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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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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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 the 3-day window1. We’ll reply to everyone within 2-3 weeks (before we announce and publish the winner, of course).

August’s theme: Utopia

✴︎ 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

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, it is the day before our new theme is announced for August’s micro challenge, so I hope you’ve been sharpening your internal and external pencils (did that sound weird…probably, but oh well!). To help bring about some charming inspiration, do spend time with Lucy’s brilliant short story today, the seventh (!!) short story we’ve published in our Substack-y pages. Ever grateful for your readership.

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When the bellies of Thread women swell with children, the women must not step outside. Threads can sense the young and will strangle the embryo from within. After all, Threads give people here life—not food or water or sunlight, but rather the energy of microscopic waves pulsing in the atmosphere. So when you start formulating an organism without the consent of Threads, they self-correct for the unsanctioned heartbeats. Stepping outside while pregnant is a death sentence.

At least, this is what Saya’s mother tells her the moment Saya’s monthly bleeds stop. But what can you do indoors besides sweeping the floors, wiping already dust-free cabinets and countertops, and picking at the bowl of dried, fermented fish strips rotting in a clay bowl? She’d go crazy if not from the aimless roaming in this limited surface area, then from her mother’s insistence that she eat yet another bowl of plain sardine gruel. Perhaps it was a mistake—to live with her mother, to let her womb fill unnaturally, to defy the Threads. She has already carved seven scratch marks into her room’s walls out of sheer frustration, a beast trying to claw free of these confines. Then just take this stupid thing in my belly, Saya wishes to the Threads silently.

“You aren’t thinking about going outside, are you?” Her mother asks again. Saya looks away, her breath fogging the window as she presses her forehead against the cold glass.

“Never,” Saya says solemnly. She drapes a blanket over her stomach, covering the slightest bump that becomes visible only after she’s eaten all her meals for the day.

“It’s dangerous out there, for both you and the baby. Threads are hostile to those with wills of their own.”

“Then why even bother to have a will?” Saya is willing to sacrifice this “will” to go outside.

“It’s an honorable duty to have a child,” her mother lectures. “You’ll only know true happiness once you see this delivery to its conclusion.”

“Could it also be will if I will myself to go outside?”

“It’s dangerous,” her mother repeats. “The Threads will seep into you and rewire your innards. The baby will die. And don’t assume that you’d be spared from the damage.”

“The thing inside me is growing just fine. At this rate, I’ll die sooner from the mental stress you’re creating than anything else.”

Thread women are built delicately and meticulously—one wrong wiring and you end up with a deformed mass of organs left to decompose in the forests. Most come from the confluence of Threads into one functional, complex system. A rare few unnatural ones, like Saya, come from mothers. In fact, she’s not sure why the Threads never attacked her when she roamed outdoors, since her existence too defied their instruction. Saya’s mother never explained much, operating more on anecdotes from dubious sources than true experience. Saya suspects her death is imminent anyway. None of those born from women rather than Threads survive long enough to birth their own. And if they do, the later children are even shorter-lived. Like little squares of frayed silk waiting to dissolve back into the atmosphere.

“I won’t go outside,” Saya reassures her mother who prepares to leave the house with a bag of fish bones. The bones sell for a decent price since they can be cooked down to collagen and fed to livestock in cubes.

Saya waits several minutes before her mother disappears around the corner. She ties a scarf around her neck, buttons her jacket to her throat, holds her hands to her stomach for several seconds, and then steps outside.

Women have lived here for a long time, so long that no one remembers who is the eldest or who has been reabsorbed. Most forget Threads exist in their daily lives. But if you quiet your heartbeat, close your eyes, and listen carefully, you can sense them moving like strands of wind, weaving between your goosebumps and humming quietly. In a sense, it’s more harmonious to exist outdoors than indoors, the way a plant bends toward sunlight.

Freedom is more than worth the death of the organism in Saya’s womb. She hasn’t even taken three steps away from the house and already feels some semblance of living again. Her mother should know better than to keep her cooped up. Saya has been a wild thing since young. “Thing,” not “girl.” She’d roll around the swamps in a thin sundress and pick bayberries alongside the Forbidden Pond, guarded by dense layers of Threads that she always felt buoyed her forward more than they dragged her down. Threads are life forces. They fuel her so she can spend hours digging up wild mushrooms, foraging odd flowers, and following ant trails. As a child, she’d stay out until the sun disappeared, relying solely on Threads guiding the way. If you pay attention, you can read them. But only if they want to be read.

Saya escapes to the Forbidden Pond, which is really only forbidden because people fear the Threads as much as they revere them.

“A pond of too much desire and greed,” others call it.

Silly. There’s nothing greedy about Threads unless Saya were to say that the desire to live is greedy. How is that greedy when she never had a choice?

She bends her head near the calm water surface and sips. The water tastes more like nectar than water. It feels like eons have passed since she hydrated with anything but gruel, and since she tasted anything sweeter than rice she’d hoard in her mouth so the starches would break down to sugar.

“If I could have this forever, I’d give you this baby for free,” Saya declares to the open air, knowing no one can hear. Threads don’t respond to wishes anyway. They operate beyond her level of understanding—gods who don’t speak the same language. Saya rubs her abdomen, pressing over the harder part of her stomach. She had thought she’d be soft and plush like a cloud, not dense and springy like an overfilled milk sac.

“There’s no softness to bringing a child into this world,” her mother would say. “It’s a testament to your endurance.”

The unborn child’s father had wished Saya would become softer. But he’s out of the picture now: Thread men don’t associate with pregnant Thread women, taboo creatures bound to hasten ends to their long-lasting lifespans. But he had been a good man. He would’ve stayed with Saya had the elders not pushed him away and her mother not siphoned her into the house under the guise of protection. He would’ve loved her unnatural, dense, cramping abdomen bump once it grew large enough to distend past her breasts. At least, so she imagines. She can’t quite remember his face anymore. Individuality is unimportant among Thread people. They all come from and return to the same source. After staying in the house for so long, the only face Saya remembers is her mother’s, and even that grows fuzzy now that she leans over the lake, watching ripples shake her reflection.

But Saya possesses common sense and self-restraint. She hurries home well before her mother finishes bargaining off the fish bones. Her mother can spend hours arguing and tiring her opponent into submission. By the time her mother returns, Saya is sitting by the window, sipping a new mug of hot water, her body an immovable accessory attached to the wall.

“Five bags of lily buds in exchange for those bones!” Her mother declares triumphantly as she steps inside. She stops suddenly and scans the house as though detecting an imbalance in the atmosphere. She takes three large strides toward Saya and immediately clasps Saya’s stomach.

Saya jumps and slaps her mother away.

“I need to make sure my grandchild is alive!” Her mother demands. “Something is wrong here. Why are there more than trace Threads indoors?”

“The thing is alive. Don’t be paranoid,” Saya replies while shielding her torso away. “What can you sense anyway? It’s not like you can hear a heartbeat from outside my stomach.”

“A mother’s intuition. A sense you still lack,” her mother tsks. “Now let me listen or else I’ll have to call several Aunties to hold you down.”

“Not necessary. I know it’s alive. I have this…mother’s intuition.” Saya is just saying whatever will get her mother to stop pulling at her arms. “Mother’s intuition” probably doesn’t even exist. It’s certainly not something the Threads would design into their systems. Like how childbirth was something they came up with all on their own, deviations from their origins.

Her mother swipes at her arm again, scratching Saya’s eyelid in the process. Saya’s hands fly to her eye to nurse the sting. Her mother immediately swoops down to press an ear to Saya’s stomach. Even though her mother’s ear rests on Saya’s stomach for only a second before Saya knocks her mother to the ground, her mother shrieks. A long, shrill sound that resembles nothing Saya has ever heard before.

“Dead!” Her mother despairs. “The baby is dead and gone. A life clipped short, before it even had a chance to prosper. It’s gone. There’s nothing we can do to get it back. Gone gone gone.”

As her mother’s moans fill the house, Saya can’t help but feel a tiny bit of relief. So she can step outside now without her mother freaking out? She can eat the wild mulberries and bayberries without hearing about poisoning the baby into delirium? It’s a blessing. The Threads must be on her side.

Her mother kneels on the ground, swaying back and forth. “What can we do if you don’t give birth to a child? What is there left to do? Is there anything? Anything at all?” She murmurs. “In the end, must we still bend to the will of the Threads?”

Yes, Saya is certain that the will of the Threads is definitively better than the will of her mother. Saya approaches her mother slowly and crouches next to her like taming a wild cat.

“I’m ok,” Saya soothes. “The Threads will claim an unnatural existence like me sooner or later. I’m sure this unborn child wouldn’t have lived long anyway.” Her mother ignores her and starts hitting the ground with her fists in staggered gestures.

“You would’ve lived! Your child would’ve lived. I’d make sure of it. But all that surrounds me is now death.”

What death? Proper Thread people live so long Saya might as well describe it as infinite. Not that she is a proper Thread woman.

“I can make you another one,” Saya promises even though she desperately does not want to make another one. But the immediate task: stop her mother from bloodying her hand and brushing her knees.

“Can you?” Her mother asks blearily. “It’s a lot, you know. One is an honorable undertaking. Two…no one has done two before. That gets dangerously close to playing god.”

You should’ve thought about that before you decided to have me, Saya thinks. “I’ll get you some fresh water from the springs. That’ll help. You’ve gone too long without submerging yourself with Threads.” Her mother, at least, is a proper Thread woman despite engaging in taboo acts. Submersion in Threads should help her regain her sanity.

She rushes out of the house, not sure if her mother has registered her words or disappearance. Likely not. Her mother acts like Saya is already dead, a ghost carrying a once living womb. Although now, Saya is just a ghost with a ghost womb.

Saya carries a bottle with her to fill up at the pond. As much as her mother hates living according to the whims of Threads, she is still a Thread woman. A creature who needs revitalization outdoors more than Saya and her body of blasphemous origins do. Saya still loves the forbidden pond—the way it nurtures with a warmth and calm of the whole land supporting you.

“Please let my mother recover quickly. Let her stop dreaming of a grandchild. Let her forget that one once lived long enough to be heard from within my stomach. Let her think I’m dead,” Saya asks of the Threads as she places the unsealed bottle at the pond’s edge and watches the water fill. Even in the bottle, the water glistens clear.

The Threads seem to beckon her forth. Saya holds the full bottle to her chest as she wades through the waters. The bottom of the pond drops steeply, more than she imagined from such a light blue-green-colored surface. The water level rises suddenly from her ankles to her waist, but the sudden submersion into the cold hardly bothers her. Rather, Saya feels buoyed, a sensation so contrary to the denseness in her torso and heaviness of her limbs that she’d argue this is as close to flying as she can get.

Saya has never thought she was empty: not after her womb emptied, and not because she lacked the Thread’s blessings. But now, sinking into the water with each step, she decides there must’ve been a lurking emptiness within her, else where does this feeling of fullness come from?

“Are you accepting me?” Saya asks. Was her child deemed an adequate sacrifice in exchange for welcoming Saya into the Threads’ governance of the natural world? Maybe this is what her mother should’ve done instead of birthing Saya. Maybe her mother would’ve been happier. Without the delusion that she had to deliver Saya.

“She’ll be upset if you decide to cut my thread now though,” Saya laughs, though the sound rings hollow. Her mother would simply become like all the other Thread women sane enough not to get pregnant, letting their undying existences stretch until neither past nor future existed anymore.

Thread women embrace nature as an extension of their bodies. They roam naked at dawn and dusk, and braid thin grass blades into their hair during the day, only for those blades to shake loose to the ground, surrendering the rest of the day to braiding and re-braiding. Might as well be straw instead of human, her mother would scoff. Saya doesn’t remember a single moment when her mother wore braids. Her hair always hung loose and freely, without even a sprinkling of jasmine flowers, an accessory so easy to adorn that even the most careless Thread women would still cover their heads in petals.

Saya likes to braid her hair, but only because the loose strands get in her face and mouth when she eats. She has tried to learn to weave grass into her locks, but the grass would always fall out the moment she released her fingers. Properly braided hair should retain at least one blade of grass by the end of the day. But Saya has never been a proper Thread woman.

This is the deepest and furthest she’s ever gone, but she knows better than to roam too deep. It is said the pond is where Threads circulate life, which sounds fine and invigorating, but you can’t underestimate an entity with neither a sense of self-restraint nor fair exchange. She brushes a hand against her abdomen. If you lose a life, you should be able to gain life, right? Saya tightens the cap on the bottle and begins wading out of the pond, back to her mother kneeling on the floor, hair sprawled over wood planks like undone yarn. Saya would rather get this bottle of water to her first.

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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?

LUCY ZHANG: I’ve been a writer since at least middle school. I’ve always been a fan of stories in any form: novels, anime, manga, word-of-mouth. I like the written form above all else because it 1) has the capacity for imagination (in a way that visual forms mostly supplement) 2) allows the creator plenty of time to pause and examine avenues of expression 3) connects with people without the burden of physical socialization, an introvert’s nightmare.

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?

LZ: I usually start with a voice or image. Rarely do I know what I’m trying to tackle thematically or philosophically from the get-go. But that part comes naturally when the characters I create end up paving paths down more complex roads of conflict.

I suppose I prefer “wildness” over “structure,” especially for short stories. However, I’ve found that I need some structure when writing novels, else I create a dumpster fire that is incredibly difficult to revise.

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?

LZ: Isolation, family, motherhood, coming-of-age, and the desperation that comes with the aforementioned things.

I have long since come to terms that I will always be writing about these themes until I die. What’s there to abandon? It’s part of who I am as a writer :)

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LZ: The same me, minus the writer part (aka the anime fan and engineer). Maybe I would dabble more in the illustrative arts. Who knows!

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?

LZ: “This is jaw-breakingly bad” —my English professor on a piece of fiction I submitted.

It was a fantastic slap-in-the-face to me. I learned I had pretty tough skin early on. I was able to take that feedback (with no actual constructive substance) and somehow, improve my writing significantly. All I knew was it was “bad.” The rest was up to me to find out. I liked the challenge.

At a broader level, that was probably the last most traumatic thing anyone has said to me. Since then, I’ve had little regard for higher authorities in all aspects of my life.

6.

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

LZ: I was working on a fourth novel manuscript, but must now return to revising the third novel since it needs a lot of work. I continue to put it off by writing short stories. Procrastination finds its ways.

I am also working on my day job work (the work-work) as well as raising an infant (the real work).

I guess all of these things are ruining my life in a good, necessary way.

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?

LZ: “No Longer Human” by Osamu Dazai

“Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End” (the anime)

“March Comes in Like a Lion” (the anime)

I can’t say these “rearranged” the way I see the world, but they definitely left a lasting impact on me. I revisit all of them every few years.

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.

LZ: It will only take ~6 minutes of your time to watch/listen to “Shelter” by Porter Robinson & Madeon :)

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Ithell Colquhoun’s Scylla (1938)1. I must say I feel slightly ashamed that I didn’t know this existed before I started digging through differnet arts archives to find the perfect pairing for Lucy’s story. But I’m so happy that I now know! The title evokes the myth of Scylla, a sea monster from Homer’s Odyssey as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Emma Jones in this lovely essay writes:

In a letter from 1977, Colquhoun writes that Scylla was borne out of ‘what I could see of myself in the bath’. She saw cliffs and a channel, a homeric myth, but also the potential to cause destruction. It is that boat I keep returning to, so small against the cliffs and attempting its futile passage. According to Colquhoun’s ex-husband, Toni del Renzio, the work is part of a series of paintings inspired by an affair she had with a fisherman while on holiday in Corsica.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, our Micro theme last month was CULTISH and we received hundreds of creepy, cool, hellishly funny, and also just plain pun entries. I hope you enjoy our pick as much as we did (how Aliyah packs so much in just a few lines is a feat to be witnessed).

We open for August’s Micro of the Month submissions in less than one week. The new theme will be announced via our newsletter sent out Sat, Aug 1st.

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The sound of the siren, and then girls were just meat. It was droning, like a firetruck, only made of her voice; her cigarette-singed lace-made melody. I’d been in line for eight hours when the frenzy hit. I was in red ballet flats, ribbon to my knees. Still, I ran. Beside me: carabiner bleeding keys, dye-stripped jeans, skinned shins, bleached pits, bloody nose; we ran, ran. We ran. Rapturous scrum, our bodies splitting like red yolks; one river, one thrum, one beat, one immaculate desire. We ran. The stage was gated off when we hit it, but the barricade was made of nothing but metal and men in hi-vis yellow who saw us and thought, perhaps: pigs. Or babies with pig faces, trick-or-treaters, witches. We stared at those men, and the men stared at our sequins, and we all played the same fairytale make-believe. That we were in our microwave safe-container, ready to be heated, to be squeezed dry like a tomato paste tube, tired out, depleted. That we would go home in our trains and on our phones, and we would unstitch our bodies from the burning, prophet-polished thrill of it. We were waiting for another two hours before she came on stage, and as soon as she did, it was done. She was our Diana, Artemis, and in our gin-sticky wilderness, we were her tree-free nymphs. She pulled apart like warm, moist pork in our fists, and as soon as we had her, we ran, ran.

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Contributor’s Note

The word cult is derived from the latin cultus; ‘worship.’ The word fanatic (from which the word fan likely developed) comes from fanaticus (also Latin), meaning ‘mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god,’ which in turn comes from fanum (Latin again), ‘temple, shrine, consecrated place.’ So, worship. Then, who are our worshippers? Who are our idols? Who are our false gods?

When writing Fanatics, I wanted to dissect, dramatise, and poke fun at our cultural obsession with fangirls. In blessing a type of person that is perpetually at the centre of this conversation around idolatry, fanaticism and parasocial relationships with the literal traits and powers they are often perceived as having, I hope to offer an almost mythic look at young women who are imbued with ferocious passion; one that cannot be overlooked. When the concert stadium is a temple, and the popstar is a god, madness becomes divine intervention, song becomes ritual, and suddenly these ‘crazy fangirls’ are seers, oracles, prophets. And then, of course, when the switch flips, they are warriors and cannibals, armour made of friendship bracelets and tank tops and glitter. Either way, they are formidable.

Throughout Fanatics, our narrator refuses to stop moving. Yes, she runs, but she also evolves. When we meet her, she is one girl in a box-wine-dark sea of girls. She doesn’t stay that way for long. Swallowed by the crowd, our narrator becomes a voice of many. That switch is why I wrote Fanatics. I wanted to ask: what is there to fear in a collective of girls?

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, this week has been one of many mini meltdowns due to what I sense is overwork, but might also just be…well, life, which is mostly work. And that’s alright. I’m happy that I can still find space to read beautiful writing like the short essay you’ll read below. Ailsa is the kind of writer whose voice feels at once calming and stirring which is to say I can bet you 10 birthday cakes you’re going to want to write after reading her piece.

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When I open the front door of my apartment, the darkness and airlessness of its windowless hallway seems to seep into me. I feel like I’m living in a puddle just looking at it. So I keep the lights off. I pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course this doesn’t work. I have to walk eleven steps along it to get to the bathroom, twelve to get to the bedroom. The hallway is visible from the sofa. It’s visible from the sink.

This place has bad bones, I said to my husband when we moved into the building three years ago. In those first weeks, I tried washing the hallway walls with soap. As I cleaned in the darkness, I imagined how much better life would be if we lived in a house by the sea where every surface was touched with light. In such a serene place, I would always feel clean. I thought about this as I went over beige carpet with an industrial cleaner. When I was done, the dark hallway still refused to sparkle, and those stains would not come out.

Now I think it’s better if I stop dreaming about seaside homes. Generational predictions suggest this rented one-bedroom apartment may be as good as it gets.

Albert Camus wrote that people often “refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” I want to take away the conditions I consider pertinent to my happiness, until I have no conditions at all, until I love everything.

As a way of learning to love this hallway, and therefore my life, I was thinking I could bring more of what I love in. I could attach all of Jasper’s branches and twigs to my walls. I could drag whole conifer woods in until I’ve hidden every part of the rental that could be described in a paint catalogue as being magnolia or biscuit. But taking the outside in is against the “leave no trace” rules of the national park, so I cannot do that.

John Cage said “begin anywhere.” So the new plan is to gather bunches of clover from crown land. I can dry them out in bunches in the apartment. And they will love the hallway’s darkness, its airlessness. And they will make the hallway smell like a bee keeper’s kitchen. And I will love it.

This is not a grand or a well-thought-out plan. I’m making it up now, in a damp B.C. meadow on a Sunday morning while watching oxeye daisies wave like fried eggs beside a silver tongue of lake. Their shallow roots are creeping just under the earth. The twinflowers are out and the thimbleberries have petals soft as crepe paper.

These sweeps of mountains could be from Norway. I could be in Scotland. I could be home, if home contained the screams of dirtbikes and ATVs as well as rivers. If home was cut with logging roads and lakes formed by megadams. I don’t mind this noise and the artifice. The sky is a low wash of pink and everything is misting and rippling, the tall purple clovers especially.

I was only meant to pick one clover to press in a book, but somehow I ended up with fistfuls of flowers in my pockets and I can’t put them back. Now I’m as bad as the short-tongued bees that bite their way through the flower’s wings and keels without pollinating them.

I feel indifferent. This lake is the length of Wales and there’s clover in every direction. I could pick for ten thousand days and still I wouldn’t make a dent in the surface percentage of these weeds endemic to Eurasia and Africa. Clover now grows from the top of the earth to the bottom and all around, in nearly every location on the rotation. I wonder if these ones miss their original homes.

I get up off the warm pink stones I’m kneeling on and go over to the car. I place the flowers over the backseats, then wake my husband. It’s already eleven. The wind outside is picking up. I make coffee on the stove of the Boler. I bring the puppy up onto the bed and lie top-to-toe beside these two warm bodies. Sunday morning with the birch leaves swaying green against the windows, with the mountains rising over the lake like a fjord. I’m lying on a sky blue duvet. I’m covered in dirt and fur. I say to my husband when I was a teenager I imagined this age would involve cocktails and shoes. I say what happened? My husband looks up from his book and says you chose happiness. I see two tails wagging and think, yes.
Back at the apartment, once I’ve put the camping things away and cleaned the dishes, once I’ve messaged my mum for flower drying tips and she’s replied “hang in bunches upside down xx” from her house filled with glass and light, I snip some twine and place big bunches of clover in groups on the walls.

Broken stalks get cleared from the melamine table I’ve covered in gingham, and now the chipped linoleum resembles a florist’s shop floor. This mess I love. Using clothes pegs, I string more flowers along a line of twine above the putty-coloured light switches. This is so easy compared to pressing flowers, which requires, for tiny petals, a grace necessitating tweezers. This is such good work for a short-tongued bee.

I place another line of flowers over the grey fuse box where a previous tenant has sharpied the words ‘Car Battery Plus Here’. I am in love with all this clover, with their roundness and their scent.

I am such a good flower drier. For years already, I have been so good at making cheap plants wither in their pots. I turn to the internet and learn I have done everything wrong.

I should never have picked these flowers on a wet morning. It is a “must,” announces the author Elda Haring, that they “be picked on sunny days between noon and 3 P.M.” I should be microwaving the flowers with blue silica gel, says a New York Times article from 1981. I should be preserving them with hairspray. I should be peeling off their leaves to speed up the drying process. Otherwise I risk the potential of rot and mildew.

I should be sourcing palm spears and cotton stems from florists, says an interior designer in the Irish Independent. They would look “great in a kitchen full of raw wood, heritage paint and crumpled linens.”

I pull down my twine strings. The flowers look sad, like purple rags on a line. I strip their leaves then place the clover back up in smaller, less crowded bunches. Now they look delicate. Now they look elegant, like a keepsake of things I love: light and dew and sky. How beautiful it is, to stop time like this. Bees and fields and happiness, this is what I’ll think of now when I open the apartment door and see clover. Dragging driftwood over rocks to the fire,using a rock for a pillow and listening to mosquitoes burble in the aspen trees, I’ll remember that too.

I want more memories in the hallway. I could string honey mushroom mycelia to the wall like night lights. I could watch them bioluminesce. I could make this place magic. I could find all the fermenting, bubbling living things of the world that need the dark. They’ll love the hallway’s darkness and airlessness, and I will too.

What is this need to keep things, take things, hoard things? This taking of flowers to keep them forever feels so Victorian. But now I’m reading that people were buried with flowers in Egyptian tombs at least four-thousand years ago. I’m reading about the bones of a prehistoric man in the Middle East who was discovered among preserved posies. Maybe this desire to keep beautiful things through to the end is simply human.

I read that in the Middle Ages, when human waste flowed into the rivers and houses were dark with wattle and daub, when cleanliness was something few could afford and those in power did little to make things better, people carried nosegays, posies of flowers — violets and lavender and marjoram — to counteract the odours of everyday life. These nosegays (literally, something to make the nose gay) were viewed as a protection against disease in a time when people believed illnesses came from bad smells.

Sniffing a flower to withstand the horrors of walking through an unclean street seems absurd. If only these medieval people knew to stop throwing human waste from the windows out of chamber pots! If only the butchers had stopped casting entrails in the ditches. Then they would have no need for such things.

Covering a sad hallway in clover is absurd too. That I’m getting real joy from this superficial change in appearance seems so sad. Why don’t I really change my circumstances? I don’t know how in a town where trailers go for half a million. I’m burned out by a landlord who raises rents in a pandemic, who ignores my messages about the mould in the bathroom.

My husband’s heading out with the dog for a walk. He’s switched on the hallway lights to get his raincoat. I’m pleading turn it off before he’s even done in the closet. Your thing with the lights, he says, I can’t keep doing this.

But these lights are a sad white. They’re as bright as strip lights, as a fridge light. How could anyone stand them?

I could change them. Three years with this hallway and it’s taken this act of actually looking at it instead of hiding away to realise there are things I could change.

The next day I buy some low-wattage bulbs from the hardware store. I screw them in and switch them on. In one sense it’s glass and light. In another it’s a nosegay. It’s absurd, and it’s almost enough. This change in light, it’s making me feel something unnameable. Something hopeful. Imaginative, and bright.

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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?

AILSA ROSS: I kept a diary from about the age of twelve, but I drew and painted much more than I wrote. I then spent much of my early twenties travelling, and stopped painting, as horsehair brushes and paints and paper are expensive and take up a lot of space in a rucksack. Then I began writing much more than I painted, a yellow legal pad and biro being both light and cheap.

Can it be that I started writing seriously because I was too cheap to continue expressing myself through painting? I think it is so.

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?

AR: At the moment, I write while my baby sleeps – so for two to three hours in the middle of the day. Before the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I wrote everywhere and at all hours. I wrote outside on summer afternoons. I wrote in the bath on winter evenings. I wrote while I was meant to be doing the fact-checking and editing work that paid the bills. I wrote alone in bed, while drinking a French press. And then I would transcribe the words that I wrote onto my computer. I procrastinated a lot as I did so, because I truly hate transcribing and get distracted easily while doing such work.

I don't procrastinate so much anymore. Now that I only have a couple of hours in the middle of the day in which to work, I feel I have to utilise those hours effectively.

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?

AR: Time, mystics, animals, plants. The way the past intertwines with our existence today. These themes prevail in my novel HOVEL, which was published by Strange Light/Penguin Random House in spring. They prevail in my thoughts. As does daydreaming.

The act of daydreaming is a skill downplayed in the modern world. I suppose it’s seen as unproductive. Yet according to Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the imaginative state engages a particular sense of being in the world, one that leads to a more transcendent understanding of the universe.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AR: Since the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I have been baking and cooking so much, because making food is something an infant can be involved in, and because it stops me from looking too much at the clock (looking too much at the clock slows time down, as anyone who has ever worked in retail knows).

Would I really like to be a baker or cook for money, though? It seems unlikely, on the days when the cardamom buns come out dry and underproofed. But to have used my law degree seems unthinkable too. If I was a lawyer, I would never sleep for worrying I had done wrong by my clients in some way. Honestly, I don't know what I would do. Become a nun?

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?

AR: Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that readers have come to believe individual heroism is the point of a story, and proposes a different kind of storytelling in ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ – where the author picks diverse things of meaning and value and gathers them together, like a forager rather than a hunter. I love that, and can think of books in that vein, such as ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk.

I'd recommend reading ‘Flights’ as a means of seeing new possibilities for how a novel can be.

6.

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

AR: I am writing about some artists whose physical bravado shaped their inner landscapes. For example, Marina Abramović lived for many years in a campervan. She walked half the length of the Great Wall of China in a red coat. And then there was Agnes Martin driving about America in a campervan for a couple of years while thinking about what to paint and where to lay roots. I'm trying to find out how those solitudinous experiences affected those artists.

My own story, of trying to embrace solitude while living on an isolated part of the prairie, runs through what I'm currently writing. I play the sincere clown as I attempt to emulate aspects of these women’s lives. This is not easy for me. I don't find it easy to eschew conventionality.

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?

AR: When I think of literary books filled with historical research, I think of W.G. Sebald, Emmanuel Carrère, Geoff Dyer. This kind of book, which sits near the academic, gets associated with men. My voice is not like Sebald’s or Dyer’s. Maybe it is more like Marlen Haushofer’s? Her sentences seem simple. But striking images build up within the sentences. They create a particular atmosphere. This kind of writing, which has the feeling of a fable, gets associated with women.

To have the historical content of the former meet the sentence style of the latter, that’s what I’m most interested in achieving on the page.

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.

AR: The 2000 film 'Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse' ('The Gleaners and I') by filmmaker Agnès Varda, which I wrote about in my novel HOVEL.

You don’t get the France of the movies in this documentary. This is a France where millions live in poverty. It’s where anti-consumer activists are fighting with supermarket managers who pour bleach on the bread they leave in skips at the end of the day, so no-one can eat it. Varda speaks to both sides. She opens people up. She opens up the doors to her home in Paris and films the mouldy ceiling. She films close-ups of her aging hands.

In a field of old potatoes, she looks for ones shaped like hearts. She holds them up to the camera, up to the light, and seems to say look, everyone, and everything, matters. She takes some potatoes home, where they grow arms.

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The Rituals

From Ailsa Ross, author of HOVEL, a novel, out with Strange Light/Penguin Random House // Scottish // In the Canadian Badlands

By Ailsa Ross

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (1900)1. It’s an empty room. Bare panelled walls, a wooden floor, a single window on the left, a door on the right. Nothing has been brought into it, not a trace of furniture in or out, not even flowers…no attempt made to un-dull, so to speak, the greyness. Light comes through the window and lies on the floor like something solid, falling diagonally across the door. Ross spends her essay trying to make a dark hallway lovable by hanging clover and imagining mycelia strung up like night lights, and then the thing that actually works is something she’d overlooked for three years: she changes the bulbs. Light elevates without a third thing, and I find such simplicity to be a cooling splash of water in our modern, often cluttered spaces (online and, let’s face it, offline too).

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s essay is part-history, part-review, part-meditation, part-mythos, and all of it enthralling. It’s the kind of writing one can spend a whole day with and still feel there’s more to be read, somewhere in between the letters perhaps, and the white space. Enjoy!

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The prisoners are led into a courtyard, where the sun beats down. Rivulets of sweat and anxious, darting eyes. The guards carry Mauser rifles—bolt-action, built in Germany—or perhaps FN Fals, a semi-automatic manufactured in Belgium. Even the Kalashnikov has found its way into 1970s Iran. No need for automatic weapons. The prisoners—nine in all—are lined up against the wall. Their crime: belonging to the National Spiritual Assembly, a democratically elected administrative body of the Bahá’í Faith. Now that the Shah has been overthrown, Islamic fundamentalists have altered the requisite legislation: Bahá’ís can be murdered with impunity. There are no clouds. The sun reigns in an empty sky.

No hollow cartridges to provide psychological relief, as in the case of some firing squads. This will not be a moment, as it was for Dostoyevsky, in which the soul is changed. If God is present here, in this place, he is silent. The rifles are loaded. One or more take aim at Atta’u’llah Mogharabi, a general in the army whose belief in a post-Muhammad prophet renders his high-ranking status moot. In this moment, is he thinking of God? Is he beseeching him to watch over his wife, daughter, granddaughters? One of the latter—you—just yesterday asked him to take you down to the market for a pair of shoes. He obliged—his last act as caretaker. The soldiers ready their rifles. Atta’u’llah closes his eyes, inhales his last breath. A clap of man-made thunder. Nine bodies on the ground. The bullet in my great-grandfather’s chest has shattered. Pieces flung outward, a fatal propagation.

Like most people, I saw Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in the summer of 2023, at the height of the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Unlike most people, I did not see it in conjunction with Barbie, which I watched in a crummy Croatian theatre with foreign subtitles (long story). Instead, my father and I drove out to a theatre in Langley, BC, the only one for hundreds of miles that showed IMAX in authentic 70mm. Oppenheimer’s three-hour runtime, combined with its non-linear storytelling, made it difficult to appreciate as anything other than a massive, overpowering spectacle. It wasn’t until I revisited the film a year later that its meaning began to unfold for me.

Oppenheimer—like most of Nolan’s filmography—is not designed to be legible on first viewing. It’s too ambitious. As Tom van der Linden explains, Nolan wasn’t interested in telling a simple, moralistic story, one that could have been summarized as “Man creates bomb, man feels bad, man gets punished.”1 While this would probably have gratified our collective desire for scapegoating, such a film would not have asked the much more serious and terrifying questions Oppenheimer poses regarding the individual and their relationship to history.

A number of formal elements collude to this effect. For one, Nolan eschews the use of composite characters, a device typical of most biopics or historical dramas whereby real-life figures are lumped together in order to facilitate audience comprehension. He says he “did not feel comfortable”2 disregarding the historical significance of individual physicists on the Manhattan Project. The result is a sprawling cast that decenters Oppenheimer, contesting and negotiating his importance. Linden also comments on how the film’s structure—Memento-esque, with two timelines converging in the middle—creates a loop. “If time is a circle, then eternity is endless repetition.”3 The film ends as it began—an ouroboros, devouring itself. “Here, Nolan’s non-chronological approach allows us to experience the bomb and its fallout all at once,” writes David Ehrlich of IndieWire, “thus making discovery inextricable from devastation, creation inextricable from destruction, and the innocent joy of theory inextricable from the unfathomable horror of practice.”4 By revealing the future before the past, Nolan dislocates causality from agency. This is not to pardon any choices that were made. Rather—and more unsettlingly—it is to regard the individual as but one particle in the chain reaction of history. When German scientists split the atomic nucleus in 1938, every physicist around the world understood the implications: a nuclear chain reaction could be weaponized to devastating effect. Suddenly, every able-minded American scientist was recruited in a race against the Nazis. For Jewish scientists on the Manhattan project—including Oppenheimer—the race was an existential one.

Can we escape our antecedents? In Nolan’s words: “If a mistake is unavoidable, is it actually a mistake? Or if someone facilitates an inevitability, do they actually bear meaningful responsibility?”5 Is history an aggregate of individual choices, like a mosaic of distinct shards, or a tapestry in which a single fiber is lost, threaded into an oblivion of meaning? Are we subsumed by history, like tiny atoms in a chain reaction of fissionable nuclei? Nolan’s circular story structure suggests a harrowing determinism: no matter how many times Oppenheimer was given the same set of circumstances, he would commit the same sin. In other words, he could never escape his antecedents.

Hasty whispers as the TV flickers, showing crowds of men with their fists raised, bearded mullahs in white turbans discoursing into microphones.

“Pack only what you need,” your father says. “We’ll be back soon.”

The first of many lies.

“Why?” you ask. There are no tears. You feel only a vast emptiness, like radio imaging of a black hole—a hungry maw of darkness chewing warmth and light inside of you.

“It’s not safe,” he says for the nth time. You and your sister scramble to pack suitcases. At 10 years old, you have no idea what to bring. You don’t understand what is happening. Your mother’s face is stony, a shoring up of grief with silence. Her father has just disappeared, along with the entire National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Iran. Nobody knows where they are.

The four of you leave the next morning, only to get stranded in Luxembourg, the necessary documents forgotten in a collapsing country. You apply as refugees for entry into anywhere. Canada is the only nation that will allow you to be human again.

There’s a scene early in Oppenheimer when the young Robert flings glasses at the corner of his apartment, watching intently as the shards fly out across the room. He closes his eyes and tries to picture the same thing happening to matter in space: a star explodes, dispersing itself. It’s a speculative cosmology, an imaginative feat of memory. The film’s script, written in the first-person, describes Robert’s thought process: “galaxies of particles disperse and reform, […] I smash a glass, and another, and another, watching the shards skid across the floor, catching and refracting light.”6 As glass after glass is hurled into the corner, Robert comes closer to visualizing an atom’s structure. Quivering belts of energy rotate, locking into place. These observations lead Robert to “write furiously at a desk, […] write furiously on a chalkboard.”7 Fragmentation as precursor to revelation. Discovery as inextricable from devastation. When a star goes supernova, it self-detonates, scattering tiny pieces of itself across the cosmos, pollinating the void. My right hand is comprised of atoms from a different deceased star than my left. We are composites of shattered stellar entities—celestial cadavers. Elegy for cosmic lightbulbs. Our violent stellar ancestry can be traced down to the subatomic realm, where matter is mostly empty space, unstable and crackling. The atom as synecdoche for star.

We are sitting in a garden you have made. Mugs of dark roast in our hands. Clay pots, dark soil spotted with perlite. Some are plants I brought here, to Surrey from Vancouver, having picked them up on the way. You found them on Facebook Marketplace ads, which you scroll idly during remote tutoring sessions as dyslexic children struggle with their sentences. Once, the woman who handed the potted plant to me said I was a good son, but all I could think was how the act was nothing—a wink of light against the vast darkness of your sacrifices. A breeze carries the scent of pine from a nearby playground. The lemon plant beside me releases its citrusy breath. The sun is shining down, so rare for this city, even in May.

I tell you about my therapy sessions. I broach the subject delicately, uneasy on this new terrain. I say that, growing up, your unreserved disgust toward displays of intimacy on film and television was hard for me. You and dad having separated when I was only two didn’t help. I had no positive examples of intimacy to supply me with a counterpoint to your revulsion. I grew up thinking all expressions of desire were grotesque. Inside me accreted the belief that love comes with terms and conditions.

Your eyes darken.

“I won’t apologize,” you say, “for trying to protect you from this cesspool of a society.”

I watch your lips form the words, a wingless bird in me.

The day grows a little darker, though there are no clouds.

Newton’s law of conservation of matter states that in a closed system, matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed via physical or chemical processes. Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² describes how matter can be converted into energy and vice versa, though this requires a tremendous degree of violence, as in nuclear fission—the tearing apart of the very fabric of reality. Except for the Big Bang, nothing in the universe was actually created; only a series of transformations have taken place, matter and energy continuously recycled, a chain of successions leading to the present moment. The past is always conserved, no matter how mutated or changed.

Although Newtonian mechanics are valid in a macro picture of the universe, at the subatomic level, chaos reigns. In Oppenheimer, a lecturing Heisenberg puts it succinctly: “One might be led to the presumption that behind the quantum world, there still lies a real world in which causality holds, but such speculations seem to us, to say it explicitly, fruitless.”8 According to one principle known as “superposition,” subatomic particles exist in multiple states simultaneously until observed, whereupon the wave function collapses and the system settles into a definite state—an irreconcilable paradox so radical that Einstein himself refused to acknowledge it, famously insisting that “God doesn’t play dice.” This phenomenon applies especially to light, which is both a particle and a wave until an observer conducts an experiment.

Every cause has an effect. Is it not meaningless to speak of Free Will—that is, of a will that is free—if one’s very desires are predetermined, traceable to an original antecedent? Schopenhauer’s formulation: “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” Does quantum paradox provide an alternative to causality? Is it foolhardy to hope that, given our subatomic composition, there exists a way to circumvent the causal chain? Are we both free and unfree, made and unmade?

You open the door, my cousin’s pants around his ankles.

Light streaming in through the bathroom window. Silence in the house. Our bodies—strange, innocent.

Your eyes are wild with rage.

“What are you doing!?”

“Taking a shower,” he says, his voice pale and small.

“Don’t lie to me,” you snarl.

You grab me by the wrist, wrenching my body from the bathroom. You drag me into the hall.

Later, you and your sister converse in hushed whispers by the door, deciding our fate.

My cousin and I avoid each other’s eyes.

To this day, neither of us has spoken of it.

A star is a burning furnace in space—“fire pushing outwards against its own gravity.”9 When the star cools, it shrinks. Gravity and density increase. Usually, the imploding star goes supernova—star shrapnel. “The bigger the star, the more violent its demise.”10 If the star is massive enough, the implosion produces a singularity—a single point of infinite density where the laws of physics cease to exist.

In Oppenheimer’s time, black holes were purely theoretical entities, answers to problems presented by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. In 1971, the first ever black hole named Cygnus X-1 was discovered based on x-ray emissions and the behavior of a nearby star. In 2015, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes were detected, and in 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first ever image of a black hole. Oppenheimer himself was one of the first to hypothesize the singularity. In the film, he describes it poetically: “Gravity gets so concentrated it swallows everything, even light.”11 Not even light, travelling at nearly 300 million meters per second, can escape the devouring appetite of a black hole. Because of this, nobody knows what lies on the other side of the event horizon. There is no light to tell us what is there.

Did you know what you were doing? On that afternoon when my cousin and I, curious, studied each other’s bodies. Did you know that your wrath was changing me, one atom at a time? That I was aching to be different—to be erased. A small step from disgust to mutilation, as in Anis Mojgani’s poem where “I wish I was dead” becomes finally “I want to kill myself.”12 What is the antonym for despair? All I can do is wonder if I was destined to become someone else—someone unafraid of their own body, who never learned the language of shame.

Light was all around us that day, but I wished it wasn’t. I wished that I could be extinguished—a lightbulb snuffed out by gravity, in a place beyond the reach of any eyes.

We’re playing backgammon and drinking tea—your mother’s signature blend of bergamot, earl grey and cardamom. You bite off a piece of sugar, holding it between your teeth as you sip the scalding beverage. I roll snake eyes and laugh. “Sorry,” I say, trampling your pieces without mercy. It’s mid-afternoon. Light fills the room from the balcony, stretching across the Persian carpet that is older than me. To our right, a cabinet filled with antique plates and glasses. In the living room, the television blaring. A life built up from nearly nothing, long before I was born. I came into this world, heedless of the lack that preceded me.

Your words, casual as you take the dice from my hand:

“Deep down, I wish I had never been born.”

I watch you say this.

Your mother in the kitchen, dicing cucumbers.

Your father in the living room, watching Wheel of Fortune.

Oppenheimer eludes us. Despite a script written in the 1st-person and oceans of screentime devoted to Cillian Murphy’s piercing blue eyes, somehow this man’s soul slips through our fingers. “The closer we got, the more obscure the picture became,” says Christopher Nolan of the historical figure, “like a newspaper photograph becoming incoherent under magnification.”13 Throughout the film, we witness Oppenheimer deploy various justifications for what he is doing. As Manohla Dargis reminds us, the Jewish physicists on the Manhattan project “saw their work in stark, existential terms.”14 Why is violence so easy to justify? Why do our eyes distort suffering into virtue, right up until the moment of detonation? It’s never clear to what extent Oppenheimer is deluding himself. As director of photography Hoyte van Hoytema says, “The face is like a landscape,”15 and the landscape of Oppenheimer’s countenance remains clouded in mystery. It becomes, in Dargis’ words, “both vista and mirror.”16

The closer I come to you, the farther you recede. Who are you? Where does the wrath-filled despot end and my mother begin? How do I separate the trauma from your resilience, the darkness from your light? It would be so easy to blame you. To say: You are the reason I feel disgust when someone tells me they love me. Because of you, I confuse closeness with terror. A partner runs their hand along my arm and I can feel only fear.

It would be so easy.

But what would it solve?

Scapegoating you accomplishes nothing. The momentary catharsis gives way to a vast emptiness. In renouncing you, I deny half of me. You, in all your broken humanity. Both particle and wave; my wound and my light.

After the divorce, dad moves to West Vancouver while you stay in Richmond with your parents. He insists I attend high school in the former, promising sports enrolments that never materialize. You get a job there just so you can drive me the 45 minutes back and forth each day. On days when you work longer hours, I take two buses and a sky-train home. All of my friends live near school, a 1.5-hour transit ride away.

One night, I’ve had enough. Enough of my loneliness. Enough of the poverty I’ve come to associate with our family. Enough of this tired routine.

I tell you all this, sparing no details, my words unending and harsh.

You who studied English literature instead of something more lucrative because my father insisted you’d never have to worry about money.

You whose parents shipped you off to an uncle in L.A. while they worked tirelessly, buying only what was on sale at the grocery store so they could afford to send you and your sister money.

You who felt unwanted in your uncle’s house, his young wife openly irritated by the presence of children not her own.

You who began hating herself in 1979, ever since the day your wanting—that pair of shoes—caused the world to end.

You who has struggled with PTSD and eating disorders ever since.

You who are standing in the doorway as my words bring you to your knees.

I tell you it’s not enough.

I say: I want a different life.

I watch you fall, clutching the doorframe, as if the weight of my words is too much.

You say: “It’s all I have.”

Composer Ludwig Göransson threaded the same melody throughout Oppenheimer—a leitmotif that changes, reflecting the protagonist’s inner transformation. “Can You Hear The Music” comes first, scoring the montage of Robert’s time at Gottingen. Here, notes swell in a flurry of exhilaration. The tempo increases, culminating in a crescendo as Robert visualizes the atom’s true form—“the innocent joy of theory.”

In “Theorists,” a once-flourishing optimism mutates, acquiring an ominous subtext, the notes sliding into an uncanny register. Oppenheimer and his team race against the clock to construct the first atomic bomb. A line has been crossed. The gorgeousness of the previous tracks is being weaponized, recruited into a system of power and annihilation. The same chords sound harried and anxious, as if fretting over their terrible purpose—“the unfathomable horror of practice.”

Finally, in “Destroyer of Worlds,” both timelines converge at the moment when Oppenheimer finally grasps the terrible process he has set in motion. He is standing by the pond, conversing with Einstein. The music transforms into an ominous portent of doom as he visualizes the stockpiling of atomic weapons, a literal cascade of neutron fractures that never cease, setting fire to the atmosphere. The score is foreboding, yet familiar; it’s the same notes as before—as if, lurking inside that beauty, such horrors lay in wait all along. Despite his best intentions, Oppenheimer can no longer deny having catalyzed an arms race that will change the course of history. And now, the same chords that once expressed euphoria are distorted beyond recognition—each note like an unstable isotope, forming a crackling, paranoid score. It surges, just like it did with “Can You Hear The Music,” but now the crescendo connotes something far more sinister: the chilling revelation of apocalypse.

It’s a coalition of opposites—beauty and terror, each held in abeyance. But I can’t help wondering: Does it go both ways? Can the process be reverse-engineered—the atom reconstructed, the particles fused back together? Can I make myself the antonym of your despair?

Somewhere in the past, a fire-breather battles the darkness with torches. Faces in the crowd appear carved, like ancient statues—Zoroaster, Persepolis. The flames leave thick orange smears across my vision that fade into purple streaks, vanishing like the sloughed skins of snakes in an underwater dream. You hold my hand. Dad stands behind me, kneading my shoulders. He kneels, pressing his mouth against the back of my shirt, exhaling slowly. Warmth spreads through my body, joining the warmth of the fire-show, of our togetherness. It’s the only memory I have where you still love me as my father’s son; where both pieces of me are still unified, as one. A pre-fission wholeness I have spent my whole life mourning.

A black hole is not a point in space, but an end in time. If one were to look back at the universe from the ledge of the event-horizon—the threshold of extinguishment—one would see all of time passing in a few seconds, as though the universe were playing out on fast-forward. Does this mean, somewhere in the void, everything has already happened? Is someone out there as we speak, watching the tape at maximum speed?

Your fists left me scrambling for witness—a hole in my self-knowing that only other eyes could fill. I know you did it in the name of a religion for which you lost everything—one that bade sexual symmetry blasphemous. The ultimate sunk cost fallacy: admit that God isn’t real, and you lost home for nothing. You did it to give meaning to what went missing. Such expensive significance, purchased at the cost of who I was supposed to become.

There are pieces of a bullet lodged in your grandfather’s chest. There are pieces of your grief lodged in me. All of us exist due to a primordial detonation, indebted to cosmic calamities. How do I disentangle myself from your despair? Where does your darkness end, my light begin? I come from your suffering. It’s folded into me, in the shape of broken wings.

Maybe I am trying to ask: Is there a future in which I love myself?

Christopher Nolan has long been interested in characters whose obsessions threaten to bring about their downfall. From Memento to Inception, his protagonists have been forced to make ontological gambles without epistemological certainty—to barter their souls without knowing what the outcome will be. They are, in Ehrlich’s words, “potentially self-destructive men who sift through the source code of space-time in a desperate bid to understand the meaning of their own actions.”17 Oppenheimer represents the quintessence of this internal struggle—an “uncannily perfect subject”18 for a Nolan movie. Ehrlich continues: “At first, I thought that if J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t exist, Christopher Nolan would probably have been compelled to invent him. […] In fact, Oppenheimer is so perversely well-suited to the Nolan treatment that I soon began to realize I had things backwards: Christopher Nolan only exists because men like J. Robert Oppenheimer invented him first.”19 In other words, the future dictated—made possible—by the past.

Pearls of rain on the window. My small body curled into yours, The Chronicles of Narnia open before us, our eyes imbibing page after page as the seven-volume saga draws to a close. We will cry together when it’s over, as if grieving a living thing. As if grieving a world. The fire crackles beside us; dusk a blue pressure against the window. It will be years until I encounter Proust’s formulation that, when the weather is cold and harsh, a fire will “add to the comfort of reclusion the poetry of hibernation.”20 It will be years until I read Knausgaard writing of Proust’s work: “The novel was like a place, and every morning I longed to be back in it.”21 Both of these authors will save me, and I will find them only because of a love for literature I learned through you. Narnia, Harry Potter, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—to say nothing of earlier works you whispered to me as the night fell. The Giving Tree stands out, a controversial celebration of sacrifice which, after everything, I now read you inside. You have always been a lover of stories, and you passed this love down to me. It was chemical, nocturnal. I have you to thank for becoming a writer. Every word on this page, indebted to your heart.

I only exist because you invented me first.

In cosmology, most celestial entities are so staggeringly far away that, by the time their light reaches us, many stars are presumed dead. The night sky is a stellar graveyard, a ghost impression. If anything, it demonstrates the persistent intangibility of light—something that can be witnessed but never captured, known but never held. An object of mournfulness.

Astronomers have determined that the universe is expanding because of a phenomenon known as red-shifting. The oldest regions of the universe—her most ancient light—shift red in the color spectrum because the light rays are being stretched away from us. Accordingly, the nearer the star, the bluer it appears.

In this way, the past escapes, fleeing our fingers.

Time too old to touch as light.

I have a picture of you on my wall. You’re four or five, sporting a comical bowl-cut. Your smile is broad, untarnished. The future exerts its pressure on this moment, like a hand blocking the sun. In half a decade, the Revolution will happen—splitting you in half. I look at your joy—pure, untrammeled—and I wish for other outcomes, alternative eventualities. Could it have been different? The photograph is smears of your light, stranded on this page. Here you are, red-shifted into a limitless nowhere, a borderless place beyond death and dreams, where you and I never wanted to be anyone else. I am pieces of you, flung into the void.

Mother, I am your star shrapnel.

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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?

ATA ZARGAROF: Not counting the Star Wars FanFic I wrote as a child about a Jedi named Marcus Jale (lol), it wasn’t until my first heartbreak in high school that writing became the emotional ventilation system it is for me today. Writing draws on the most unassuming of materials--language--to connect us with one another. This, combined with the form's intimacy, is what makes it truly unique for me.

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?

AZ: I try to write first thing every morning, when the dreamworld's associative powers are still in reign. Writing by hand slows me down. That + a little bit of coffee and my writing playlist = chef's kiss. I know a piece is really taking off when it latches to a single song. In the case of this essay, I had "I Wanna Know" by Phantogram on loop like an insane person. I'm talking hours and hours. I can no longer casually listen to that song as it's become fused with Star Shrapnel for me.

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?

AZ: Memory is my Roman Empire. How do we remember the dead? What do we get wrong when we write about them? Does writing about the past justify the violence of representation? Particularly as the child of immigrants, these and other adjacent questions have haunted me for years.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AZ: A chef, probably. I'm a bartender, which already feels like a fusion of the culinary and the creative. I love drawing on the longstanding history of various spirits and liqueurs when remixing cocktail recipes (Chartreuse monks, anyone?). Still, nothing compares with the aura of a chef. Or maybe I'm just The Bear-pilled.

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?

AZ: When Elissa Washuta came to speak at my university, someone asked how she managed to finish a project as long and researched as White Magic. Her advice was to "touch the project every day," even for only a few minutes. Doing so helps maintain momentum while also lowering expectations. Sometimes a few minutes is all we have, and that's enough.

6.

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

AZ: I'm currently working on a meta-fictional novel about a philosophy student who discovers a translation of an ancient text written by one of his ancestors. It's also a braided narrative that jumps back and forth in time, because apparently I'm a masochist.

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?

AZ: Speaking of memory, I'm forever indebted to Marcel Proust and Karl Ove Knausgaard for the way their sprawling bildungsromans have shaped my understanding of the self, how time creates and distorts us. Also, shoutout to Maggie Nelson's memoir Bluets and Heather Day's paintings, both of which made me a student of fragmentation.

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.

AZ: The music video for Weval's song "Someday," directed and edited by Páraic McGloughlin, is probably the most exquisite audiovisual mindfuck I've ever experienced. You won't be disappointed.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Anselm Kiefer’s Sternenfall (Falling Stars) (1998)22. The canvas is dark and thickly built up, closer to scorched ground than open sky. White points are scattered across it, each marked with a number, some strung into constellations by thin drawn lines. At the foot of the canvas, broken glass lies on the floor—stars that fell out of the picture and shattered. This essay moves on a similar plane I feel, but full of more characters than the lone figure…many star-like iterations of that one elusive unit, family. So much happens, fades, erupts and yet the stars stay where they fell, beautiful and iridescent, and something entirely other yet ours.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, the flash you’re about to be treated to below is something that made both Karan and I say FUCK out loud more than a few times, and I feel like that’s all the preface you need from my end for this one.

As you know we are also open for general submissions right now, so if you’re sending us your work then with a gentle push we also ask you to read/catch up on what we’ve published so far.

Short Stories ✶ Essays ✶ Flash Fiction ✶ Flash CNF ✶ Micro

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I own a man. I don’t fuck him—what would be the point of owning him if I did, but I pay for him with my tears and laughter and he lives in my spare room and stands in my living-room when I want him to, dressed up or down, depending on my mood.

To be fair, he’s more of a rental. I buy his labor, and every single emotion he feels during these fresh, honeyed hours. Some people do poppers and twentieth-century movies to get off, I do whiskey and an hour of him reading Anne Frank’s diary, sobbing his eyes out. An eye for an eye. After all, why wouldn’t I buy myself a healthy dose of what I sell?

People call me the quintessential post-modern porn star; I say, I’m Marilyn born anew, performer of the forgotten art of feeling too much in public, one of the last remaining flesh actors in the time of AI-only movies. I am exquisite dishevelment, rage, heartbreak, excessive pleasure… and people pay a pretty penny to watch me burn from it all.

My man, I met at one of the most exclusive live shows for the rich and notorious. There, with the glacial face of someone who knows the currency of a smile, he bartended for a silly fraction of what I make from a single lash bat on stage. Raw from telling the audience how, seven years ago, my one true love abandoned me in a shady motel half-way to LA, on what was to be our one-way trip to life unbound, I asked for a whiskey sour.

My voice clipped in places like someone fighting a panic attack. Patrons crowded me, offering the empty comfort of words mingled with praise for my art, while their fingertips crawled to my forearms or thighs, all greedy for a bit of me.

Bartender extraordinaire shook his head at my order, face unfeeling, and poured me an Irish mule, with such disinterest for my feelings, immediate relief flooded me. I offered him the job on the spot.

The man has a name but I never use it unless he performs. Unlike movie stars made of pure code, he also has a body, more attractive for how imperfect—real—it is, and he uses this instrument very well in his own art making. There is something magnificent in a handsome, substantial man, ranting in his floppy briefs, only to fall to pieces on my crimson and orange rug, as rain tumbles from the sky.

Unfortunately to believe this man doesn’t expect something of me would be delusion. Because he wishes neither to fuck me nor to see me cry as my patrons crave, doesn’t mean he wants nothing from me. What he wants obviously is a career, and in the moments that follow his best performances, when my own body stirs with the need to touch him, console him, make sweet, gentle love to him the way I don’t do anymore these days, I offer promises—the silken words on my adept tongue the closest thing to a stroke I will allow myself. Yes, he can be my opening act, my protégé, but not until he has truly learned the craft.

How convenient: I am the only judge of his talents. Deep down, I’d rather not share his art with others.

My act exhausts me and leaves little space for the gentle swaying of calm emotions a happy daily life requires. Most days, I come home cried out, fuming, or blanked into nothingness. I ask him to mirror my emotions to me, and he does, while fixing me a plate of eggs and bacon or a glass of straight whiskey.

We scream at each other about nothing at all, and it sounds almost like a game. We stare at each other in silence, weeping. We stare at each other, aroused and disturbed. We don’t touch but when I head to bed alone, the frustration reassures me that I can still feel when I am not performing.

We never touch—like me, he doesn’t have sex for money—but as time passes, I ask him for increasingly private and vulnerable slivers of him and he doesn’t deny me. How could he, when I never deny my own audience? He trusts I am training him.

I ask for an account of a day when he truly wanted to undo someone, not with his words, but with his hands, and after he swears there were none, he strangles a pineapple for my pleasure, laughing all along at my absurdity. I request a replay of his last act of sincere violence and the laughter dies as he destroys a simple sheet of paper, his features quietly twisted. I demand he surrenders the harshest words his father had for him, demand he speaks to me as if I was his mother, demand he tells me he loves me the way he did to the last person who left him.

When he does, holding me out a glass full of ice cubes, I crack and slap him, throw the glass at the window, calling him a liar, a devil, a performer.

Then I tell him he’s fired.

After that scene, I don’t go to bed; I go back to work and give my audience all of it: the rage, the lust, the loneliness. They drink my face like I’m champagne, lick my instrument with brilliant eyes, dripping with envy. Why don’t you watch each other I want to ask them. But I don’t, because I am glad to be their idol, for at my altar they lay precious tributes. A deity of truthfulness, woven, like them, from live matter—not a disembodied and unfeeling icon who cares nothing for their worship.

I come home, pockets full of diamonds—the kind that twinkles on fancy credit cards—to the wind whispering through the splintered glass of the window. On my couch, my jack-of-all-feels lies asleep, his expression fleshly, divine, volatile.

Human.

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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?

DIVYA KERNAN: It sounds incredibly corny but I wrote my very first story the year I learned to read and write. I was terribly chatty so I would often get held indoor at recess as punishment, and I started writing then. During adolescence, I also wrote that shameful (or shameless?) first novel many of us have where we’re the main character and everyone realizes how awesome we are.

More seriously, my brain processes emotions in a delayed, non-linear manner so, early on writing became the safe space for dissecting all that mess at my own pace, and through the safe distance of speculative fiction. And with practice came more intentionality: now I get more leeway to choose what complicated feelings and ‘what-ifs’ a story will explore early in the process, instead of tumbling in only to discover what it is actually about in the twentieth draft.

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?

DK: For short stories, the voice almost always comes first. I’m out there minding my own business, when suddenly those opening lines ambush me. After that, things start to assemble on their own, concepts that had floated around in my mind for a while but had no container yet, suddenly claim they belong in this particular story… and who am I to deny them? Sometimes these opening lines stay stranded in a file for months before the rest of the story has brewed long enough to emerge.

For novels, I start with a speculative premise that mirrors a question I have about our world and my identity within this world.

As for my routine, when compatible with my daily life, I try to have time with my writing in the morning as often as possible, a fixed time-space when my brain is allowed to do the dreaming into words. For longer work, I plot a little but not so much that the magic of discovery is lost.

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?

DK: Well, my (still) short list of publications doesn’t do subtle (laugh). So yes, I’m obsessed with the complicated connection between physical intimacy and emotional vulnerability, probably because I grew up with Christianity as the backdrop. I’m fascinated by the dichotomy of how physical intimacy is often easier, more straightforward, than real vulnerability, yet our society turns it into a vehicle for shame. Sometimes I feel this part of my writing is the least original, but on the other hand it has found the most outer resonance.

This also ties into another motif of mine: the body as something independent from the mind, uncomfortable to inhabit, even foreign or hostile at times. I suspect that’s a reflection of my personal experience of being neurodivergent.

In an oddly specific way, flowers often show up in my stories too, tinted by my lyrical obsession with beauty as both enticing and toxic.

Last, identity (and how we perform it) occupies a big space in my writing. My identity sits at the edge of a lot of things, which has made it hard for me to find a sense of belonging—so I’m always chasing it through dreamworlds.

I don’t think I stand a chance of outwriting any of these obsessions!

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

DK: Artistically, I’ve tried a bunch of things including dancing and singing (sadly, though I love dancing and karaoke, I suck at following a beat hahaha) and acting (to work on conjuring those feelings in the body and in the moment), but writing is my medium. Still, I love to touch ‘stuff’, so if I had the skills to craft with my hands (instead of with my mind!) that would delight me. Maybe a glassblower, a sculptor or a potter then?

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?

DK: Annie Hartnett, who taught the GrubStreet Novel Generator for my cohort, told us that to write her novels she “told herself a story,” and, thus, encouraged us to write chronologically when drafting a first draft. I don’t always abide by this rule, but this is the one piece of advice that has enabled me to finish projects. Before that, I would discard drafts once I’d written all the tasty bits.

As for advice from my practice? I’m terrified of being trite. Yet, what does it mean to produce something original? In response to that anxiety, I aim for a sense of truth. When I edit, I listen for this grating sensation, when a word, a phrase, a line feels untrue to the story, emotionally or otherwise. I don’t always know why or how to fix it immediately, but I know I must come back to that beat and dig deeper. In the end, I think we love artists for how they offer a sense of connection to their deep, authentic truth and how experiencing someone else’s emotional landscape can help us feel our own feelings. To me, nothing authentic and sincere is ever trite.

6.

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

DK: I’m wrestling with a horror novel that blends girls on bikes, neurodivergent girlhood body horror, and the gaslighting of women. This is the third novel I’m working on (not counting that self-aggrandizing teen novel!), and it is the one that draws most directly from my growing-up experiences. This makes me love the story in a more tender way than my previous stories and feel fiercely for its characters, but it takes away some of the escapism. So, there: very necessary ruining of my writing life haha.

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?

DK: I’m still deeply enamored with my childhood and teenage formative reads and can’t help but torture them into new forms on a regular basis, namely fairy tales, gothic romanticism (Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and early vampire novels), and period pieces focused on the complex relationship between beauty, love and power dynamics (Dangerous Liaisons, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Chéri by Colette). In that vein, Guillermo Del Toro’s movies have fed my aesthetic a lot, particularly Pan’s Labyrinth or Crimson Peak.

I obviously love very many contemporary writers, across fiction genres, but I don’t understand well enough yet how they inform my writing. In non-fiction, however, Girlhood by Melissa Febos has profoundly supported me in my writing of the horror WIP mentioned above, and so have a number of Green Day songs (I’ve been a fan since forever!).

Complex speculative movies like Inception, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and one of my absolute favorite movies of all time: Arrival (based on the even better short story by Ted Chiang) have inspired me to get comfortable with layered complexity in my own writing, trust the readers to pluck all the small pieces to collage into meaning. I view this as a very impressionist way of writing stories. Series like Maniac and The OA (season 1) on Netflix also thrive on layered meanings and duality of interpretation. I love how far they go into the weird, while their core remains emotionally simple (and brutal).

On the gentler side of things, I hope to someday conjure the sense of wonder of Howl’s Moving Castle and Chihiro in my own writing without the grim fog of old-time fairy tales creeping in. About Time and Your Name are also aspirational, should I let myself write a rom-com (and not let it turn into a dark yearning creature). I even have a premise...

Last, one piece of worldbuilding I am in awe of is from the manga/anime/live-action One Piece: the use of snails as telephones is so incredibly unnecessary and whimsical—I love it! It reminded me of how as worldbuilders we have more freedom than we sometimes grant ourselves!

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.

DK: PSYCHE REVIVED BY CUPID’S KISS by Antonio Canova at the Louvre. A personal favorite since my college years!

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Leonor Fini’s Chthonian Deity Watching over the Sleep of a Young Man (1946)1. A black sphinx looms in the dark over a young man asleep, nearly naked, a strip of pink fabric across his hips. Her gaze is fixed on him. She could be guarding him or deciding what to do with him — the painting doesn’t say and in a way…we don’t ask it, we don’t feel like there’s anything missing (or well at least I don’t). I love how Fini reverses what we might generally see in art… the body on display is the man’s while the watcher is the female character here. Therein lies so much of the wild heart of this beautiful flash piece too, I feel.

There’s a bliss to it, of course, and we feel a lot happier (and safer) than when we were in the US, but it also means that some things were just very hard to squeeze into our schedules of working full time, parenting fuller time, and… * gestures at the thing called life *

But not to despair. We are now OFFICIALLY OPEN for our free Summer window. One thing we’ve changed is that you can now send us stories and essays up to 10,000 words as opposed to the previous limit of 5000. All the other details are below in case you need a refresher, or you can just hop on over here to submit (and you might notice our submission portal got a little makeover, so any and all praises for that are heartily welcome ha).

take me to the submission portal!

◉ Send us

Short Stories (1001-10,000 words)

Essays / Narrative Nonfiction (1001-10,000 words)

Flash Fiction (100-1000 words)

Flash CNF (100-1000 words)

Each piece will be published alongside a short interview with the author.

◉ Payment

$200 for long-form

$50 for flash

• Deadline: July 20, 2026

• 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)

Full guidelines + submission portal →

General submissions are — and always will be — free.

To run a magazine that doesn’t charge fees and pays writers, we rely on our readers. If you’d like to help sustain Strange Pilgrims, you can:

1. Become a paid subscriber

2. Leave a tip when submitting

3. Request paid editorial feedback (via the submission form)

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May the alphabet sing to you,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’re back again for another Micro of the Month writing challenge with a new theme. In case you need a refresher on what this is, here ya are:

☆ Details for the July challenge ☆

Opens: NOW!

Closes: July 3rd midnight EST (we’ll keep it open another 12 hours for anyone in a different time zone as I know this can get confusing, but please do try to get stuff in by this official deadline).

Rules: Send us prose (not poetry, please) 300 words or less in response to the month’s theme revealed below (however loosely, however strangely).

Money: As with our other general submission calls, the Micro of the Month is fully free to submit to though you can choose to pop something into our tip jar or request paid editorial feedback if you like. We do not give more weight to subs by folks who do go for these paid options, but being an indie, ad-free lit mag all such support helps us keep going. The winner receives $30.

Timing: Everyone will hear back from us by July 25th at the latest. The winner will be published on the last Sunday of the month, so this time around that’s July 26th.

Theme: Cultish

Submit Now →

Can’t wait to read your micros!

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

PS: For some inspiration, check out the previous winners here:

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, June’s Micro of the Month theme was Love & Sex because June is stupidly hot (unless you’re in New Zealand and Australia…or I guess the North Pole…anyway). And well, boy did y’all deliver. Evan’s micro below rose to the top of our heated (pun very much intended) discussions because of just how wonderfully wild it was. By now, you might have picked up that we here at Strange Pilgrims love the outrageous and…uh…strange….Alright, get on with reading this fantastic piece and don’t miss out on the new theme announcement for July on Tuesday!

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The phone sex only starts to get interesting after the chainsaw comes into play. Months of long distance burns quick through the vanilla until all that’s left is the fun. It’s the last thing that Demi wants to wrap his hands around, but his boyfriend Arman whines about it, “want to hear the purr, honey. Taste the exhaust through the receiver. You wear it like perfume, y’know? When I’m there with you, we’ll hookup behind the sawmill, and I’ll lick the dust off your throat.”

So, fuck it.

In his moment of rest after jumping across continents, Arman sheds his flight attendant’s uniform and rests in the mess. He tangles the hotel’s landline between his fingers and presses the plastic to his ear until the cartilage is flat and flush. “I want the blades.”

Demi kneels in his bed, the phone laying before him adrift in a sea of white sheets. He holds tight despite sweat-slicked palms and hovers the whirring belt above the microphone. Veins throb as the two-stroke engine hums. He can’t hear his love from so far away, but he must be close. The blades are singing to him.

When his grip slips the choir crescendos as they cleave through glass and black plastic.

They don’t even get to say goodbye, goodnight.

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Contributor’s Note

There’s a certain romanticism to a desire left unsatisfied. It keeps us hungry. Demi and Arman are starved, and desperate to circumvent the barriers between them however they can. They each, in a way, em

body these specific sexual tropes and the elements that draw them together and keep them apart are derived from the professions that define them—the lumberjack and the flight attendant. That’s the kind of dysfunction that I find interesting, the kind that makes my mind spiral, and it works well for a micro. The form allows you to erect new barriers, and it invites the reader to linger in the lust alongside your characters.

From there, Arman brings the distance, and Demi the toys. Together, they make the phrase “fuck me with a chainsaw” into a nice fantasy.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s short story is, if I’m remembering correctly, the first short story we ever accepted for our lit mag. I remember reading it through once and then a second time and knowing that this is indeed a Strange Pilgrims tale. I hope you love it as much we do!

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I should have listened to the man in New Orleans who told me I needed new shoes. He shouted at me from the door of his shop like an angry Jack Russell, telling me that he could see the soles wearing thin even from there. He was a shoe salesman, so I ignored him, dismissing his warnings as a sales tactic. If I had bought new shoes, I never would have found myself in Chicago, dying barefoot on the cold marble floor of the house of God.

That was my first sin, and it was a bell tower.

I crossed the Swamp Bridge in my mom’s old Pontiac and made it all the way to Jackson before she broke down. 327,017 miles on the machine, but the last 200 were enough to kill her. She died in front of a late-night bowling alley at two in the morning, conveniently across the street from the bus stop. The bus to Memphis would be there in an hour.

I think heaven and hell started their battle in Jackson. One of them killed the engine, and the other sent the bus.

I went inside and ordered the fries. They were crinkly, soggy, and a concerning hue. The bowling alley manager had a bird tattooed on his shoulder—a falcon, I think. It looked like he had done it himself in a poorly-lit bathroom in front of a foggy mirror. He wouldn’t let me sit at the table unless I changed into bowling shoes, so I asked for the fries to-go and ate them on the curb while I waited for the bus. A couple staggered out behind me, laughing, and she vomited on his truck tire before they peeled away.

I said goodbye to my mom and her broken Pontiac, leaving them next to the bowling alley dumpster. She might have been haunting that goddamn car, because the door cut my ankle as I closed it the last time.

This was my second sin, and it was a radiating chapel with a relic.

On the bus, I sat crisscross and bled on the seats.

I used to stack blocks when I was young. Little wooden blocks, given to me by my uncle. They were simple—unpainted cubes, cylinders, and pyramids cut from pine. They were the only toys I had apart from my imagination, but those are really the only toys a girl needs. They taught me so much about the world, although I didn’t realize it at the time. They taught me how things fit together—how atoms become space become experience, and how experience shapes the body. I learned how everything must be built from the ground up, and how everything falls.

Charlie used to play with the blocks alongside me. That was back when the only thing people expected us to be was children. That was before he grew old enough to put on boots, open a Bible, and see himself differently. Back when we could run around barefoot and no one would bat an eye. When we grew tired, we could sit in the dirt out behind the porch and stack the blocks in as many different ways as we could imagine until our fingers were sore.

There was one block in particular—an arch, proportioned just right so that it fit neatly against the rectangles—that we would fight over. We called it “the Steeple.” Both of us wanted to place the Steeple at the top of our towers, like we were building some holy place. We climbed trees for the same reason. Same reason humans started walking upright. Some invisible thread ties us to the earth and to the sky. We were hardly four feet tall and already knew about the axis mundi. Truths like that are rooted in our DNA, but sometimes those roots grow sideways and tear up the garden.

I always drew my axis mundi from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head. I did that when I was a kid, dirty and barefoot, then again when I wore shoes, then again when my shoes fell apart. Charlie found his world tree inside a church. Or maybe he never had one.

If I had given Charlie the Steeple a few more times, he might have been around for me when I needed him. But I had kept the Steeple for myself. That must have been the reason he went chasing after God. I tried to be happy that he had dragged himself out of the swamp into some kind of faith, but he had left me behind, just like my dad left my mom.

The pattern on the seats of the bus looked like someone had taken my uncle’s blocks, painted them with bright colors, and thrown them into a bowl of bright blue macaroni noodles. On the road to Memphis, after I learned I couldn’t sleep, I searched the pattern for a shape that looked like the Steeple. The street lights came by in flashes, so I searched in the same rhythm. I found it at the top of my seat, right behind the head rest. To find it, I had to sit on my knees like I was in prayer.

This was my third sin, and it was stained glass.

The bus driver woke me up in Memphis, saying “ma’am” a few times and gently touching my shoulder. The first thing I saw was a mosquito on my hand.

The nearest car rental was a quarter mile from the bus stop. That quarter mile was all it took for the shoe salesman’s prophecy to come true. Apocryphal blues in Memphis.

First the right shoe, then the left—anarchy set loose on the sidewalk in front of a strip club, beneath a billboard warning me about hell. That kind of shit only happens in cartoons. I shrugged and left the soles behind like the fossilized footprints of a dinosaur.

I kept wearing the top half of the shoes like a cardboard facade on a movie set. I doubt they would have rented me a car without them. If I had taken my time and used the two legs the Lord had given me instead of getting in that rental car, I would have arrived in Chicago at a ripe old age. I could have spent all that time eye-level with other people instead of flying right past them. Maybe then I would have finally understood what Guthrie was singing about, or maybe I would have just died barefoot along the way.

That was my fourth sin, and it was a buttress.

As I crossed the Mississippi for the second time and looked out onto the flat fields of Arkansas, I thought about the Pontiac again. I wondered how long it was going to sit next to that dumpster. Maybe the man with the falcon tattoo would take it home and fix it, or maybe it was just as dead and lifeless as Mom.

Mom may have died only a few days before I left, but she started dying before I was even born. It was a slow death, 327,000 miles of it. It started when Dad lured her to Louisiana, back when she was in love. He stayed around just long enough for her to get pregnant and start to sink in the mud, then disappeared.

Dad had poisoned Mom’s world tree the day he left her, and then she spent the next twenty years taking an ax to the roots of the tree to put it out of its misery. She hacked away until there was nothing but churned swamp, then she watered it with Bushmills until the quicksand dragged her down. After her cardiac arrest, I was left with nothing but her piece of shit car, my piece of shit shoes, and a boat-load of hatred for a man I had never even met.

I stopped at a diner just short of St. Louis. The waitress looked like she belonged anywhere but there. Her silk-black hair, high cheekbones, and burgundy lipstick made her look like those LA actresses from the 90’s—the kind you would expect to see dancing in a Lynch dream. She sure sounded country, though, and I saw her take four smoke breaks during my thirty minute stop. I thought about asking her if she would let me take her away from all of this, as if we were in some kind of movie, then I remembered my shoes and I laughed.

I did tip her a little extra, not just because she was pretty, but because she was probably burning all of her cash on cigarettes. I had to slide past the other things in my pocket to get to the cash—that slip of paper with a name and an address was still there, and so was the gun tucked into my belt. I handed a wad of bills over to her. She thanked me with a pretty smile, and tucked the bills into her own belt, in the same place I had my gun.

I forgot about her when I saw that my car was stolen. Shards of glass shimmered in the parking spot, sparkling like stars telling me where I shouldn’t go.

There were two other cars on this side of the lot. A Tacoma with Arkansas tags was full of furniture, stacked twice as tall as the truck itself in a game of Jenga you would find in a Seuss book. It had truck nuts and an NRA bumper sticker.

The only other car was a hearse. It was all black, which I think is the only color they ever come in. It was parked in the handicap spot.

Truck nuts had left his doors unlocked. I was twisting the wires of the Tacoma together, trying to get a spark without much luck, when I felt someone behind me and turned in a panic.

He was shorter than me, even with boots on, and lanky. His head looked too large for his body, but it might have just been his long, tangled hair and wild beard that framed his face like a lion’s mane. A camouflage cap mashed his hair down and a pouch of tobacco pressed against his lip. I remembered the NRA sticker and braced myself for a quick death.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

He brushed past me, setting his spit cup on the roof of the truck and taking the wires in his hands. A few seconds later, the old machine rumbled to life. He nodded at me and spit into his cup. He walked around to the back of the truck, jostled the truck nuts off, and carried them across the lot where he attached them to the back of his hearse.

Attempting to steal the Tacoma was not my fifth sin, but it did come a few moments later when I followed the lion man toward his hearse. I forgot about my bare feet, and the broken glass.

A minute later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of the lion man’s hearse, tears streaming from my eyes while he pulled shards from between my toes.

This was my fifth sin, and it was a confessional.

Lion man’s name was Pete. I held Pete’s spit cup between my thighs while he cleaned my wounds with rubbing alcohol. Pete had been living out of his hearse for a year. He had bought it from a bankrupt funeral home for cheaper than a bicycle. He assured me there was no dead body or coffin in the back. There wouldn’t have been room, anyway, between his boxes of mass-market paperbacks, skateboards, and the dirty twin mattress he slept on. It may be the only hearse in the world that smells like weed.

Pete was headed to Sault Ste. Marie. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t ask why I was going to Chicago, or why I was barefoot, or why I was trying to steal a truck. He just offered me a ride.

As that ugly arch fell away into the horizon behind us, he asked me to tell him stories. I thought it would be painful to talk about Mom, even more to talk about Charlie, but it seemed to help a little. Pete was a good audience, and asked me good questions.

Once, when we were in sixth grade, Charlie tried to kiss me. I think he did it because he felt like he was supposed to. I didn’t know what to do, so I pushed him away. We didn’t talk about it until high school, and then we both laughed until we couldn’t breathe.

Sometime after the kiss, I asked Mom why people kiss each other. I got way more than I wanted in an answer, since she decided that was the time to tell me about how my body worked, and how other bodies worked. I’ll give her credit: she was sober for that conversation, but still just as angry.

One thing she kept telling me was that my body was a temple. I didn’t understand that at all, but I remember hearing her praying it to herself some nights.

Pete asked me about my dad—his first bad question. I flinched, and I think he could feel that he had made a mistake. Mom—or maybe God—answered for him by splattering the hearse with rain. The storm picked up fast until the wind was howling and the wipers were sprinting to keep up.

I didn’t remember much of the Bible—certainly not as much as Charlie did. And the parts I did remember were the ones Mom used as a belt. But I remember one story about how God used a storm to kill damn near everybody. He was disappointed with what he had made, and what they had made, so he sent rain to wash it all away and start over. Like Charlie knocking over his blocks when it was time to go inside for dinner. I thought about that storm when the radio started playing that strange, wailing tone.

We almost made it to the outskirts of Chicago before that storm became truly Biblical. Pete pulled toward a highway rest stop, but he couldn’t see where the road ended and the mud began. We ran the rest of the way to the plain gray building. I imagined that I was the last of the sinners running for the gates of the ark. I wondered how many of them were running on bare, wounded feet.

I didn’t look where I was running and stumbled face-first into that sweet flood water. I thought about lying there and letting it baptize me into something new. The water was too strong for me to fight—too heavy for me to draw a line between my feet and the sky. Lion man wouldn’t have it, though. He heaved me up and dragged me toward safety, breaking the latch of the building with his shoulder.

The storm raged outside of our ark for hours. The sky was so black I couldn’t tell what time of day it was. Pete broke the glass of the vending machine, and we ate Bugles while we watched the world fall away.

My shirt was torn and covered in mud. After an hour, I was freezing, so Pete took off his jacket for me to wear. He turned away to let me change, but I just took my own tattered rags off and waited for him to turn back around.

In the dim light of the vending machine, drenched in rain, mud, and sweat, our bodies didn’t really look like temples, but we said our prayers to each other all the same. After we worshiped, I somehow managed to fall asleep with Pete’s arm around my waist, the storm lulling me to sleep.

This was my sixth sin, and it was a baptismal.

I had a dream about my dad. He wasn’t in the dream, not in so many words, but I could feel him. I was on a spaceship sailing up into the heavens. No one else was there—only me—but somehow I knew I was the last hope of the human race. I was supposed to find a new planet to colonize and keep our DNA going. Keep his DNA going, though. I felt him in my blood, salty and bitter, poisoning roots like he had done before, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the flood again. About Noah and his ark.

I found his name and address carved into the floor of the spaceship. It looked just like it did on the little slip of paper I kept tucked away in my pocket. Mom never knew that I had found that in the pages of her Bible seven years ago.

Charlie told me he was going to leave only hours before he actually did it. I was furious he hadn’t told me sooner, although looking back, I don’t know if it would have made much of a difference. He tried to explain—said something about divine calling and holy purpose—but I just kept asking him why. I needed a friend, I told him. But he needed God.

After he was gone, I found Mom’s Bible hidden in her nightstand behind the liquor. I thought maybe I could understand Charlie better. The book fell open to a page in the middle, letting loose this paper. I read the paper first and saw the name. The only thing I had ever learned about my father was his name and the pain he had caused. Mom had told me she didn’t know where he went, but there I was, staring at his name and an address in Chicago.

On the Bible page beneath it, I read only one line.

“Thou dost lay me in the dust of death.”

That little piece of paper became my Bible. I kept it in my pocket for seven years, waiting until Mom finally died, so I could finally do what I needed to do. I read it over and over to myself when I bought the gun and etched it into the metal, when I ignored the shoe salesman, when I drove the Pontiac over the Swamp Bridge, when I kept sinning along I-55.

I read it again on the floor of my spaceship while it touched down onto a new world. I realized in my dream that I was barefoot. The letters were burning my feet.

Around the name and the address, a poem was written. I had heard the poem before, but it never meant anything to me then. In the dream, though, I understood that the words condemned me.

The walls of the spaceship peeled open in front of me, forming three steps down onto green grass. The sky was blue, and I could hear birds chirping. Sweet, fresh air—cleaner than I had ever felt—filled my lungs. I was supposed to leave the spaceship, but I stayed there until I woke up.

This was my seventh sin, and it was a clerestory.

My gun was gone in the morning.

The birds woke me up first. Pete was a heavy sleeper, still snoring in harmony with the vending machine. I left him there to dream about whatever spaceship he was on.

The first dim lights of the sun sparkled on the swamp outside. I was a thousand miles from Louisiana, but a vision of a bayou had followed me even here. I started looking for the gun like I was fishing for mudbugs—jeans rolled up to my knees, ankle deep in the muck.

Something was sticking up near the root of a tree—the body of a turkey vulture, turned stiff and cold and bloated with rain. I thought it had drowned in the storm, but I saw the hilt of my gun rising from its beak. I pried it open like a clam, fighting against the stiff jaw muscles, until I held the weapon in my hand.

That was my eighth sin, and it was a monstrance.

The Mississippi River once flowed north for a brief time, centuries ago, when earthquakes rocked the land and sent the currents backwards. Anyone who knows the river knows how impossible that seems, but it didn’t seem so impossible to me that day. I looked out on I-55 stretched out in front of me, winding through the hills and sparkling with rain water, and I could feel its current pulling me north.

I stole a clean shirt and some food, but I left the hearse behind. I told myself I left it to be kind to the lion man, but the car was stuck deep in the mud. It wouldn’t have gone with me, anyway.

The skyline of the city rose up toward the heavens in front of me.

All around me, as the darkness fell again, axis mundi of glass and metal stretched upward. I no longer cared about the pain in my feet. They had become a reflection of myself, smearing blood across the land. They carried me over sidewalks and streets so potholed they looked like Swiss cheese. They carried me over sharp rocks and broken glass and still-hot cigarettes—all of heaven and hell still trying to keep me away. My body was one stigmata, from my broken feet, to my tired thighs, to my hunched shoulders.

They were hunched against the misting rain that filtered through, and against the weight of my sins. I’m sure if someone had seen me—although I saw no one around—they would have thought I was a creature of some kind. My humanity had been left behind in pieces along I-55. I was a rough beast, like the poem told me I would be, my hour indeed come ‘round at last, but I was not slouching forth to be born. I was slouching forth to die.

The shadow of a bird passed over me, so large that she blocked out the rain. I turned my eyes upward and saw the steeple of a church turned blood red in the dying light.

This was my ninth and final sin. I thought it was a steeple, but it was a crypt.

In the middle of the empty city, this house of worship seemed small, but I didn’t care about the size. I cared only for the ground that it sat on. My father’s address was not a house, or an apartment. He was a church. Above the door were words etched in Latin, like his name had been etched onto my gun.

EGO AVTEM SVM VERMIS ET NON HOMO

The door was not as heavy as it should have been. The air inside smelled damp and cool, and herbal as the last smoke of incense trailed away. Nothing moved there except for me, and the wind that I pushed.

Humans are born head first, which means our feet come last. The whole picture must take shape before our feet can, and from then on, we spend our lives placing weight onto them, forcing them to carry all of our baggage while we get to look up at the sun and the stars. Mine finally gave up when they touched holy ground. They were nothing more than bloody stumps by then, but they brought me down with fury.

I crawled from there, dragging myself along the aisle, beneath the flickering candle light, toward the holy place in the center. The house of worship told me where to go, built long ago by careful hands who never knew what crimson stains would later come.

In the center of the church, beneath the highest dome, I found that name carved into the floor. My father lay buried beneath me, six feet or more below. If not for the earth between us, I could have kissed his cheek.

I think whatever we put beneath the soles of our feet becomes our worldview. If we walk in shoes, life is supported, commodified, isolated. If we walk on asphalt, life is painful, immortal, cracked.

If we walk barefoot on dirt or grass, life is familiar.

If we run barefoot in a storm, life is wrath.

If I’m right, changing your life is as easy as changing your shoes.

I never heard his voice. I was too close to death for sound to reach me. But I felt his hands on my shoulders—gentle and caring—and when he rolled me onto my back, I saw his eyes. Charlie had grown since I had last seen him, but his eyes were the same. They looked down on me from above his white collar, first with concern, then recognition, then shock.

There was a time when his eyes would have brought me comfort, but that time had slipped away from me.

My feet were broken, but I made one more axis mundi, my arm raised up toward the sky with a steeple made of metal. I gave the rest of myself to heaven and to hell, but all I had left to give was sin.

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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?

J. NEWMAN PRITCHARD: When I was very young, my grandparents would sit with me and my sisters on a swing in their garden and we would play a storytelling game. We would each say one sentence of a story before passing it along to the next person until we reached a satisfying ending. That's certainly where I began as a storyteller. When I was much older, I began playing roleplaying games with friends. That was like unkinking a hose. Stories started to spill out faster than I could keep up, so I began writing them down, just ideas or loose outlines. At some point during undergrad, those ideas turned into true prose, and I have been writing fiction ever since. I think, because of those origins, storytelling is always inherently a collaborative process for me. I might be alone with my thoughts and the page, but I am hearing voices of other people as I write. I am hearing idioms from my southern family, strange comparisons that a friend once pointed out to me, or the weird notes that I discovered in the margins of a library book. All of that is blending together and forming the voices of my characters that sit in the room around me and whisper. I am the only one writing, but I am never writing alone.

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?

JNP: I think I treat my creative mind like a horse I am trying to tame. It needs to have the space to run wild and show me something I never would have guessed, but it needs a gentle hand at the reins or it might buck me off and leave me in the dust of an indecipherable draft. Each new piece often begins with just a visual or emotional image. I will jot that down quickly. If I think the piece is a short story or flash fiction, I will just start writing it. If I feel like it wants to be something longer, like a novella or a novel, I will toss around some outlines before I start working on the prose. Outlines aren't to box me in, but just to keep me focused on the story I am trying to tell. "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55" began with a mental image of someone's shoes falling apart one after the other. That was the image that kept me anchored throughout the writing process.

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?

JNP: There is nothing that I circle back to more than the physical space that human beings inhabit. We are embodied creatures. None of us have ever had an experience that wasn't defined by the space we occupy—the confines of our body, the limits of the walls or sky or forest, the smell lingering on surfaces, the emotions carried in the air that we breathe. When I walk into a room, the first thing I notice is the way the new environment pushes and pulls me. I want my characters and my readers to experience that vividly when they enter a story. Regardless of what kind of story I am trying to tell—whether it is horror or fantasy, grounded or speculative—I will always tell a story that “Takes Place.”

If not a writer, who would you be?

JNP: Before I started writing prose, I was (and still am) an artist. Charcoal, graphite, and ink were my mediums of choice, but I dabbled in most visual mediums. For several years, I was on track to be an architect. If that had worked out, I might not have ever tried to write prose. I am grateful that I am a writer instead of an architect, but I do consider myself to be both, even if I use a word processor instead of a CAD software these days. I still draw frequently, often illustrating scenes from my own fiction. At this point in my life, my art rarely leaves the walls of my bedroom, but it helps me spend more time in the worlds inside my head. When I can’t find the words, I can often find a picture. My love of art and architecture is certainly closely related to the embodiment I discussed above.

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?

JNP: I still consider myself an emerging writer, so I don't have answers to “solve” writing, and I hope I never trick myself into thinking that I do. But I have learned quite a few things. There is no correct way to be creative, so long as you are turning inward before you ever turn outward. Your creative mind is like a pot of stew on a stove. That pot is larger than you think—it is vastly deep and wildly hungry. You have to feed it. Toss everything in there. Vegetables, roots, meats, seasonings, fats. Read so many books, talk to so many people, watch international films that you have never heard of before, wander in an art museum and pretend you are someone else for a day. Or, you can take my personal favorite: sit in a crowded restaurant and eavesdrop on neighboring tables. After your creative pot is so full that it is overflowing and you simply can't handle it anymore, then you write like you are never going to stop. And keep writing, even if you think what you are writing is bad (it isn't). You can always edit a terrible first draft, but you can't edit a blank page. Lastly, never, ever, ever go near artificial intelligence: not for brainstorming, or writing, or editing. Don't touch it with a ten-foot pole. If you do, I will find you and I will fill the inside of your computer with a gallon of Nutella.

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

JNP: I don't like discussing too much about works in progress: my main motivation for writing is sharing my story with an audience, so I need to keep that motivation close to my chest to push me forward. What I can say is that my current project is a postmodern gothic horror novel. It tells the story of several individuals affected by a person's disappearance. There is a small cast of characters, a mysterious theater play, and a garden full of stone statues. This novel has already been trying to ruin my life as I have been working on it for a couple of years, drafting outline after outline. The current draft looks like a completely different story to the first one, but it still has its roots buried deep in something true. I am close to uncovering an outline that I think will carry me to the end, but I still need to toss some more things in my stew pot. Soon, though, I will be full-steam ahead.

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?

JNP: Ursula K Le Guin stands out above all of the rest. She was everything I admire in a great writer, artist, and person. Every time I discover something new from her, I feel entire worlds open up within my mind, like rooms I hadn't given myself permission to explore. Ever since I started reading her work, I do not think about genre in the same way. I also have an undergraduate degree in religious studies, so I have read many thinkers from many different faiths around the world. This has had a profound effect on my writing, I think, allowing the voices of my characters to bend and shape their worldviews in ways reflective of human spirituality. Other writers consistently make ripples in my writing: Mark Z. Danielewski, Shirley Jackson, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, among others. The only storyteller I think about as often as Le Guin is David Lynch, especially when I am working on the realm of postmodern horror.

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.

JNP: If you enjoyed reading "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55," I can certainly recommend some films that may strike the same chords in your mind. 'Red Rock West' (1993) is a delightful noir western crime thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Doyle. 'The Outrun' (2024) has been an inspiration for me this last year since I first saw it, and Saoirse Ronan delivers a spectacular performance. The Coen Brothers are my favorite directors and have influenced my writing in many ways. 'Inside Llewyn Davis' (2013) is probably the most relevant comparison to "Nine Deadly Sins on I-55", and I think you would enjoy it. One of my favorite films of all time is Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’ (2002), and I think more people should watch it. For music, John Prine and Emmylou Harris were on repeat when I was working on this short story and will always have a permanent place in my library. I have been listening to Sunny War a lot this year, especially her songs "Ghosts" and "Whole." As for other artists, I have found so much inspiration and peace from the work of Christian Watson (@1924us on Instagram). The animation style is both startlingly unique and strangely nostalgic.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601)1. A man lies flat on his back, arms flung up and open, eyes shut, his sword fallen in the dirt beside him. The horse fills the entire top of the canvas, one hoof raised above him, and the only other figure, partially obscured, grips the bridle and tends the animal, untouched by whatever has happened. Though the story shows no holy presence outright, we do witness a light falling upon the man and there is some sense that there is something miraculous taking place (indeed this painting depicts the conversion of Paul from someone violent and “unholy” to apostle). There is a similar propulsive, wondrous energy channelled throughout this story…and it’s one that will stay with me for quite some time.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today’s published piece does not have our usual interview alongside it because the brilliant writer of the piece has just given birth to one of the most beautiful babies in the world and, friends, creating and bringing life into this world is a pretty good excuse to skip an interview, ha. In many ways, though, I feel this critique speaks for itself and I can’t wait to hear what y’all think, especially on this topic!

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I’m not one to shy away from challenging conversations. In fact, if you were to ask my friends and family they’d probably indicate I actively seek them out. Speak with my Catholic grandmother about abortion rights? Sure thing. A conversation over drinks with my female jiu-jitsu friends about why they voted for Trump twice? Bring it on. Discuss the rise of cancel culture and sterilization of language in the literary world with other writers? Absolutely.

As a writer, these kinds of conversations feel natural to me—I believe words carry power, and that as artists we have a responsibility to engage our art with the world we find ourselves living in. We are products of our environment, after all. That’s why I write about violence against women; about climate change and environmental degradation; about religious abuse and control. The written word has always been a way to engage in conversation, to present ideas, perspectives, critiques, opinions, and lived experiences to a wider audience than our own social and familial circles allow. And, as readers on the other side, to be exposed to these things outside of our own, often small bubbles of existence. This has been true since humans first started putting pen to paper—from Dante to Machiavelli, Voltaire to Paine, Stowe to Melville, Wright to Orwell, Atwood to Morrison, and into the present. Their works (and works by many other writers) changed the conversations of their times. As a testament to the potency of such efforts, we’re still talking about their writing today.

It’s now 2026, though, and I’m worried about the state of art as a means of conversation. In particular, as a writer and a reader and a member of the publishing world, I’m worried about creative writing—whether fiction, poetry, or nonfiction—as a way for us to engage with the uncomfortable, with things outside of our own opinions, beliefs, or values.

In my first creative nonfiction workshop at my MFA program, I turned in an essay about having Guillain-Barre syndrome at the age of twenty—an autoimmune condition that led me to be temporarily paralyzed among other complications. It was a vulnerable piece, and one that I was proud of, as I had experimented for the first time with point of view in an attempt to capture the feeling of disassociation. I was eager to get feedback on whether or not it was working. But instead of focusing on the craft of what I had written, or trying to understand the intentions behind my approach, the conversation pivoted to a critique that the piece was inherently flawed. I didn’t acknowledge my privilege as someone who could access good hospital care in an emergency, or who could travel to Rwanda while taking time off from college, and as a result, a reader apparently wouldn’t feel empathy for the narrator (me).

In many ways, I am privileged—I am a white, cisgender woman who grew up in a financially well-off household. But that wasn’t the point of my essay, nor did I think it necessary to include that I worked two jobs for over a year while a full-time student to afford my international travels. I left the workshop that night feeling upset and confused. Having never been in a creative writing workshop before, I began to believe this analysis of work was the standard, an analysis not focused on craft but on the individual behind it (and whatever opinions, privileges, or beliefs they were presumed to hold). This idea was reinforced as I began to work with various literary magazines and engaged in conversations about whether or not to accept pieces of work. Why were we willing to publish writing that spoke badly of Christianity, but not anything that felt overtly religious? Why was a straight author not “allowed” to write a queer character? If an author had publicly held an anti-vaccine stance, or refused to wear a mask during COVID, why did that mean we shouldn’t publish their story on a completely unrelated topic? If a poet was a Zionist, why did that automatically mean their poem was “wrong”?

The conversations we were having about writing were often not about the quality or craft of the writing itself, but its alignment—and the author’s alignment—with what we believed was “right.” If a piece made anyone uncomfortable, if it challenged our own held beliefs, if the author identified in a way we disagreed with, then it was often dismissed as not being a good fit.

Looking back, it’s not surprising to me that this is where we’ve found ourselves. We are living through some of the most polarizing times in recent history, where differences in opinion and belief are more often a catalyst for disengagement (and hatred) than conversation. From cancel culture to book banning, to the shit show that is US politics, the effort on both sides is to silence anyone we disagree with rather than seek an understanding.

To me, this is a dangerous place for us to be.

Speaking with writer friends, many feel afraid to share or seek publication for anything that steps outside of what has been deemed “acceptable” in literary circles, even if it is true to their existence. And for those in the publishing sphere, there is a fear of publishing something that is later deemed to be controversial. But where does this leave us? If art is meant to be a form of conversation, what does it mean for us if that conversation has become increasingly one-sided and “safe”? What does it mean for us as artists if we are falling victim to the same narrowness of thought that exists around us?

To be clear: I don’t believe there is any reason to publish work that is inherently hateful or violent, that is racist, sexist, or promotes harmful rhetoric. But I do believe that art is for everyone, and that a diversity of opinions, perspectives, and beliefs make for a more well-rounded and compassionate society. I think, for example, that we should be willing to read and publish the work of someone who voted differently than us, or who holds beliefs about the universe that are different from our own. We should be willing to listen to someone’s experience even if it doesn’t fit our view of the world or how one should live in it.

I’ve been vegan for over a decade, and my husband is a voracious carnivore. We don’t agree, clearly, on what the best way is to eat in this world. I believe that a vegan diet is the best choice I can make as an individual to combat climate change, and that if I can get sufficient sustenance elsewhere there is no need for me to kill an animal to meet my needs. He believes that human beings are meant to eat meat while acknowledging that killing an animal for food is not an easy thing to do (he cried the first time he killed a chicken), and asserts that animal agriculture is an essential—and natural—part of a sustainable ecosystem for growing food. We’ve spent hours discussing what we both believe, sometimes heatedly, but it hasn’t changed our diets. I’m still vegan, he still eats meat. But through the conversations we’ve come to understand each other and why we each hold the beliefs that we do. We respect the freedom each of us has to eat how we want to. He makes me vegan meals, and I buy him meat from the grocery store.

More often than not, engaging in conversation with someone you don’t agree with won’t change your own opinion (nor theirs)—but it will help you to better understand where they are coming from and to see them as a whole, complete person rather than “the enemy.”

In “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling,” a podcast with Megan Phelps-Roper (an activist who was a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church), she presents listeners with five questions to ask in order to see if you are open-minded or not:

I think these are the kind of questions we should be asking ourselves as writers and readers, as ,publishers of other people’s work. These questions don’t ask us to change what we believe, but to be open to conversation. Imagine if we started workshops or editorial meetings with these questions at the forefront?

I hope to be engaged in the literary world for my whole life, but I think we need to move away from a fear-based approach in our writing, reading, and publishing to one rooted in curiosity and compassion. If we don’t, we risk losing the potency of our art form. We risk contributing more to the problems of our times than rebelling against them. Art is meant to be a conversation—we just have to be willing to engage with it as such.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1559)1. I’m sure there are countless literary and art-criticism-y explanations you can read about this painting, but what it simply evokes for me is the strangely pleasant chaos of coexisting in society…of being alive together. And I think in a way this is what Justine’s critique above is asking us to be okay with also.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’ve now been a living, breathing lit mag for six whole months. When we first created Strange Pilgrims, we really didn’t know if we’d be able to last the year. As you all know, we’re a two-person team and do pretty much everything ourselves. We love the world of indie lit and have been involved with it for over a decade now, so it’s something that feels like home. And though we know that the amount of work it takes to sustain even a small subsection of the arts is a heck of a lot than it might look from the outside, we are…inherently, fools, and obsessed with trying to innovate, create, and uplift the practice of reading and writing, especially the weirder stuff and folks (like us) who might often be overlooked by the more “mainstream” spaces.

We’re grateful that we now have 290 paid subscribers, which allows for us to cover contributor payments and artist commissions as well as pay for platforms like Tally, Notion, Figma, etc.

Your support & enthusiasm has also allowed us to dream of new things we can try, and one of those things is what we’re announcing today (weird sentence sorry not sorry?):

The inaugural $3000 Strange Pilgrims Prize for

Story of the Year & Essay of the Year!

Submit Here →

How it works

Send us your best (or strangest, wildest, craziest, purest, est-est) story or essay (or both!) — up to 10,000 words — by August 31st. Two pieces shall claim victory and be named the Strange Pilgrims Story of the Year and the Strange Pilgrims Essay of the Year.

TIMELINE

Opens: July 1

Deadline: August 31

Reading Period (to evaluate submissions): 8-12 weeks after closing

Results Announced: November

Winners Published: December

We will respond to everyone before the results are announced publicly.

AWARD

• Story of the Year: $1500 USD

• Essay of the Year: $1500 USD

Aaaand, we have partnered with Curtis Brown/UTA — one of the top literary agencies in the world. Both winners will also receive:

• A one-on-one conversation with a Curtis Brown/UTA agent about their work and writing career.

• A six-week Curtis Brown Creative online writing course (worth £250) of their own choosing

• Guidance on your path to literary representation and if the shoe fits, then an offer of representation from one of the Curtis Brown/UTA agents

SUBMIT

• Stories & essays up to 10,000 words in any genre and style

• Previously unpublished work only (though social media/personal Substack publication is alright)

• Do not include your name or identifying information in the document or the title of your submission

• All submitted work is considered for publication in Strange Pilgrims

• All writers who submit their work are considered for representation by Curtis Brown/UTA Agents

• Simultaneous submissions are totally fine, but please let us know promptly if your piece is accepted elsewhere with the words “Withdraw” in the email somewhere.

  

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FEE

• Early Bird: $18 ^{until Jun 30}

• Regular: $22 ^{Jul 1-Aug 31}

Perks: Everyone who enters gets 3 months of Strange Pilgrims membership free (with no annual commitment requirement), effectively making the entry free + an extra month. You can see all the paid subscriber perks here. The reason we’re doing things this way is because we believe that a contest entry should also offer you more access to the place you are submitting to and thus supporting. If the fee is a barrier, please refer to our waiver policy below.

JUDGING CRITERIA

• Judging process: Your work will be solely human-evaluated. We, the editors (Karan & Shannan) will read each and every submission ourselves. Within the first few weeks, we’ll longlist a selection of stories and essays, which will then be shared with the team over at Curtin Brown who are working with us. In collaboration with these agents, we’ll come up with a shortlist. The final winners will be selected by us, Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor.

• Judging criteria: In evaluating submissions, we look for originality, an authentic voice (something that only you could’ve written), emotional intensity, musicality of language, cohesion of plot, characters & narrative.

AI POLICY

Writing is an act of imagination, research, and memory—one mind reaching for another. Artists hold the pulse of the human condition in a way machines never will. They catch what algorithms miss—the contradictions, hesitations, tiny human errors that turn into revelation. An artist’s work carries the weight of lived time, of memory and forgetting, grief and joy that can’t be squeezed into a template.

For that reason, we only publish work written by humans. We’re utterly uninterested in outsourcing imagination. Literature has always been a conversation between people across time and place, and we intend to keep it that way.

For more details on the nature of literary contests, our full Transparency & Fairness Statement, and contest disclaimers, please read this post:

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

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