseman, delivered her. Late. That day and the next. Which made Stepmother late for barre class and lunch and appointments with dermatologists and decorators. As weeks went by, Stepmother was late planning menus and writing grocery lists for Nicholas, who was often himself detained since the girl now required constant supervision, lest she wander into Pine Island Sound and drown. (Lori had been expelled from camp on Day Three, after she dropped her racket mid-serve and passed-out dead asleep on the court.) Dad complained that cocktails and appetizers weren’t ready when he got home. One terrible night, dinner wasn’t served until nine.

Most importantly, Stepmother was not getting her beauty sleep. Her job was to be beautiful and to create a beautiful life for Lori’s father, which necessitated eight hours rest. Lori hated Stepmother’s beauty, her large eyes and long dark hair. Hair like her mother’s, in an old photo Lori remembered, with Dad’s arms around Mom and her arms around a baby Lori. The picture was lost, Lori had looked everywhere. Stepmother must have tossed it into the sea, to join Mom’s ashes. Lori could have eventually forgiven Stepmother for that (there was no proof) but she could never forgive Stepmom for being what she was: a younger, skinnier, dumber replacement for her mother.

Years later, Lori felt more sympathy. She imagined her stepmother could see how Lori saw her. And Lori’s refusal to go to bed meant she had no respite from judgement. Dad was upset about the situation too. He couldn’t perform well at work if routines were disturbed. “At least it’s still summer. We’ve got time to fix this before school starts,” he said.

So the family went to see Dr. Sandford, who locked Lori in a bright room where women with latex gloves strapped her to a high-backed chair, snipped with cold scissors and shaved with an angry electric razor until all her long dark hair snaked around the base on the plastic-protected floor. Then they took Lori to a white-violet room and sat her on a paper-lined platform while they drew dots on her scalp. Shivering, kicking her legs, Lori tried not to cry. Sandford entered with a black plastic cap that had wires and sensors inside. “This might itch,” he said as he pulled it over her scalp and forehead, almost to her eyes.

Lori felt biting teeth. Then Sandford blocked her sight with a blind-visor and put headphones on her ears. “Listen,” he instructed, guiding her to lie back. A noise hive rose. “Let yourself float away,” he commanded before closing the door. Lori stayed docked and did not float away. The visor baked her eyes, the noise burned her ears. Five minutes was more than she could take. She ripped off the visor and the headphones and tore the electrodes from her skin. She got up and tried the cold, brushed-silver knob. It was unlocked.

Supporting shaky legs by feeling the walls, she turned a blue-white corner and heard Dr. Sandford explaining to Dad and Stepmother that if they gave in to Lori’s demands, let her sleep and wake whenever she liked, the girl would be doomed to an unproductive, asynchronous future. Sleep patterns corrupted in childhood result in deviant rhythms as an adult, and crucially, an inability to conform to the Hours of Business. Lori’s life and career choices would be limited, which typically led to mental illness and premature death. Sandford prescribed pediatric zolpidem and when it had no effect, Dad held her head as Stepmother clamped one nostril shut and shot chloral hydrate up her nose.

But before blackness swallowed her, Lori saw a glimmer, a tiny iris. Rising and falling chords streamed through, harmony, dissonance. The singing tongues would save her, a concert of demon frequencies. Wave after wave. Her neurons thrummed, seeding kerneled spells. Powerful geometries took root. Progressions of the number three.

Lori didn’t realize how strong the curse would be. It was August first, her ninth birthday, which was also Dad and Stepmother’s third anniversary. (The number of years added a sting, for they revealed the length of her father’s betrayal.) The two had plans to drive to the mainland for a performance of Macbeth followed by dinner at Chez Aurore. Stepmother had been a theater major and played Lady Macbeth herself. And though Lori did get to blow out nine candles on her high-protein, low-carb waffle at breakfast, there was no promise of a cake. Her one present: green silk pajamas identical at smaller scale to Stepmom’s.

A moment occurred that might have saved them. Dad mentioned Hurricane Trey, the possibility it could hit that night. But Stepmother checked her phone and stated confidently the storm wouldn’t arrive until morning. And no matter what, Stepmother wouldn’t let anything spoil their date. Lori rushed to hug her father before they left. He laughed and ran a hand over her fuzzy head but didn’t pick her up or extend the embrace. “What’s all this?” he asked, straightening. “We’ll see you in a couple hours, darlin’.”

Promptly at eight-thirty, Nicholas escorted Lori from the downstairs computer room, where she’d been tracking weather predictions, up to the attic to commence Sandford’s prescribed nightly regime. Teeth-brushing, face-washing complete, Lori dutifully opened her mouth and Nicholas placed a pastel blue pill with the letter S (for Silenda Pharmaceuticals) on her tongue. Lori sipped from the water glass he handed her, appeared to swallow, then climbed into bed, rising up partially so he could secure the electrode cap that connected her to the doctor’s neurofeedback device—the Generative Encephalography Module or GEM. After Nicholas had closed the door behind him and left her in darkness, apart from the glow of her fairytale castle nightlight and the dimmed display of the humming GEM unit, Lori turned to her side and spat out the pill.

The tongues branched through her brain. She’d learned to use them in new ways, her knowledge enlarged from the internet, the ultimate grimoire. Specifically, she found out that to conjure an entity, you must know the spirit’s true name and purpose. And she learned GEM was not just the name of a machine, it was the root of Gemory, the Queen of the Great Abyss, a time demon who could speed or halt events: slow or quicken a woman’s womb, bring late or early death, spin winds faster or clear the skies. Nine, ten, eleven o’clock passed. Lori’s alpha and beta brainwaves dispersed as massive theta waves crested. Like the sea in San Carlos Bay.

Lori watched dark wings spread across the sky. She heard cracked voices call upon thunder, lighting, and rain. Power over Winds and Seas coursed through her small limbs as she conjured devastating rotations. Seventy-five, eighty, ninety miles an hour churned the depths. At two minutes to midnight, Dad and Evil Stepmother sped along the causeway, returning home from Chez Aurore. The lone sports car battled walls of water, towering vortices. Lori took Gemory’s silver-fingernailed hand and the gloved hand of a figure clothed in mist and the three stirred the void. An onyx mountain surged up from the pitch. It crashed down on the span. Obliteration. No! Lori cried out. The realization stabbed. Her father too, was doomed.

In mid August, before the start of the school year, Lori moved to New York to live on Roosevelt Island with her godmother. “You want to stay up all night?” Godmother asked, her stiletto heels ticking on the parquet floor. Lori nodded. “Fine,” said Godmother, as she flung back a swoop of her hair that had fallen out of place. “I don’t care. You don’t want to go to school. Fine. But I’m not teaching you. You figure it out. Get me whatever forms the Education Department needs. Tell me where to sign.”

Lori understood this was a rare chance at freedom. So, instead of demonology, she turned her mind toward deciphering the Department of Education website. She quickly discovered how to acquire a three-month absence authorization for family tragedy. But getting approval to virtually attend a school in another time zone was more involved.

She prepared the forms and printed them out, but it took a week of pestering to get busy Godmother to sign. When Lori looked, she saw she had only an hour until the twelve a.m. postmark deadline. This did not discourage her. At five after eleven she boarded the tram across the Queensboro Bridge, then transferred to the Downtown N, got off at Herald Square, and ran to the twenty-four-hour main post office branch on Eighth Avenue and 33^rd Street. She stepped up to the window and handed the woman with green glasses the envelope and exactly three dollars and sixty-five cents (for return receipt). It was 11:51. Outside under the streetlamps, urine, pizza, and something smoky yet sweet hung in the air. The smells added to her exaltation. No one had questioned her, or tried to stop her. The people of this city respected responsible nine-year-olds who understood postal rates and transit systems. “I love this place!” she shouted, and heard an unseen “Fuck yeah!” in response.

Staring out the scratched windows of the tram heading back over the East River, Lori gazed at an inverted sky. Along the striped water, the lights of the buildings looked like clustered stars. Godmother returned home from an event minutes after her. “Congratulations,” she said when Lori related her success. “You want some food? Some cheese? I’m having wine…Wait! I have gelato. Pistachio. You like that?”

Lori enrolled in remote classes at a middle school in Makawao on the island of Maui in Hawaii. She was years younger than the rest of the students, having tested out of fourth and fifth grades, but this didn’t bother her. Attending from eight a.m. until two in the afternoon HST was a comfortable two p.m. to eight in the evening in New York. Godmother enjoyed explaining to her friends that Lori was “on Hawaiian time. Fits with my schedule. We have dinner at nine. She helps me clean up, then works in her room all night. Some kind of neural engineering project. I don’t know much about it, but it’s serious. She even has an advisor, this professor at City U, name is Koshmar.”

Lori continued to sleep with the cap connected to GEM, until her hair grew and the strands got caught in the sensors and the connection stopped.

The two lived happily for many years. Then Godmother’s concerns that the sea would overwhelm the city spurred her to move to Denver. “They’re detonating bombs under the polar ice shelf. To get the oil and gas and precious whatever-the-fuck else. It’s bringing down the glaciers even faster. And that tsunami system they set up is ridiculous. By the time it goes off, it’ll be way too late. Come to Denver with me.” Lori declined but gratefully accepted ownership of the lease for the apartment.

Despite the threat of a titanic wave, all seemed well until Lori’s twenty-seventh birthday. It was the age her mother was when the prionic disease was first detected (though she would not fully succumb for another six years). Godmother had explained the onset was marked by a small stroke—“She never could sleep at night. But after she had you, she tried to change. Started therapy and took pills. Which she suspected caused the first hemorrhage. It was minor, she recovered. Then she got the diagnosis. That made her really scared to sleep. Afraid she’d never wake up again.”

Lori’s mom had a mutation at codon 178 (D178N) in the PRNP gene. But this abnormality alone wouldn’t have caused her disintegration. It was the mutation combined with the wrong amino acid—methionine instead of valine at codon 129. Lori reminded herself the methionine made all the difference. Because she had inherited the same mutation—D178N on the PRNP—but did not have the corollary. Lori had safe, nurturing valine at codon number 129. Lacking this second key, the prionic monster could not break in. Yet fear remained that a distortion, a shift in genetic expression could occur. Lori felt there was no worse fate than being seized in the in-between, neither in somnus nor awake.

On Lori’s birthday, the chime on her phone woke her up, like usual, in her bed. But she found she couldn’t move. She wasn’t actually awake. She told herself she was dreaming and this would normally wake her up—a technique called rescripting. It didn’t work. She fell back into darkness and tried to claw open her eyes from within. But her lids were steel gates, rolled down, padlocked to pavement. She could not move them or open her mouth. Her panic became a soundless scream. She sensed her dead mother shaking her sleeping-child-self.

Finally, gripping the sheets, she force-ejected and jerked awake. Still rattled, she showered, brushed her teeth, got dressed, grabbed her jacket and keys. Only as she locked the door of the apartment and turned to walk to the elevator did she notice something seeping through the trim along the floor. Pushing and pulsing. Growing up and out. Mushroom gills in accelerated time. She reached for the wall to steady herself. Her fingers sunk into soft stickiness. Pulling her hand back she sniffed. Rot. She was not awake. She was trapped.

A velvet density crushed her. She felt herself shrinking, smaller and smaller until she was just a tiny, miniature Lori. Half the size of a footlight. She strained, pushing up with her back against an enormous curtain. The fabric was so heavy. But she would not be smothered. She turned and gripped it with her fingers. For days, weeks, months, using every muscle, every ounce of strength, she could barely budge it a centimeter. At last it flew up, weightless, and she woke, sweat-drenched.

She wouldn’t risk falling asleep again. But even if she hadn’t been so determined, her anxiety and tolerance for medications had risen so high that a coma-inducing knock-out might not have kept her under. She had to conquer sleep. And her old professor, Dr. Koshmar, was going to help. Koshmar was now the Head of Research for the Silenda Corporation. The company had expanded beyond pharmaceuticals to the forefront of neural adaptation and suspended animation. Moved by her proposal, Koshmar gave Lori unlimited funds to construct a lab on the 99^th floor of the Silenda Building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South. Using the structure’s solar capture cells and network of wind vacuoles, Lori powered neural processing drives, hyper-gravity centrifuges, and incubators for mycelium lines. She had everything necessary to build a revolutionary stasis capsule.

Lori took Provigil and shaved her head so she could connect with a new neural-interface modeled after Sandford’s GEM. Far more sophisticated, this GEM enabled fluid coupling on all levels of consciousness, allowing Lori’s brain to run theta and delta wave sequences that mimicked the regenerative processes of sleep and dreaming. And she refashioned the electrode-net into a sculpted jewel which showed off the contours of her skull.

As the suspension chamber neared completion, Lori never needed to descend to the city streets. She showered in the lab’s compact bathroom and sustained herself with the mycelium lines she’d cultured. Even kicked back the occasional vodka with cubes from the ice-maker. Regularly each day she spent a sleepless forty-five minutes in the suspended animation pod to make sure the interior conformed precisely to her dimensions.

Koshmar received her reports with exclamations of enthusiasm. But as the weeks passed, the reports failed to disclose the full truth. Lori’s perception was out of control. She tasted streptococci on her tongue, rothia mucilaginosa clusters coating her cheeks and festering in the crevices of her gums. Each breath brought sulfurous staph and methanethiol. She cold-showered, sucked on ice. There was no relief. Her eardrums rang and pulsed. Her heart pounded faster and faster. Then one stormy evening, every nerve shrieked.

Suddenly she realized what she was sensing. High-frequency oscillations. Precursor waves. The kind that herald a Leviathan. She checked her phone. No signal, only an emergency alert from hours earlier—WARNING: TSUNAMI. Looking out the windows, she saw nothing. Just black. A vein of lightning revealed the cityscape she knew so well, but only for an instant. Then, gone. All of Manhattan was dark. No power.

No problem. The 99^th floor was sustained by its own independent supply. Lori fitted the last crome panels of the pod in place. It was beautiful, shining, the culmination of all her ambitions and desires. She could survive the deluge. She just had to fall asleep. Which would be difficult, but she had prepared. She knew she couldn’t resist forever. Now was the time. She muscle-injected midazolam, then gulped three diazepams with a beaker of vodka. Breathing deep, she pulled on the shimmering interface. Fully integrated with GEM, she no longer smelled or tasted rot. A blood release was required for activation. Lori pricked her finger, heard the chime that signaled initiation, and lay in the bed of her design. A perfect fit.

Let us travel forward.

The magic that suspends the sleeper seems ever powerful. The living cells surrounding the silver vessel divide furiously, forcing the spell to comb out sinister curls, lest a chaos of mutation be unleashed. Hyphae overbraid the mortar, stretching ever upward to bloom galaxies of spores. But, eventually, growth slows. Sunlight cracks the canopy, a ray shoots through a high window and shines into an open eye.

You’re awake, comes a voice.

A woman with long black hair and glittering cybernetic eyes the color of the night sky over the sea looks down at the sleeper. The woman is stately, a queen. Every gesture is made with purpose. The queen says she only found the chamber by chance. She was on horse, cantering by with no objective, when the wilderness parted. Vines blossomed or withered at her touch. Branches swung aside revealing a door.

“I think I’ve been asleep a long time,” says the sleeper softly, a beat between each word. As she grips the sides of the capsule and struggles to rise, awareness takes hold. Everyone and everything she knew must be long, long gone. With one possible exception. “My name is Lori.” Speaking is difficult, but Lori must ask, “Do I know you?”

I knew one named Lori. The queen’s dark eyes flash white. A thousand centuries ago. The white glow breaks into glimmers. Sparks of recognition. You are she. The queen gently grasps Lori’s wrists with silver-nailed fingers. You have not changed.

“The world has changed,” Lori says, feeling strength returning as the chamber fills with light.

It has. Come with me. I’ll show you.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

MARGARET JAMESON: I liked writing long before I enjoyed reading. As a child I had problems learning to read. Letters rotated and bled into colors, sounds, and textures. Sentences only started to make sense when I realized I could use the clumps of symbols to write my own stories. In part because I read so slowly (I’d get impatient), I had little interest in the fiction I was assigned in school. Also, I didn’t feel much for the characters: so much time spent on people who seemed little more than names. No smell, no weight, no spark. I did read myths, folktales, and fairy tales voraciously though. I loved the speed and density of them, the way they presented entire life arcs in a few pages, and how quickly fortunes shifted. I studied music and acting and art and if I thought of myself as a writer, it was as a playwright (at the time plays were more fun and easier to read). I wrote and directed weird, surreal one-act plays in my Northern Virginia high school—Christopher Durang, Maya Deren, and Eugène Ionesco were major influences—then I moved to NYC to attend NYU and study film. I worked in the film industry and was a professional musician and did a lot of other stuff. Then my father suffered a stroke and was being shuttled around the D.C. metro-area from one ICU bed to another. I spent months commuting from Brooklyn, spending days in whichever hospital he happened to be in, and nights in the spare room at my parents’ home in the Virginia exurbs. Unable to sleep, I started writing a science fiction novel. The early parts were narrow and spare, like a railroad apartment—base paint on the walls, no details, just a plot to carry you through from one end to the other. Then the chapters grew longer and stranger. Hallways stretched in all directions, doors opened to grander, weirder scenes. I heard my characters speak, and soon I felt like I lived in that elastic space, even when I wasn’t writing. I was there while I watched my father’s oxygenation levels rise and fall. Everything I experienced I stored in the house in my head. I’ve continued to live in that space ever since.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

MJ: I’ll start with the last part. “Somniphobia,” like many of my stories, began with a dream—a recurring one, related to sleep paralysis and lucid dreaming—where I’m certain I’m awake, getting out of bed, doing normal routine stuff and then things get really weird. I realize I’m still asleep and go back to bed (in the dream) and then wake up in another dream that feels real. Layers of this continue (the whole time I’m scared I’m experiencing a stroke) until finally I exert extreme effort and somehow wrench myself awake. So dreams are a big source. But also obsessions that go back to childhood. I’ve always been obsessed with how Sleeping Beauty sleeps for a century. She’s a time-traveler. When she wakes up everything and everyone she knew is gone. There’s probably been a political or at least economic revolution—her kingdom’s collapsed, factories have replaced tenant farms, etc.. “Somniphobia” is a mash of nightmare and longtime fixation. Also, ideas and inversions of pre-existing narratives spark stories: What if I tell a Stepford Wives type story from the POV of the replacement wife-bot? And combine it with du Maurier’s Rebecca & Atwood’s Handmaid's Tale and set it three hundred years in the future? This was the concept that led to my first published piece, “The Wife of Abel Grace.” In terms of structure vs. wildness, I have delayed sleep phase disorder (DSPD), meaning I am a total night owl, approaching vampire-level aversion to mornings. I cannot function well in the morning. Daylight makes me sleepy. Ideal days for me start at around ten a.m., I drink a lot of tea and sometime between noon and two p.m. the gears start whirring and I can work all night until dawn. What this means is I have to set aside whole days to do nothing but write. So I do 12-15 hour ‘sprints’ two to three days a week, then deal with the rest of my life the rest of the time. So a structured wildness, I guess.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

MJ: The self, consciousness, how we construct ourselves, our internal narratives and realities, our identities both socially and philosophically are foundational elements in all my work. Twins, doubles, doppelgängers, parallels, etc. of some kind always appear. I’ve come to be at peace with that. I also find that I inevitably use one or more of the three ‘core questions’ of science fiction: What-if? If-only, and If-this-goes-on…as scaffolding to construct my narratives.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

MJ: I’ve been a lot of things: retail worker, film production coordinator, production manager, commercial and music video director, post-production supervisor, video and audio editor, vocalist, music producer, recording and performing artist, sound artist, gallery assistant, managing director for a fashion designer, literary magazine editor, creative writing teacher…So, any one of those.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

MJ: Two seemingly contradictory pieces of advice I think are hugely helpful for any creative endeavor: 1. There are no rules. 2. Learn the rules before you break them. Together they mean: Learn from the artists who precede you. Study the craft of their work so you can understand how they do what they do. Then use that foundational knowledge to be fearless and take risks with your own work. Because really there are no rules in art. Creativity is antithetical to strict adherence to conventions and limitations. This is the fundamental difference between Art and Science.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

MJ: I’ve been trying to work exclusively on a novel for the past year and a half. I love this project and I’m three-quarters of the way through. But I increasingly became obsessed with two short story ideas that grew from extremely vivid dreams (one led to “Somniphobia”) and they interrupted the process. I’m really happy about this though. The sense of completion you get from publishing short fiction is so motivating and validating for writers. I think I needed to complete these pieces and put them out there in order to finish the novel the way I want to, to help me take the risks I need to allow the novel to be all I want it to be.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

MJ: Originally, I was going to answer this question with a list of all the authors and artists who have influenced my work generally. But so many of them are people everyone reading this already knows about. So perhaps it’ll be more interesting if I mention some of the short stories that inspired this piece. Tanith Lee’s “When the Clock Strikes” is a dark retelling of “Cinderella.” Lee delves into the fairy tale’s 17th century Italian roots to tell a crackling, scary story about the fall of a great noble house which leads to revenge on a generational-ruin-scale. Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood”—I read it in high school and it was one of the first works of short fiction that not only grabbed me while reading it, but haunted my thoughts. Two more: Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch”—love how she explores and expands the folktale / urban myth of “The Green Ribbon”—and Kelly Link’s “Origin Story,” which pulls apart and reassembles superhero tropes and characters from The Wizard of Oz. In my opinion, “Origin Story” is one of the best, most fascinating, and hilarious high-school-relationship-evolves-over-time stories.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

MJ: I hope it’s okay if instead of a single work, I recommend an artist and their body of work. Satoshi Kon is one of my all-time favorite artists. All of his films are worth watching over and over. Maybe start with Millennium Actress or Tokyo Godfathers, though Paprika is amazing and very influential too. Sadly, Kon’s career was cut short when died at forty-six.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

Tonight is the eve of Leonard Cohen’s birthday. In case you’ve somehow missed it, we—the editors behind this magazine—are lovers of Leonard Cohen, devotees, fans, worshippers, call-it-whatever-you-will-ers. Today we’ve opened for a very blink-and-you’ll-miss-it free general submission period in honor of LC.1 Some quick recap below on submission guidelines, friends, but if you already feel ready, then, gently kiss the button below (metaphorically speaking. You do need to click it, literally speaking).

take me to the submission portal

Oh and if you’re a poet, then this is for you → Our sister mag, ONLY POEMS, is currently open for the official $3500 Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize until November 7, 2026. You may send up to 3 pages of poetry on the intersections of love, faith & sex.

You can also expect an update on our reading adventures for the inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for Story of the Year & Essay of the Year soon. And I’m at work on a few more exciting editorial pieces. Upcoming: Leonard Cohen Was Right: 11 Prophecies, Prayers & Reflections from the Poet Laureate of the World!

Submission Guidelines

Submit:

Short Stories (up to 10,000 words)

Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (up to 10,000 words)

Flash Fiction (under 1500 words)

Flash CNF (under 1500 words)

This is an un-themed call. Your writing can be about anything. Though as a refresher:

• Deadline: Sep 22 midnight

• Eligibility: Open to anyone writing in English, anywhere in the world

• Restriction: No previously published work (but self-published on your blog/Substack/etc. is fine!)

• Evaluation: All submissions are read by us, Shannan Mann & Karan Kapoor, the editors of Strange Pilgrims (& ONLY POEMS)

• Response time: Within 4 months

• Optional: $10 Fast Response (response within 4 weeks)

• Payment: If selected for publication, we pay $200 for long-form writing, and $50 for flash (via PayPal or Wise).

Submit now!

And always remember:

& we’ll add to that: be a strange pilgrim!

With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, for today’s piece we cheated a little, but come on…we’re writers and readers, and sometimes I feel we are allowed our innocent indulgences. Namely, this time, instead of publishing just one of Jefferson’s flash pieces, we…couldn’t help ourselves, and had to publish the whole series. And once you read these, you’ll see why. It won’t take you long, you can also listen to his recording which comes in at under 10 minutes. But actually, it will probably take you many days, or weeks, because that’s how long it lived in our heads and hearts…to be honest…it’s still there. So, proceed with caution but also with wild literary abandon!

Pssst: Some fun stuff coming this weekend from the editors. 🫶🏽

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House of Reunification

Back before the house was ours, there was a carriage house south of the barn, back from the time when horses lived in the field and their related tack lived on hooks and pegs in the carriage house, and dairy cows lined up in their stanchions for their morning work. And on the second story, two rows of checkered windows looking out onto the drive way. But now the carriage house is gone, and only imagination can place its foundation anywhere on the south side of the property. In the 1980’s when the couple who’d been living here and renovating the old farmhouse split up, he got the carriage house. And he had it moved two miles away to live out the rest of its life as a small house. The carriage house must’ve felt so lonely so far away, yet so close over on Back Meadow Road just beyond the Baptist Church. A carriage house is only a house in its detached yet integrated relation to a main house. And what of the grief of the main house? Like a tree, the sadness of a house is long and low and often at a frequency unable to be detected by humans, but no less real than the shock we’d feel at losing a child who was now living only a few miles away and whose presence we could still sense but we did not understand how the forces of the universe could allow this separation. To a house, such fallout from human divorce illustrates a centuries long history of misdeeds and lack of foresight at the expense of houses, to whom it is achingly obvious that humans so easily find new mates and strike up new lives, but houses simply wish to remain intact, maintained, and cared for.

There are mornings, especially in fall when the landscape’s plangency strikes its most minor chords and wood smoke mixes with the scent of fallen leaves, that I can feel the house’s sense of loss and desire for unification. At such moments, I tell the house that to live with loss is simply to live, and that we love its old bones and will take care of them as best we can. And when I drive by the carriage house on Back Meadow Road, I say the same thing, but I say it as if to a child.1

House of Breath

The house was undeniably lonely in the way of the second house left closed up, curtains drawn, on top of a hill. And to think, when the owner, who’d inherited the house from his mother, talked about the house, he often mentioned the moment he’d removed some ugly siding to discover the scalloped trim “like a petticoat.” And it seemed like he would work to maintain and restore the house, but no, he mostly stayed in Massachusetts. Said, the house is fine. Said, work. Said, money. Said, next summer.

Against its better judgement, the house began to welcome mice. Welcomed in the wind. To keep warm. It wanted human inhabitants, but this was better than nothing. And the wind, when it died down, became the breath of mice.

The owner had grown up in the house and possessed very few fond memories of his childhood. He remembered bats in the gloaming as he stared out into the night of his second floor window. He remembered walking the train tracks to the lake, and he remembered the sound of the train whistle down the hill, which the house now came to feel was its own mournful call to the owner – come back, come home. But the owner so rarely did.

The house, in order to feel useful, began evening conversations with the two neighborhood owls during which it encouraged the owls to perch on the roof line to hunt. The owls, nervous at first, came to love the view afforded from the southern peak. When the house closed its eyes, the owl calls sounded like the train whistle.

House of Teeth

Purcell Montague kept a box. He lived alone in his family home along the Androscoggin with a long sweeping field down to their spot of river, which he sometimes imagined a sea. No one ever saw him open his box. It sat upon his mantle, sometimes, other times he carried it with him like an eternal baby cradled in the crook of his arm. Rumors: a fanciful machine that wove money; his mother’s ashes he couldn’t bear to dispose of; the antler of a buck who’d shed its rack for Purcell as a gift one night on the shores of the river.

Purcell was trying to learn about Time. Money, he told himself, he’d mastered. Love, unfortunately but with relief, he’d given up on. Only Time remained, and he gave himself his final years to master it. Eight to ten years, he estimated, and if he could rally his faculties and really apply himself, two out of three of life’s big mysteries would be his. And that, he thought, wasn’t bad at all.

Inside the box were two milk teeth. They were his key to understanding Time. At various moments of the day, he placed the milk teeth in his mouth and tried to comprehend Time. How was it Time lasted for so long, but felt so fleeting? How could Time move so slowly, but also so fast? And other stuff like that. Purcell didn’t even know if the teeth were his, maybe another relative’s? He found them in a chest in what once was his grandmother’s room, so who really knows, but when he held the two tiny teeth tucked along his cheek, he could feel Time slip backwards and slip forwards as if Time were a loose tooth, and he was determined to pry it free. But it had taken him years to come to even this understanding. He hadn’t wanted to put the teeth in his mouth, but when he finally overcame his squeamishness (he’d disinfected the teeth for a week in vinegar), he wondered why it took him so long.

Now he was truly old and he kept the teeth almost constantly rattling around in his mouth in hopes of a final understanding of Time. Sometimes he swished them, sometimes clicked them, rubbed them, or shook them like dice in the palm of his mouth. He’d long since fired all his staff and only talked with the river and the house these days. It was the house that told him to go down to the river one night with the teeth in his mouth. Once down there, Purcell found the moon had frosted the river like a cupcake, and it was so quiet with a light breeze that Purcell couldn’t help but smile, something he seldom did, a broad smile that made the river happy, a smile so open that the two milk teeth fell from Purcell’s mouth. Before he could catch them, the river greedily swallowed the teeth, and thanked Purcell by splashing him in the face, waking him up to an understanding of something, but what he never did find out.

Years later, when he heard this story, Purcell’s great-nephew decided to name is prog-rock band Two Teeth in the River. The band developed a small, but fervent following, and were often praised for their innovative, masterful uses of time signatures.2

Imagine a Road

“To imagine even part of the road makes one tired, and more than part, one just cannot imagine.”

— Franz Kafka

This road is forever moving. A long stretch of field placed next to field, hawk placed upon wire, farmhouse planted just barely in sight of farmhouse. To walk this road is to know a ditch life of lilies and vetch; in winter, dirty snow sprayed and mounded from the careless mouth of the plow. The stretch of road leads not to a town, but to an ocean of forest. No one has yet conquered that portion of the map. Our stretch of road has greenery from ancient days and the tracks of animals abandoned by time. We believe the tracks of these animals, which no one has ever seen with their eyes because the animals are invisible, to be embedded communication, a language of migration. A dwindling number of elders translate this language into words. When the raven sits in trees along the road and makes the sound of water dropping, dripping, drop by drop into the dark night, we know it is time to move the road, and so we all band together to harness the strength of all-together now, and we use all our strength to lift, and when we finally let go, the road can be a road again, born again though we’ve heard that it dreams of being a ribbon.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

JEFFERSON NAVICKY: I wrote my first poem in high school. The yearbook advertised that it accepted poems, so I got it into my head that I would write a poem for the yearbook, even though I'd never written a poem before and barely knew what a poem was. But I DID know about playing basketball, because that's how I spent most of my time, so it only seemed natural to write a basketball poem. I think I waited until the last minute, then I wrote a clunkily-rhymed poem about a basketball player complaining to a ref about a bad call -- the big turn at the end was that the referee called the foul on another guy and the speaker of the poem was absolved! It was a terrible poem, but I do remember my mother coming upstairs into my room to help my write it, which I thought was awfully nice of her. And I remember staring at my stereo (that used to be my grandfather's stereo), listening to the radio, and trying to think up rhymes. That last part -- staring at that old wood-paneled antique machine and trying to think up rhymes -- is a very nice memory. And the poem was published in the yearbook, but no one believed I actually wrote it, because, you know, I was a basketball player.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JN: Structure. I approach writing like a cobbler does his work -- make the shoe, fix the shoe. I love routine, and particularly fine-tuning routine (i.e. various types of tea, lighting, pen, etc). But once I sit down to work, who knows what will come out. Pieces of writing announce themselves in myriad ways, and I consider it my job to listen to what they want.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JN: Houses, obviously. But also archives, books, libraries, dust, chickens, cats, language, failure, and the failure of language.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JN: I’ve been lots of things in my life: gym teacher, hall counselor, job coach, editor, garbage man, receptionist, archivist, teacher. All those have supported me as a writer. If not a writer, then...I admire therapists and how important their work is. So, maybe a therapist. Also maybe a baker. I admire (and eat) their work a lot.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JN: The best piece of advice was from poet Gerald Stern in 1999, who said wait as long as possible to publish something. Once you think about publishing something, for the first time or for the five hundredth, things change. Stay in that state of discovery for as long as possible -- it makes the work better.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JN: Prose poems about history, houses, archaeology, objects of the 19th century. I’m taking a class this fall called Material Culture of Early America, and I’ve heard its reading list will ruin my life, in a good way, of course.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JN: Shaped my sense of narrative, hmmm...good question. I’m thinking of the 2001 film “Memento,” which was a mind-bending fractured story of disjointed memory that I really enjoyed as a young person (who knows how it has aged). I have always also loved Jorge Luis Borges and his labyrinths and mirrors. I just finished a deeply satisfying new book by the inimitable Lisa Robertson called Riverwork -- dust, archives, rivers, Chateaubriand!

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JN: I’m going to take this opportunity to highlight some of my favorite Maine artists: I love the expansive art of multi-genre artist Alex Rheault, whose elegant typewriter drawing graces the back cover of my most recent book. I love artist Carrie Scanga’s ferry boats. Since it’s September, I always listen to my favorite fall album by Eric Schwan’s musical project The Orchards, “Sing Birds, In Your Shrinking Woods.” I love Rebecca Goodale’s paintings of tents. I love Peter Neill’s podcast “Conversations from the Pointed Firs.” I love Hilary Irons’s exacting and whimsical paintings.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s essay may well be the opening pages of a play or a novel or an enticing heady surreal Apple TV series or a short story collection, but indeed it an essay in its intended iteration. I love this about creative nonfiction specifically, it is so malleable in the ways it can take shape and influence us, indeed reshape right before our eyes as we read. I think more of us, especially if we’re fiction writers, should try our hand at CNF. And if you already write it, then see if you can “weird” it a little, and then a little more.

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I saw him again. At the new bookstore on Slavyanska St. Prizewinner! I wanted to shout. It’s me!

It was the fifth time in the last two weeks that we have seen each other. Well, that I’ve seen him. I’m pretty sure he has never seen me.

I was all alone and a bit further away from the neighborhood where I usually run into him. I convinced myself I needed to get out of the house and go walk or something. I am here in Sofia for five months on a scholarship to teach and write poetry.

But so far, I haven’t taught much and haven’t written much poetry. Or at least not any poetry that I like. Not because of lack of effort. I sit here every day feeling like a complete failure and wonder why anyone would have given me a scholarship.

Before the Prizewinner became a prizewinning novelist, he was a poet. In fact, the first thing I ever read by him were his poems. I’d go as far as to say that I actually prefer his poetry. It is the kind I like, clear and straightforward with a little humor while his novels can be complex, overly full of references to mythology and history.

I wrote a novel once. I wrote three actually. The first two were practice. The third one was published on a small press and it came out during the pandemic. Nobody read it. Okay, a few people did. My friends, mostly. But not even all of them. Some lied and said they read it but didn’t. I spent years of my life on it. I think it turned out okay. Maybe I’ll write another one if poetry fails me. Why not write a second novel for nobody to read?

At the bookstore, the Prizewinner wore his long black coat that looked exactly like the one I was wearing. But that’s the only thing similar about us. Although my wife Diliana says I kind of look like him. I don’t really see the resemblance. Does he have a wife?

It was still cold in Sofia even though it was April. It snowed only a few days before. As someone from LA, the first few months of snow charmed me, but I was ready for change. Diliana, who grew up here and had just left to go back to LA after visiting for ten days, said this was unusual weather for April.

Of course he’s at the bookstore, I texted her when I saw him.

When she was here, Diliana had been the first to notice him in the neighborhood. He was seated at this dessert place on Ivan Asen St., a place I pass by every day, usually on my way to the Tokyo bar across the street, where I drink beer and stare at my phone. I saw a man and woman sitting at a table and the woman eating a dessert, some kind of mascarpone cake I was admiring, when Diliana nudged me. And that’s when I saw the Prizewinner sitting with the woman.

The second time, he was walking down the street with a bag of oranges. Of course he was. Just like a prizewinner to be healthy, I later joked, as I opened a second bottle of wine in the kitchen. That night, Diliana’s sister was over, staying with us for a few days, and we were all sitting around my dining room table, having a laugh. Mostly they were making fun of my attempts to speak their language. The one bedroom apartment I rented for five months felt full. And crowded. At the time, I remember thinking it felt chaotic to have two other people in my little sanctuary. After all, how was I supposed to get any work done?

I admit, I’d gotten used to my solitude, which isn’t to say I hadn’t missed my wife. For almost two months, I’d existed entirely in my head. I missed her, of course, but I also needed to write. We joked that she arrived like an “agent of chaos” upsetting the orderly universe I’d created. Then she invited her sister to join us for four days. I could have gone to one of the many cafes in this city or to my temporary office at the university, but I didn’t. Instead, I used it as an excuse not to do anything.

The next time we saw him, I’d been joking with Diliana as we walked down the street, “So where are we going to see the Prizewinner today?” and the minute I said it, swear to the International Booker Prize committee, we turned and looked inside a café and he was standing in line for a coffee. It was a new place in the neighborhood. It’s called Stories. Of course it is.

At that point, I became convinced maybe the Prizewinner was stalking me. There’s no reason I shouldn’t talk to him, Diliana suggested. “You should just come here and hang out until he shows up.” “And say what? Hi, I don’t know you, but I’m a writer too.” A normal person might, she says. An annoying person might also.

I did go into Stories once. A misunderstanding led them to charge me extra for the espresso in my cappuccino which, last time I checked, I’m pretty sure comes with cappuccino. The guy asked me what kind of espresso I wanted and I had no preference and didn’t realize he was asking if I wanted an extra shot of espresso. Just to appease him, I chose one from Mexico, maybe out of some kind of homesickness for LA. At first, I thought maybe there was confusion because of the language barrier, but later realized the whole exchange had been in English.

Next time, the Prizewinner was coming out of a market, again on the same street, Diliana was still here and he looked straight at us and made a face, not sure what kind of face exactly, the face of recognition, the face of disappointment, the face of why are these nonimportant people looking at me? Worse, he no doubt wasn’t thinking any of that stuff. He was probably thinking about the next prizewinning novel he was going to write or about that time he met the pope which he’d recently posted about on Facebook.

Ten days went fast.

Diliana’s visit had come to an end and she had an early departure to Frankfurt where she’d catch her flight to LA. We took a cab to the airport at 4 in the morning. Coming back, I’d decided to wait it out in the terminal until the subway opened at 5:26 am to be exact. It wasn’t that I was too cheap to take a cab, it’s that it can sometimes be a little intimidating trying to explain to the driver in a foreign language exactly where I live. And it can also be that sometimes taxi drivers try to rip you off.

By 4:55, Diliana was already through security and I had 31 minutes to go so I waited in the airport café. I ordered a dulgo kafe which is a long coffee, but which is still short as opposed to the normale kafe, which is the regular and even shorter. I watched as families came in to Terminal 2, some traveling together, some saying goodbye to individual members just like I had done to Diliana, waving as she ascended the escalator then disappeared. It was strange given that I was here in her hometown waving goodbye as she flew back to my hometown. It felt equally strange when she’d dropped me off at LAX to come to Sofia.

Outside the airport, smokers all huddled in the cold getting in a last dose of nicotine before they checked in for their flights. Maybe I needed a cigarette. I used to smoke. I made the mistake of quitting last year. Maybe I can’t write well because I’m not smoking. They say that nicotine stimulates the brain, even as it ruins the lungs. Which did I care about more? But the Prizewinner didn’t smoke. All the times we’d seen him, he’d never had a cigarette. Surprisingly, I’d made it two months here without one, which is kind of a miracle in a country that consumes the largest amount of tobacco in Europe. My friend Ninko, who is translating my first book of poems to be published in Bulgaria, handrolls his own smokes and sent me a picture of a tobacco chunk formed into a heart and said, “For all my friends who smoke.” I said I will always have a tobacco heart but that I hadn’t smoked since I got here. “That explains why I am smoking for two,” he wrote.

As I waited at the airport café with still 28 minutes to go. I read the display with all the departing destinations: London, Frankfurt, Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Doha, Belgrade. Maybe I should get out of here and go somewhere. But wait, am I not already somewhere else?

On the subway home, it was freezing. I got on about five minutes before departure. Others had boarded. I sat across from an elderly woman wearing a mask next to who I presumed was her middle-aged daughter, snuggled together with their suitcases in front of them. Along the way, the car filled with workers heading to the city center to pick up trash or drive buses or work at the grocery store or on a construction site or at the hospital. Real jobs unlike what I was doing, flopping around the city pretending I was a writer.

At Orlov Most, my stop, I exited then walked through the April snow down my street at 6 in the morning, the only one out. When I got to my apartment, it was dark and empty. Now that Diliana had been here, her absence was prevalent. The solitude I thought I’d missed was replaced by dread and loneliness.

The writing life is a lonely life, says the Prizewinner.

Somedays I don’t even open my mouth to speak to anyone. But not only writers are lonely. A lot of lives are lonely. A lot of people come home to dark and empty apartments. It doesn’t take a prizewinner to figure that out. It’s not like writers are special. The crane operating life can be a lonely life. The flight attendant life. Scanning items as a clerk at a grocery store can be a lonely life. Emptying bedpans at a hospital. Driving a taxi. Most lives are lonely lives in one way or another. In fact, the writer at least has the advantage of filling up a lonely life by writing. But I was a fool. I wasn’t a writer. An imposter. I had people in my life who loved me. Look at all this time I was wasting by being away from them. For what?

The new bookstore is named Umberto & Co, a play on Umberto Eco. They even have a full statue of the author. The Prizewinner likes him, I’m sure, as he was standing in front of the statue taking a picture of it. I also took a picture right after the Prizewinner; maybe I should have taken a picture of the Prizewinner taking a picture of the other prizewinner.

This time he was with a woman and younger girl, maybe his wife, maybe his daughter, maybe a friend, maybe his publisher, maybe his agent, I don’t know anything about his personal life. I care as little about the details of an author’s life as I do his awards. Honestly, I even hate that I noticed him at all. Not once, not twice, but five times. Even though it became a funny joke between Diliana and me. What is it we want from another writer outside of their words? Some kind of assurance? Some kind of company? You feel a connection, of course, because you’ve lounged on the sofa of their imagination for days, even weeks. Sometimes through many books. Maybe I was just looking for a familiar face.

As I left the bookstore, the Prizewinner was at the checkout buying books and smiling and charming all the clerks. I don’t know what he said because despite the classes I’ve taken, I still can’t speak the language, which makes it kind of funny I was there in the first place, since I can’t read any of the books. But I had nothing else to do. If I were the Prizewinner, who obviously not only speaks the language but is a master at it, I’d feel pressured to buy something at the new bookstore too even if there was nothing I wanted. There must be something annoying about being a prizewinner. The prizewinner’s life is a lonely life too in a different way. Everywhere you go, the feeling you have to perform. People who you don’t know, like me, either hate you with jealousy or think they know you and already come with preconceived notions about you. Even when you’re just buying a coffee. Though one of the nice things and maybe one of the curses about being a writer, even the prizewinning ones, is that outside of a small circle most people don’t know who you are, much less read your books.

But nobody was more anonymous than me at that moment. Just a random stranger in a foreign country. I didn’t feel any pressure to buy or be anything. In fact, it would have been embarrassing to buy a book in a language when I couldn’t even understand the person ringing me up. So I left.

That was two weeks ago. As for the Prizewinner, I haven’t seen him since. Maybe he’s traveling, accepting another award in some far off place, or hunkered down writing the next prizewinning book. Maybe he’s left town like everyone else to visit family for the Easter holiday. As for me, with nowhere to go and no family here, I plan to take a walk around the empty city. The weather is changing and it’s getting warmer now, at least.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

CLINT MARGRAVE: The first stories I remember writing were when I was five years old. Then, at around ten, my father used to bring his electric typewriter home from the office on weekends so I could sit in my room and write. I wrote my first “novel” then, which was really only about forty pages. For a while, as a teenager, I chose music over writing then came back to it in my early twenties. For those years I played guitar in various bands, but it wasn’t enough to express myself only through the strings and a fretboard of a musical instrument. I needed to do it with words.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

CM: I try to write every morning. I get up early and spend at least some time free writing before I have to get ready for work and confront the day. Maybe I’m inspired by a note I jotted down the day before, maybe an image, or question, or something I read, or that came to me in the middle of the night. I might have nothing and have to jog my memory for an idea. It may or may not turn into something at a later date when I have more time and can go back through my journals and see what I find. Occasionally, a poem, or essay, or story, will just announce itself and demand to be told and come out close on the first try, but it usually takes more effort than that.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

CM: The old goth in me still seems to be obsessed with death. I don’t think it’s from a desire to be morbid or depressing but more as an existential snort, a way to acknowledge and defy death by remembering to laugh and live and love life. But I’m still always pleased when I write something that doesn’t have to do with death.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

CM: If not a writer, I’d be pretty lost. I can’t imagine going through the world and not being able to turn the raw experience of life into some form of art. In my fantasy life outside of being a writer, maybe I’d love to have been a great singer. I imagine how good it must feel to be able to belt out those notes. Maybe that would still involve words. Or maybe I’d take up something like painting. I’ve never been good at visual art and have always been in awe of those who are.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

CM: I’ve always appreciated the epitaph on Bukowski’s grave that says, “Don’t Try” as good writing advice. Get out of your own way. Don’t try to write “literature.” Just write what you’d want to read yourself. There really are no rules except maybe try to enjoy yourself. As for advice to emerging writers, maybe I’d echo such advice by saying “don’t try to make your mark.” You have to have more than good writing skills. You have to have style and personality and something to say. Don’t be boring! Don’t worry about being a “good literary citizen.” Don’t spend your life thinking about publishing or making connections or being famous or winning awards. Don’t waste all your money at AWP and entering contests. Go out and see the world, make some mistakes, “do the wrong thing” as Irving Layton used to tell Leonard Cohen.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

CM: Mostly poems and a few essays. Many of which have to do with my time abroad as depicted in “The Prizewinner.”

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

CM: There are so many.

Adam Zagajewski, Wislawa Szymborska, Gerald Locklin, Tony Hoagland, Charles Bukowski, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Simic, Fernando Pessoa, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, John Fante, Leonard Cohen, Michel Houellebecq, Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Raymond Carver, Ralph Ellison, Carl Sagan, Borges, Karl Knausgaard, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Bernhard, Egon Schiele, Lucien Freud, Otto Dix, Remedios Varo, Van Gogh, Emil Stoychev, Godard, Lars Von Trier, and many more.

Not to mention late seventies British punk and post punk which had a huge influence on my attitude about art in general.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

CM: Listen to the album Strange Times by The Chameleons.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s flash fiction is meditative as it is mysterious. Take a coffee/tea/smoke/fake smoke break and sit down with for a few moments. I’m positive you’ll be as charmed as I was.

One requirement for the job of keeper at the Last Bird Eggs exhibit is being good with children. I have enough grandkids to not be bothered by a horde of urchins storming the museum but none patter through my halls. Kids pile instead into the VR rooms, where Maite whisks them off to the Flying Raptors Simulator.

Yet Maite doesn’t get a single adult. All of them come to me, to see the real things, the last bird eggs left on Earth.

I stay out of the way, leave the patrons be. They mill in timidly, the way people must have stepped into church once. There are no birds in our skies anymore, except the metal ones they used to call “drones” and now call “birds” because the word became available. You can learn about the real birds from fairy tales and the people who’ve seen them, although many, myself included, have begun to wonder: did we ever really see those birds or did our minds conjure them up?

The eggs here are our last reminder. I stand by as visitors walk past the polished glass displays, staring wistfully at the pale blue egg of the jackdaw, the glossy pinks and purples of the tinamous, the milky-white oval of the Alpine swift.

Dead things, I mutter to myself because it’s easy to forget what you’re really looking at. Before you know it, you’re seeing phantoms ready to lure you into believing again.

Today, a girl of six or seven wanders in. Tiny sparrow of a child, birdie bones showing through translucent skin. She marches up to the guillemot’s case, looks at the green cone of the shell and smacks her tiny fists onto the display.

I hobble over on my weak, arthritic legs as the child crashes her whole body against the impenetrable glass. I take her balled hands into my big leathered paws. Her knuckles are red, raw, angry. The child looks at me and I see guilt in those wide eyes. Defiance, too.

“Is this where the birds come from?” she asks.

“It is, indeed. Are you in search of a bird?”

She eyes me suspiciously. “Maybe.”

I give her a thoughtful nod. “Perhaps I could be of help? I know where every bird is, here.”

The girl considers. “It’s that big”—she throws her hands out—“and grey, and it has black on the wings.”

“Well, let’s see. Could it be a her—”

“It killed my brother Kevin, who was my big brother and the bird killed him with those sharp claws and now I’m… I’m gonna…”

She’s shaking and for the first time in my twenty years here, I do not know what to do. I’m just a sack of old bones and a heart that’s cracked in one too many places. A deep fissure opens up inside me and starts seeping, and I’ll need to sew it back quickly because my boy is not coming back and it was so long ago anyway and I thought drones were under stricter regulation now and this child, right here, needs me.

But she’s not a sparrow I can scoop up in my palms and shield from the world.

“I’m sorry, young lady,” I say, uselessly, with the little voice I have left. “I’m afraid you won’t find that fellow here. My birds are not that kind of bird.”

Slowly, the child lifts her head and I can see, through the soft mist of tears, a glint. “What kind are your birds?”

I might not be good for much but I have stories to last me a lifetime—and this child is starved for a good tale. So I give her my favorite, one I heard as a little devil myself and return to whenever hope leaches out of me. It’s the story of how the cosmic eggs birthed the world and it goes like this:

Once when there was nothing but primordial waters, a little duck flew over the dark currents looking for a place to nest. The Mother of the Waters raised a leg above the white-tipped waves and the duck swooped down, laying four eggs, three golden and one iron. Just as they were about to hatch into four ducklings, the Mother of the Waters twitched her leg and the eggs whisked down it and shattered into the waves. There, they mingled, their shells sweeping into the sky and the earth, their yolks fusing into the sun, their whites becoming the moon.

When I finish, the girl is quiet. She looks into the glass case she tried to break minutes before, studying the elaborate scrawls inked on the surface of the guillemot’s egg. “Are you waiting for them to hatch? Like the little duck?”

I open my mouth to tell her there’s nothing in those eggs, but the girl’s eyes are so big and bright, as if they see something I don’t. The words dry up in my throat.

“Why yes, indeed,” I say instead. “Would you like to help?”

She nods with the eagerness of a chick pecking at a worm that wiggles from its mama’s beak. My mind’s eye summons the ghost of the guillemot and I tell her about the velvety feathers of its chocolate-brown head. I mime the piping staccato of its calls. The girl leans into the glass display and puts a finger over her mouth: Shhh. She listens—for a beat, a chirp—squinting to catch the tip of a beak poking through.

The lights in the hall have dimmed. The gloom swallows the thin stems the eggs perch upon, so they seem suspended in the air, like so many candles flickering in the dark. And though I should know better, as I behold the last bird eggs on earth, I find myself looking for the cosmic egg among them. I, too, listen for the tiny crack, the tap of a beak on shell, and then: the yolk spilling like a golden river, the feathery white billowing out into a new sky.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

ELITSA DERMENDZHIYSKA: I’ve always loved reading. As a kid, I devoured the children’s classics, but by the time I got out of high school, I was convinced I had nothing of note to say and should probably stick with math. It wasn’t until two years ago, actually, that I began writing. I was part of a team that created a fantasy mental health game and perhaps this provided an impetus and permission to try things out? Or maybe I just got less self-conscious with age and went for it.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

ED: I write for an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon. I don’t count words or set goals: that’d be a surefire way to discourage myself and quit writing. I usually start with an image that springs into my mind – sometimes in ways completely mysterious to me, other times from the mash-up of half-formed snippets I’ve jotted down in my notebook.

Before I start writing, I like to have some rough plan for where the story is going. However, as I proceed, the plan often changes because I’m able to see new connections and possibilities that weren’t available to me at the start.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

ED: I don’t consciously write with motifs in mind. But looking back over the stories I’ve written, they all explore relationships – mother-child, father-child, siblings, friends, strangers – and how these relationships evolve under strain and changing circumstances.

I also love writing older characters who find new relevance, and I seem to have written a fair amount about death, too.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

ED: I’m not primarily a writer, actually. I’ve been an entrepreneur in mental health for the past seven years and it suits my personality. No day is the same. I don’t have set responsibilities. I need to hop between jobs and functions all the time. I love having ideas and being able to try them out without having to go through committees and what not.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

ED: One piece of advice that has always served me well is to look at the first draft as extruding the material. It’s a crude, ugly process and I just need to get through it so I can have the raw material to shape later. If I find myself stuck on how to describe something during that first draft, I’d often write XXXX or “some description here” and move on. It’s been very liberating.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

ED: I just received feedback notes on a story. As I look at them, I feel the usual low-grade dread and wonder if I have what it takes to wade in and make all the necessary changes. As usual, I’m also bewildered about how clear, in hindsight, the issues are and then tell myself that if I was a real writer, I’d have been able to foresee them ahead of time. Of course, that’s never the case, since we’re too close to the material to be able to see it with fresh eyes, but it still bothers me even if I get it intellectually.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

ED: Some of my favorite writers are Michael Cunningham, Daniel Woodrell, and Wallace Stegner. I love the way they can turn a small, ordinary moment into something you can feel viscerally. I also adore the epic scope of Larry McMurtry’s novels and the sheer imagination of Karen Russell’s short stories.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our theme for this month’s micro challenge was Utopia and turns out y’all have a whole lot to say about that! We read over 600 entries for this challenge and present you the winner below. Aaand we’re also now open early for September’s challenge.

Drumroll please for the theme announcement (or a general cackling cacophony will also do!).

September Micro of the Month Theme is:

Marriage

Submit your micro

Send us your micros (300 words or less) before September 3rd midnight! Remember, it’s free to submit and the winner gets $30 + publication.

If you need a refresher on the details ↓

And now the winner of the August challenge!

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Today, they took me back to the river. I barely swim anymore. Sometimes they put me in a Tupperware container where I can dangle my legs. And I have to react to a music box. Sometimes they use a water gun on me. And I have to react to a plushie doppelganger of myself. Sometimes they put a crocodile head that moves by itself in the inflatable pool where the cat wheel is. And I have to react to a dancing squid toy. Sometimes I witness the hatching of a mystery egg. And I have to react to an octopus popsicle.

The mystery egg hatched a plastic penguin. They put half of the mystery egg’s shell on my head. I watch an anti-gravity water drop illusion. And I have to react.

Today, I heard a bird whistle for the first time. That’s what they said. They did an unboxing of merch. All the showerheads look like me. And I have to react.

Sometimes, there is a birthday sushi train. Sometimes, my bowl remains empty for a long time. I am on a diet, they said. So they show me a virtual fish on a tablet. And I have to react.

Sometimes, I turn on the faucet and get angry at the water.

Today, they strapped me into a harness and leash. The river looked different. I saw others like me. I strained at the leash, but I couldn’t go far. I strained for a long time. I got tired. When I woke up, they were gardening. They sprayed micro mist in my face. And I had to react.

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Contributor’s Note

I wrote OTTER out of an interest in the strange distance between care and control, and in the ways affection can become performance. I was thinking about captivity not only as a physical condition, but also as a relationship mediated by observation, entertainment, and the expectation to react. The piece grew from that tension between being cared for and being contained, and from the unsettling possibility that the two can begin to resemble each other.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we have another original gorgeous accompanying artwork from . She’s outdone herself with this one, which, if you look all over Strange Pilgrims, you’ll see is hard to do since everything she creates is brilliant. I also think this was the perfect story to pair one of Mariam’s art pieces with, because boy is it wild and wonderful and folkloric and weird and just plain sweet and spiritual, damnit all the good things. I love that we get to share it with you now. Go read!

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There once was a farmer who lived with his wife in the fields on the other side of the forest. Their life had been hard even in the best of times, but when a drought in the kingdom entered its second year and caused their crops to fail, the couple was at the end of their rope.

“I don’t know what else to do,” the farmer told his wife. “I think we have to sell our cow.”

“But she gives us milk and butter and cheese to trade at the market,” the farmwife objected.

“I know,” the farmer said, “and I am sorry, but without the grain from the fields, our tiny pasture is too small to keep the cow fed. If we sell her, we should have enough money to buy grain to feed ourselves over the winter, and new seeds to plant in the spring. You must sell the cow at the market tomorrow.”

In the morning, the farmwife led the cow down the dirt path that led to the village. She hadn’t gone very far when she came upon an old woman who was standing up to her waist in a pool of mud in the middle of a field, a short distance off of the path. The farmwife had never seen the old woman before but stopped anyway to call out to her. “Hello, mother,” the farmwife said. “Do you need any help?”

“Why yes, daughter, thank you for asking,” the old woman replied. “I thought that I would take a shortcut across this field, but now I am stuck.”

The farmwife looked at her cow and then turned back to the old woman. “I think that this rope I am using to lead my cow will be long enough. Hang on, and we will pull you out.”

The task was quickly accomplished, and soon the two women were leaning together on the cow. “I owe you a great debt, daughter,” the old woman said, “perhaps even my life. Where are you headed this fine morning with this magnificent animal, and how can I help you in return?”

“Sadly, I am headed to market to sell our cow,” the farmwife answered, and proceeded to tell the story of the couple’s plight.

“It is indeed fortunate that we met,” the old woman said. “I have something that will solve all of your problems, which I will be happy to trade to you for your cow.” The old woman pulled an elegant notebook from her bag and handed it to the farmwife.

With an oilskin cover, it was easily the finest item the farmwife had ever held in her hands. “It’s very nice, indeed,” the farmwife admitted, “but how can it possibly solve my problems?”

“It’s a magic notebook,” the old woman replied. “Whatever you write in it will come true.”

“How does that work?” the farmwife asked.

“I don’t know,” the old woman answered. “It’s magic. Give it a try.”

The farmwife opened the book and saw that its pages were all blank. “Do you have a pen?”

The old woman rolled her eyes. “Of course,” she said, and pulled a silver pen from her bag.

As soon as she touched the pen, the farmwife realized that it was now the nicest thing she’d ever held in her hands. “Shiny,” she said. “What should I wish for?”

“Whatever your heart desires.”

The farmwife thought it over. “Our cow has served us long and well,” she said, “but she is old and tired now. I think she might like to be young again.” Very carefully, the farmwife wrote the words My cow is young again into the book.

A golden glow immediately enveloped the cow as she slowly stretched and stood up taller and straighter. From somewhere came a sound like angels singing, and a pair of bluebirds descended to place a wreath of flowers on the cow’s head.

“Wow,” the farmwife said. “Nice touch with the birds.”

“Thank you,” the old woman replied. “Do we have a deal?”

“I don’t know.” The farmwife pretended to weigh her options. “My cow is considerably more valuable now. Is this still a fair trade?”

The old woman mentally counted to ten. “I can see that you are a shrewd negotiator,” she said. “How about if I throw in the pen?”

“Done!” The farmwife gleefully handed the cow’s rope to the old woman and had already turned quickly towards home when she thought of a final question. “Why didn’t you use the notebook to get out of the mud?” she started to ask, but when she turned around, the old woman and the cow were already gone, with not a trace remaining. “Now that is odd,” she said to herself.

When she got home, the farmwife showed her husband the notebook and the pen and excitedly told him the story of the old woman and the cow. Unfortunately, he did not share her enthusiasm. “You foolish woman,” he admonished her, “you have given away our greatest possession and received nothing in return.”

“But now we can have anything we need,” she objected. “Let me show you.” She sat at the table and opened the notebook. “How much do you think the cow would have brought at market?”

“I was hoping for at least twenty dollars,” the farmer answered.

“Twenty dollars, then.” The farmwife took the pen and wrote a dollar sign in the notebook.

“You might as well ask for twenty million,” the farmer sneered.

The farmwife considered this. “That seems like an awful lot of money,” she said. “Would we really need all that much?”

“Twenty thousand, then,” the farmer suggested. “It’s all just a cruel joke, anyway.”

“Whatever.” The farmwife very carefully wrote 20,000 after the dollar sign and set down the pen.

“Now what?” the farmer asked.

“Wait for it,” the farmwife said. As they waited, a fly came in through the window and began to flit around the room. In the silence, the buzzing seemed much louder than usual. Eventually the fly landed on the pen, which was still sitting on the table. The farmer tried to swat it with the notebook, but the fly jumped up just in time to make the farmer miss and then escaped back out of the window.

“What a useless thing,” the farmer complained. “It’s not even good for killing flies.” With that, he flung the notebook through the window, where it fell between the woodpile and the side of the house.

“I don’t understand,” the farmwife said, but the farmer had already left the cottage to sit in the woods and drink the last of the previous year’s cider.

He was still slightly hungover the next morning when they were awakened bright and early by a pounding on the door. It was the solicitor from the village, come to give them a bag of gold coins and some forms for the farmwife to sign in triplicate. The forms said that the farmwife’s uncle had died recently and left her this money.

“How much is it?” the farmwife asked.

“Twenty thousand dollars,” the solicitor answered.

The farmer’s eyes grew wide as the news slowly pierced his cider-fogged brain. The farmwife signed the papers, and the solicitor left them both to sit and stare at the bag of coins on the table.

“You foolish woman,” the farmer finally said.

The farmwife blinked once, then twice, before she turned to the farmer. “What did you say?”

“You should’ve asked for more,” the farmer explained. “We could’ve had all the money in the world.”

“Whatever would we do with all the money in the world? What would be left for anyone else?” the farmwife argued. “Besides, we have more than we need right here. What could we possibly spend more on?”

“I’m sure lots of things would occur to us,” the farmer said. “You never think big enough. Ask me again when we have the money. Here’s the pen. Where’s the book?”

“You threw it out the window.”

“Only because you made me angry. Come, help me find it.”

Together they searched the pasture, but neither found the notebook where it had fallen between the wood pile and the outside wall of the cottage. As the morning wore on without success, the farmer became increasingly frustrated. He finally reached his limit when the heat of the noonday sun began to sweat the liquor in beads out of his aching forehead.

“This is all your fault!” he accused. “You’ve hidden the book to keep the treasure for yourself. Tell me now where you’ve put it!” The farmer picked up his walking stick and waved it wildly as he chased his wife around the field.

Fortunately, she was much quicker than him, and in his dehydrated state she easily dodged his attacks and ran around him back into the cottage, where she picked up an iron skillet and laid the farmer out cold as he came through the doorway. Exhausted from the excitement, she sat to catch her breath and collect her thoughts. Looking back and forth between the sack of coins on the table and her husband lying unconscious on the floor, her thinking became clearer as her breathing slowed, until she decided that this was probably as good a time as any to pursue her lifelong dream of travel.

Packing her few clothes along with the bag of coins and some bread and cheese in a rucksack, she left the pen in the middle of the table as a reminder to her husband of his folly and headed down the lane.

The farmer awoke to a cottage grown cold as the hearth embers finally had died out, and he realized that his wife was gone for good. He cursed his own foolishness, until he saw the pen on the table and mistakenly imagined that his wife had left it for him as a final act of charity, because it was the true instrument of the magic.

Taking one of the forms the solicitor had left, he turned it over and wrote a dollar sign on its back, followed by a one and a truly spectacular number of zeroes. Midway down the page he paused, then crossed out the numbers and wrote I am the king. This pleased him enormously, and he admired it at great length before picking up the pen one final time to cross out king and write beneath it emperor. You can probably see at this point where this is headed.

With his “magic” pen and paper in his pocket, the farmer strode confidently into the market town. It happened that the actual king was coming that day to that very same town on his annual tour of his subjects, but the farmer immediately assumed that the decorations and other preparations for the real king were meant instead for the farmer.

He stepped into an invitingly boisterous inn, sat at the biggest table, and loudly demanded food and drink. Seeing his simple garb, the innkeeper demanded payment up front for the meal.

“Such impudence!” the farmer cried indignantly. “I’ll have you know, my good man, that I am your emperor!”

“And I’m the Queen of May,” the innkeeper replied, “but nobody eats for free on my shift.”

This of course infuriated the farmer, who took the paper from his pocket and waved it about, all the while questioning the innkeeper’s ancestry in a voice loud enough to draw the attention of the king’s guard from the nearby street. He yelled even louder when they picked him up and carried him off to present to the king.

Even on his best days, this particular king was never easily amused. As it happened, on this day he was suffering from a singularly painful bout of gout, which subsequently resulted in an all too predictable damper on his disposition.

The farmer, on the other hand, became increasingly delighted as he surveyed the throne room. “Finally,” he proclaimed, “I am in my proper element.”

“And why is that?” the king asked.

“Why, obviously, because I am your emperor!” the farmer replied.

“On the contrary, sir, you are clearly a lunatic, and I judge you to be a traitor against the crown,” the king summarily declared, “and order you to be executed without further delay.”

Undaunted even as they dragged him away, the farmer continued to insist at the top of his lungs that he was the rightful ruler and that everyone involved would be very, very sorry indeed, thank you very much, once the truth was properly revealed. His tirade continued right up to the point when the executioner’s axe cut off his rant.

This had an immediate calming effect on the farmer, and he quite suddenly experienced a remarkable clarity of focus. The farmer’s head tumbled into the basket and landed face up, so that the very last thing he saw was a beautiful blue sky, with a single cloud that seemed to him to be rather in the shape of a certain cow of his former acquaintance, albeit somewhat younger than he remembered.

As the rest of the farmer’s body slumped to one side, the pen dropped out of his pocket and bounced across the platform, drawing the executioner’s attention. “Shiny,” he said. Thinking it was the nicest pen he’d ever seen, the executioner picked it up and put it into his own pocket, and it quickly became his favorite, until one day when he accidentally left it on a shared table in the dungeon and it disappeared and had to be replaced with another pen, which then became his new favorite.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, a wandering hermit discovered the now abandoned cottage and decided to live there. When fetching wood to light the hearth, he found the misplaced notebook behind the wood pile. With its oilskin cover, it was easily the nicest thing he had ever owned, and he decided that it would be the perfect medium in which to record for posterity everything that he’d learned from his lifetime of asceticism.

Whenever he would reach a temporary impasse in this project, he would entertain himself by making little drawings in the margins, mostly of flowers or abstract geometric shapes, but occasionally of baby animals with overly large eyes. If inspiration struck him, he’d write simple parables illustrating his imparted wisdom, and sometimes even short verses of poetry. Many of these poems dealt with the beauty and wonder of nature, while others were more amorous in their content. His general sense of contentment at this advanced stage of his life meant that all of his stories had happy endings.

Because they were written in the notebook, everything in the hermit’s stories and poems of course came true, but since he set them all in distant parts of the kingdom, the hermit never heard anything about the events that he’d caused, and the people who benefitted from them never learned the true source of their good fortune.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

KEVIN SANDEFUR: I was already writing little stories in the fifth grade, mostly Tom Corbett fan fiction. A handful of my original poems and stories appeared in my high school’s literary journal. I first started submitting work to professional markets while in college, but without any takers. After that, life intervened, and my creative energies went into accounting software development and newsletter editing/production for a string of non-profits. I realize now that these were just alternate ways for me to bring things that hadn’t existed before into the world.

It wasn’t until eight years ago that a gen ed writing class required for my accounting degree reminded me of how much I enjoyed the sound of my own voice. For me, writing is literally a form of play. My greatest joy is moving words around to make sentences and paragraphs.

I started submitting again, this time with some modest success. After my retirement, I was able to complete a Bachelor of Applied Studies in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, and here I am now, still writing, still submitting, and still playing.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

KS: It varies from piece to piece. A lot of my stories come from prompts and themes suggested by publishers or competitions. “The Magic Notebook,” for example, came from a simple contest prompt: a moleskine notebook and $20,000. I didn’t have a story in time to meet their deadline; I rarely do. But the idea crawls around in the back of my head until the premise coalesces.

The one thing I need before I can go any further is the knowledge of how the story will end. The final sentences are usually the first thing I write. They also let me know who is telling the story, and that frames the voice, which in turn tells me where the story should start.

By that point I usually have enough for the story to spill out onto the page as a nearly complete whole. My first drafts are often very fast, sometimes as little as a day or two. Editing, on the other hand, can take years, and never really ends until the story gets accepted somewhere.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

KS: Death. Definitely death. My mom died seventeen years ago, and one of my sisters just three years later. My father and mother-in-law passed within five weeks of each other in 2023. I’m 71 years old. I write a lot of ghost stories.

I also write a lot of pieces where things are just a little bit off. Okay, sometimes more than a little. I’m a big fan of magic realism and weird fiction.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

KS: I like to think I’d still be a creator of some sort. My family had a strong musical background, and years ago I did some simple compositions. I used to draw a lot when I was in college. I’ve already mentioned my career in computer programming. I’ve also been a lifelong learner. I don’t think I would ever be bored.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

KS: Ray Bradbury said you should write a short story every week for a year, because it’s physically impossible to write fifty bad stories in a row. Kurt Vonnegut basically said just do it, something, anything, make something, even if it’s awful. It will get better.

If your measure of making a mark is to be published, I would offer the words of the Dread Pirate Roberts: “Get used to disappointment.” If, on the other hand, you write because you can’t help yourself, because you simply have to, and because nothing else even comes close to making you as happy as a perfect sentence, then you’re already doing it right.

All I’ve ever wanted since I first learned to read was to be a storyteller. I’ve spent seven decades soaking up stories from books and magazines and movies and tv shows from all over the world. Eventually, some of that just had to start leaking back out.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

KS: I’m slowly adding pieces to a novel that I started at Iowa. The physical time required for the longer form is daunting, and life keeps getting in the way. I’ve never written anything longer than about 10,000 words before, but I was able to write the first 8,000 words of this story in less than a week, because I had a deadline. The going has been much slower since. And of course, it’s about death.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

KS: Ray Bradbury. Peter Beagle. Terry Pratchett. Lord Dunsany. Poe. Roger Zelazny. Harlan Ellison.

A writer’s primary job is to hold the reader’s attention to the end of the story. The best and maybe only true way to do that is to elicit an emotional response, to make the reader feel something along the way that stays long after.

In a written medium, that means that language is everything. How we say something is every bit as important as what we mean to say. Maybe more. The language must be eloquent and graceful while remaining efficient and concise, in order to deliver multiple levels of meaning in as few words as possible. The intellect is the pathway, but the target is the heart.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

KS: The movie “Cloud Atlas.” After maybe a half dozen viewings, I still see something new every time I watch it.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, this interview sprung from some great conversations I’ve had with Lily Kovacs (literary agent over at our prize partner Curtis Brown) about the literary world today, indie publishing, how writers find agents, how agents find writers, the AI problem everywhere, and so much more. I’m excited for you to read it. Lily is a wonderful human and an honest, very un-gatekeep-y literary professional.

Part of our goal with creating and running Strange Pilgrims is to make the literary world feel less like a void and more like a home you can walk into and feel comfortable in, you know, open up the fridge, grab a snack, hang out on the couch, that sort of thing? This interview is one more step in that direction. And on Tuesday, August 25th at 12pm EDT, we’re going to do our first Substack Live with even more in depth conversations about publishing and agents and a lot more. You can make sure you remember to tune in here:

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• considered for general publication

• considered for literary representations

• and of course the winners and finalists will receive lots more cool stuff (besides the cash award).

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Is there a book in recent times you wish you could have agented. If so, why?

LILY KOVACS: YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke. It was actually agented by one of my brilliant colleagues Emma Finn here in the UK, so I got to see some of the behind-the-scenes on that. But I just think it’s a perfect example of a book that is deeply topical, and yet still has that timelessly immersive quality I’m always on the hunt for.

Day in the life of a literary agent:

LK: Usually a precarious balancing act of admin, editorial and entertainment! As agents, we are responsible for negotiating and drafting contracts, handling rights queries, invoicing advances, processing permissions, and being a general point of contact for our clients, so all of that has to be done before we can pursue some of the more creative tasks. Then we are actively reading submissions and anthologies, editing manuscripts, and of course pitching to editors, scouts, producers. Publishing is also a very social industry where relationships are everything, so there’s lots of lunches and drinks to go around too.

What’s the part of this job that writers/people most consistently misunderstand?

LK: I would say probably just how busy we are. Agents — and really anyone who works in publishing — are almost always overworked, and there is never enough time or resources for anything. We read submissions and edit manuscripts mostly in the evenings or on the weekends, because our standard hours are usually filled with meetings and admin. So I would say to writers that it’s unfortunately completely normal not to hear back from an agent for months, as we are probably just waiting until we have the space to give a query the proper consideration it deserves.

People often talk about how they “fell in love” with a book. When/if this happens to you, what precisely goes on?

LK: For me, falling in love with a book usually means falling in love with the characters or the atmosphere. Those are two aspects where, when they work, I’m completely drawn to a book, and when they don’t, then it’s probably not for me. I have a strong imagination, so if a character sticks with me, I often find myself thinking about them and what they might be doing long after I’ve finished the book. As for the atmosphere, a strong sense of place or a distinct “vibe” (not the best word and always hard to explain, but I always think of how putting “Tumblr” after a word during an image search generates such a specific style — it’s that, but in a book) are guaranteed to pull me straight into a world or a mind and keep me there.

How often is a no actually about the writing, versus timing, market, or what’s already on your list?

LK: I would say the writing is always the priority. From my experience, if the writing is really compelling, it can often override anything else. So we as agents do operate writing-first. The market aspect is about pitching the story in a way that the potential positioning is clear to editors and booksellers, but I think that becomes more relevant later on and is ultimately the agent’s job, not the writer’s. Timing is probably the second biggest contributing factor to a rejection. The publishing industry operates on a contradiction. The process itself is very slow, meaning that editors tend to acquire titles 2 or sometimes even 3 years in advance of publication. If a book is too trend-based, it might not resonate quite as much by the time it actually comes out. On the other hand, agents and editors get tired of these trends a lot faster than audiences do, due to the sheer volume of our reading. So an agent might say no to a submission because they have read too much of that particular kind of book, even though there might be appetite for it in the wider market.

Can a story or essay collection get agented and ultimately, sell? What has to be true for this to work?

LK: Yes, but it’s much harder than traditional novels or non-fiction. Because a collection is made up of lots of independent universes or ideas, it’s more difficult to create a pitch for the book as whole. Readers like to be immersed and publishers like a “branded” campaign, both of which are tricky if there is no consistency or returnability across the stories. They are also harder to sell in translation, which is sometimes a factor. In order for it to work, I would say it helps if the writer has a pre-established reputation through other formats or if there is a genre attached, as those can create a unifying element to build pitches and marketing around.

Do agents ever read lit mags to discover talent, or is that a myth writers tell themselves?

LK: Absolutely! I would say many agents actually prefer to discover talent via lit mags or anthologies, because they have already passed an initial stage of curation. It is an unfortunate reality that submission inboxes are just not an ideal medium, as the format for querying through there is always the same, so it can be more difficult to stand out. In contrast, lit mags often have themes, illustrations, author interviews, etc. that allow for a more comprehensive reading experience for agents, thereby making it easier to fall in love with a piece of writing.

Where’s the line between “unclassifiable” as the thing that excites you, and “unclassifiable” as the thing that makes a book impossible to sell?

LK: While I enjoy a certain degree of experimentation, I’m not really someone who is excited by an “unclassifiable” story. I love subversion, challenging the norm and genre-bending, but I need there to be characters, some kind of plot, a clear structure and punctuation (looking at you Cormac McCarthy) in order for me to enjoy the writing. So in a way, I guess that’s the line for me!

What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever taken on?

LK: A book called IN TRANSIT by Brigid Brophy! Hers is one of our literary estates, so it was more of a rediscovery rather than a “taking on”. It’s a book that kind of defies explanation, but it very loosely regales the story of a gender revolution at an airport. First published in 1969, it was way ahead of its time!

You read an enormous number of openings (lines/paragraphs/pages). What do you know or rather, what do you want to know, by the end of the first paragraph/page?

LK: Most agents request the first three chapters or first 10,000 words of a manuscript, but on average read only one or two pages before they know whether they are going to ask for more material or not. For me, I would say I want to know by that point who is telling us the story and what the central engine is. Every book needs a catalyst pushing the characters to action, and if this is not identified early on, then I find it hard to connect with the story.

What makes you stop reading?

LK: Some of my “red flags” are too many characters introduced in a short amount of time without proper development, over-describing the setting rather than actions or characters’ thoughts and multiple POVs that are not distinct enough. Another one that is probably just subjective to me is short chapters. I find that they rarely work, unless it’s a very specific stylistic choice. I think they propel the story forward at the expense of depth.

“Voice” is the word everyone uses and nobody defines. Can you define it in terms of how you see it?

LK: An excellent question! I’m just in the middle of reading THE VIVISECTORS by Missouri Williams (I’m desperately trying to make my way through the Booker longlist before the winner is announced) and I think it’s the perfect example of a book with a really strong voice. Other recent ones that come to mind are THE PRETENDER by Jo Harkin and PALAVER by Bryan Washington. It’s definitely a hard thing to define. I would say if you take away all of the individual characterisation and plot points, the writing that remains is the voice. It’s the vantage point from which the author chooses to approach the narration or the gateway into the story. If it has a distinct quality to it, say an apathy or a propensity for a certain kind of observation, then that is a voice that sticks with me.

What should a writer ask an agent before signing — and what’s a red flag on the agent’s side that writers don’t know to look for?

LK: What their editorial and larger creative vision is. Writing a book is obviously a very personal experience for a writer, and reading it is for agents as well, but there is also a commercial product at the end of it. I firmly believe that every book needs editing. Not necessarily because parts of it are bad, but because as a writer you have access to insight about the book that readers don’t have, so there are always elements that need clarifying or refining that you just won’t pick up on. Oftentimes, however, writers can (understandably) be very protective of their writing and end up having friction with their agent down the line when their editorial notes are not well-received, even if they are in the writer’s best interest. So I think it’s important to establish early on what you want that relationship to look like. A red flag on the agent’s side is probably overpromising. Debuts especially are increasingly hard to sell and so every agent should be managing expectations in order to establish trust with their client. If an agent swears they are going to get a six-figure deal and a film adaptation for your first book, they don’t know what they are talking about!

Are you seeing loads more AI submissions these days? Is it easy to tell right off the bat or do you find yourself on the fence? How much does it matter to you personally?

LK: Yes, piles and piles of them. Thankfully, it’s usually very easy to tell, because the submissions will include lots of repetitions, unnatural-sounding writing and AI-generated images. What is harder to tell is whether AI had been used in the writing process as a whole, not necessarily in the final submission. Ideas, plot lines or even certain phrasings could have been generated via AI, but then incorporated into an otherwise human-written manuscript. I definitely do not think it’s my place to push my opinion on anyone else, but I am a purist when it comes to AI usage in that I am absolutely against it in any shape or form. Detrimental effects on our individual creativity and independent thinking aside, its widespread environmental consequences are just not something I can in good conscience justify.

What are you hoping to find in the shortlisted writers you’ll be reading for the Strange Pilgrims Prize?

LK: Lots of strange, vulnerable, weird, honest writing! I want to see the world reflected kaleidoscopically through a thousand eyes and bask in the individual light of each one. I have so many thoughts about everything that is going on right now, and I can’t wait to hear what the brilliant writers on the shortlist have to say.

What advice do you give over and over that you feel not enough writers take to heart?

LK: Learn from your peers. Read all the books you can, and really think about what you like and don’t like about each one. Your writing comes from a deeply personal place, but technique and execution take time to refine. You are too intertwined with your own work to always be able to see it objectively, so look to what others have done.

What are you reading right now purely for pleasure?

LK: Some of the original CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books from the 80s! Tremendous fun.

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LILY KOVACS works across Heritage and the SFF Department at Curtis Brown. In her own words:

In terms of fiction, my favourite kind of stories blend narratives around suspense, mystery and psychological drama, and I especially love when this involves post-apocalyptic or survival plot lines. I’m also a big fan of a Gothic atmosphere, multigenerational sagas or morally ambiguous characters, as well as exploration of the queer experience. In non-fiction, I enjoy the riveting investigative journalism of (Empire of Pain), and raw vulnerability (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?).

Across the wider SFF genre, I’m drawn to character-driven adventures, intricate and memorable world building, well-developed side characters, lots of banter, and slow reveals backed by subtle foreshadowing. Think Game of Thrones or Throne of Glass. I lean more towards fantasy than sci-fi, preferring varied and distinctive magic systems à la The Atlas Six, and am particularly on the lookout for a unique, non-elemental concept. I would love to find a speculative dark academia (Babel), an adult urban fantasy with a variety of magical creatures (The Shadowhunter Chronicles) and a magical realism-infused historical fiction (The Water Dancer).

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I’m excited to share that we’re going to do our first Substack live next week on Tuesday, August 25th at 12 PM ET. Shannan will be speaking to literary agent who helped set up our partnership with one of the best literary agencies in the world, Curtis Brown!!

It’s totally free to attend live and we’ll be discussing what literary agents are looking for, the publishing world today as it relates to and affects folks trying to enter that space professionally, as well as how literary magazines like ours fit into this space. And a lot more, I imagine!

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If you’d like to be reminded about the event, then please add it to your calendar. This will be free for all our subscribers to tune into live, but the recording will be paywalled and shared with paid subscribers later in the week.

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The summer of 2023 when smoke from the wildfires started blowing into the big cities down South is when I found out that woodsmoke is bad for you. Every year the northern Boreal lights on fire. It’s part of the regenerative cycle of the forest, and absolutely natural.

When I was growing up we had two woodstoves in the cabin, one for cooking that dated from around 1900, and for heat a pot-bellied stove that went back to the 1950s. In the summers we’d barbecue outside on a wood fire set in a sectioned forty-five-gallon drum left over from some mining operation. We thought woodsmoke was good for you, because it’s natural.

We thought the lead in the water was natural because lead is on the periodic table of the elements. Asbestos is natural, and radon. A little bit just toughens you up. At school they took away our white glue because it was unnatural, although I’d heard that glue is made from horses, but sniffing it was unnatural. Of course every kid that learned about the glue sniffing epidemic tried sniffing glue first chance they got, so that seems pretty natural as a behaviour. We were given mucilage for all our adhesive requirements, The rubber nipple was suggestive, and our paper cutouts, too thickly slimed, curled upwards away from the cardstock underlay. Exceptionally good work got a gold star or a Scratch-and-Sniff from the teacher. There was a grape Scratch-and-Sniff with a purple grape cluster pictured in its white circular frame, and a gasoline-flavoured Scratch-and-Sniff showing a gas pump with the nozzle lifted out of the cradle. Gasoline is made from dinosaurs and ferns, but not flowering plants or mammals because those are too new. Some of us had mammals confused with vertebrates and lizards confused with snakes. We made dioramas to illustrate the Cretaceous period, but they fell apart on account of the inadequacies of mucilage. It was the 1980s. We were warned about eating baloney because of the nitrates. We spelled it “baloney” which is the natural way, and not “bologna” which is weird.

We played in the woods after class and ate blueberries we found growing at the old minesite, which were way better than the ones from the store. “More concentrated,” we repeated, “and no pesticides.” We ate grayling from the lake by the quarry. We learned what to do if anyone swallowed a fishbone, or fell out of the canoe, or went swimming within thirty minutes of eating and got a cramp. We had excellent physical fitness. We rode our bicycles home along the shoulder of the highway, swerving in the gusts from the passing ore trucks. “Those kids sure are healthy,” said the teachers and parents and ore truck drivers. We got multiple sclerosis and colitis and head-and-neck cancers. We got tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. Whenever we went into remission we’d get right back out there, skiing, hiking up mountains, backcountry camping, living off the land. “Sure tastes better than store bought,” we said, and, gnawing dandelion roots with dirt still on, “a bit of minerals in your diet is good for you. It’s natural.”

Any big birthday was marked with a bonfire, and any memorial service just the same. Woodsmoke is good for you, its fragrance, its resin, its very nature.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

DAWN MACDONALD: I started young but took my sweet time. The librarian at my elementary school very kindly photocopied some stories I had written (and illustrated), bound them in cerlox, and placed them on the shelves. However, I did not start to publish seriously until my forties. There was a long diversion in which I was “living life” and getting heavily conscripted into providing administrative support to other people’s artistic and entrepreneurial endeavours, mainly my boyfriends, so I have a cautionary tale in that regard. Your own art matters! Don’t forget to do your own stuff!

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

DM: Yeah, there is no routine. I carry a paper notebook and pen with me at all times, to catch stuff on the wing. I’m mostly a poet, so it’s sometimes possible to catch the whole thing in one go (with minimal subsequent revisions). My attention span is really short, but also really sticky -- like I will keep returning to the same thought in 15-minute increments until it’s eventually gotten somewhere -- and short forms work well for that style. As a mostly-poet, it’s often turns of phrase that kick something off for me. But there are persistent themes that come back in new guises, which leads to the next question below...

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

DM: Insider-outsider stuff: who gets to tell a story? Who gets to say how a story should be told? I really did not want to write about the Yukon, where I am from. I was bored by all that “northerny” stuff. Then I titled my first book “Northerny.” I was bored by the usual portrayals of the North because they were not for me; they’ve tended to highlight those aspects of the North that strike the attention of someone coming up from southern Canada or the US. These aspects (sled dogs, northern lights, minus forty) are not remarkable to me. I’ve wound up writing a lot about that stance. Whose experience of the North is reflected in culture? I’m in an awkward set of positions myself, as a White settler descendent whose family arrived in the last generation, and we’ve still not heard enough of the other stories of the North, the stories of Indigenous citizens of modern self-governing First Nations, of International students and temporary foreign workers who’ve come here for reasons unrelated to old myths of the Klondike. Do those stories have to position themselves in relation to the established ways of telling, or can they be understood on their own grounds?

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

DM: There have been lengthy periods where I was not a writer, but I always had creative pursuits. For a while I think I tried to express my creativity through expansive forms of living, and went a little hard. A creative practice can channel that perhaps more safely.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

DM: Whatever is the thing you do in your writing that people keep telling you they hate, you should do that more, because it’s your one chance of originality. But as an additional piece of advice, I would say that you should quit drinking (if you ever started and haven’t already stopped). Either you don’t need to be drinking, in which case you might as well quit, or you do need to be drinking, in which case you really ought to quit. In any case, it isn’t helping your writing.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

DM: I don’t know if I see myself as working on things. I’m tinkering and jotting and seeing what comes of that. Lately I’ve been messing with forms that mix my words with found text. I’ve done a set of “fake translations” and a few centos and a series of 14-line poems in which the first word of each line comes from the title of a scientific article in the journal “Nature.” These pieces have tended to veer back around toward themes of organic life, and the messiness of the body. I’m edging my way around how to talk about things I can’t say directly: secrets, undefined qualities, places where my story impinges on others’ stories that I don’t have the right to simply tell. This is an acutely uncomfortable space to be in, so you could say it’s ruining my life in that way, but I’d say it’s more--how to speak from the position of a ruined life?

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

DM: My husband has pointed out that I’m a bit of a “bro” in my reading habits. I have a vast affection for a panoply of real “bro” writers: Charles Bukowski, Charles Portis, Ernest Hemingway in my youth, even the currently-unfashionable David Foster Wallace. I’m coming from a place that values macho presentation across genders, but also I’m obsessed by the ways in which people express themselves when their manner of expression is constrained. The cultural scripts of masculinity are one such form of constraint. Then for me, as being a woman with a heavy admixture of supposedly masculine qualities, what would be my “natural” form of expression, and what would be sayable or unsayable within that?

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

DM: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” is an experience I recommend having exactly once. I’ll probably never watch it again, but I’ll never stop thinking about the one time that I did. It’s boring in a way that makes you question what boredom is, how repetition structures a life, and what happens if that is punctured. I was somehow riveted the entire three hours and twenty minutes, shot mostly with fixed cameras in a handful of positions, often showing the character from the back while she does household chores. I don’t know how to explain this. When I’ve tried to explain it to someone else the usual response is “that sounds terrible” but it is a feminist classic, and entirely worth your time.

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Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap

Concise, idiosyncratic reviews of books I got for free or cheap, with an emphasis on Canadian poetry.

By Dawn Macdonald

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, you’ll notice below that today we haven’t paired an older painting with the piece but rather have some glorious new original artwork by our in-house artist and very good friend ! If you’ve visited our website/Substack, you’ll know how much we value beautiful, unique, cohesive design. Art and design was on the top of our minds when we started our poetry magazine back in 2023, and it was also the first thing we thought about trying to figure out when we started getting the seeds for Strange Pilgrims almost a year ago (holy shit).

I’m so happy that we have Mariam’s mind and talent and heart. We are now going to try and have original artwork for every long-form piece to start. I’d like to extend this for every flash (fiction and cnf both) published work as well as our monthly micro writing challenge winners.

Of course, since human creativity takes time and thought and isn’t just a click into the abyss (ahem, y’all know what I’m talking about, right), there’s greater cost involved. But this is money the way it should be spent — on art and artists and life-giving creativity and community. I’m so damn grateful to our paid subscribers for helping us keep indie lit alive & human & full of art & literature as ever. I’m also equally grateful to every single person who reads our newsletters, reads what we publish, replies to our work, shares a story with a friend, thinks about our raven at night while drifting off to sleep…

If you’ve been on the fence about a paid subscription till now, I’d be all the more grateful if you decided to upgrade today. Your paid subscriptions will directly help us pay for gorgeous, original art for Strange Pilgrims. Thank you, dear ones.

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“Vermin’s very closeness—biting us, inhabiting us, eluding our control—makes them the animals holding up the sharpest mirror to ourselves and the universe we share with them—whether we want to or not.”

—Getting Under Our Skin, Lisa T. Sarasohn.

Sometimes, I sit in my room and I want to die, and I want so badly for someone to knock, and I want so badly that no one knocks. Because a knock could be anything. What defines the invasiveness of a knock is the nature of my relationship with the one who is knocking. The security-man, a man who always tries to act more familiar than he is, is received, my body wedged between the small opening. Followed by: Is everything okay? You knocked on my door. No, I still haven’t bought a new bag of water. I am sorry. No, I do not have garri or food to give. Look, I am a broke student. I haven’t even eaten all day.

The boy is received with the door wide open. A smile. Q, a question on whether a text was sent prior to the visit.

My room’s door does not fit or close. In the bathroom, there are two holes for ventilation—entry points for vermin and blood-thirsty mosquitoes and the Daddy Longlegs and tiny scorpions. The rats, however, avoid the rooms. They skid over the stairwell onto the tiled floor and rummage through the bins in the kitchen for food. Once, the caretakers came over and pretended to care. They started at the door as though they were seeing it for the first time.

“We’ll do something about it,” they said. Nothing was done.

Apart from the other vermin, perhaps the most personable and daring ones are the cockroaches. The American Cockroach (Periplaneta americana). They got to their current state millions of years ago, a JSTOR article reads. They are much older than us and will probably outlive us, too. What this paper did was invoke an image of apocalyptic ruin, and the cockroaches, unscratched, scrambling around. What its soft body withstands is equally commendable, but this is not a panegyric for the vermin, but a panegyric for the misfits and the not-quites.

My friend says cockroaches are part of the ecosystem of universities. In the shared kitchen, they drown in soup, and die on clean dishes. Once, I got a bottle of insect powder and poured it all over the surface of my cabinets. A few of them died—brown-bodied, belly-up, floating on their own body juice. Compared to the kitchen, my room is a metropolis.

“The room appears to be birthing these things,” I tell my old roommate.

“I can swear on it,” she says in response. “They come out in their numbers after I spray the room with insecticide. Where do they even come from?”

“And I saw a scorpion,” I say.

“No way! The mother must be lurking somewhere.”

I was on my bed for the most of the day, terrified, and mistaking every black item for an angry scorpion mother. When I needed to come down to relieve myself, I wore my ugly bathroom flipflops, and curled back into bed.

While scouring the cyber-libraries, I found out more about the older occupants of my room. Their democracy. Their personalities: shy cockroaches, extroverted ones, and the mad, flying militant ones. Another article mentions that they can be trained. Before my research, as a bee propagandist, I daydreamed about the queen, the mother of the cockroaches, secreting cockroach milk, feeding the nymphs, surrounded by ootheca.

I became more interested in Entomology about a month ago. I had found a dead moth on the floor in my faculty. I tried holding it to my pinafore, as a brooch. But it was dead and I could not pin it to my dress. When I picked up the corpse, the brown, earthy scales peeled off on my fingers. After failing to secure the dead moth on my pinafore as a brooch a few times, I let the corpse fall my fingers down the height of my faculty building.

I did not have what was needed for insect taxidermy, but I started learning anyway. The first victim was a moth I found on the porch of my dormitory, beating its soft wings against the light bulb. It died the next day, on its back, the soft orange underbelly reminding me of my failure. I had wanted to keep it alive before deciding what to do with it. My friend, during one of his visits, spotted the corpse on my tiled floor, and attempted to remove it. It is there for a reason, I told him. Please, leave it. Amused, he asked if I’ll ever find a husband.

It took more than six thousand five hundred and thirty four more days to become an adult human. In a few more months, I will be twenty-one and old enough to get alcohol anywhere. While the American cockroach has been observed to enjoy alcohol and beers, I do not quite like the taste of it. I have no wings. I have two legs. Two eyes. No antennae. My only physical human advantage is my ability to lay on my back without dying. But what this advanced adulthood means for the cockroach is that it can survive quite early on its own. Even in places that it does not belong in. I do not know if I belong here or if I am well-equipped for this adult thing. The word “nymph,” for example, is used to describe both insects and humans. One thing, we regard with disgust, the other, with wonder—a young attractive, “wingless” girl, a myth, a young, wingless cockroach.

A nymph and a nymph in a room, both, molting.

As a young child, I thought my parents were lying to me about having to grow up, so I cried, alone in a dark home in my grandfather’s house, bemoaning their betrayal. Many years have passed since then, and I still haven’t gotten the hang of it. I know now that they were not born grown, but the betrayal is there—a small, pulsing thing. A silent why.

I am no nymph (not to be confused with a young female), but if I were one, I’d be an adult in thirty-six days. In a little over a month, I would be well rid of my parents. Not needing them to fend for me or teach me how to use a gestid for your stomach ulcer, go to the school clinic, give the phone to your gateman, your curfew is 9pm, I know I work here as security, but I see you as my daughter, please, be careful and use protection, tell your boy to buy me something when he comes over.

I was 19 in my first year. Old enough, but sheltered throughout my life. We did not go anywhere other than my mother’s church and the market. Once, my father came to my secondary school to pick me up after tutorials because he was worried I would have to make my way back home by myself instead of on the school bus. I was fifteen. I waited for him, shaking in anxiety, misremembering his phone number when I was asked even though I had learned it since I was five.

When I resumed in Ife, my mother travelled with me, my bags pressed between her feet in the vehicle, haggling, buying roadside snacks and beverages, asking if I wanted àkàrà and bread. She left Ife a few days later.

Months after resumption, I was still trying to settle in. My terrible sense of direction did not help. I would walk around, looking for a familiar building. The first thing I do whenever I go somewhere new is this: look for what stands out. I miss my way even in places I have been to a dozen times. This period of settling in is similar to attempting to walk as a newborn. I knew nobody. I didn’t want to know anybody. I sat at the back in classes, trying to be as invisible as possible. For an application for chambers’ membership, I had written in the gap “a feeling of belonging.”

But there was no “belonging” within the walls of LLT2, in our white and black uniforms, or in the meetings where students played pretend professionalism. What happened was a kind of drowning. I felt then, as one born premature into a throng of people, without a mother, expected to avoid being trodden upon instinctively. Still covered in her blood, still dangling from her pelvis, still feasting on her. A parasite. A premature adult.

I called her to hear her ask me how I was. My mother rarely picks up her phone except when she calls first. Because then you knew it was urgent. Because what else could be urgent about a student’s phone call but money and tuition and textbooks? The line would drop dead before I could tell her how I was really doing. How the semesters piled over my drowning, how the classrooms morphed into dance floors, and how the floor was unstable. I forgot everything that led me to Ife, except the thread dangling from my navel, stretching all the way to my house in Ondo. On days like this, I reach out to my room, arms stretched, examining the length of my body with renewed interest. It was in this room that I saw a scorpion for the first time.

At what point does entomology bleed into anthropology? Infestation? Where does the room fit in in all of this? Marc Auge in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity describes a nonplace as spaces of transience where human beings remain anonymous and are mere users. These include airports, malls, banks and the like. I think of this theory and its effect on supermodernity, but as an extension to the almost cosmic homelessness I feel in my body and my presence in my dorm room. The anonymity Auge assigns to these spaces is akin to that of a student in a dormitory. It extends the theory even further into the personal. The space, although private, is still transient. A non-room. In response to Virginia Woolf’s prescription, how does one own a non-place or a non-room?

I have two years left until graduation. This room is both mine and was never mine to begin with. These dirty yellow walls have seen more pain and known more love stories than I have.

When someone knocks on my door, my initial panic is akin to that of a homeless person who has been caught trespassing. A squatter. I do not know if this homelessness is universal, or if it can be attributed to supermodernity, but I do not know of a better way to explain this feeling, of sitting in a corner of one’s room, afraid that someone would knock than the theory of the nonplace. I feel disoriented, like an isopod scurrying for cover after its home has been kicked away by unsuspecting kids.

The room, I once told my partner, is where one is divested of the need to be. This is an extension of the anonymity of the non-room. One is divested of the need to perform. To be feminine. To be masculine. However there are times I find myself trying to be, strutting in front of a mirror, puckering my lips, and measuring the slimness of my waist, the privacy allows me the opposite sometimes. I sit down on my half-made bed, in old clothes, hair shrunken, and compressed into a thick black cloud.

The room watches the processes: the molting and the transformation. I play songs in my room, phone speakers pressed against the hollow of its echoing corners, scaring the boys and the nymphs away. I blast Afropop and Soul and Blues and Sade and the Narcissistic Cookbook and Eartha Kitt and Pomme and Obongjayar and Asa and Burna Boy until the room develops a pulse. I do not think I have gotten used to owning my own room. Virgina Woolf prescribes this to the female writer: a room of one’s own. I have failed the first step of Woolf’s prescription.

1. I feel no attachment to my place. The caretakers have spare keys, as though to remind us that we do not really own our rooms. They enter our room in our absence, to turn off faucets we left running or to check for contrabands (electric cookers and hot plates). The last time I left the faucet open because we had not had light in days and there was no water, the faucet was turned off by the time I came back. I had left the room untidy.

2. In my dormitory, no boys are allowed to sleep over and the gate closes by ten. This happened once (a boy slept over), and I was asked to sign the agreement form all over again. Also, I always end up on the other side of the locked gate despite the warnings.

3. The kitchen is shared. Here, my depression and rock-bottom is public; dirty plates on shared sinks, soaked pots with burnt instant noodles, and empty takeout boxes.

“Hello, ma/sir. It’s me, Sunmi.”

“Why are you so late? The gate closes by ten. This is thirty minutes after 11.”

“I am so sorry. Goodnight, ma/sir.
I share a room with my sisters at home, so this luxury of owning my own room is unfamiliar. Our beds are placed side by side, with our luggage crammed in the small space left between a couch and a bookshelf filled with old books. I craved my own space, but the house has only two bedrooms. At first, my parents were certain I was going to live in one of the school’s halls of residence because they didn’t think I could live alone. My mother was scared I would burn myself in a house fire, cause a house fire, and be unreachable by phone. They ended up forgetting about it, and the registration closed. I have met people who were shocked that I had never lived on campus. You’ve really never lived on campus? Not even your first year? Big girl!

My room is infested. This is to the end that the room is the extension of my body. The cockroaches, like the boys, when they overflow their nests, might be driven to explore the openings of my body. I lay awake, thinking of this, spraying insecticide they have grown resistant to, watching the slight freeze before the scurry as the light comes on. I like to watch them on their backs, stabbing at the air, helpless.

What is more complicit in this madness is the room herself. She watches, with the stern muteness of a mother warning her ward in public. Vermin crawl into her walls, and I recline against her, hitting away at my faulty phone, crushing the soft-bodied insects against the ugly, yellow walls, leaving the white blood, brown stain and the odor of death.

I have assigned my room the position of the deus absconditus to symbolize the material absence. I have assigned both godhood and motherhood to an unfeeling thing. The placenta is left unsevered, and I stare at the room with new eyes. Infantile, genderless, small, curled up in a fetal position. I am a daughter behind the half-closed door, calling my mother who rarely answers. The room contracts and I see myself in Ondo, trudging after my mother, in quick, short steps, unable to hold her hands. I am now too old to hold my mother’s hand. I was never young enough to hold her hand.

I am relearning how to be born in this non-place. How to be an adult. To strut, to become a nymph, to love and be loved, to become, and to become. The placenta stretches out from my body, bloody, twisted, through my pierced navel, through the solid-emptiness of the air, to the light fixture, bright, dangling—a slice of the moon, bulbous navel. One must not forget how in The Metamorphosis, the transformation took place in the room. This extension of the body that one must molt in a cybernetic, post-human birth, must happen somewhere, so it takes place in a room because it is as private as the coffin. But what happens in a non-place? What birth happens within unfamiliar walls? What displacement? The uterine walls do not contract, and the fetus, unmoored, bumps against them, and floats in the womb. There is nothing to herald here. The fetus died before it learned to live.

The room contracts, a boy knocks, and my body is forced out, as though through the room’s uterus to the boy.

The boy comes in, a wide smile, through a widely open door, and I wrap my hands, two feelers—the antennae, around his waist. A nymph crawls out from a crack in the wall. She stays in a spot for a while, beside the boy’s slides, antennae, twisting, as though surveying the room. When the boy lifts his legs, she scurries back into the safety of her home.

“It’s fine. I have cockroaches in my room, too,” he says, laughing.

“It probably came out to say hi,” I say.

“Well, hi then,” he says to the walls.

Beside him, a nymph molts quietly on the floral sheets, soft-bodied, alone in her metamorphosis.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

SUNMISOLA ODUSOLA: I started writing at the age of seven. I had read a work by a nine-year-old, and I believed I could do a lot better. My first story was my own of version of their story. I remember handing it over to my siblings and my father to help me proofread and publish it. My father left it on the dashboard for days. That was the last time I saw my first manuscript.

About using writing as an exploration of questions, I began writing because I was an obnoxious little thing. Of course, the exploration of question came later. I wrote about everything from death to religion because no one could answer the questions I had in a way that erased them. As a child, I was always by myself, thinking up stories, and reading whatever I could find. I had a hard time fitting in as a child, so in a way, I built the world I could steal into.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

SO: Wildness!

I thrive in wildness. Sometimes, I wake up with a string of words in my head. Other times, I find a word or a statement interesting, and the story begins from there.

The voices announce themselves. I have been told my characters talk a lot, but it is hardly my fault that they would not stop talking.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

SO: I find myself returning to the self and embodiment. I have tried to work on something different, but maybe it is insisting because I have not really exhausted the relevance of it. It is hard to ignore the body and the self. They sit there, at the centre of human existence. To ignore them would amount to a level of falsehood.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

SO: Probably a painter? Some of my works have been influenced by art and artworks.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

SO: The best piece of advice I have ever received is to edit my works like a crazy person. As a writer, it is easy to be convinced that every line you write is the gospel, but some lines, even when they appear to be relevant may not be that relevant. My advice to emerging writing trying to make a mark is to:

1. Read like crazy.

2. Edit like crazy.

3. Sit with your works. Don’t rush to publish them. Sitting with them for a couple of hours might go a long way in helping you finetune your writing.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

SO: Right now, I am working on a non-fiction piece about my family’s old house. I have been working on it for years now, but it has never felt finished. Is it trying to ruin my life? Not necessarily. But it is driving me crazy.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

SO: Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the filmmakers that has shaped my sense of narrative. I have always been obsessed with non-linearity and fluidity, so when I came acros his film, Mirror, I fell in love. I enjoy reading Clarice Lispector, too. And Anaïs Nin for the poeticism and the language (again, for the poeticism and the language). I also love reading Milan Kundera!

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

SO: Everyone should see Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

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The Obsidian

Mad ramblings.

Thank you for spending time with Strange Pilgrims.

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I hope you’re having a calming week and there is both the warmth of Summer and its stillness too. Do take some time out in your evenings or mornings to read this week’s piece (and/or listen to Amanda’s wonderful recording of it). I’m sure it’ll transport you across worlds like it did us but also shake you up in the soul (we can all use that here and again).

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As the cicadas moved north, so too did humanity. Every channel in every country played the same images on a loop, the same thirty seconds of footage caught by a drone humming iridescently over the destruction. The road clogged with cars, the vast roiled sea formerly known as the South’s most populous city, the roof eaves poking out of the murk like tentative frogs. And not one county over that swatch of cracked earth, colorless and sighing, trees sapped. It was an incongruous patchwork. It was a time thick with mosquitoes and dread. A state of emergency had been declared, but who was left to heed the warnings? Everyone agreed, flood or drought, the South was uninhabitably hot. Migration was all the rage. Surely the seasons had lost their train of thought.

The North didn’t know what to think about this sudden influx. They were used to living in close quarters, huddled for warmth in palimpsest cities that creaked with history. But this was a bridge too far. Some said let the newcomers try our winter on for size. And laughed. Others remembered the terrible years, they shuddered to name them, the crisis was too newly buried. But the mere mention was wreathed in bitterness. The aura of irony shimmered. Hadn’t the South sent the North its migrants, poor souls fleeing their own varieties of calamity even farther south? Hadn’t the South then invaded the North under the guise of border protection, terrorizing everyone regardless of status? Never mind, never mind. Let the textbooks make of those years what they will.

Now, though, it was summer and the cicadas were making a racket. The Mogul wouldn’t stand for being upstaged by an insect. It was horrible. No one had ever been treated so unfairly. The Mogul pitched his voice to carry above the clamor. It was horrible, all these big beautiful cities overrun with migrants, who were really good people, really fine people, but these cities, all that crime, the homelessness and overcrowding, they’d become shitholes, they had no stores, you couldn’t even go out to eat at the restaurants, he proclaimed he would build a building, a big beautiful building, he was a builder, he built things, tremendous things, people were always coming up to him, tears in their eyes, they said no one built buildings as big and beautiful as he did, he said with that voice like a street at winter’s end, all salt-encrusted and pitted with potholes, that he alone could fix the mess these cities of the North were in, he would build a building bigger and more beautiful than any other building in the world, the tallest, it would house the entire population of migrants from the South, they were such fine people, they deserved the best, they didn’t want to live in these run-down remnants of the past, let the Northerners have their rowhouses and old gnarled trees and crumbling brick streets, his building would be tall and beautiful and it would be made of smooth marble and gleam gold, bring back the sun these poor souls had left behind in the South, because they were, in fact, really fine people, it would be the tallest and most beautiful building in the world, he vowed. Somewhere in the distance a cicada screamed.

For a year, the crane became a fixture of the skyline. Its etched silhouette had a vague, unreachable appearance, especially at sunset. A steel volcano crooked over the city and presiding. The construction crews worked day and night. They wielded tools that spit comet tails. Soldering day and night together they made a racket that rivaled the cicadas’ urgent whine. The protesters gathered around the base of the crane wielded cardboard signs and thumped on drums. In contrast with the crane, they had a fluid presence but abiding as a river. Various members of the throng came and went chanting down-with-tyranny, the-water-is-rising-and-so-are-we, tax-the-rich, and other indecipherable demands. Still, the tower kept growing, spiraling toward the unreachable crane. The sidewalk thickened with skirmishes: Between the protesters and police. Between the protesters and counter-protesters. Between the counter-protesters and police. And then, eventually, between the police and disinterested bystanders just waiting for the bus. There was a persistent cloud of tear gas. Reporters ignored the skirmishes and announced the tower’s current height nightly on the news, but every channel reported a different figure. No one noticed the precise day language was lost. Or if they did, they didn’t have the words to record the event. It was a strange and unprecedented Tower of Babel. A confusion born not of languages multiplying but of one language bled dry. Words weaponized until exhausted of all meaning. Without a common understanding, truth took on the jaundiced cast of tear gas. Reality felt nebulous and burned the eyes.

The Mayor thought that what her city desperately needed was empathy. But she lacked the higher authority of dictionaries and wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Empathy, she decided, had gone the way of the rotary telephone. The now-completed tower had hallowed out. People who’d flocked to it and plunked down sky-high down payments wanted nothing to do with the place. Wars raged in every corner of its marble-clad halls. This is how one of these skirmishes might start: At 3:45 in the morning, one resident would bang on his neighbor’s door. Keep it down, I’m trying to sleep. The neighbor, let’s call her Neighbor B, would blink her eyes uncomprehendingly. I’m just living my life, you’re the one who’s banging on the door, what about your TV blasting at all hours of the day, I can’t hear myself think, haven’t slept a wink since you moved in, and she’d slam the door in his face. Slam drawers and doors, just to make her point. Neighbor A would respond in kind, until eventually, an arms race of noise erupted. No pair of apartments was spared. The Mayor, who lived on the tenth floor, couldn’t get the word empathy out of her head. She thought that empathy could save them all, if only they hadn’t lost the meaning humming inside words that made the empathy possible.

Now, though, it was summer and the cicadas were making a racket. The Translator was attuned to their rhythms, both the frayed throb of their so-called song (it was, after all, just that one gnawing note) and their annual cycle of emergence and death. And she orchestrated her life accordingly. Each year, the avant-garde cicada would rustle out of its subterranean darkness to test the waters. To the Translator, that first corrosive wail always sounded like a question mark: anybody there? But it was her cue to scurry underground. She’d made her peace with the centripetal force the seasons exerted on her body. She saw poetry in it. How the wheel of the seasons mirrored her brain’s currents, whirlpools really, which the doctors had pronounced…diseased? defective? disabled? The words gnawed like the cicada’s song. She imagined fractals, submerged and flaring iridescently. All she knew was that certain sounds took a roundabout route through her neural pathways, looping instead of subsiding. The so-called song, for example. She heard it throbbing in her ears during the still of day, would lose her own whereabouts for a time. The Translator adapted by migrating down into her basement where she couldn’t hear much of anything. Like some antipodean cicada, if such a thing existed.

At first, this forced migration made her lonely, every time the Translator told someone I can’t, I have to disappear for the summer, she felt the fist of isolation closing. Until she tried saying it like this: It’s summer, and I’m going underground. And then she felt revolutionary. The Translator was attuned to words, to their rhythms and stories and textures, she thought words and cicadas were at once heavy and insignificant, awesome and terrifying, she liked the way you could string words together, make them sing sigh grate rustle gnaw wail burble plop explode. The word revolutionary, for example. The lilt of its vaulting vowels, its submerged history. Originally referring to the orbital movements of the heavens, but the word, a stone in rushing water, had been worn by the centuries and polished smooth. The Translator preferred this original meaning, she saw poetry in it, perhaps she’d even been forged in its likeness, her brain full of repetitions and seasons and celestial bodies orbiting, and she spoke the syllables as though in possession of a secret. But in a leap of association, she said it’s summer, and I’m going underground, and in the political sense this, too, was revolutionary. Like the Dostoevsky story. If all around her was noise, of towers spiraling skyward, of tools spitting comet tails, of neighbors on marble-clad floors above the clouds slamming doors, then going underground was a subversive act.

Above-ground the so-called song billowed, becoming hard and knotted as a tree trunk. The Mayor still couldn’t get the word empathy out of her head. It, and not the cicadas, kept her up at night. The tower had toppled into all-out war, its battles had spilled into the streets. On the sidewalks battle lines bled together, protesters counter-protesters police residents bystanders coalesced into one incomprehensible cacophony. Slowly the waters parted, North versus South. A fierce clamoring for resources which the newspapers might have called a housing crisis, if they weren’t all defunct. At midnight, as the roar down below crested, the Mayor got out of bed, opened her computer and, in the flash of aurora borealis across her face, typed empathy into the search engine. Her finger hovered over the Enter key, her eyes perched on the Translate function. A translator, of course, now that was what her city desperately needed. Someone to translate the word empathy. To unearth meaning, that yearning between battle lines. Someone to carry across.

The Translator received the Mayor’s email on one of her difficult days. She mustered a brief but earnest reply: Come. You are welcome down here. On the agreed-upon day, the Mayor stood on the Translator’s doorstep, a little bungalow veiled with shade trees. The door was opened to silence, the Translator gesturing and a staircase stretching down. Only when the two had reached the basement did the Translator urge the Mayor on with her eyes, kind eyes disinclined to make excuses or offer explanations but grateful for the visit. The Mayor launched into the events that had brought her here, and as she spoke she felt a burden uncoiling. She finished in a rush, exhaling a question she hadn’t thought to ask before she’d come: Will you, can you, restore the language we’ve lost? The Translator’s head dipped thoughtfully, her hands cupped in her lap. Instead of answering the question she looked up and spoke of her disability, her voice took its time, like a fresh breeze blowing, grave but vulnerable, accepting. She said: I cannot but hear. She said hearing, for me, is painful and also beautiful. She said language is like that. She said to restore language, you must create a new language, a language that returns to sound, circling back, like the seasons, like the cicadas, circling in order to be reborn. She said words are bodies, you have to listen to every creak and shudder, listen with your ears and then with your body, listen to the repetitions. You will discern patterns there.

When the Mayor emerged, she discovered she heard more acutely. Standing on the Translator’s doorstep, her chest rising and falling in the key of C Major. Sheer, hushed, breath rushing in, out. Gusts of blush-colored wind rushing in, out, and brushing the hairs on her arm. And the cicadas droning wha-wha-what did the Translator mean, she wondered iridescently. Standing on the Translator’s doorstep, bereft and beginning again, wha-wha-what does it all mean? She didn’t know, was beginning to know. Crunch, took one step forward. Crunch, then another. Crunch, her soles sliding on gravel. The strap of her bag dug into her knotted shoulder. Just then the bus sailed up on a puff and a gust, smudgy gray urgency. She felt that too, the diesel scream, key of C Minor? She heard the rattle of diesel and metal in her chest, in the knots in her neck. Taut thud of thunder, doors urgently opened. Wha-wha-was beginning to understand. Laughing, whose laughter, hers or the passengers’ spilling out of the bus? The Mayor laughed, the passengers laughed, the bus laughed, haaaaaah, deep diesel exhale and thud, doors closed. With a shriek and a groan, the bus pulled away. The Mayor walked, just walked, step crunch step crunch. Past mowers moaning, rattle of metal and diesel. Past angle grinders wailing, their syncopated sparks singed the hairs on her neck. The hiccup of a basketball trailing down the sidewalk. The Mayor surrendered to its rhythm. The Mayor was a totality of taut strings. The Mayor breathed aloud, now I understand, and laughed. As she reached the tower door, she felt the shiver of an idea forming. Somewhere in the distance, the last cicada trailed off. She looked up and noticed the leaves beginning to turn.

The following summer, the crane appeared once more on the skyline, mobilized this time to demolish. As it peeled off the layers of steel, clawed through marble-clad floors, and wrenched the gold filigree from the moldings and fixtures, the crane assumed the pose of a praying mantis, hungry and skeletal and whipping around ready to strike. The entire city suffered from a ringing in the ears. Of cicadas gnawing, of cranes gnawing and grating at steel, of angle grinders grating and spitting sparks. At the Mayor’s urging, the cranes had multiplied, buildings sprang up like saplings, tall but modest, aspiring only to prominence, nothing more. It turned out the tower’s capacity had been wildly exaggerated. But the new edifices, smaller yet legion, overshadowed their predecessor, housing among them the whole of the migrant population and then some. The housing crisis was at an end. The trick, the Mayor had revealed when announcing her plan, was to build up as ambitiously as they burrowed down. “Go underground” transformed into revolutionary slogan, plastered on billboards and trumpeted on TV commercials, and everyone understood the meaning bristling inside those two words, grasped the repudiation of the tower and everything it stood for. Architects bent heads and conferred, drafting new building codes to accomplish the Mayor’s plan. She’d insisted on rigorous soundproofing. Make the apartments as snug as cicadas in winter, both above-ground and below, she was heard to demand. So often that all of city government had cicadas on the brain.

Now, in the spring, the sidewalk is thinning of protesters. The Translator awakens in her two-floor apartment that straddles ground level, one floor up, one floor down. She peers out the window in the whisper of silence just before the cranes awaken. And in that silence, she discerns a fluttering in her chest that hems and hums and she’s certain there must be a word for that sensation but can’t seem to grab hold of one. Never mind, she will invent it, she thinks. And listens.

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1.

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

AMANDA SARASIEN: I began writing from a young age, shortly after learning to read, so I can’t quite remember what drew me to this form of expression other than a burning desire to answer the books I’d read and loved, as though we were in conversation. While I do practice other visual art forms, I think I’ve always been innately verbal. Much of my work, though, is an attempt to push at boundaries – between mediums, between genres, between languages. I’m not sure I do find that writing asks questions that can’t be explored any other way; I simply gravitate more toward text, sound, syntax, and I’m always thinking about how to make the structures of language do more, spill into other sensory possibilities.

As a pre-teen, I started to teach myself foreign languages to enhance the realism of my writing. I never set out to be a writer, or at least not a published writer, which is what I understood the word to mean. But after studying languages in college, I went on to work in international manufacturing, still writing in my free time. An acquired disability took me out of that career path and into literary translation. It’s only through literary translation that I feel I really became a writer, much in the way Walter Benjamin argues that a translation creates its original.

2.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

AS: I may start with a first line that materializes so clearly in my mind that everything else forms around it. Or it may be an unease, yes, a feeling of the uncanny in the world around me that I can only put my finger on through writing. Or, in the case of my nonfiction writing, I may just have something to say, an idea I need to take for an essayistic walk, like my beagle, her nose to the ground, or it will just keep circling inside my head, clamoring for attention.

I usually spend weeks or months filling notebooks with impressions, story arcs, character flaws, questions. I like to write them by hand, intelligible only to me, but lately I’ve taken to putting them in my phone just to capture the thought before it flees. I won’t start writing until the notes become so urgent and overwhelming that I have a visceral sense it’s going to come pouring out of me. Especially if what announces itself is a first line, I feel I need to put fingers to keyboard just to free myself of the burden of the ideas. From there, I tend to have a bit more structured approach, counting words, editing as I go along, pushing myself to keep writing each day so I don’t lose the thread. Deadlines are a constraint that I sometimes use to great effect.

3.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

AS: I’m interested in language itself: how identity shapes the way we use and understand language, how the language we use and understand shapes identity. Especially language as an embodied form, capable of being experienced as a rhythm, a texture, an image, an architecture. And because language is so intimately bound up in embodiment, I’m also fascinated by its limitations to convey things like pain or individual sensory perception - the isolation wrought by language - and yet without language, we would be more isolated, wordless worldless silent selves. I’ve been told there’s an electric current of aloneness running through all my work.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AS: I’m many other things besides a writer: I’m a translator, an editor, an artist, an interpreter. But would I be any of those things without writing? Probably not.

Perhaps I would be an archaeologist. I’ve always had a fascination with layers and palimpsest and transporting myself into lost or distant worlds. But archaeology, too, is narrative.

5.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

AS: It may sound a bit trite, but read. Read widely, read in translation because it exposes you to the bristling possibilities of difference, read until you develop a certain muscle memory for the acrobatics of a sentence.

6.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

AS: At the moment I’m in that amorphous note-taking stage I described earlier, for a domestic gothic novel set in a multi-family building. I don’t know much more than that except that I want to explore the uncanny psychogeography of urban life, the way it throws us together with complete strangers who, paradoxically, we come to know better than our closest friends and family, even as they remain ominously alien to us.

Translation, meanwhile, is my daily writing practice. I’ve got several projects at various stages of completion while I pitch them to publishers, including a French New Wave novel brimming with slang, wordplay, and invented etymologies; and a Brazilian novel that weaves together historical fiction and magical realism, about a rape survivor coming of age during the military dictatorship, who goes on fantastic adventures with a mystical black horse.

7.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

AS: I’d be hard-pressed to choose even a handful; really I take something from every piece of art I’m exposed to, whether consciously or unconsciously. A sense of narrative is to my mind something that grows out of a compendium of all the reading, writing, film-watching, music-listening, art-viewing, theater-going, storytelling work a person does over their entire lifetime.

8.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

AS: One of the paintings I used to love getting lost in at the Indianapolis Museum of Art was Odilon Redon’s The Yellow Sail. I think they’ve since taken it off view, but I could recommend any of Odilon Redon’s boat paintings. They’re mysterious and transportive, and I love the way the artist depicts faces wrenched with emotion despite, or perhaps because of, their blurred, anonymous outlines.

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