Hello fellow strange pilgrims, there’s something special and secret and so exciting brewing behind the scenes over here at our indie lit mag and we can’t wait to share it with you, but you’ll need to wait just a few more days! For now, here’s a heart-stoppingly (no but in the best way) luscious alive essay to help you ride the waves of time.

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I told my friend I want to visit Antarctica. She said you love cold places and I said no, I love expanse.

Antarctica, it turns out, was once green. Deep down in the guts of the ice continent, there are deposits of amber, smaller than grains of sand. Amber comes from trees, and not just any trees. Rainforest trees. Antarctica was once a temperate rainforest.

Who was there, is my first thought. Second thought is, I was. This is how people get it into their heads that they’ve been reincarnated. One day a self-aggrandising little thought occurs: I was there. And they can’t undo it. They think, this explains so much. It explains a whole range of desires, the foremost being immortality, but also, in my case, emptiness.

They think: if I was alive then, it explains me now. And now, thankfully, I am relieved of the burden of explaining myself.

From this perspective, then, a belief in reincarnation could be useful. It might finally shut me up. Launch me out of my head and into the world where I belong. Even if it isn’t true.

Especially if it isn’t true.

Or maybe it is true.

I was in Antarctica when it was a rainforest.

I was not in Antarctica when it was a rainforest.

In times like ours, we want to tell the truth. We want to eschew relativism. Relativism has been dragged semi-conscious to its fated end, fucked every way, cut up, reanimated, become evil. No, we want to be able to say: this is wrong, this is true.

We want to say no.

No, you cannot tell two lies and have that make a truth.

No, I don’t need to question myself on matters of evil.

We’re done questioning and want to make a stand.

So the difficulties begin. As an honest person, I can’t help admitting I might be wrong. As a thinking person, I think. The more I think, and the more I say what I think, the more flaky I sound. For example, if pressed: I’m not completely certain if I’m alive on this planet right now, or if I’m dreaming.

Are you?

Go ahead, pretend to be sure. I’ll call you a liar.

Some degree of relativism is necessary for the sake of integrity. Even the question of whether relativism is useful or harmful calls for relativism. And this is what keeps tripping people up and preventing effective opposition to liars, thieves, and killers. No decent person thinks they know the absolute truth.

And yet, look what becomes of us without any kind of institutional truth. Look what happens when we discard history, burn down the library. Look how stupid, what dogs we are.

All that’s to say: under the Antarctic sea, half a mile inside Earth, lie networks of fossilised roots.

Eighty million years ago they were trees, breathing through thick layers of greenest vegetation and sweating beneath a temperate Cretaceous sun. There were copious fauna pattering among the vegetation, scraping up soil and sand with their claws and paws and talons.

If there’s one thing I want to see more than a frozen expanse, it’s an Antarctic rainforest.

Rainforest, then ice continent.

Ice continent, then rainforest.

I long to see the difference for myself.

Where the planet’s plates are concerned, where snowscapes and beachscapes and the formation of mountains and births of elements are concerned, relativism is not either/or. It’s a question of timescale. Even the sun, our constant star, will burn itself out. But the timescale of its burnout is so vast that for us, during our short lives, it’s meaningless. For the whole of our lives, we can count on the truth of the sun. This is how real truth exists inside the relative, and the relative inside the truth.

Despite my reincarnation from a past Antarctic life of stalking tawny southern hares among giant gleaming green southern ferns, I’m ignorant about southside Earth. And yet, its emptiness pursues me like a ghostly aroma, a good-time memory, a reflection of sun on mirror sand.

The fascist tech-bro capital class dreams also of expanse. I would have thought this one thing was true: whatever they are, I am not. I’m broke and I want fewer things (people, tech, cities, buildings, products, developments, ads, offices, ideas, wars, lies). They’re rich and they want more things, more and more. They want to bury me and us in things, and once we’re buried, chain us underground and overland so we can dig. They’ll end by burying dignity and beauty, the only stuff that makes humans worth a damn and which could somehow plausibly redeem our evil history and original sin. They’ll bury it all in endless plastic shit.

And yet, when they and I close our eyes to rest, we all dream of Antarctica.

They dream of how it will melt and they will mine the poles, minerals without end.

I dream of how maybe, one day, I’ll put my foot on its crust.

We’ll both be wearing boots, and we’ll both be hoping for a twin to stand and face us, to hold us like a mother and say welcome, you’re not alone or empty and now, neither am I.

In the South Sandwich Islands, biologists have taken the first ever footage of a glass squid: a squid whose skin is totally clear.

The South Sandwich Islands sit just above the Antarctic Circle. On a map, they look as though the Antarctic Peninsula has continued its outward curve and then looped back west on the way up toward South America, as though rounding the breast of an enormous highway, speeding alone into the blue horizon headed, with an unfathomable depth of disappointment and relief, toward civilisation.

The squid, wholly uncivilised, immodest as it is possible to be, exposes its internality through glass flesh. You can see everything, all the neon insides: organs transparent, or becoming transparent, or translucent white. The squid can control whether it appears transparent or opaque, depending on its goals and needs and, perhaps, its mood.

Glass flesh is not unknown among deep sea creatures, but to see the colossal squid so radically undressed, alive and moving about in its own home, is new for science. All I can think about, as I watch the squid sucking up ocean and pulsing its blue tail and waving its electric orange tentacles underwater, insides fading in and out, is: what trouble might we ourselves avoid if we could see our own insides, if our skin was window upon window rather than field upon field?

When I feel inside myself and feel a squish of red wet organs instead of seemingly endless mind, emotion, and idea, I understand myself quite differently. I understand that it’s absurd to pretend I will live forever, and all the moments I spend trying to live forever are moments of a wasted earthly life.

Recently, during a religious service, I was assailed by an awareness of everyone in the room as animals. It was one of those uncanny fresh moments, as in, everything I thought I knew about who and what I am, who and what everyone and everything else is, seemed to melt away and I was struck as though having just been born or just come awake from a long amnesia with the absurdity of a bunch of animals sitting in a room silently contemplating their being and attempting to feel the energy, undying, which connects everything for all time, and discern its contours. I looked around at the people, my friends and also strangers, imagined and felt my own body, and marvelled at how we had arrived here, human animals seated amid a shared ritual.

And how strange, also, that we all have distinct faces, haircuts, clothing, styles, and personalities. I really did feel insane about it. Personalities. I thought about animals and which animals have distinct faces (elephants, apes) and which ones have distinct personalities (my pet rabbit, RIP, who was unlike anyone else with her bizarre games and codependent sweetness and rude little attitude, hopping in to the fridge every time she heard it open). And I was filled with just this glass squid type consciousness of my own animality, my own meat, inside and out, and my own ability—I could flip a mental switch and see the world anew—to become transparent at will.

In school I took a course on religion and psychoanalysis. My professor was neurotic and kind. A distinct personality. Eventually, a few years after I graduated, or so I’ve heard, the pressure of vying for tenure broke him and he landed in a psychiatric facility. So, I suppose he was teaching his subject with passionate understanding, and that may be why the course has continued to influence me so deeply.

Surveying the subject of religion and psychoanalysis, my doomed professor introduced a class of spiritually-minded millennials (already a death-obsessed breed) to the most 1970s book of all time, second only to Taxi Driver in its perfect crystallisation of the gritty post-hippie era just preceding our own unfortunate corporatist-apocalypse one. The book was The Denial of Death by one Ernest Becker.

The premise of The Denial of Death is simple: everything anyone ever does in life is just about trying to be immortal. We attempt to achieve immortality in the following ways: having families, forming civilisations, practicing religions, falling in love, and also, most especially, constructing a personal identity. So, everything.

I took this thesis to heart and still agree with it, though I would argue that Becker downplays a key piece of the human makeup, which is our deep desire to ruin ourselves.

As a species we are suicidal. Not in the sense of making intricate plans to kill ourselves (we do that too, of course) but in the sense of, perhaps, sitting in the front seat of the front train carriage even though we know those are the seats which guarantee our death in a crash. Not even though—we sit there because we know this.

Three out of seven days a week I don’t care if I live or die.

One day a week I very much want to die.

The other three, the days where I desire to live, and desire it so passionately that it wakes me in the middle of the night, broken out in sweat and tears, praying to a god I half-believe in to please not make the end ever come, it’s those three that cause all my problems, all our problems, social unrest and relationship woes and destruction of nature and egoic behaviour. Or so Ernest Becker claims.

It’s our midnight prayer—the begging for more life, terror of the nothing which breathes in the dark—that enslaves us and causes us to act out. To hurt and to build. To be free, we have to accept death. With acceptance of death comes an end to, or at least a modification of, immortality projects

(that’s what Becker calls them, immortality projects, such as, for example, colonising Mars or mining Greenland or creating an authoritarian superstate or drilling for oil in a national park or withholding contraception from religious followers to build a bigger base of believers to pay the church in future or abusing kids or crow-barring someone’s windshield in a road rage incident or charging predatory interest or murdering everyone in a village in order to steal their homes or hurting a lover on purpose with words)

and the beginning of a search for naked truth.

We wake in the night, afraid of dying, desperate to prolong our existence, praying for it. Then we go beyond this prayer, somehow, and pray instead for dignity. The dignity to face the expanse of nonbeing, even if it doesn’t turn out to be real (of course we hope it’s not real). To accept nothingness as real is to begin to be free.

My point is only that on the way to Antarctica there are colossal squids whose skin is glass, who light themselves from within, and whose faded outlines of organs are visible. If we could see our own organs, we would know ourselves for what we are (vulnerable, temporary animals, meat) and perhaps be satisfied with the fact that we can think and experience and make personalities for ourselves, and not need anything else.

The contrast between what we are materially (meat) and what we are capable of (psychic depth, being moved by beauty so that it changes us, acceptance of change, love) is so shocking, so actually unbelievable, that we should need nothing else other than this fact to satisfy us for our whole lives. To become conscious of it, over and over, is enough for a life. To try and express this consciousness is already a delectable excess.

Nobody needs to order and return five pairs of trousers or look at reels or colonise Mars.

Imagine yourself as a glass squid swimming the near-empty undersea beneath a near-empty continent of pure ice which was, incredibly, for reality changes so constantly and profoundly and isn’t that an insane firework in your heart, once full of green rainforest and teeming with every kind of life, even dinosaurs, maybe even us, maybe even you, and maybe me.

There is something beautiful about civilisation. There’s something beautiful about an ornately decorated doorway, the golden ceiling of a mosque or a cathedral, a martello tower, a lighthouse, a cinema, a cafe, a nighttime city street in 1970s neon rain. But what if we had never made it? What if we had done everything differently, and kindly? What if we had started out by accepting our fate: nonbeing? What would be available to us now, in the way of beauty, in the way of expanse? What sort of civilisation might we have made instead, to what uses might we put our technologies?

Imagine the lands that would still exist. Imagine the animals, the mysteries, the natural fields, the created fields, the extent of the silence, the simplicity of prayer. It’s important to imagine this, now. A different world, where we know good and evil and life and death properly, deeply, where we become adults or, better yet, become as baby children again in wonder and animals in wisdom and wise adults in stillness, stop grasping, become a dignified species worth saving. Become as the glass squid, who knows how to transcend.

Notes

See Robin George Andrews, ‘First ever video shows colossal squid in natural habitat,’ on the National Geographic website (15 April 2025), for a description of the glass squid sighting, with photos and video. Enjoy.

For the full story on Antarctic climate and geological formation since the planet’s inception, and every other thing about Antarctica you might want to know, see David W. H. Walton (ed.), Antarctica: global science from a frozen continent (Cambridge University Press 2013).

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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?

MARIANNE DAIGH: I’ve been writing since childhood — stories, poems, essays, journals. The first story I remember was about a horse. Who knows why. I had no experience of horses. Everything I wrote was too long, including the horse story. The teacher pulled me up for it in front of the whole class. I was 9. The horse story was 11 pages long and the assignment was 2 pages, maybe. This is good, she said, but unnecessary. You didn’t need to do it. So, nothing changes.

I’m not sure if writing explores questions that can’t be explored any other way. Having access to another person's mind in such vivid detail is not a normal life experience, so that’s quite special. Basically it’s the medium I’m using because it’s what I know how to do.

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?

MD: Usually a line or image occurs first. For one story, the first line came to me fully formed while chopping vegetables. Often the lines and images are random and pointless, but sometimes there’s a whole piece of work in them. This essay came from a phone conversation with my friend Caitlin and a video my mom sent me of the glass squid. Thanks Mom and Caitlin.

My routine depends on the season. March to October it’s easy to wake up early and write for a couple of hours, then revise or work on side pieces at night. I write best late night and early morning, which is fucked up. Winter is awful for writing. I’m still figuring this out.

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?

MD: That’s easy. Religion. I can’t stop writing about the religious dimension. I spent a good portion of my adult life studying theology and writing academic theological essays. I have tried to move on, both in life and in art, to no avail. It constantly insinuates itself. I would say I should just accept it, but maybe the reason it remains interesting is because I keep running away.

The other subject almost all of my work touches on is the natural world. These aren't unrelated. Nature and the divine are the ultimate characters because they're all around us but their mystery is impenetrable.

If not a writer, who would you be?

MD: Filmmaker. If I thought I could access the training or talent, I’d do it now.

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?

MD: There’s an Irish writer and podcaster called Blindboy. If you know him you know him — he wears a bag on his head. I’m a fan. He speaks a lot about the artistic process and the importance of having craic with yourself on the page. Craic is an Irish term for fun, hilarity, play. All the other ego shit about writing is not only bad for you, but it also leads to bad art. When you’re having craic with yourself on the page, in a state of flow, that’s when the writing is good and the process is worth it.

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

MD: Not to jinx it, but I’m working on a book. I’ve been writing creatively in a focused, serious way for about two years now, so I feel ready to tackle a book. Jk, I have no idea what I’m doing. So far it’s good craic.

It is simultaneously improving and ruining my life by forcing me to be more disciplined with time. I also tend to lay in bed at night thinking about how bad it is, which is unpleasant.

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?

MD: James Baldwin teaches me how to make a sentence. Anne Carson teaches me to tell the truth and that I can, at the end of the day, write however the fuck I want to write. Dostoevsky teaches me that a story is allowed to be thrilling and deep at the same time. James Dickey (my substack is named after one of his poems) teaches me to write about the natural world with love and respect. He's also made me think twice about camping.

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.

MD: Check out the Irish doom folk band Øxn. Their album is called Cyrm. Weirdos who enjoy this essay would probably enjoy the album. They close with a cover of the Scott Walker song Farmer in the City — absolutely gorgeous.

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Note on Artwork

We’ve paired this piece with Kay Sage’s Le Passage (1956).1 A woman sits at the edge of a plain cracked into pale shards, her bare back to us, facing a grey horizon. I remember first seeing this painting and thinking she’s sitting by a frozen ocean witnessing slow ice shelves. I suppose it could be either really. The uncertainty and melancholic calmness of this painting evokes for me the same mood rising from this beautiful essay.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I won’t dilly dally much today because I really want y’all to dive into not one but two new amazing flash pieces from the wonderfully weird and wild imagination of GennaRose Nethercott (one of my most favorite contemporary writers and poets). Go forth!

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The Museum of Doors

It begins at the entrance: a paint-peeled green door with a faulty latch, the twin of your apartment door back home. Within, you will find every other door you have ever passed through. The tall wooden door with the crystal handle from your grandmother’s house. The door to the driver’s side of your first car. The door you closed when you left the termite-ridden farmhouse you shared with your husband and never reopened, and all the doors that came after. Shop doors and doors to the bedrooms of one night stands and hissing electric doors into department stores and the hospital door through which you first exited after being born.

Most of the doors you do not recognize or remember, but the metal placards insist you have, at one point, crossed through them. Some of the doors don’t look like doors. A door can be many things. One door is your first lover, fumbling with your bra clasp in the dark. One door is the phone call from your sister, the tremor in her voice when she found your father on the sofa after his stroke. One of the doors is the horse who bucked you off when you were eleven, marking the moment you realized you were mortal and fragile and would one day pass through the final door of death.

There is a special exhibit in The Museum of Doors containing all the doors you almost opened… but chose not to. They stand sarcophagus-tall and sealed–relegated to their own wing, away from the others. For an additional fee, the curator will pull a delicate silver key from his pocket and let you slide it into the lock of one of these doors. You must not turn the key–though yes, it fits. You must not open the door. You can only stand there, the metal warming in your hand. On the other side, you hear another you breathing–wondering who they would be if only they had left this door closed.

The Museum of Cats

No one knows how long they’ve been there–the cats of Viareggio. Nor is it known how many there are, save among the cats themselves. The curators, too, are cats and do not share their records with a human public. All we can say is: there are certainly hundreds, possibly thousands.

The museum itself is not a building, but a bank of large stones stacked by the shore of the Ligurian Sea. This pile stretches a good kilometer from end to end. Each boulder is roughly the size of a cat.

The cats live among the stones.

Visit in late summer, and you’ll see them sunning themselves, draped like fur coats over the rocks. Tabbies and tortoise shell. Sphinxes gone oily and pink with heat. Fat orange tomcats feasting on sardines thrown to them by visiting spectators. The cats weave in and out of white marble like shadows. When the tide is low, they breed, yowling under moonlight. When the tide is high, we do not know where they go. They turn from us. They make their plans. Strange, untranslatable plans that alter the course of human history: Every great war. Every newborn king. Every monument raised or fallen. It was planned here first, strained through a comb of whiskers.

You too have been shaped by the cats. What–did you think your choices were your own? No. The cats scratched the entirety of your life into their secret ledgers, long before you came to be. Philosophers of our own species have spent centuries debating the balance between the cats’ influence and our believed free will. And it’s easier, no? To accept that all of this, it is the cats’ doing. Your worst mistakes: not your mistakes, at all. They are merely a flea behind the ear, swatted with a careless paw.

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Also by GennaRose Nethercott:

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Dorothea Tanning’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1943)1, the title of which is a reference to Mozart, translating as “a little night music. The painting depicts a hotel corridor of sorts, a place of transience, with the doors shut and numbered like exhibits, a sunflower the size of a body forcing its way down the red carpet, two girls caught in a wind no one else can feel, hair lifting, dresses already torn. Save one, none of the doors open, at least not as we are shown them. In the far corner is just one ajar door, a bar of light flooding in cleanly…beckoning…warding off? I’ve spent so long gazing at this painting and I couldn’t think of a better piece to lend visual harmony to the beguiling museums conjured by GennaRose.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you the winner of our second Micro of the Month challenge! The theme was Rabbits and you guys…I had no idea y’all loved rabbits so much, haha. Karan and I moved this month from the US to Canada and mostly what we were reading during that time was your micros on rabbits…it was a delightful experience and I’d have it no other way! I hope you enjoy the piece we’ve picked as much as we did.

Details for June’s Micro of the Month Writing Challenge

Opens: NOW!

Closes: June 3, Midnight

Theme: Love & Sex

Submit here →

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I lift the kit from her cage to cradle her lop-eared comfort. She knows my hands. She knows the dark. Light. Alfalfa, piss, droppings. Her mother’s teats, my human smell. To be so small, to be made airborne, placed on my long thighs. She doesn’t bite. Maybe she should.

We are entangled, this baby and I, two hearts beating. If it’s a race, hers is winning. Mine is in the running. She can’t know promises, the ones I’ve made, the ones I’m breaking—how hard it is to be honest to oneself. She can’t know the voice in my head and how it’s different from what I say to you out loud, how even the truth I tell myself is fiction, how everything I know is a story that I’ve shaped.

What can she know of story? So sits this baby with her translucent ears, her tiny brain of happiness, or anxiety, or indifference. She might know my cardigan is her relative. She might feel me shrink when you appear. She doesn’t know the splintered guitar, or where I’m bruised. I stroke the unearthly soft of her, or earthly, for what is she but of the earth. She doesn’t wear a watch. Or read the news. Better than the poet, she knows the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. She would eatthe flower. I will eat the roots.

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Contributor’s Note

What does a tiny rabbit, a “kit,” newly arrived on the planet, feel when I put it on my thighs and stroke it—it, with 40 million years of deep instinct as prey, knowing it is edible, and what that does to the heart—and me, as predator. I delight in its adorable self. Soft. Vulnerable. Safe in the knowledge it won’t bite. Does it feel safe? Or is its stillness an act of self-preservation? I have voices in my head about which it can’t have a clue. It knows what it knows, which we underestimate if we’re being true to form. I’m interested in how animals perceive their lives, how we perceive ours in that context. We are, as a species, egocentric, but each being, walrus, kit, scarlet mite, is equally as important to itself. I feel reverence for those unique lives. Here, the leap to fiction becomes what happens when you put these worlds and consciousnesses together, when the human is a different kind of vulnerable. Or is she? She is psychological prey. She is thinking that everything she knows is a construct in her mind. Maybe she’s thinking she should bite. She is thinking this rabbit knows something deeply fundamental, something important, something she doesn’t.

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LEAF SHEEP

Poems about animals. Poems about us (with animals). All the creatures, great and small, one poem at a time.

By D M Gordon

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I hope you’re all settled in for the evening because below I’m sharing with you a new kickass brilliant story by the award-winning writer Isabel J. Kim. I first discovered her work in Clarkesworld, when I all but fell outta my chair because her story was unlike anything I’d ever read. I hope that you all too fall out of your chairs after reading “Nomenclature”, then, in the best way possible ofc!

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So God looks down from heaven and says to Cain, “You have to invent murder.”

Cain looks up from the field and says, “OK, you got it, God. What’s murder?”

And God says, “Murder is when you kill someone with intent, so you’re going to kill your brother.”

And Cain says, “What’s a brother?”

And God says, “You’re going to have to invent that first, actually.”

Sanctuary puts his armor on from the bottom up. Greaves, breastplate, gloves, helmet. Identification taught him that, before Identification was blown up in a drone strike.

“You need your hands free for as long as possible,” Ident told him, back when Sanct had just been decanted. “The buckles on the breastplate are a bitch, and after you get it on, it’s hard as fuck to bend over.”

Sanct had nodded, uncertain. He hadn’t known enough about the world to disagree with Ident. And anyway, Ident was his squad leader, so he was in charge of Sanct, and Sanct was six hours old, his brain pre-loaded with the Basic Bio™ package and the Standard Movement™ package and a handful of trade secret combat sims. Sanct didn’t know anything much about anything, other than that he was a soldier and he had been born to fight and die. So, he was imprinting hard on Ident.

“This is where you can make a joke about copulation,” Indent had said, kindly. “It makes the commanders feel more comfortable, if you do things like that.”

“What’s copulation?”

“It’s how people are made. Not us. People. You and I and all the other pieces of meat are made in the vats, but the commanders and the civvies at home are made by a male and a female copulating. The male inserts his penis into the female’s vagina. Or so I’m told. I’ve never seen a female. You won’t either. But the commanders are people, so they like to imagine we’re people too.”

“Okay, so copulation,” Sanct had said. “And my armor on from the bottom up.”

“Quick study, Sanct,” Ident had said.

Two months later, he’d be dead. Drone strike. Death from above, Ident’s limbs flying and his red Blood™ leaking out onto the desert rock. Sanct would have a perfect visual of Ident getting blown to high heaven.

“What do we do,” Sanct would whisper, shocked by the sight. This wasn’t the first time someone had died on the battlefield, but it was the first time his squad leader would have died, and he would feel something sharp and terrible in his chest. Not a physical feeling, but something else.

“Nothing,” Feign would say, before hustling Sanct and Copyright and Passage back into their vehicle and driving them back to base like a maniac while arguing with the commander over the comms, even though Sanct was supposed to be driving. And then Feign would be the new squad leader. And they wouldn’t talk about Ident again. The same way they didn’t talk about Clay and Endure and all the others who had been downed, in the two months since Sanct had been decanted.

Things that exist so far: light, darkness, life, death, mothers, fathers, god, satan, all the animals, shame, the wasteland, the garden, snakes.
Things that don’t yet exist: murder, brothers, your mother weeping, your father moaning, the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.

The pieces of meat are similar to human beings in that they’re derived from a single, legally acquired pool of human DNA, although the meat’s formulation has been substantially improved on through clever technological enhancements. The meat has limbs that are swappable and more durable, their blood is Blood™, and they’re stronger, overall, with improved eyesight. The meat is decanted and is ready to go after a single week of conditioning. The pieces of meat don’t have names. They only have randomly-assigned callsigns.

Sanct doesn’t know how many conflicts the meat is deployed for. He only knows that he has been decanted into a rocky desert, where the sun is hot and it never rains and they have to slather their exposed flesh with a thick white goo before going outside, to protect them from the UV rays.

There were rumors and conspiracy theories among Sanct’s squad, that they haven’t been deployed in the Middle East or Africa or the American Southwest, that they’re on an entire planet entirely. There’s no way to know. None of them knew that much about earth, other than what was included in the Basic Bio™ package. Being on another planet would explain why they rarely saw commanders, but that fact could also have been explained by the fact that most warfare has been automated. In some ways, the meat’s presence is anachronistic.

“They lost their taste for dying,” Right had said. “But they didn’t lose their taste for killing. And you wanna hear my theories?”

Copyright knew more about what was going on than anyone else, because Right had an in with a commander who called on the off-hours. Sanct and the others figured it was probably some sort of strange romance, although romance was maybe the wrong word. Right and the Commander mostly had long, secret conversations over the comms, and occasionally Right was called in for a special mission that he would return from, tight-lipped.

Sanct never asked about what happened with the commander. They all had topics they didn’t want to touch. Right’s commander, Feign’s soap carvings, Sanct’s reaction to Ident’s death.

“Sure,” Sanct said.

“The civvies like to watch. Nah. Like’s not the right word. We look like them, right? They can….what’s the word, empathize, with us dying. And other than us, it’s all machines and code and shit. It doesn’t feel like a fight, a real fight with stakes, if you cripple a landship or a drone. But us, we’re full of Blood-Tee-Em. We’re a good watch. You can feel like your team’s really winning, when we take a base. And when we die, you can feel sorry for us.”

Sanct considered this. It would explain why they were issued rifles, instead of ion cannons and beamers. It would explain why they existed at all.

“If they felt so sorry about us, they shouldn’t have us out here,” Sanct said, and it came out wistful because even Sanct, less than four months old, understood that it was their lot to fight and die. If they weren’t made for this, they wouldn’t have been made for anything at all.

And despite everything, Sanct is glad to have been decanted.

Cain goes home after God’s command. He eats dinner with his mother and his father. Abel is somewhere in the hills and valleys, with his flock, and won’t be home until dark.

And Eve says, “You look tired, Cain. Are you alright?”

And Cain says, “God asked me to do some stuff, and I don’t know about it.”

And Eve says, “Oh that guy.”

And Cain doesn’t ask her to elaborate, because his mother is using that tone she uses when she talks about the cows having escaped the pasture, the rain having ruined the drying laundry, the dog having shit inside. Which is to say, when she talks about a natural phenomenon that she can’t argue with, only able to deal with in the aftermath.

And Cain eats his dinner and thinks about Abel. His father doesn’t say anything. For the entirety of Cain’s life, Adam has seemed a little defeated.

Sanct’s life is split into downtime and uptime. Downtime is for sleep, showers, eating real food, watching propaganda, playing card games with increasingly complex rules. Uptime is for digesting mandates from the commanders and piling into vehicles and driving out to combat zones, for readying their rifles, for shooting. It’s for planning maneuvers with landships and drones and readying traps and strike points. It’s for trying to recover territory. It’s for sitting behind a brick wall, three in the morning, heart in Sanct’s mouth while he hears shelling in the distance.

By month eleven, Sanct’s the second-oldest member of his squad. He no longer drives the vehicle—the honor of the safest seat is reserved for the youngest piece of meat. Instead, Sanct runs comms and tactics, which should be Right’s job, but Right’s their gunner, since he’s shit at reading. Probably there was something wrong with his Basic Bio™ download.

But it works out okay, because Right’s a good shot.

Today they’re being deployed for a longer mission—a week, trying to recapture a supply depot that command thinks has been abandoned. Right’s late, though, which is aggravating. Sanct just grits his teeth and flips through the maps and the mission briefing, because realistically, it doesn’t matter if they’re half an hour late getting out. They’ll drive a little faster and it’ll be fine.

Right finally jogs over.

“Sorry, my commander called,” he says, swinging over the side of the vehicle and getting cozy up next to Sanct and the gun mounted on the open back of their ride. “Start the car, Popular!”

Pop starts the vehicle, arcing them out of the hanger and into the burning desert. Sanct stashes his papers and glances at Right.

“Your commander give you anything useful?”

“Nah. Just wanted some attention before I headed out.”

“Hm,” Sanct says. They’re eating ground fast, but it would still be a long drive. He was sore, still, from the last deployment. He had gotten a real bad full-body bruise from when half a building had fallen on him. Right had risked his life dragging him out of that situation. They’re the two oldest in their squad, now. They’ve known each other for the entirety of Sanct’s life. “Why’s he like you, anyway?”

Right shrugs. Folds his legs, wincing as he changes position.

“It’s not romantic. Sorry if that loses you any bets.”

“Oh yeah?” Sanct says, his interest piqued.

“He just likes to talk. I apparently look exactly like his dead son,” Right says. “Fucked, right?”

“Yeah,” Sanct says, for lack of anything else he can say. The wind whistles around them. They have to lean close together to speak.

“He says he wants to get me out of here,” Right says, quietly, against Sanct’s cheek. “But I’m pretty sure he’s full of shit. I bet he’s said that to dozens of guys that have my face. His son’s face. Whatever.”

“Could all have been you,” Sanct says.

“You know I don’t believe that stuff,” Right says, and then the wind picks up, and it’s too loud to talk anymore, so they don’t.

A lot of the meat believes in reincarnation. They say that the stuff that makes you you is still in the gene pool, and eventually your combination will be reassembled, and then you’ll get printed and decanted again.

They say that unlike everything else in the universe, the meat is destined to come around again. There’s only so many neural patterns and body types that have been preprogrammed into the vats, and eventually, something exactly like you will be printed, and it will be the perfect shape for your soul to re-inhabit.

There’s guys that get really spiritual about it. There’s a smuggled book on Buddhism that gets passed around the barracks. A Bible, too, and a book of Norse mythology.

Sanct read them all, but he doesn’t know if he believes in any of it.

After dinner, Cain sits on a bale of hay and looks at the fields and the orchards and the great velvet sky above the basin of the valley that his brother is herding sheep in, and he sees the speck of his brother among the sheep and he can faintly imagine that he hears his brother singing.

Cain gets up and begins walking toward the valley. God has called him. He’s supposed to answer.

The next day, their vehicle pulls a tripwire as they’re rolling past an aquifer. Automatic turrets spring from the ground and start shooting at the squad.

“Duck,” Sanct shouts, and everyone crashes to the floor, except for Pop, who frantically puts the vehicle in reverse and slams his foot on the acceleration. Right begins inching shakily his way over to the gun mounted on the back.

“Don’t—” Sanct says. Over the edge of the vehicle he can see that there are reinforcements, coming to back up the turrets.

“They’re going to radio in that they saw us unless we get them now,” Right shouts, and hauls himself up to brace against the gun. “Get down!”

Sanct dives back down. He hears the whine of the staccato scream of the big gun above him as it charges up and then Right fires, one, two, three times. Sanct peeks over the edge of the vehicle. One turret down. Couple of assholes coming right at them. Sanct spins his rifle from his back into his arms and takes a couple of shots, gritting his teeth as Blood™ blooms on the adversaries’ uniforms. Hope springs in Sanct’s heart. Maybe this will be easy.

And then he hears two more shots, one after another, and then he’s not paying attention to anything at all because their vehicle is swinging wildly and next to him, Right’s bloody body is falling and ragdolling out of the vehicle and it’s happening too fast for Sanct to say or do anything, and Sanct is gripping the side of the vehicle as it spins out of control and he hears shots, and for a long moment the world is just a smear of color and noise until the vehicle

“Pop’s dead,” Waste shouts from the front. Sanct looks over the edge, and Waste is leaned over with his hands on the steering wheel, half-sitting on Pop’s dead body as he pushes down on the acceleration with his foot.

Pop’s head dangles. Blood™ oozes out of the side of his neck. Sanct feels a sick numb feeling in his stomach. There’s Blood™ in the back of the vehicle, too, where Right was shot, where he fell. It’s all over where it smeared against the low walls before Right was tossed out.

It happened so fast. It always happens so fast. Sanct is never going to see Right again.

“We going back, Sanct?” Waste asks. He’s still got his foot on the acceleration. Nobody’s chasing them, at least.

Right. Sanct’s in charge now. Sanct’s in charge and Right and Pop are dead, and its all the fucking bastards fault and it’s a day’s drive back to base, and he has to decide what they’re going to do next. He’s the oldest, now. Right is never going to get back to his commander.

If they go back, they’re just going to have to report what happened, and they’re going to have to come back out and the situation is just going to get worse.

“No,” Sanct says. “We didn’t need the whole team for this one. We keep going.”

They drive through the rest of the day and the rest of the night. They decide to dump Pop’s body at sunset. Until then, it lies in the back of the vehicle, and Sanct drives, because Waste’s hands are shaking too much after the first few miles. They don’t clean the Blood™ off of the upholstery and dashboard—they only have so much water to spare. Sanct’s hands are tacky by mile number ten. They drive in silence. The sun begins to go down, slowly, at first, and then all at once.

Sanct pulls over near a rock formation. They drag Pop’s body across the sand. They set it facing the setting sun. They close it’s eyes. They head back to the vehicle. Sanct sits heavily down in the drivers’ seat. He doesn’t know if it’s better or worse, that they don’t have Right’s body. The way it ragdolled was terrible.

“Is it always like this?” Waste asks.

“No. Only sometimes.”

“I wish I were dead,” Waste says. “Instead of. Them.”

“It’ll be better in the morning,” Sanct says, and wishes that he had anything better to say, that he believed like some of the others did, that everyone would be reincarnated, that they would live and die again. But all he has are platitudes. The same ones that Ident used to tell him, though, when Sanct got scared. When Clay and Endure were killed. It would be better in the morning.

“Okay,” Waste says. “Do you want me to drive?”

Sanct shakes his head. He starts the engine. They continue.

The rest of the trip is bizarrely peaceful, as if they’re receiving some cosmic recompense for the death of half their squad. Sanct tries not to think about it. He’ll think about it later. He should be used to this by now—they’ve rotated so many pieces of meat out of his squad—but he never is. It always feels different. It’s always a surprise.

Their luck runs out as they approach the supply depot. It’s not abandoned. There are turrets at the corners, vehicles visible behind a barricade, and when Sanct pulls up his heat vision goggles, it’s clear that there are multiple lifesigns inside. Sanct swears. The depot was supposed to be empty. The survivors from the earlier aquifer shootout must have called ahead.

“We heading back?” Waste says.

Sanct hesitates. If they return, they’ll just be sent out again, with two new freshly decanted pieces of meat. The supply depot might be better guarded by then, and there might be more ambushes along the road now that the other side knows that they’re trying to take the depot. And then what? Freshly decanted meat, dead.

He shakes his head. “We’re calling in a drone strike.”

“We can do that?”

“Not usually,” Sanct says. Sanct is eleven months old, though. Sanct understands relationships, and how they change what people are going to do. “I’m going to call Copyright’s commander.”

At the edge of the valley, where the grass turns to rock and sand, Cain sees Abel. He’s a small figure down in the valley. Cain recognizes Abel by the crook of his staff among the sheep, and then by the cloak that their mother has woven for him. It isn’t very good. All their clothes are poorly made. Nobody has made clothes before their mother.

And Abel waves his staff and calls, “Cain!”

And Cain waves back, rock in his hand, and says, “Abel!”

The commander listens to Sanct’s explanation without interrupting. When Sanct is done, the commander speaks in a calm, measured tone.

“In half an hour, there will be a drone flying overhead with a precision payload. Make sure that you’re at least two hundred meters away.”

“Copy that. Thank you.”

Sanct leans back against his seat, the tension leaching out of his muscles. Reinforcements are coming. He’s not going to have to lead Waste to his death.

“Was it bad, when he died?” the commander asks.

“It wasn’t bad,” Sanct lies.

Cain’s killed a lot of things. Bugs. Snakes. Lizards. Sheep. A dog, once, when it attacked him first. He’s reaped sheaf after sheaf of grain, if that counts as killing anything. His parents have told him that every single thing on earth is alive, and that all of them were created by God. God has not provided any guidance on the subject.

Nobody else on the earth has a brother, other than Cain, other than Abel. Cain thinks that killing Abel is going to be different than killing the dog. But he doesn’t know. He’s never had a brother before. Nobody has.

And Abel calls out, “Why do you have a rock?”

The drone streaks overhead. From its belly a black speck drops and hits the supply depot and there’s a bright, beautiful plume of flame. Dense clouds of black smoke billow from the windows and broken ceilings.

Sanct and Waste watch the supply depot smolder. The fire begins to flicker out. The smoke trails into the bright blue of the sky. Sanct gets the heat vision goggles out and squints through them. There’s too much ambient warmth to tell if there’s anyone still alive. Sanct unlocks the vehicle, strapping his weapons to his back and to his belt.

“If I’m not back in an hour, drive back without me,” he says, and hoists himself out.

And Cain looks down at his brother and thinks about light, darkness, life, death, his mother, his father, God, all the animals, and the story that his mother once told him about paradise and the snake and his father, when he asked why she was so sad. And he thinks about his sickle. And he thinks about his flail. And he thinks about his hoe, and the rocks he digs out of the ground, and he thinks about how strong he is, from the days in the field. How the human arm is engineered for throwing.

And Cain thinks about Abel. How soft Abel’s head is. What is a brother? What does a brother matter to him?

The rock is warm in his hands.

Sanct walks through the bombed-out ruins of the supply depot. The exterior walls are still intact. Inside, the structure is a ruin. Sanct wonders about the waste of it all. The original plan had been to take the depot clean, but he supposes that destroying it and preventing the enemy from having it is better. He glances through the heat vision goggles every few meters. So far, there isn’t anything that looks like a live body. He steps over a corpse, and then a second one. There’s Blood™ and ash on the floors.

He gets nearly to the other side of the building before he raises the heat vision goggles and sees the figure on the other side of the wall, hot and alive. Sanct angles himself against the wall and peers through the open door. Yes. There he is. One survivor, then. It could have been worse.

Sanct lines up his shot. He doesn’t think. He shoots. There is a high whine, and then the sound of someone collapsing, swearing. Sanct waits for the ensuing silence. It doesn’t occur.

Sanct sighs. Rolls his shoulders. Walks outside with his rifle in hand, ready to deal the finishing blow. After this is over, he’ll go out to his vehicle, and then him and Waste will head back to base.

And God, standing next to Cain like he always does, says: “Look, it is crucial that you invent the act of putting the rock against the head and bashing it open.”
And Cain says: “Can I do that to a sheep, instead?”
And God says: “No. It’s got to be a person.”

And Sanct looks at the stranger, and the stranger looks at him, and the stranger is bleeding from his thigh and there is a growing pool of Blood™ around him, and Sanct understands at that moment.

The zealots are right. They’re all made of the same meat. The same gene pool and presets. The same faces and the same bodies and the same DNA being printed out on Sanct’s side, on this stranger’s side, on all the sides of every conflict. Every piece of meat.

This stranger has Ident’s face.

And Cain says, “You know, I think my mom was right about you when she said that she loves you but doesn’t like you.”
And God says, “I don’t care if you like me. Do you love me?”
And Cain says, “I don’t know what love is. That hasn’t been invented yet.”
And God says, “Shit. Fuck. Whoops. Hold on one second.”
And Cain feels a pain in his heart so great that he feels like he is dying.

“Can you make this quick?” the stranger that looks like Ident wheezes. He’s unarmed. He’s wearing downtime clothing. He looks exactly like Ident did, before Ident died.

There is sweat and white sludge dripping into Sanct’s eyes. He wipes them. He looks up at the sky. The drones. The birds. The beating sun. Where are the commanders and the civvies and all the people who are people might be watching them right now? Sanct’s thoughts are all bleary, smeared with exhaustion There are drones high in the sky and there is a camera on his helmet and maybe the same thing on not-Ident’s helmet. Is anyone looking? Is anyone ever looking?

“Hey, man,” Not-Ident says. “We don’t have all day here. C’mon. I don’t need any foreplay. Don’t fucking draw this out, kid.”

And Sanct, looks back down. He wonders, despairingly, rifle held ready in his arms like a warm lover, if a crass vocabulary is genetic. He puts his finger on the trigger. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to watch this. And besides. He’s one meter away. His aim doesn’t need to be perfect.

“Now, Cain,” God says.

Cain has never disobeyed God before. He feels love like a deep stupid painful throb in his heart. He closes his eyes.

Sanct opens his eyes. He throws down his rifle. He unbuckles his gloves and his body armor. His breastplate falls to the ground. He strips his sweaty, stained uniform, and then his sweaty undershirt that had once been bleach-white. He ties the undershirt to the barrel of his gun. He jams the gun into the sand. He leans down and heaves not-Ident’s body over his shoulder.

“Hold on to me,” he says. “Don’t fucking bite.”

“The hell are you doing?” Not-Ident wheezes.

“Doesn’t matter, you’re probably going to die either way. I probably nicked an artery”

Sanct hefts Not-Ident’s weight. His shoulders are killing him. Not-Ident is heavy as hell.

“You’re insane,” Not-Ident says.

“Nah,” Sanct says. “You look exactly like someone I used to care about. All my friends are dead. And I’m done with this shit. I’m tired. Aren’t you tired?”

Silence for a moment, before Not-Ident coughs wetly.

“Yeah. I’m tired.”

Sanct looks to the sky.

“I’m done with this shit,” he says again, to the sun, to the drones, to anyone else who is watching. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

And then Sanct turns and starts walking. He grips the white flag like it is a life buoy. He is taking one step after another, away from his vehicle, away from Waste, away from the bombed-out supply depot. He doesn’t know where he’s going. He doesn’t know if there’s anyone else out there. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. He doesn’t know if Not-Ident is going to die.

Sanct takes step after step. He is waiting for Right’s commander to kill him with a remote drone strike. He is waiting for anyone to stop him.

“What do they call you?” Sanct asks.

“History. Tory, to my friends.”

“I’m Sanct.”

“Hi,” Tory says, and then coughs again. “Again. I just want to make it clear. You’re crazy, and we’re both going to be dead.”

“Yeah. But right now, we’re alive. So shut the fuck up, and let me carry you.”

And Tory laughs, wheezing, and it’s strong enough that Sanct thinks that his Blood™ might have clotted and Tory’s not going to bleed out immediately. And right now they’re both alive, and they still have a couple liters of water and the desert is vast and deep and there is no one immediately coming to kill them, and Sanct is choosing not to kill anyone ever again.

And Cain bashes God in the head with a rock, and wanders into the desert.

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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?

ISABEL J. KIM: I started writing with a pretty conventional story: I was a kid, and a teacher gave me praise for my fiction. Shout out Dr. Horn from Warren Middle School, you set me on a path that led me to such strange places as “writing short science fiction stories.” I started writing stories with more than superficial meaning mostly because I have a hard time writing stories that don’t have any meaning, in fact, I am probably too didactic in my fiction and have actively been working to pull that aspect back, to middling effect. I think part of the reason why I do this, though, is that I have a hard time explaining my thoughts through a traditional essay format, and sometimes I feel that I’m the recipient of a particularly strange curse: I can only say how I feel through the lens of a 4000 word science fiction story, a format that nobody asked me to write (well, now people ask me to write them, but for a long time they didn’t!).

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?

IJK: I went full time as an author a little over a year ago, and since then any semblance of a consistent routine has regrettably dissipated, despite my best efforts. Things happen when they happen, I work pretty much every day at any time between 7am and midnight, but I do less work per day than I used to, when I had a more traditional job. I do try to write during “normal” work hours, just to match my partner’s schedule. I also have different drafting cadences for novels and short fiction—since you've got a piece of my short fiction here, I’ll talk about that process. I usually start with one vivid, clear scene or concept that I want to scaffold a story around, which usually isn’t enough to carry the entire narrative, and then I start trying to think about what other concepts might go well in that story. I collect these ideas like a crow collects shiny stones, and these ideas will kind of just be in my brain for weeks or months or years until I have enough pieces that fit together into something cohesive and more interesting than just the sum of their parts. Then I start writing, and it usually goes pretty quickly after that.

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?

IJK: Doubling, bodysharing, death of the self, being overtaken by an alien entity or having to commune with that entity, tremendously strange ethical dilemmas, leaps of faith. I have no idea why all my themes are so strange. In real life I’m fairly cheerful! For a while I was also including the word “fluorescent” in everything I published, but I’ve stopped doing that for now.

If not a writer, who would you be?

IJK: Easy but boring answer: Biglaw corporate transactional attorney, specifically in a leveraged finance or M&A group. That was my profession before I took my own leap of faith.

I became a lawyer because I felt like I should get a "real job," when I was younger, and I liked it enough that I would go back to that. Before I was a lawyer, though, I was thinking about getting an MFA, though, and in that case I would have been doing conceptual installation art and making no money. There were a lot of lives I considered inhabiting when I was twenty-two, okay.

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?

IJK: I’ve both received and would like to pass along this piece of advice: Quantity over quality. Write more stories, get your reps in, learn where you always stutter. This is more effective at quickly improving your craft than endlessly polishing a single narrative ever is. Ideas are cheap, work on your execution. Also, you can recycle those ideas into different executions over time.

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

IJK: I’m working on my second novel draft! My first novel, SUBLIMATION, is out on June 2nd, and I am truly in the trenches working on the next book I owe my publisher. Everyone says that second books are harder and I didn’t believe them, but this draft? This draft wants to kill me. With hammers. If it doesn’t kill me, though, this book will be fun for people to read. I’ve been pitching it as Piranesi meets the Backrooms, and it is about a mall in an alternate reality that goes on forever, and it is about how empire and cultures replicate themselves. It’s also about losing your girlfriend at the mall.

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?

IJK: In no particular order: Kazuo Ishiguro, Masaaki Yuasa, Wes Anderson, the Wachowski sisters, Kelly Link, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Ted Chiang, Porpentine Charity Heartscape. And some specific works–Catch-22, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Homestuck, Futurama, OFF, 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss. I am, for better or for worse, a product of my time and also of the internet. And I’m probably forgetting people and media, too.

Many of the names and pieces of media on this list have shown me how to create a perfect traditional narrative, and then, how to break a traditional narrative in an effective way. The other thing that many of these creatives have shown me is how you can use humor effectively, and how humor and horror are two sides of the same coin.

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.

IJK: DAK0TA by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries—this was one of the first pieces of video art that made me think of text as an artform. It plays with time and text and music, and it’s a little dated now (it’s quite old, I first saw it a decade ago), but I think it still holds up as an experience.

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Notes on Art

I remember first seeing this painting and thinking, wait wait Willliam Blake writes such good poems and he’s a great artist. But of course, talent is in a way a divine gift, and indeed in The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve1, Blake draws away the layers of divinity in the figures depicted here. We witness Cain fleeing into the wilderness with his hair seemingly on fire, mouth open in a howl, while Adam and Eve cradle the body of their dead son. There is a crack in the veil of light, of God, and evil has sprouted yes, but also there is family, and heartbreak, and as you ponder Cain’s interiority, just…humanity. This is exactly what Isabel J. Kim is so darn good at. She gives us strange, ancient, biblical even (as you saw in Nomenclature) characters and tales, and yet it is always their humanity, however marred, that shines through.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, below we share a flash nonfiction piece that could well be a prose poem or a series of handwritten letters torn at seemingly random places and yet it binds together into a delicate, cohesive whole full of longing and love. Enjoy!

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Adele had a small waist, a blue Chevy pickup and a laugh that would fry an egg. She was studying Chinese and landscape architecture and finished with a law degree. Which was about the last I heard of her except for a single Internet post: “I am a dedicated commitment-phobic,” it read. “I dare call it freedom.”

She bought the truck with the last of the insurance money, which also paid her tuition at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her father was a “hot-shit driver” passing on a double yellow line, top down on the Sunliner after a night out in Rolla, Missouri. “If you want to imagine that. I sure don’t. Killed them both.”

She was living in a tent when I met her. At twenty-eight she had four years on me. I had a black-cat tattoo and was a sucker for a bleach blonde with a soft southern drawl. I bought her a gun rack for the truck and we drank Genny Cream Ale and laughed until she peed herself and laughed some more, parked out by Rick’s Sunoco on a hot summer night.

“Dear Addie, Thank you for the newspaper article. Rider and I are so proud of you in New York. The days are longer now, and the pecans are green as lemons. We say that every spring now since you left. Rider’s got his postal pension. He spends his time at home now and is good company. We miss your Momma, and I know you do too. Here’s a little money. The bus still stops at the depot. Your loving Aunt Inez”

Adele and her cousin would shake the trees at her grandmother’s pecan ranch, where she went to live after Aunt Lu got too nervous to mind her. She took the bus from Little Rock to Okemah on her own and stayed in the house in back with Inez and Rider until she finished high school and got on a Greyhound to New York, where she lived with a jewelry maker whose name you’d know on the Lower East Side and saw Lee Morgan at Slug’s the night before his wife shot him between sets. He was thirty-three. It was the same year, ’72, that the Times mentioned her in a review of Moonchildren, and she moved to Vermont and bought the truck.

“Dear Pie,” she wrote me in Jamaica Plain, “I’m rather worried right now. How am I going to survive? You know what I mean? Nervous, nervous, nervousnervousnervous. Strung out. Crazy. Scared. Slippery. Cranial winds. Etc. etc. etc. Oh, I want to be light-hearted about it all, but I’m overwhelmed. I’m POOR. I’m TOO BUSY. I’ve got BUGS. I want to cry. I want my Momma. I long to see you. I would come down to Boston but I can’t afford it. I guess I’ll have to wait for you to come back up here. All my love, Pie.” I was still in love with her, so I did.

She planted a garden in the beds in front of the house, basil, thyme, garlic, and green onions that sprouted every spring after she left me. She could really cook. She made drop biscuits, brown gravy and fried chicken that was perfect, with ease, and talked about her brother who was in prison in Kansas for something he didn’t do or almost didn’t do and threw the plates at me after I washed them and the cups too when I called her a sad cliché.

I paid off all her debts before she left. She gave me a Leica camera to hold. Dinah and Bix, her cats, stayed on to love me on those long dark nights. Or when the stars were out, I would whistle and hear a rustle in the brush on Sunset Hill and whistle again and sit on the front steps until they came back to me.

I found a letter from her Aunt Inez in a file marked “Okemah,” tucked in with a faded studio photograph of her father in his army uniform, thin as a rail with a full-body smirk, lit cigarette and those same sharp cheekbones, “1944” penciled on the back; two snapshots of her mother, left hand on her elbow, ring on her finger, younger than Adele was when we met, prettier; and a two-dollar bill, still crisp, sealed in brown envelope marked “Good Luck” on the front.

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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?

FLEMING MEEKS: I began in fits and starts, in high school, in college. I wanted to find out what was in my head. I wrote like a photographer. I took snap shots. I discovered I could do that by writing and rewriting and rewriting. My first work was very short. I went from there to longer narratives. Word by word. Figuring it out, writing it. Trial and error and patience.

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?

FM: Voice, image, unease. That's all of a piece for me. I don't have a routine. I sit down when I can and where I can and write and think. And boil it down. Compress, And I go where it takes me. I look for ideas and things I could note resolve. Time, time and time helps me figure it out. Many things I couldn't figure out a year or five years or ten years ago start to make sense. I figure it out by stripping the work down and building it back.

I don't have a routine. I don't have a writers room. I can write anywhere. I find stories in what I see all around me. Sometimes things I see and hear touch things I want to know more about, things I want to understand. Snippets of conversation, body language, frustration. When I was a journalist, an editor said he could put me in an empty room for an hour and I would find a story.

The magic is to do it. To fail and fail again. To never give up. much more about failure than success. She published a book of photos of her family. There are something like 60 photos in the book. Or 62 or 64. She and assistant went back and looked at all of the photographs she took for this book, all of glass plates that are her negatives. She uses large format cameras. There were 6,000 plates. Only one in a hundred was acceptable to her. One good photograph out of a hundred, It's very gratifying. I saw her show at the National Gallery of Art in 2018. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings. I have not gotten over it.

It's not about that 10,000 hours crap. It's about working every fucking day and believing in yourself no matter how difficult it is. Sally Mann inspires me more than any other artist. Off the top of my head I can't name a writer who inspires me at that level. Who inspires me day in and day out. No, I can. Philip Roth, Bob Dylan. Yes, they inspire me day in and day out and have for decades.

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?

FM: I think about it like this. Put two people in a room and create a stituation. A problem. A conflict. Emotional, yes. Intellectual, yes. Spiritual, not so much. Conflicts between people, misunderstandings, arguments, longing and desire. I try to land in the middle of it. In media res. To create problems and try to solve them. Resolve them. Often there is not satisfaction, no real resolution. But understanding. These conflicts are also with the self. All of these "people" are parts of the self. Life is tough.

If not a writer, who would you be?

FM: A photographer. Photography for me is always learning. I would love to have done that full time.

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?

FM: Keep working back into a piece. Build it stitch by stitch. Don't be in a hurry.

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

FM: I am combing photography and text. I have something like 35,000 photographs, and I've probably lost another 30,000. I think about my pictures and what I am writing. There is a commonality to it. There is often a connection between what I have written and what I have photographed. I put them together in my head and then on paper.

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?

FM: Bob Dylan. Sally Mann. They are people of my generation or almost of my generation. I marvel about how they figure it out again and again. I constanly learn from them. And learn about persistence.

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.

FM: Any photograph by Saul Leiter. The late interiors of Pierre Bonnard. In the Mood for Love directed by Wong Kar-wai. Every second of it is brilliant.

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Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World1 (1948) — a woman in a pink dress turned away from us, seemingly dragging herself across a field of dry grass toward a gray house on a distant hill. We never see her face. This piece has a similar aesthetic and heart I feel. Adele is rendered down to the cheekbones, the laugh, the bleach blonde, and yet she keeps slipping out of frame so to speak — to New York, to Vermont, to law school, to a single internet post years later while the narrator stays in the field and the pecans go green as lemons every spring.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you a beautifully argued essay. I especially love the way Liza weaves reportage, personal reflection, and poetic engagement with grace and humility throughout the piece. I encourage you to experience it as a kind of meditation!

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I am an unlikely science writer. My appreciation for science has always run deeper than my talent or skill level. I spent my high school years at a public magnet school for science and technology, and while I was interested in the broader questions of how and why we perceive the world the way we do, I couldn’t seem to get any of the details to stick. Diagrams and problem sets left my brain in tangles, and I dozed off during demonstrations of chemical reactions and lengthy descriptions of cell structure. Hands-on experiments only underscored my lack of ability—one misstep and my solution would turn pink when everyone else’s was blue. 10th grade chemistry, 11th grade physics, 12th grade probability and statistics: I hated it all.

In much of the public imagination, and to me for most of my life, the word science conjures images of people in white coats using inscrutable jargon, rather than the many tangible impacts of science on everyday life. I say “conjures,” as if it were magic. Science can feel like magic at times, at least from an outsider’s perspective, but in reality it is the opposite of that. It’s a process, one that’s often discouraging, frustrating, and difficult to explain. It involves plenty of failure, and even after years of labor it may not provide the results one would hope for. And yet, without it, human societies wouldn’t exist. Science is in our drugs, our food, our weather, our infrastructure. It’s in the air we breathe. And with ecosystems changing more rapidly each year, the planet’s food supply dwindling while the population grows, and more people getting sick, we can’t afford to ignore it.

It’s summer 2025, and I’ve been selected to spend a week at a writers’ residency at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Government funding cuts loom over the campus like the smoke currently drifting down from Canadian wildfires, and the entire community is reeling. We are still in the early days of an administration hostile to scientists and to science itself—an administration that, not content to defund necessary research by as much as one-third, compounds the problem by presenting stories that spread fear, panic, and disinformation. The purpose of my residency here is to build bridges between the scientific community and the general public, using art (in my case, poetry) as a medium. According to CSHL’s website, “Artists who can interpret scientific research elements into accessible works of art—paintings, novels, poetry, and more—will connect with CSHL scientists who can explain the significance of their research, lessening the prevailing distance between the public and science.” I wonder if I can live up to this, or if anyone is up to the task these days.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was founded in 1890 and since then has become world-renowned among scientists, though it’s less known to the general public. It has been home to eight Nobel Prize winners and currently has 1,000 employees, in addition to the 12,000 scientists it hosts from all over the world through its Meetings & Courses Program, graduate school, and other educational outreach. It’s been the site of groundbreaking discoveries in cancer research, neuroscience, and plant biology, to name just a few areas. Uncomfortably, CSHL also provided a setting for a more sinister chapter in the history of “science,” namely the Eugenics Records Office, which was housed on campus between 1910 and 1939. CSHL makes its records of the eugenics movement, and its own role therein, available via an extensive website and archives collection, to anyone seeking to understand the catastrophic impact this had worldwide. This difficult history is hard to reconcile with the diverse and innovative scientific hub that exists at CSHL today, as is the case with so many prominent and powerful institutions in and outside of the United States.

The role of science is to investigate, to seek and find, to question and answer, but not necessarily to inform the public, let alone to persuade those who have already made up their minds. At the same time, people need—and deserve—to know about the work that is being done, not only to stay informed about their own health and that of their environment, but to appreciate the wonder and even the beauty inherent in science. Positive developments can provide reasons to maintain hope and resilience in dark times. In order for this to become a reality for more people, however, true stories about science need to be a greater part of the conversation, and they need to be presented in an approachable and less problematized way. This is where good storytelling comes in.

Think, for instance, of the Covid vaccine. Ian Oldenburg, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, points out how utterly astounding it was that within the span of a few months, the world went from encountering a new disease we knew nothing at all about to having a completely new technology that saved thousands if not millions of lives and got us back to our jobs, our schools, our communities. It was nothing short of miraculous. Such a discovery should have prompted a renewed appreciation for the necessity of science and what it can accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, the vaccine was met with suspicion, refusal, and a distrust that lingers even today—and, tragically, countless more Covid cases and deaths that could have been prevented. Even as I type this essay, the news is breaking that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of health, is slashing funding for mRNA immunizations, including the Covid vaccine and a new one for avian flu.

Clearly, we need better stories. “Science doesn’t have a great PR department,” Oldenburg says. Right now, the public is in desperate need of stories that celebrate what science can do to change our lives for the better, that can give us reasons to persist in the face of such challenges as disease, hunger, and climate disaster, while acknowledging the untold damage false “science” has wrought historically. Stories as compelling as the ones being circulated on certain corners of social media, but without misleading or bending the truth. Stories that present information in a way that’s approachable without being condescending. It’s easy to slip into blame and frustration, to chalk people’s distrust of science up to ignorance. It’s tempting to rail against misinformation and those who spread it. But the truth is much more complicated than that, and complaining won’t resolve anything. Maybe scientists also need to do a better job of communicating.

It’s not hard to see where distrust of science stems from. In addition to the long and actual history of racists and ableists presenting themselves as “scientists,” fictionalized stories of scientists as villains are deeply embedded in our cultural mythology. Some of the most iconic villains in modern media are doctors or scientists—Dr. Octopus, Dr. Horrible, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Then there’s science itself, which by its very nature uncovers new truths that challenge previously held perceptions. Human beings are notoriously resistant to change. Even before the advent of modern science as we know it, Galileo was famously excommunicated from the Catholic Church (and wasn’t pardoned until more than 300 years after his death) for proving the earth revolved around the sun. Some people still believe the earth is flat, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. It’s impossible to expect a new scientific discovery to change entire worldviews, embedded as they are in culture, media, religion, and individual psyches.

Then there are the very real stories of science’s dark undertones: the histories of eugenics and forced sterilization, and the theft of biological data from marginalized groups, whose impacts still reverberate in countless families and communities. For far too long, studies compromised by personal and cultural prejudices were passed off as “science,” costing millions of lives and the endangerment of entire languages and societies. Add to this the more recent stories of racism, sexism, and queerphobia within the scientific community, harms that persist not only in science but in every field, and it’s understandable why science cannot have unchecked power, why so many people fear and distrust it so deeply.

One scientist I talk to at CSHL says the blame rests not with science as a whole, but with the bad actions of individual scientists. I think the truth is more complicated than that. The concept of science, the desire to make sense of the world we live in and determination to uncover the truth, is what makes us uniquely human. Without it, we wouldn’t have much of what makes the world liveable today. But science as practiced by humans is inherently flawed, and contains all the shortcomings of human beings themselves. Take, for instance, the British doctor who published a now-discredited study erroneously linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The paper was eventually retracted, and the doctor was de-licensed. Yet the myth that vaccines cause autism continues to be publicized—and believed—and children have become ill and even died as a result.

Individual stories that circulate about bad actors within science, within medicine, seem like isolated incidents, and they are. But it’s a flawed system that allows these things to happen in the first place, and lackluster communication methods that allow false rumors to spread while positive developments go relatively unnoticed. How, I wonder, can we imagine what an alternative model would look like?

On my first morning at CSHL, I speak with a bioinformatics expert, Hannah Meyer, who runs a lab on campus. “Scientists should become better at advertising what they do,” she says. She specializes in the immune system, and how the thymus gland teaches our T-cells which cells are healthy and which are infected. She says to think of the thymus as a school and T-cells as students. T-cells learn the skills they need from the thymus, even learning to specialize in treating different types of infections, the way an undergraduate student chooses a major. They leave the thymus, or “graduate,” when they have learned everything they need to fulfill their function.

T-cells specialize and serve different functions from one another, Meyer explains. She likens the T-cells to slices of Swiss cheese, layered on top of one another. Each individual slice has holes, but if you have an entire stack of Swiss cheese, the holes disappear. One slice picks up where another leaves off. It’s the same in the immune system: each T-cell has its own specialization; one’s weakness is another’s strength. I reflect on what this comparison says about community collaboration, how, in a thriving, well-functioning community, each member has different skills that are seen as valuable, and no one is labeled useless or left out. When someone isn’t able to perform, someone else is there to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, as in a society rife with divisions and inequalities, this is not always the case. Just as there are holes in the fabric of society, there are holes in the Swiss cheese stack of the immune system. This is why people get sick.

Meyer often speaks in metaphors like a poet. She is from a rural area of Germany, near the French border, and was the first in her family to attend college. She shares her personal background with students, and encourages other potential scientists who doubt their own abilities to “go for it.” Science, and scientists, have a good advocate and storyteller in Meyer. And we need better metaphors, better stories, when it comes to talking about science. Speaking with Meyer’s team, I reconsider the more commonly-used metaphor of the immune system as the body’s military force: in this framework, T-cells are “soldiers” who fight off “foreign invaders.” The language of military and policing is so overused in talking about health that it’s become cliché—and because I deal with autoimmunity myself, I’ve heard it ad nauseum. What if, instead of these stories, we told new ones?

I compare the violent portrayal of the immune system in the popular imagination to the way Meyer presents it: T-cells are not soldiers but students. They spend their time in the thymus learning, then work together for the body’s greater good. There is such humility in that metaphor, a recognition of the power of community, of individuals working together to improve the whole. If the stories we told about science were presented with warmth and understanding rather than violence and fear, would public perceptions of science change?

I am shy to share my personal history of autoimmune disease with Meyer. Instead, I ask if she’s ever encountered someone in her career who has personal experience with autoimmunity or cancer—two opposing examples of the immune system’s inability to function properly. She is very cautious, and doesn’t want to overstep her bounds. Meyer is not a clinician, and though her work is impactful in developing T-cell therapies, which are in turn impactful in clinical and pharmaceutical settings, she is “so far back on the chain,” she says, and doesn’t interface with the public the way a clinician would. But that’s just it. If we are to improve public health outcomes, we need doctors, pharmacists, scientists—we need everyone. There’s that Swiss cheese metaphor again. No one can be an expert in all of these fields, but together we can accomplish so much.

Maintaining a sense of metaphor and play, expanding the possibilities of what stories about science could be, making the abstract real in order to serve others and the community—these may seem trivial on the surface but are in fact necessary and undervalued. Such themes permeate the workplace culture in Meyer’s lab. On the way to lunch that day, Amitava Banerjee, a postdoctoral fellow, pulls a thymus plushy out of his bag. “I like to call it my emotional support thymus,” he says. I can’t help but burst out laughing. The actual thymus, an organ I didn’t even know I had until earlier this week, has a dull pink color, and is kind of bumpy and gross-looking to a squeamish non-scientist like me. Banerjee’s emotional support thymus, however, is bright yellow and smiling, with big googly eyes, rosy cheeks and a mischievous grin. It is wearing a BATMAN hat—a reference not to the superhero but to the database the team created containing over 22,000 interactions between peptides and T-cell receptors (BATCAVE, or Benchmark for Activation of T cells with Cross-reactive AVidity for Epitopes), and the AI model they developed to comb through it (BATMAN, or Bayesian inference of Activation of TCR by Mutant ANtigens). In this lab, even databases and AI models can be associated with a quirky name and a familiar face.

The emotional support thymus is more than four times the size of the real thymus, but that’s not the point. Almost all of the scientists I spend time with at CSHL are so good at making the conceptual tangible, presenting their work in a way that’s approachable, even exciting. Who wouldn’t want to hold a smiling, cuddly thymus, to cradle it in their arms like the adorable puppy they can’t wait to come home to? Going into this residency, I had expected to be intimidated or condescended to, thinking that maybe the selection committee had chosen the wrong Writer-in-Residence, that I was in over my head. But then it hit me that there is no “wrong” person. Science is for everyone. Or it should be. In a more just world, we would all have access to accurate information, thoughtfully told stories, and the positive changes good science can effect.

So where is the disconnect? Where is the breakdown in communication? Why are stories of fear and violence so much more powerful, more memorable, than ones of gratitude and community, humility and learning? Meyer tells me I will need a social scientist to answer that one.

As a poet, I wonder if poetry can be a medium with which to tell better stories. It is an unlikely tool, in the same way I am an unlikely science writer. But I feel some personal responsibility, too. The scientists I’ve talked to at CSHL have instilled that sense of responsibility in me. They’ve given me their time, treated me with interest and respect, and are spoken of highly by their grad students and those who work in their labs. In terms of communicating better stories about science, other forms of writing—campaign rhetoric, advertising, social media posts, and the like—haven’t worked out well. So why not poetry?

I have models in poets such as Andrea Werblin Reid and Joseph Osmundson, whose books tell stories of breakdowns in communication between the immune system and the body, and between the body and the stories the body tells itself—not unlike the breakdowns in communication between the scientific community and the rest of the public. Both poets, like the speakers in their books, like all of us, are living alongside the results of medical science, its breakthroughs, its promises, and its limitations.

Reid’s posthumous collection, To See Yourself As You Vanish, deals with the poet’s experience of ovarian cancer and acknowledgement of her own mortality. Like Meyer, Banerjee, and the other scientists I’ve spoken with at CSHL, Reid resists the use of militarized language to describe science and the human body. In one of the book’s earliest poems, “Language is a Virus,” the speaker criticizes others’ thoughtless use of war metaphors to discuss cancer:

[...] they say she lost her battle with—

Like it was a duel she entered at dawn, like she was ever

in possession of a pistol. there is no fight against.

there is live with, for as long as humanly possible.

How many times have we heard phrases such as “She lost her battle with,” or “He’s fighting cancer,” forgetting that no one ever agrees to this fight in the first place? The more I think about such metaphors, the more ludicrous they seem. No one gets to referee someone else’s illness, or to declare a winner. As Reid’s speaker points out, she never willingly donned armor and went into battle. By suggesting she did, we are not only making an unfair judgment; we are taking away her agency. Reid so brilliantly reclaims the voice and agency of those who are sick and dying, and are too often assumed not to have either.

Reid’s speaker allows herself a full range of emotion—envy, superiority, distaste, ill will—and grants herself the agency to resist and refuse. She is resistant to the judgment and isolation she receives even from those close to her, the “magic of the disappearing friends.” “[W]hen you say you’ll retire in Boca Raton/your backyard fat with the children of your children,” she admonishes, “know your audience.” So many of the speaker’s friends and loved ones are unable to hear stories like hers, or the privilege of health keeps them from listening. And that’s what health is: not a virtue, but a privilege. The same goes for access to affordable, high-quality health care and accurate scientific information. These privileges are not earned but granted randomly, unfairly, at the whims of the universe and not necessarily to the most deserving among us. Yet, Reid asserts, most people want to point to a specific and available cause of illness. That way, they can rationalize, it won’t happen to them. “[W]hen someone asks what it was, what caused it,” the speaker observes, what they’re really asking is, “what could they personally avoid not to get it themselves.” She responds, simply, “bad luck. avoid bad luck if you can, because that’s what it was/and that’s what it is and mostly nobody wants to hear that out loud.”

The way we talk about science, the way we talk about health, matters. These stories do not just stay within the lab; they flow through the membranes of the scientific community and spill out into our public and private conversations about health, illness, and those living with illness. This is exemplified in Reid’s work and in Capsid: A Love Song by Joseph Osmundson, who is both a scientist and a poet. Capsid: A Love Song deals with autoimmunity, specifically HIV, and explores viral transmission and replication as a metaphor for romantic and sexual relationships. As with virus and host, one partner can overwhelm and overtake the other, until it’s not clear where one begins and another ends. Balance, intimacy, and risk-taking, Osmundson’s speaker suggests, are inherent both in personal relationships and in having a human body that can get sick at any point. “All human bodies know disease,” his speaker points out. “All bodies take risks. It is just that some of us pay more dearly for ours.” Similar to Reid’s discussion of “bad luck,” Osmundson addresses the additional bad luck of being stigmatized, of having one’s needs ignored, and how this further complicates the effects of the disease itself.

Like Reid, Osmundson is critical of the language of war and capitalism as used to describe illness. In “IIa. Drugs/Small molecule inhibitors,” the speaker says, “this is where the war begins… I will gather my troops against you. 3TC. We will build a barrier, a wall, and you will lay siege.” Osmundson implicates both partners in the relationship, both host and virus, for the violence that results:

We made these soldiers. We built them together. They are made of our dead. They speak for the gone. We built them together, bodies and industry; capital and ash; activists and artists and scientists and doctors pushing and dying and pushing and dying and pushing and dying.

In war there is a clear “we,” those complicit in the violence, and a clear other—the nameless, countless dead whom “we” were willing to sacrifice in order to build our own soldiers. Like Reid, Osmundson ultimately rejects the language of war in favor of living with. In “IV. Latency,” he says: “We see people living with. Living in spite of. Living.”

Again, the stories we tell about illness, about bodies, about the human condition, reach well beyond science. Science comes with real human stories attached—stories of real people’s relationships and lived experience. “We are alive thanks to the stories we tell,” Osmundson asserts in “I. Fusion.” “We are alive because of the words we speak into silence.” Poetry recognizes this. Science needs to do the same.

Can storytelling be a way to build a better relationship between science and the communities it is inseparable from? It’s not easy to make stories about real science as alluring as the ones promoted by conspiracy theorists. Instant gratification is endemic to our culture, and science doesn’t work that way. Despite the popular myth of the “Eureka” moment, scientific breakthroughs take years or even decades to achieve, and most people don’t have the attention span for stories so long in the making. At the same time, the stakes are too high to give up. The mechanics of science can seem cold and abstract, but in fact they are part of our everyday lives: the food and medicine we rely on for survival, the weather forecasts we use to determine our safety, the technological tools we take for granted.

Science can be intimidating. Certainty, even false certainty, feels a lot safer. But it’s an illusion. It’s precisely because of uncertainty, because of the desire to know more about the world, that science exists. Science can be beautiful, life-changing, even joyful. Almost everyone I talked to at CSHL, scientists and non-scientists alike, said some version of the same thing: we need to tell better stories. So how do we get there? How can we tell stories about science that are compelling without being hyperbolic, that challenge misguided perceptions without threatening people into submission, that become widely discussed without causing widespread panic? It won’t be an easy task. But stories like these must be possible, because we cannot afford to live without them.

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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?

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN: I think I was always writing in some capacity. I started writing poetry in earnest when I was about 13 and just never really stopped.

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?

LKD: Fits and starts. I wish I had a regular writing practice and could stick to it, but my own practice is pretty chaotic, mostly dependent on my work schedule (I’m a teacher). I tend to write over long stretches of time, rather than short bursts here or there.

I’m often driven by a question—what can the environment in which we find ourselves, whether natural or social, teach us about what’s going on in our internal environment, or vice versa? The self being a microcosm of the world, and the worlds we contain, and so forth. Sometimes I start with a specific image or event and let the language itself lead me.

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?

LKD: Bodies of water. The Jersey Shore, where I’ve spent a lot of my life. The intersection between science and storytelling. The body and its depths. The more-than-human world.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LKD: Maybe a psychotherapist—I’m fascinated by the human experience in all its forms and constantly amazed by how the mind works. Or a science journalist, since I was terrible at science in school but would love to have the opportunity to see the natural world up close.

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?

LKD: To be fearless. To write what scares you or makes you uncomfortable, those topics you most want to avoid. To lean into your obsessions. To find your people—writing ancestors and writing community.

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

LKD: I’m simultaneously working on a climate novel, a memoir-in-essays called Bodies of Water, and a collection of poems about grief, fields (physical and metaphysical), and the lunar maria. All three are ruining my life in that they’re consuming my mental space faster than I can write them.

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?

LKD: Too many to name. But in terms of weaving together elements of place, science, and the body to create narratives that disrupt and surprise: Sy Montgomery, Susanne Antonetta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert MacFarlane, Melissa Febos, Sabrina Imbler. Too many more to name.

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.

LKD: I’ve been relistening to Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown and reflecting on its lessons about past and present, life and death, human and more-than-human, and how these supposed “opposites” are more interconnected than those in power would have us believe.

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Notes on Art

We paired this essay with Hilma af Klint’s Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth (1907)1 — orange ground, snail-shell spirals, a cluster of eggs in the middle that could be cells under a microscope or candies in a bowl. Af Klint trained as a botanical illustrator and spent her life trying to diagram the things science hadn’t yet found language for: how spirit moves, how matter coheres, how a body comes into being. There’s something of the same energy in this essay which often has to cadence of a fable, a story…and indeed, the best essays do!

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I remember first encountering Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s work when I read his award-winning short story “Taylor Swift” as a class assignment. I’ve probably never had as much fun analyzing fiction as I did with this one. So, getting to publish him now is a dream come true!

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Frank invents a shrink ray. So the first thing Frank does is go visit the bank, handing the teller a note. “Give me all your money I got a shrink ray.”

The teller says, “Really?”

“Yes,” Frank says. To prove his point he shoots the Xmas tree in the lobby down to the size of a bonsai.

It’s a slow day at the bank; nobody gets too upset.

“Hmm,” the teller says, making sure Frank sees she’s not making any sudden movements. “That’s ok, but the last person who came in here with a shrink ray, instead of trying to rob us, he waited for someone else who was trying to rob us, and he did you know what to several you know who’s. Big reward money by the way, clean rap sheet as well, making it easier to get into the college of your choice if you know what I mean. Think about it.”

Frank thinks about it, trying hard not to stare at the teller like a weirdo. “Any idea on how long a guy has to stand there waiting for someone to come by and try to rob you?”

“Not long,” the teller shrugs. “You’d be surprised how often people try to rob us. There might be someone right behind you planning to do just that.”

Frank looks at the people behind him to see if any of them look sketchy. They all look sketchy.

“Ok,” Frank finally says. “Where should I wait?”

“Go stand over there by Carl.” The teller points to a guy who looks like he could be a plain clothes police officer if he wasn’t so obvious.

So Frank walks over and stands next to Carl. Carl says, “I like what you did to the Christmas tree. That’s an impressive shrink ray you got.”

Carl carefully pulls out a mayo jar with holes drilled through the lid, with a couple tiny bank robbers inside. “I’m starting a collection,” he says. “But since Lucy sent you over here you’re probably not really a robber, you just haven’t figured out what you ought to do with your life. So I won’t shoot you.”

“Just you wait, Carl,” one of the men in the jar peeps. “Once we figure out how to make a grow ray, you’re going to get what’s coming to you!”

“Or I could shake this jar a bunch if you two won’t settle down,” Carl tells them. “I think there’s one of those agitators at the paint store next door. I can use that while Frank here guards the bank.”

Frank nods, a little embarrassed. The other guy in the jar is about to shoot himself with his brother’s shrink ray, maybe out of despair, maybe just to get himself down to the size of something so small no jar could hold him, even if it means almost certain death from all the viruses and bacteria and who knows what tiny monsters that exist in the microscopic world. His brother tries to wrestle the gun away; when they fight Carl rattles the jar to break it up.

Carl grins, like he’s twelve, it’s finally Christmas, and he’s definitely going to get that bike he’s always wanted. “This is exciting! Just think of the odds of all these people with shrink rays trying to rob the same bank! Maybe it’s a side effect, that once you build your first shrink ray, you get pulled irresistibly towards the nearest financial institution, thinking wealth is finally going to be yours. The next thing you know, you have a job as a security guard, normally a safe, secure and boring career if it weren’t for all the people with shrink ray guns showing up.”

The door to the bank slides open and another sketchy looking dude walks in, hands in bulging pockets.

“Maybe I should just try to rob the bank after all,” Frank says.

“But you won’t,” Carl says. “Because you also want to be seen as a good person by Lucy over there behind the window, because you have feelings for her.”

Frank blushes, realizing once again Carl knows more about him than he does himself. “Wait,” he says. “Are you attracted to Lucy too?”

“We all are! Lucy’s the best,” Carl says, grinning because he finally has a best friend to tell everything to. “Where do you think all those ideas about shrink ray guns have been coming from?”

Our Frank turns around and waits in line again to see Lucy. It takes awhile, as even more men with shrink ray guns have to be convinced to go stand next to Carl, or get shrunk cricket sized for the jar. Frank isn’t angry, mostly just puzzled, and he’s not sure how he wants to phrase the questions branching across his mind.

“Back so soon?” Lucy says, snapping her gum, looking like this too has been happening over and over.

“What did you shoot with your shrink ray gun?” Frank says.

“The odds,” Lucy shrugs, then she leans over. “Somewhere nearby there’s a really tiny house with really tiny people living inside it, laughing and laughing, because someone was dumb enough to ask them how to make a shrink ray. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to get better at crochet or taxidermy?’ they told me. ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘I’ve dreamed of shrink rays ever since I was a little girl, but instead of becoming an engineer I sought true knowledge and that’s how I found all you little people in your hidden tiny little house, and I have three letters of recommendation attesting to my goodness so could you please just give it to me or let me intern with you or whatever.’”

“And they just gave you the gun?” Frank asks.

“They gave me ideas,” Lucy says. “Much more useful, and fun, don’t you think?”

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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?

HUGH BEHM-STEINBERG: As a kid I was terrible at music (I hated practicing) and I never had that sketching/drawing itch, but I read all the freaking time, and it wasn’t that much of a jump from there to trying to be a writer. The funny thing is that writing led me into art and music making too: it’s sort of like if you choose a creative life, any door can lead you to any other door, so long as you’re willing to just go through.

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?

HBS: I’m part of a writing group that every November tries to generate a new short story every day of that month. That’s where most of my raw material comes from. Coming from poetry, both wildness and structure matter to me. A good working process tries to honor both of these things.

I tend to start my stories with problems or situations/opportunities, and then try to explore how things might unravel as the characters try to make the best of things.

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?

HBS: Nothing so heavy. But I love talking animals, doubles and multiples, imaginary stores and acts of buying things, made up magazine titles, fantasy/science fictional tropes like time travel and aliens, witches, potions, magic, etc. I also like to leave things out: I seldom describe what my characters look like, or go too deeply into what anyone is thinking. I think I’m an anti-weird writer, in that I often put my characters into weird situations that they then go on to treat as being completely normal. I try to be kind to my characters.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

HBS: I think I’d make a good tour guide.

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?

HBS: My teacher Jane Miller told me that most writers are better at their work than at their own lives, because when you’re starting out you can get away with it. But if you’re serious, then you have to start paying attention to your life, and working on all the things that will make you a better human being. You’ll write better when you have your act together, and you’ll be happier in the process.

6.

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

HBS: The big thing I’m working on is learning Spanish; my reception is still way ahead of my production, but lately it’s started to seep into my dreams. I’m also working on putting a manuscript of stories together and sending it out to publishers.

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?

HBS: I tend to imagine prose as an open space, given shape by culture, but where pretty much anything can happen. So I’ve never been much interested in realism/naturalism. Along with the tons and tons of SF and Fantasy I read as a teenager, and all the poetry I read and wrote, I’d say Italo Calvino has been really helpful at crystalizing my values as a fiction writer, especially Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Quickness and lightness are very important to me. I’d also include Grace Paley for how she uses dialogue. I love how her characters just say things. There’s a Bay Area writer, Peter Thomas Bullen, who operates in a similar way and sometimes I hear his voice in my ear when my characters argue with one another.

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.

HBS: Lately I’ve been totally smitten with Juana Molina’s music. It’s gorgeous, head music; like when you’re listening you’re in a forest you’ve never been in before, and there’s children and witches and birds and insects and spirits and small animals and so much else you’ll never understand, but that’s fine. It’s enchanting. All you have to do is listen. Segundo is a good place to start.

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Notes on Art

We paired this story with Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games1 depicting a town square crammed with over two hundred figures, every one of them absorbed in some game the others, it appears, couldn’t care less about. None of them relalize knows how all this scene looks from above. I love Bruegel for this — how seriously he takes play, how the composition just keeps accumulating bodies and you keep finding new ones doing new inexplicable things in the corners. Behm-Steinberg’s story has that same energy, the cascade of people with shrink rays all ending up at the same bank for reasons none of them fully understand, a mayo jar filling up with tiny failed robbers, and Frank — poor Frank — who built something extraordinary and could only think to rob a bank with it.

Welcome back to our crash course on the lit theory we wish we had actually learned in our MFA.

Okay, first off, here’s part 1:

And yes, we sent that out a while ago and then well, things got insanely busy round here. In fact, as I type this I’m sitting amid a living room overflowing with moving boxes because we’re moving back to Canada in just a few days (!!). So you can imagine that life is still very very busy. And yet, I didn’t want y’all to feel like I totally dropped the ball on this because, ahem, I didn’t. I’ve been working on this for months.

So, below is part 2.1. Yes, you read that right. 2.1. Because things are about to get ultra-nerdy, friends, and I want to give this out in chunks. My rough draft for this second unit was over 15,000 words (!!).

This unit on VOICE, CONSCIOUSNESS & DISTANCE will have four lessons:

1. Narrator & Focalizer ← today

2. Distance: Showing vs. Telling

3. Modes of Consciousness

4. The Unreliable Narrator

We’ll send them out every couple weeks along with writing exercises for each. As with the first unit, everything will be free to read but will eventually become paywalled like some of our archive (the stories and essays we publish will always remain 100% free to read, but because these lessons take a whole lot of work from us, we’re deciding to paywall them after the initial free send).

Paid subscribers can also access the writing exercises connected with each lesson. This is Part 1’s:

Alright, let’s get started.

Today we’re tackling the topic of VOICE, otherwise known as perhaps the single most abused word in the entire craft vocabulary (am I dramatic? No not me). People say voice to mean tone, style, sensibility, character interiority, the way the prose sounds, that special je ne sais pas quoi a certain author might possess. The idea of voice is used to praise work and also to dismiss it and seldom does it seem to mean the same thing twice.

And the reason this matters — the reason we’re dedicating pretty much the entire second unit of this series to voice — is that almost every failure in writing is a failure of voice.

The accompanying writing exercises will let you try each of these techniques in your own prose. Here’s they are for today’s unit:

Unit II: Voice, Consciousness, & Distance

Lesson I: Narrator & Focalizer

For most of the twentieth century, critics talked about point of view as if it were one thing. Was the story told in first person or third? Limited or omniscient? Fixed or roving? But French literary critic Gérard Genette noticed that point of view was actually two questions glued together.

Alan Palmer1, in Fictional Minds sums it up as follows:

When you read a discourse and ask “Who speaks?” or “Who narrates?,” you are concerned with narration. When you ask “Who sees?” or “Who thinks?” then you are concerned with focalization. Sometimes an agent sees and speaks at the same time, and sometimes the agent who sees is different from the agent who speaks.

A first-person narrator recounting her childhood is speaking as her adult self, but the narrative might be focalized through the child she was — seeing a parent’s argument with the limited understanding of a six-year-old, even as the adult voice arranges those impressions into sentences.

Gérard Genette gave us three positions of focalization, let’s dive into them.

1.

Zero/ Free Focalization

With zero or free focalization, the narrative isn’t tethered to any single consciousness. Rather, the narrator perceives and knows more than any character. This is what we used to call omniscience — think the 19th-century novel’s expansiveness, Tolstoy moving freely between Anna’s interior and Vronsky’s to narrators who can comment on history, weather, the secret thoughts of strangers passing on the street and so on.

Gérard Genette coined this term because he wanted to move past terms that were “too specifically visual.” He felt this for a lot of the terms we use in lit theory (point of view, angle, perspective, field of experience, etc.). But characters aren’t exclusively seeing, are they? They also hear, smell, feel, think, remember, intuit… So, this term was his attempt to account for everything a consciousness does.

Genette borrows Tzvetan Todorov’s formula to describe this position2:

Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly says more than any of the characters knows).

Wayne Booth’s term for this is privilege.3 Here he is on what it means, how rare its complete form is, and why even the novel that seems to disappear into its characters can't actually escape it:

Observers and narrator-agents, whether self-conscious or not, reliable or not, commenting or silent, isolated or supported, can be either privileged to know what could not be learned by strictly natural means or limited to realistic vision and inference. Complete privilege is what we usually call omniscience. But there are many kinds of privilege, and very few “omniscient” narrators are allowed to know or show as much as their authors know. […] Our roving visitation into the minds of sixteen characters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, seeing nothing but what those minds contain, may seem in one sense not to depend on an omniscient author. But this method is omniscience with teeth in it: the implied author demands our absolute faith in his powers of divination. We must never for a moment doubt that he knows everything about each of these sixteen minds or that he has chosen correctly how much to show of each. In short, impersonal narration is really no escape from omniscience — the true author is as “unnaturally” all-knowing as he ever was.

Watch it happen in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, page 56:

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and that…

So Sarah Bletchley said with her baby in her arms, tipping her foot up and down as though she were by her own fender in Pimlico, while Emily Coates ranged over the Palace windows and thought of the housemaids, the innumerable housemaids, the bedrooms, the innumerable bedrooms. Joined by an elderly gentleman with an Aberdeen terrier, by men without occupation, the crowd increased. Little Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life but could be unsealed suddenly, inappropriately, sentimentally, by this sort of thing — poor women waiting to see the Queen go past — poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War — tut-tut — actually had tears in his eyes.

A different example, from a piece we published recently:

Most of the post-1900 examples I can name use zero focalization to move between living minds. uses it to move between living minds and dead ones — between mortal characters, the spirits of unborn children, and a collective we-narrator speaking from beyond death. Take the bathroom scene where the unborn spirits watch their mother sew a stillborn baby back to life:

They were born in a tub, in a bathroom with high clay walls and a flimsy zinc door. They slid out of their mother, a soul with a tightly curled body. She didn’t scream, this mother. She rinsed the body, that silent breathless baby, then washed herself. They watched, curious.

Her lips tight, their mother dug out a spool of thread and a needle attached. Their curiosity morphed into horror and they tried to scream. But spirits cannot scream to the living, so, they could do nothing but watch, dread curling, as the mother pricked her finger, then stabbed the dead baby’s stomach. and blood began to flow along the thread, white to red as it flowed into the body.

Then the body’s eyes opened, and it began to cry. The mother cried too, and hugged the body. The body looked at where They floated, close to the yellow bulb, hatred clear in their eyes. And it smiled. Through its tears, it smiled, and curled further into the mother.

The narrator here is moving freely between several consciousnesses at once: the spirits’ interior (curiosity, horror, dread curling), the mother’s actions and her tight lips, the dead baby that becomes alive and looks back at the spirits with hatred. No single character could narrate this. The spirits couldn’t speak to the living, the mother couldn’t see them, the baby was dead and then was something else. The narrator can see all of it because the narrator is operating from above any single consciousness — and from beyond death. That’s what zero focalization actually buys a writer: the moral and metaphysical authority to say things about the storyworld that exceed any character’s capacity to know.

2.

Internal focalization

The narrative is filtered through a particular character’s consciousness. We see what they see, know what they know, and no more.

In Genette's terms, this is the position where:

Narrator = Character: the narrator says only what a given character know.

Where zero focalization gives you the long view from above, internal focalization locks the camera to one mind. Genette divides internal focalization into two subtypes:

Fixed — the lens stays with one character for the whole novel. His canonical examples are Henry James’s The Ambassadors “where everything passes through Strether,” and What Maisie Knew:

where we almost never leave the point of view of the little girl, whose ‘restriction of field’ is particularly dramatic in this story of adults, a story whose significance escapes her.

Variable — the lens moves between characters but stays inside one consciousness at a time. Genette's example is Madame Bovary, “where the focal character is first Charles, then Emma, then again Charles.”

The variable version is doing more contemporary work than people give it credit for. Genette himself notes:

the commitment as to focalization is not necessarily steady over the whole length of a narrative […] Any single formula of focalization does not, therefore, always bear on an entire work, but rather on a definite narrative section, which can be very short.

The lens can move sentence to sentence, scene to scene, even mid-paragraph. Most novels we’d casually call “third-person limited” are actually variable internal focalization.

James Phelan4 describes it thus:

Internal focalization [is the] center of consciousness narration such as we find in the fiction of Henry James, where the narrator perceives and knows only what the central consciousness perceives and knows.

In other words, the narrator’s knowledge is intrinsically bound to the character’s and that binding so to speak is the engine propelling the story forward.

Having said that, Mieke Bal — and Phelan after her — argued Genette’s strict divide doesn’t quite hold. For Genette, narrators speak and characters see and never the twain shall meet. But Phelan shows that narrators can perceive too. “Determining focalization is just a matter of answering the question who perceives?“ — and the answer can be the narrator, the character, or both at once, sometimes inside the same sentence. Phelan calls the simultaneous version dual focalization. His central example is Lolita: Humbert the narrator perceiving Humbert the character’s past perception of Dolores, two focalizations stacked in the same syntax. The slow change in what Humbert the narrator can bear to perceive across the novel is the moral arc. It’s a way to write retrospective first-person where the present-day narrator and the past self are both focalizing at once — useful any time you want a narrator reckoning with who they were.

Palmer (2004) pushes back on the whole concept from a different angle. He argues:

Focalization was envisaged primarily for, and works very well for, one aspect of mental functioning — perception.

Focalization works well when you’re tracking what a character sees and hears. It gets shaky when you’re tracking what they think, feel, remember, or half-know without realizing. Internal focalization gives you the edge of what a character can perceive. It doesn’t give you the rest of their interior — what’s happening underneath, around, and past the senses. That stuff lives in distance, psycho-narration, and free indirect style. We’ll come back to all of those.

For now, here’s internal focalization at work, from chapter one of Gatsby. Nick has just had dinner with the Buchanans and stepped outside for air when he sees a figure on the lawn:

Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (pg 32)

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

And another contemporary example is from this piece we’ve published by recently, the entirety of it fixed internal focalization:

3.

External focalization

The externally focalized narrative reports only what’s observable from outside. There’s not really much interiority, or if there is, it comes through dialogue which isn’t quite the same thing. Think Hammett’s hard-boiled detectives, Hemingway when he’s at his most withholding (“Hills Like White Elephants” — we never enter either character’s mind).

The narrator perceives and knows less than the characters. The reader is locked outside their minds and has to read them entirely from the surface — what they say, what they do, how they move, what they pointedly don’t say. Think of a camera on a shelf. The recording is honest, but the interpretation is entirely yours.

In Genette’s terms, this is Narrator < Character — what Pouillon called “vision from without” and what Genette also calls “the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist’ narrative”.

Mieke Bal5 argues that what Genette calls “external focalization” isn’t really focalization at all but its absence — a refusal of access rather than a technique of access. The category is contested. But it’s still the best name we have for prose that holds the reader outside so to speak.

Gerald Prince6 defines external focalization as prose

…limited to the conveyance of the characters’ behavior (words and actions but not thoughts and feelings), their appearance, and the setting against which they come to the fore… the narrator tells less than one or several characters know and abstains from direct commentary and interpretation.

The trouble is that virtually nobody pulls it off purely (inasmuch as such a thing can even happen…more on that later). Alan Palmer points out that “’pure’ behaviorist narrative is difficult if not impossible to find” — and theorists don’t even agree that Hills Like White Elephants qualifies as fully behaviorist. Norman Friedman7 divided the territory into two: the dramatic mode (selective external — what Hemingway actually does) and the camera (pure recording, no selection). The camera mode was always a theoretical limit case because, well, even a camera has to be pointed…someone, a human with independent thought and will, always chooses the angle.

Genette gives a beautiful example of why writers reach for this position in the first place — what he calls “the reason of propriety, or the roguish play with impropriety.” The carriage scene in Madame Bovary: Emma and Léon inside a moving cab, the cab going nowhere in particular for hours, the windows pulled down and Flaubert refusing to let us in. We get only the cab seen from outside — its erratic route through Rouen, the driver’s confusion, a glimpse of a bare hand tossing scraps of paper out the window. The whole adulterous encounter is external focalization as moral discretion. Or external focalization as wink. Either reading works. The refusal of access becomes the thing that makes meaning.

Seymour Chatman8 got so impatient with the whole focalization framework that he wanted to throw the term out and replace it with two new ones: filter (a character’s perceptions) and slant (a narrator’s angle of reporting). Monika Fludernik9 even argued the whole concept should be “scrap[ped]… in its traditional configurations.” External focalization is the position that has provoked the most theoretical pushback in the entire taxonomy — partly because it’s the rarest in practice, partly because every example anyone reaches for ends up debated.

If I wanted to pick one primary takeaway from this, it’d be this: please remember focalization can shift! Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway slides between Clarissa and Septimus and Peter Walsh within a single paragraph… the third-person narrator remaining stable while the focalizer flickers. These moments of transition are where the prose does its strangest, most beautiful work. Two consciousnesses brushing against each other through the same syntax.

Focalization is one of the few narrative tools that can carry a metaphysical claim. Liviu Lutas10, for examples, writes about disembodied focalization — that is, narratives focalized through a brain in a jar, a forest, a mountain, a house — what he’s exploring is the idea of whether vision can detach from a human body.

I partially bring this up because I’m very interested in non-human interiority. I know that can seem like we’re into the whimsical over here but I actually am not whimsy-oriented as much I am interested in this kind of interiority as a real ontological proposition — the dog who is a perceiver, the river that sees and so on and so forth. Focalization is the technical instrument that makes that work (or doesn’t). If you write a story focalized through a horse and the horse just feels like a person in a horse costume, it is a failure of the craft as well as imagination. The focalizer’s vocabulary, sensorium, attention, sense of time and ontological stakes have to actually be, well, the horse’s.

Here, I’m reminded of how, during a recent conversation, Kelly Link recalled a mentor mentioning that every story ought be blessed by an animal. I think fiction and truly literature at large affords limitless opportunities for us to explore the consciousnesses of beings other than those embodied as humans and focalization is a good place to start when trying to learn these techniques in practice. Speaking of which, here are some writing exercises devoting to helping you with exactly that:

Alright, that’s a wrap on Lesson #1 for our second unit in Lit Theory 101.

We’ll bring you Lesson #2 (Distance — Showing vs. Telling) in a few weeks, Here, among other things, we’ll get into why “show, don’t tell” is one of the most damaging pieces of advice the workshop tradition ever produced, and what the actual inquiry is underneath it and more.

Once more, here’s the writing exercises to help you learn more about the Narrator & Focalizer in practice.

Until then, read closely, write slowly, & daydream aplenty.

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With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Below the paywall are three detailed writing exercises to deepen your understanding of our second installment of Lit Theory 101 as well as practically apply the lesson on Narrator & Focalizer. We also include, with each exercise, questions to guide and sustain your practice.

Here’s the lesson itself:

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We’re back again for another Micro of the Month writing challenge with a new theme. First, though, a quick recap on what this is all about:

☆ Details for the May challenge ☆

Opens: May 1st (officially, but for our subscribers—you folks!—subs are open right now!!)

Closes: May 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 May 30th at the latest. The winner will be published on the last Sunday of the month, which in May is also the last day of the month, May 31st.

Theme: Rabbits

Submit Now →

Can’t wait to read your micros! Yours,

Shannan & Karan

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you our first ever Micro of the Month! We received 473 entries for this call which was open for just three days and it was especially difficult to pick a winner. Ultimately, Meg’s charming piece emerged as the most delightful and also with a sweet spin on our April theme of The Fool.

MOTM submissions will always open the first three days of each month and the theme will be announced either the day before or the day of. For May, you’ll get an email on April 30 for the May theme alongside the submission link.

All submission call posts will have a dedicated section now and you can turn notifications for these posts and emails on or off here.

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That year Mr Potato Head became Anya’s changeable dad. He wasn’t a mad dad or a bad dad or a sad dad or a rad dad. He was kind, simple, mute. Wore a blue plastic hat and had flabby lips. His pets were sea monkeys and his friends were matchstick people and his eyes were round as moons as they stared straight ahead in a foolish way. As a nose, she screwed in a pink ear. He looked like a misunderstood dork, off-kilter but kind— the sort of person one might meet at the grocery store and feel sorry for, the kind of man her mother, once she grew nicer again, might invite over for a bowl of homemade vegetable soup. After a while, shoots grew out of his head. When Anya felt mad at him she poked in a villainous moustache and sunglasses, replaced his ear-nose with a bulbous orange blob. Then, she took him for a ride all over the neighbourhood, potato juice stinking up her fingers.

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Contributor’s Note

Write about a toy and expand into a bigger metaphor

There’s a good deal of unspoken backstory in “Mr. Potato Head”. It’s told from the point of view of a young character who was removed, when very young, from her unstable father and who now lives alone with her angry, divorced mother. The micro derives its strength from small physical details about what having “a dad” means from her changing perspective. It is a collage piece of imaginary masculine features and vague memories of a father, never knowing what to make of him in hindsight. It is also a story of how sad it is, to Anya, that her mother has become closed off and untrusting. The plot, if you wish to call it that, is internal, psychological. Anya is trying to make sense of it all by doing something active (ie making a changeable version of a dad by swapping his features) and she takes the reader on this exploratory journey. I love writing from a child’s point of view. Kids are highly creative and resilient, which balances the fact that they are also endlessly vulnerable and too trusting.

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Microfiction Workshops & More with Meg Pokrass

Meg's upcoming workshops posted here. Paid subscribers can participate in a private "submissions support group" on a bi-monthly basis, hosted by me. Subscribers receive $10 off of Meg's solo-taught workshops and editing requests per project.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, below we have a propulsive genre-bendy and beautiful new flash piece from the wildly talented JoAnna Novak. Read it one go and then read it many times again, each re-read is more rewarding than the last.

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She devised the system without telling anyone, and so when she shared it with the man, she knew that she had forsaken herself and that she had forsaken the system, too, since the system functioned only when she honored it with commitment and privacy, as though the system were not merely a system but a secret, one that’s survival depended on the fat energy of concealment, an energy which—if she were honest with herself—she had long been forsaking, in microcaloric offerings to the man, so month upon year upon month upon year she had sustained fewer secrets, though perhaps she would’ve sustained other systems, had she not been so impinged; she had devised few programs—pneumonic, schedule, diet—but systems? This one involved a mirroring of metal, knives and spoons and forks, objects she touched constantly, gladly, without reprobation throughout a day, and because she had not as yet encountered criticism for her contact with the knives and spoons and forks, and because she was proud of the mirror trick, which really might save her hours over the course of her life, many hours and even days, if she lived a long life, and though she had gone from believing she wouldn’t see sixteen to believing she’d easily see one hundred to believing any day now could be her last, she kept this worry over her longevity a secret because the man had steps, he had optimism, he had a life untarnished by resentment, and he had an unafflicted mother, a mother who, the man told her, had already devised the system with the mirror trick, though knowing the man’s mother, her system would not have been devised but innocuously offered, hatched, devising itself being a dark art, and what could be dark about the man’s mother, with her knives and spoons and forks? Yes, the woman expressed delight, voice mylar with joy, delight and joy at sharing this system with the man’s mother, thinking perhaps this common ground would encourage the man to bestow upon her some respect, even equilibrizing the energy lost with revealing this secret—but, no, the man, apprised of the system, ignored it, flouting the mirror trick, mixing knives and spoons and forks, and his ignoring and flouting and mixing so injured her that without doing anything the woman lost five pounds in a weekend and for once in her shambolic, overt life did not celebrate and shop.

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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?

JoAnna Novak: In sixth grade, I wrote a very long short story about a glamorous ballerina who's being stalked and, ultimately, uses a stiletto heel to end her assailant. My life did not involve being stalked, attending rigorous ballet practices, or dressing up in skyscraper pumps, so writing was like a pastiche of what I read--Harper's Bazaar and Mary Higgins Clark thrillers--a way to catapult myself into what seemed like adulthood, with all its accoutrements. But really, it was two years later, writing a poem about anorexia that placed in a state writing contest, when I realized I could do exactly what you've said--ask questions that couldn't be asked another way. Ask questions that, thankfully, didn't come with easy answers. Or any answers. Ask questions to flout their unanswerability. Ask questions to take pleasure in the cadence of the interrogative. Ask questions to enact a voice or strike a pose.

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

JN: I've grown less fixated on routines, the longer I've written. Being a parent also helps with that. The days of 4am wake-ups, not talking to my husband until the clock struck 7am, are gone, and I'm fine with that. Now my writing routine varies based on the project I'm working on. Last year, drafting a novel, I wrote every day, in my office at home. Wifi switched off, phone in another room (specifically, on a shelf in the kitchen, in an empty ceramic pot that was supposed to house a succulent). Right now, I'm working on shorter, stand-alone work, and so my routine is even less routine. I'll write for several hours (3-4) and then repeat that the next day or a couple days later.

A voice clearly articulating an especially inevitable-sounding sentence or first line usually compels me to begin.

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

JN: Death and appetite. The desire to create and transform, the desire to annihilate and disappear. Tensions between visibility and invisibility. Love and cruelty as two sides of the relational coin.

I come to writing and art to hang out with these obsessions. I'm grateful to the big questions and obsessions that impel my work. I don't try to abandon them.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JN: My first take on this is in the occupational sense––pastry chef or counselor/therapist working with folks with eating disorders or a visual artist working in colored pencil. But maybe you mean in a broader sense? Like what kind of person would I be if I weren't a writer? That's impossible for me to say because being a writer is completely intrinsic to my identity, to how I move through and make sense of the world, to how I relate to other people and beings, to how I understand or try to understand the paradox of existence.

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

JN: In grad school, my professor Kathryn Davis explained her method for revision: After marking up a first draft manuscript, retype it in a new document. This lets you reenter the expansive, generative headspace of drafting, rather than getting trapped in the rote task-work of cutting paragraphs or tweaking verbs. I still do this, whether I'm rewriting a 70-word poem or a 70,000 word novel. This semester, I've been talking with my creative writing students about drafting by hand. The lovely freedom it affords you. The gift of getting to type that handwritten draft before workshop, thus building in a preliminary revision.

Advice? Approach life with the curiosity you had during the happiest, wildest periods of your childhood. Practice "free and easy wandering," what Agnes Martin called the ideal state of the artist, whether that's in how you experience nature or how you browse the library stacks or how you lose yourself in a museum. Read more than you think is possible. Get off social media; don't dignify AI with your energy or time.

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

JN: I'm writing essays about the intersection of culture and parenting. Writing never tries to ruin my life, and this writing certainly hasn't!

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

JN: Agnes Martin, Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, Leonora Carrington, Spike Lee, Garielle Lutz, Nicholson Baker, Anaïs Nin, Hervé Guibert, John Cage, John Waters, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Jordan, Claude Monet, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Richard Pryor, Larry David, Caroline Knapp, Roger Ebert, Anna Banti, MFK Fisher––

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

JN: Everyone should watch Věra Chytilová's 1967 film Daisies––think of it as the insouciant, anarchistic love child of Jean Luc Goddard's Pierrot Le Fou and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

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JOANNA NOVAK is the author of seven books, most recently, DOMESTIREXIA: Poems (Soft Skull 2024) and the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood (Catapult 2023). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, Conjunctions, and other publications. She writes a weekly newsletter about culture and parenting, How To Watch TV With Your Kid.

How To Watch TV With Your Kid

A parent's guide to exploring, and delighting in, arts and culture

By JoAnna Novak

Notes on Art

We paired this piece with Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather1 — 14 self-portrait busts: seven made of chocolate and seven out of soap. Antoni licked the chocolate ones and bathed with the soap ones until her own face’s likenesses wore down to almost nothing. I love how surreal and yet…real it is (aha, yes I did use our mag’s tagline here). Novak’s essay burns with that same tension — erosion so careful you could mistake it for a kind of maintenance.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, when Shannan and I first read this story, we read it again together out-loud and though I know we were in our living room in front of a screen, I distinctly remember feeling transported right into the midst of this crazy dinner party. Now, we invite you to join in!

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We found the lamp in Youngstown, Ohio.

We weren’t supposed to be in Youngstown, which was our childhood home. We’d made a list of what to avoid in our thirties, and it included Ohio. For a time we succeeded. We didn’t want the new build with a large lot or the long commute or school politics for five-year-olds. We didn’t believe in single-family neighborhoods. We didn’t want to live near her folks or my folks, and we also didn’t worship our careers. We despised anyone buying an SUV, but also anyone whose entire identity was their electric status on wheels. We didn’t want to be our older brothers and sisters even more than we didn’t want to be our parents: neither the right suburb with the dependable income and the blooming stomach, nor the wrong borough with the men wearing beanies in summer and everyone flaunting their jean shorts and bespoke tattoos. We didn’t need every restaurant to sell local ales, and we didn’t preen about liking bad beer as some sort of authenticity gambit. We didn’t visit coffee shops that thought every seat should be a kind of middle-finger to relaxing. Benches everywhere, and no cushions. We ordered these shops’ coffee to go.

We didn’t want the material of materialism or the trends of trendiness.

At first, we only wanted each other.

Then we had children. And we wanted them, too.

Now, tonight, we were going to have a dinner party.

“Huh,” said Melissa.

We were in the basement of our cul-de-sac home. Our two children were at my parents’.

“Huh,” Melissa repeated. “There’s a small door here.”

I disagreed. I said, “No, there isn’t.” This wasn’t my first trip to the basement.

“Look,” said Melissa, and pushed aside some boxes.

“Huh,” I said.

The door was square and wooden and barely tall enough to crawl into. It wasn’t locked.

“We have to,” said Melissa.

“We do,” I agreed.

She turned the old brass knob and pulled.

There wasn’t anything but a shelf. On the shelf was a lamp from ancient Persia.

“Peter is going to love this,” said Melissa.

“I love it,” I said.

We found the tablecloth we’d been searching for in the first place and brought it upstairs with the lamp. It was almost time for dinner.

“Okay, okay,” I said, above the noise of conversation. “Before dessert, we want everyone to see something.”

Melissa brought in the lamp on a platter and set it in the center of the table. The two couples present were also married with children.

“What is that?” asked Peter. “It looks like Aladdin’s lamp.”

“It might be!” said Melissa. “It just appeared in our basement.”

“You know how basements are,” I said, which made everyone laugh. I felt very good about getting this laugh and also about the lamp and my wife and the house we never wanted in a town I never thought I’d have to see again. I felt wonderful.

“Let’s try it,” said Sarah, who was married to Peter. “Or have you already tried it?”

“We were waiting,” I said.

“It’s a little small,” said Keeleigh.

“But beautiful,” said Brandon, her husband. “Who should try it first?”

“As hosts, we are happy to defer,” said Melissa. She was always proper.

“I think Peter is the oldest,” said Sarah.

“Age before beauty,” said Brandon. He beat me to it, but I laughed with everyone else all the same. I laughed the longest even.

Peter lifted the lamp from the center of the table and examined it. He bumped his glasses up his forehead even though he wasn’t a professor or anything. He was an internal auditor. But he was one of those guys, very into history and reading and so on. Always a new documentary he wanted to discuss.

With the handle in his left hand, he rubbed the lamp in a counterclockwise motion.

“Counterclockwise?” I asked.

“Maybe you’re right,” said Peter, when nothing happened. He rubbed it again, this time in a clockwise direction.

A clockwise direction. A clock. A wise direction. A navel is not a tick but tap I went in the center.

“Ah!” we all shouted. Not screamed.

“Honey,” said Melissa, a wife. My wife. “Honey,” she said. “Quit rubbing your tummy.”

“Stomach,” I said. I didn’t like baby talk when the children were away.

Tap, I went. Tap on the belly button, I went. I went—

“What, um,” I said, “what the hell is happening?”

The lamp released vapor and hissed when Peter had rubbed the way that was correct, the wise clock’s way as Ah said—I mean as I said. The vapor? Hence our almost shouting. But tap, I went. Hop on one foot I went. The words, my thought-words, they word thought me order out of, but wrong. “Hell is what?” I said.

“Other people!” said Brandon, triumphant.

“What did you do, darling?” asked Sarah, Peter’s wife.

“Nothing! I didn’t even get to make a wish.”

My tapping stopped.

“Thar wastrel,” I spake, as like the pirate as a pea to its pod-mate. “Ye had me as a fool in yer foul melon.”

I was a-foot and steady, and if I but made constant in my deployment of the buccaneer swag, I could set each sail of the mind to wind and fare forth in good thought. F— me, methinks. It bespooked me. I groaned as the wee man Brandon and his knave, the man-jack wish-caster, also took to feet, though Brandon could nay demand equal ground, being always an easy miss of the cutlass should one swipe at arm’s height. Whoosh. Him ye must stoop at before ye behead.

“Get him some water.”

“Something stronger, surely.”

“Have a seat,” one or the other, twin blanks both of them, said, misfiring and misfiring.

Peter put the lamp down and my thoughts snapped into place.

“Jiminy Cricket,” I said. “That was worse than being drunk.”

“I certainly didn’t wish for that.”

“Yeah, we’ve all seen you drunk,” said Brandon, stealing more of the night’s laughs.

“Well something happened,” said Sarah, picking up the lamp.

“Yes,” said Peter. “But I was only rubbing and thinking, you know, just thinking, and I didn’t even know what I wanted to wish.”

“What were you thinking?” asked Melissa.

“Truthfully?” Peter glanced at me. “I was having trouble focusing.”

“You felt foolish, maybe?” I said. I was determined to be clinical and not take any personal offense.

“Not quite. But I didn’t want to look foolish, no. I suppose I never do.”

We all hmmed at each other. Melissa brought more wine and Keeleigh, who’d been the quietest, rose to use the restroom. “But wait for me!” she said. “I don’t want to miss anything.” Her lovely, if diminutive, form fled the table. The luck of Brandon was unavoidable tonight. My wife watched Keeleigh round the corner as well, and we both gave inaudible sighs. We didn’t want to care about unattainable beauty, yet here we were.

“What’s the most interesting conversation you’ve had since children?” Sarah asked. She was still holding the lamp.

“That assumes we used to have them,” I answered. Some chuckles. Not laughs.

“I read a lot, is what I mean,” said Sarah, “and Peter reads a lot, but we care about different things. I feel like we can talk about work and the kids and every now and then summarize what we’ve been reading or whatever, but we don’t actually get into the details of anything.”

“I’m in a book club,” Melissa offered. “It’s pretty much all novels, though. I think our favorite was probably about a podcaster who gets caught up in a local murder. One of the gals knew a lot about, like, old-timey radio and said podcasts were a funny way of going back to, you know, the 1930s and such. That was interesting to me.”

I beamed at my wife.

“I feel like I only ever get into it when I’m smoking,” said Brandon. I didn’t know he smoked. Tobacco or something more than tobacco? He never invited me. “I dunno why,” he continued, “but a friend and I were discussing Kierkegaard the other week, just bullshitting while we smoked out back. Neither of us had read anything since college. But I really think Kierkegaard was a prophet of mass media, like he was against it, I mean. And my friend insisted that was a really stupid thing to focus on for the guy who gave us Fear and Trembling. We didn’t really make sense, but I definitely felt alive, you know? We both went totally overboard, like real undergraduates again.”

Keeleigh returned to us and was told the prompt. “Oh,” she said. “We’re done with the lamp?”

Sarah was still in possession.

“Brandon and I have been discussing a book of letters from World War II,” said Keeleigh. “We both love art, as well, especially the pre-Raphaelite cult. I mean they weren’t a cult, but they were a bit of a blip, you know?”

Only Brandon nodded. There was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles joke somewhere in what Keeleigh was saying. But it escaped me. It slithered away from me. Post-Leonardo. I stayed silent. Of course I did. An ignoramus. A moron. There it was, myself, spread about an inch thick on the ground. Puddle-deep piece of shit. We all said nothing.

Sarah coughed. “Well,” she said, “I might give it a little rub myself.”

“Not-the-first-time-you’ve-heard-those-words-huh-Peter?” I said. My quick draw was vicious. More chuckles. Brandon nodded in admiration. He’d opened his mouth only a fraction after me.

Closing her eyes and gathering a thought in her mind, almost as if she were obeying birthday rules, Sarah began rubbing the lamp. Her brow scrunched. Her hands tightened.

“Oh crap,” said Peter.

“Uh oh,” said Keeleigh.

“For real?” said Brandon.

“What?” I said.

Sarah was gripping the lamp with one hand and the edge of the table with the other and her eyes were still closed. We didn’t exist to her anymore. Lucky Sarah. She was somewhere else and I couldn’t tell if she was in pain or in ecstasy, and I didn’t know why my wife was nudging me in the side with her elbow. It was strange! It was exactly the sort of escape from this moment—this dinner party which was not going how I thought, yet which was going to provide memory fodder for my guests and for myself for months and maybe years to come—it was exactly fit for this moment, or maybe any moment.

Oh, I realized. Sarah was having an orgasm.

She didn’t make any noise but her lap seemed to press deeper into her own seat and her hands gripped both the lamp and the table.

“Please stop looking at my wife,” said Peter.

“First-time-you’ve-seen-that-in-a-while,” I said, but I shouldn’t have. No one laughed.

Besides, Sarah had the right idea. We did look away, or at least we tried. Peter couldn’t, and we were all looking at Peter, which made us want to look at Sarah. This was only a matter of seconds, we’re talking. The depths of sex cannot be overstated in this neighborhood, which has nothing animal left inside its walls. Our grandfathers hunted and we never wanted to hunt, and neither did most of our fathers. Some of our uncles and aunts still shot geese in the fall, but we didn’t want that. We wanted dogs who could be caressed into plush toys.

Sarah was caught in a deep wanting that was under whatever conscious thought she held in her mind. She undulated a little bit, but nothing too indecorous. A firm and quiet and passionate woman. God, I hated myself.

Peter was talking to her.

“Baby, put the lamp down. You gotta put the lamp down, okay?”

He was reaching for the lamp. How could she acquiesce? Saint Sarah, lost in the one intersection of our lowest and highest instincts. We didn’t want to be beasts and we didn’t want to be angels.

“Here we go,” said Peter, and finally pried the lamp from her hand.

“Oh my god,” she said. “I was here the whole time?”

“Yes,” said Melissa.

“I tried wishing for the power of flight. That’s what I was thinking, I mean.”

“You are one lucky guy,” Brandon told Peter. Everyone guffawed as a way to break the tension, and Sarah blushed. But a happy blush. Her pale neck was still flushed.

“It’s like the only tether, sometimes, sex,” said Keeleigh. Her beautiful, petite form pulsed a bit with the word sex. I was staring very hard at her cheekbones. “It’s one of the continuities, you know?”

“I need some water,” said Sarah.

“We didn’t have sex until we got married,” said Peter. “We’ve only known each other, you know?”

Keeleigh nodded. “I remember Sarah saying that. It’s amazing to me. Beautiful, really.”

“Like meeting a woolly mammoth in person,” said Brandon. “Aren’t your kind extinct?”

“It’s something sacred to us, even now I mean,” said Peter. “I remember my college roommate, very much not a woolly mammoth, tried to explain to me how there was sex and there was making love. It was a very young idea, and he was pretty new to his own sexual adventures. But he was right, of course. Everyone knows the difference.”

“He’s going to say something about Saint Augustine,” I said. “He’s told me this.”

“I am going to say something about Saint Augustine.”

“I don’t even really know who Saint Augustine is, and he loves telling me this.”

“Maybe it was Saint Aquinas?” said Sarah, returning with her water.

“One of the big guys,” said Peter, “makes it clear that sex has to arise—”

Brandon and I opened our mouths.

“—from the love.”

We agreed to a silent truce.

“The spouse can become an object if you’re not careful.”

“Have you been careful?” asked Keeleigh. “Do you use each other as objects?”

Sarah shrugged. “Sometimes. But we try not to.”

Keeleigh nodded. “I sometimes feel like the bedroom, with the kids asleep and Brandon very obviously horny, is the only retreat from our current life. It’s this little tent, this time machine tent, we can enter or leave. It exists within our current life, but remains apart, too.”

“An oasis,” said Peter.

“Yes. An oasis. I had to read the Song of Solomon for a poetry class, and I remember that, Peter. An oasis.” She didn’t blink. The two of them watched each other.

“What the fuck are we talking about?” asked Melissa.

No one was sure.

“Let’s try rubbing the lamp together,” said Keeleigh to her small husband, Brandon. The short wit. Brevity is the soul of—. Well, he was beautiful, too. Compact.

Their left hands overlapped on the handle of the lamp, and their right hands, his fingers in between her own, began rubbing.

Not much happened. Nothing was happening. Our children were playing in the room next door. Sarah was undressing in front of Peter.

“Don’t look at my wife,” said Peter.

Melissa was getting drunk. Or getting me drunk. I was drunk. People kept drunking me.

Keeleigh and Brandon were in their nice dinner clothes and not wine-bibbled and not undressing, although she was on his lap now.

“Do you want me to undress?” Keeleigh asked my wife.

Melissa made a face. She could take it or leave it.

I realized it wasn’t only our children, it was everyone’s children in the next room. All the children. Peter and Sarah’s three kids and Brandon and Keeleigh’s one child were playing with our two girls. The odd one out was Sarah and Peter’s youngest, a toddler. But they were playing so nicely.

“We’re all playing so nicely,” said Brandon. They kept think-ripping me. Ripping my thinks. My thought cords, pulled.

“Yank,” said Brandon, and winked at me.

But we were also having a lively, robust conversation.

As if mid-dialogue, Keeleigh was saying, “Peter and Sarah, now, they think abortion is wrong.”

“Sure,” said Peter, his wife still undressing.

“Yes,” said Sarah.

“And Brandon and I, we’ve paid for an abortion.”

“Of course,” I said.

“But we’re all together and happy and friends. Which calls into question the moral case for abortion, doesn’t it?”

Brandon was watching his child, a son, play in the next room. Our two daughters were matched by Peter and Sarah’s older two. There was a little plastic slide and many cars and some dolls getting their hair braided and a coloring pad being abused by the toddler, who was told, “Oh, I like that picture so much!” by one of the girls every few minutes.

But we were also talking.

“I think, actually,” said Peter, his wife’s areolas entering the air, “that our instinct not to bring up abortion calls into question how much we underestimate the need for socializing. We take the moral heft of getting along too lightly, maybe.”

“You’re not getting an abortion right now,” said Sarah.

“I love when they play like that,” said Brandon, watching our children.

“I don’t take socializing lightly,” said Keeleigh.

“I feel awful,” said Melissa. “I don’t want to talk about abortion. You’re making me feel horrible.” But she kept drinking.

“I think maintaining the social fabric is a vital cause,” said Keeleigh. “It’s not a slight or superficial idea at all. But still, if you think I’m a murderer, shouldn’t that come up now and then?”

“Good sharing!” Brandon shouted at the other room.

“But we’re friends,” said Sarah.

“Exactly!” said Peter and Keeleigh at the same time, not agreeing, both of them watching Sarah begin to pull at the waistline of her husband’s jeans.

“Give me that!” said Melissa, and she took the lamp.

The children were gone. The clothes were replaced. I was un-drunked again, and so was Melissa. She held the lamp high, brandishing it at the room.

“Oh, man,” I said. “I wish the girls actually were here. I didn’t expect that.”

“I wish,” said Melissa, out loud, and she began rubbing the lamp. But she didn’t have a chance to voice the thought.

Had she been wishing? She kept the lamp in her lap, and we continued the dinner chatter we’d all been enjoying.

“So you’d go to Crete?” Keeleigh asked Sarah.

The question was: what vacation would you repeat if you could only travel somewhere you’d already been? We’d been discussing the question for, oh, the whole night I should say.

For some reason, though, I missed our daughters. I won’t tell you their names. We don’t post their likenesses anywhere online. Just the backs of their heads. We don’t want the wrong kind of exposure for them. From our feeds you’d think we wanted to be somewhere in the mountains or near the ocean or out beneath the stars, just me and Melissa like old times, with two castoff shadows and silhouettes, at best, dragged along. But that was only digital security. We wanted to watch the girls experience the mountains, the beach, the stars, more than we wanted to experience the mountains and the beach and the stars ourselves. We wanted for them and through them, but not in the way our parents did. Not vicarious vampirism. We wanted them around, and wanted them to want to be around. And they did! For now.

“Where would you go?” Brandon asked me.

“I’d like a chance at the lamp,” I said.

“I thought we weren’t doing that tonight,” said Sarah.

“We all passed,” said Peter.

“Babe,” said Melissa. “Let’s try it another night.” It was sitting in her hands atop her blue skirt, the one with pleats which was somehow very attractive and very old-fashioned at the same time.

But I wanted to hold the lamp.

“Let’s just see,” I said, smiling as widely as possible. “One of us should try it.”

I took the lamp from her hands, and she let me.

We all remembered at the same moment.

“Your wife has exquisite breasts,” said Keeleigh.

“Stop,” Melissa said. “Stop ruining this!”

The lamp was lighter than I’d hoped. Almost cheap.

“What’s in your heart, do you think?” Brandon asked me. The competition.

“I’m sorry, Melissa,” Keeleigh was saying. “I was just joking.”

“Honestly, I don’t feel as much shame as I would’ve expected,” said Sarah.

Peter guffawed. “I do.”

“It happened to me, I mean, the same as it happened to all of you.”

I was centralizing a thought in my head. Or trying.

Gripping the lamp’s handle, I began to rub at its middle, clockwise as any sane person would do.

A gun appeared in my hand.

The lamp in one, the pistol in the other.

“Honey,” said Melissa.

“Whoa. What the hell?” said anyone. Take your pick.

“I’ve never held a gun before,” I said.

“Next!” said Brandon. “Do not cross start, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“You know,” I said. “Our life here is very full. Everyone told me it would be empty, the suburban deadness and all that, but it’s not. It’s very full. I thought I’d hate it, but I don’t. I don’t even love the wrong parts of it. I think.”

“Let’s be done with the lamp,” said Peter. “I want to hear more. But without the lamp.”

“Or the gun,” said Keeleigh.

“But he wants to die,” said Melissa. “I’m not surprised. He wants to die.”

I smiled. “I think a loft in exactly the right city and without the wrong job would solve everything.”

Peter reached for the gun. “Here. You can give it to me. I’ll take it.”

“What I wished,” I said, “or what I wanted to ask for, I mean, was the ability to stop time.”

Brandon nodded. “For yourself? Or for everyone?”

“I dunno. For myself, I guess. Or maybe everyone would stop around me, and I could exist in a little bubble of time. Or maybe the effects of living would stall for a bit. No aging for a day or a week or a year, or something. Maybe that’s all time is, a kind of decay. I dunno. But I wanted to be able to stop time.”

“Here,” said Peter. “I love what you’re saying, but just hand that here, yeah?”

“That’s like dying,” said Melissa. “Stopping time, I mean. I’m not surprised. It’s not an escape hatch. It’s negation. Erasure.”

I shrugged. “It’s the only real choice. A realist deals with reality. You choose to accept life as it’s piped into you or you choose to die. Once you realize those are the options, well, it becomes an option.”

“But do you want to die?” said Brandon.

Keeleigh touched his wrist. “I think Peter’s right. This is a genuinely interesting conversation. It just needs one less gun for us to have it.”

“Wanting is downstream of reality, I think.” I was enjoying the weight of the pistol. I didn’t know it’d be so solid, so exquisite as a creation. “What can be wanted, you know, it dictates the desires. You can want to receive, or you can want to die.”

Melissa was staring at the table. “We should have had a family party. We should be in the backyard with the kids, all the kids. We should be getting interrupted.”

“But if life is a disappointment,” said Sarah, whom I’d seen topless, “like if you find the bad parts of life overwhelming your desire to keep living, that can only flow, you know, from life being good. Right? Life is good, otherwise it wouldn’t matter when it’s not.”

“I didn’t say I was being logical.”

“We all think we’re logical,” said Peter. “We all think we’re realists.”

“You can’t be so disgusted by life—”

“I’m not disgusted!”

“—that you want to kill yourself, without first believing life is good at the most basic level. That’s the seed of all our desire. We want more of the good.”

“Just give Peter the gun,” said Keeleigh. “We’ll all feel better. Just give him the gun.”

“No gun for you!” tried Brandon.

“Keep talking,” said Peter. “Keep talking. Just let me see that.”

“You don’t want this,” said Sarah. “You don’t actually want this.”

Melissa shook her head, but kept staring at the table.

I put the gun to my temple. Everyone made a lot of noise, but no one was quick enough to stop me. I pulled the trigger.

It hurt. It sparked and boomed.

But it was a blank.

“Ha!” I laughed. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

What a wonderful joke.

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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?

JOEL CUTHBERTSON: I’ve always lived in my head too much. I believe my most entertaining stories were written between third and fifth grade, when I spent every afternoon jumping on a rusted trampoline a neighbor gave us, entering whatever worlds appeared that day. I tried to be a screenwriter and a playwright in college, but I guess I’m drawn to ideas that need both a larger and a more intimate canvas. There’s no world too big for a novel, and yet no medium is as well-suited to explore interiority.

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?

JC: I am firmly in the “stealing time” phase of life. I write during breaks at work, in the mornings if a larger project has possessed me, and sometimes at night. Most pieces begin with an opening line; usually some kind of perspective is already half-sensed. But any strong impression will do: a character that leaps out of life, a paradox I continue to injure my brain on, or a place I love and can’t explain why.

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?

JC: Fatherhood seems dominant at the moment. But I think the strain of connection generally appears in my work. Also, if I straighten my invisible bow tie and adjust my glasses with the right sort of intellection, I might say that the problem of evil, which is sometimes a very funny problem, seems to insert itself into everything.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JC: Many things are possible. I might be a marketing drudge or a dedicated high school English teacher or even an emergency room doctor. I suppose the most likely outcome is that I’d be marvelously rich, probably a rock star, and that I’d have really defined abs. Damn you, fiction!

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?

JC: Two pieces of advice stand out.

The first, which I cribbed from George Saunders, is to justify your excesses. Can you parse what this advice means? Can you feel its weight in your mouth when reading your work aloud for revision? It appears like a revelation, at some point, if you internalize the phrase. “Justify your excesses.”

The second is to touch the work every day. I stole this one as well, from Dana Spiotta this time. It can be ten minutes, five minutes, or less. Sometimes you’re editing a lot because that’s an easier lift in between feeding the children and feeding the loan officers. That counts. It all counts. Stay in contact, if you can.

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

JC: A nonfiction work of book length—of novella length at least—has entered my life. I’m still trying to scribble out stories as much as possible, but I never thought I’d be this distracted by something that puts on reportorial airs. I won’t say more than that it’s called Animal Life, is memoir-ish in a diet Annie Dillard kind of way, and should be finished in the next several months.

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?

JC: Some authors and storytellers that give me permission—another stolen line, this time from Jenny Offill—are Mikhail Bulgakov, Penelope Fitzgerald, Muriel Spark, Terrence Malick, David Lynch, Gene Wolfe, Dave Malloy, Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Wynne Jones, Jane Greer, Zadie Smith, and Joy Williams.

Gene Wolfe in particular is an author who’s reminded me to add, to enlarge, to find annexes as part of the editing process. Bedazzling is sometimes more necessary than the Lishian cutting I practiced and was pointed to in earlier years. Maybe your narrative is too small rather than your language not being sharp enough. Once the voice and technique find their balance, you’ve still gotta let it rip sometimes.

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.

JC: I’ve been listening to Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook on and off for weeks now. Go forth and do likewise!

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Commonplace Bert

diatribes and distractions, usually bookish

By Joel Cuthbertson

Notes on Art

We paired this story with Nicole Eisenman’s Winter Solstice 2012 Dinner Party (2009)1 — six figures around a candlelit table, wine half-drunk, plates barely touched, everyone slumping or staring or somewhere else entirely. Eisenman paints social gatherings the way they actually feel after enough hours and enough wine: the bodies are still at the table but the minds have wandered into private, ungovernable places. Her figures are together and alone at the same time, and the paint itself can’t decide how real anyone is. Cuthbertson’s dinner party works the same way — a place of reckoning and magic and chaos where truth and fiction tango together until the very end.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

As you might know, Karan and I are both writers, and we love being writers, and now we’ve also been editors for quite a while. First and foremost though, we feel ourselves to be readers. Without a desire to read (and understand what you read), the first two things — writing and editing — are virtually impossible. We’d very likely be terrible writers and editors if we were terrible readers.

We don’t really do date nights, the two of us, but as a family (along with our daughter) we do lots of story nights. And because we edit two magazines together, we also read and talk about so much exciting, weird, beautiful contemporary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Beyond that, we do the same for what we read for leisure and pleasure (which, yes, of course we make time for). It’s one of our favorite things — to argue about what works in a story or a poem and why, to vibe with the stuff we both love, to try to trace out some kind of critical analysis that might inform our own work.

With all of this in mind, we thought… wouldn’t it be cool to have some kind of a reading club? There are many cool writing clubs around, and spaces, and workshops, and programs. We run some of those too. But we haven’t really done something strictly focused on the wonders and joys and literary sweetness that springs forth from a really good, close read.

If you’ve done an MFA or are in the process of one, you might be familiar with the Close Read. Reading a piece of writing beforehand, making notes, then coming into class to discuss the work, the whole session generally led by, if you’re lucky, an experienced instructor who can offer the proverbial magical magnifying glass that’ll get to the heart of the work and help it open up for you like never before.

I’ve seldom had such an experience in an academic setting. But at home, during our story evenings, it happens all the time. And that’s kind of what we want to try and offer you. Though we’d love to run these sessions in person, for now we’re going to experiment with an online format, to allow for maximum accessibility.

Here’s what we’re thinking

Our first Strange Pilgrims Club meet will happen on Thursday, April 23rd at 7pm EST, over Zoom.

Since this is a test run, we’ll keep the group small. We’ll save 5 slots for paid subscribers, first-come first-serve, and the remaining 5-10 seats will be open to everyone, also first-come first-serve. After that, there’ll be a waitlist. To enroll, sign up here:

Sign up for Strange Pilgrims Club

The story we’ve picked for this inaugural session is Kelly Link’s “Prince Hat Underground.” The reason is, one: I fucking love this story. Two: it represents very clearly what kind of work we love to publish. And three: there’s a lot in it we can dig into and try to understand in ways that might inform our own writing and creative decisions.

Before the session:

• I’ll send the PDF to everyone who signs up

• Based on the first-come-first-serve basis, I’ll send a Zoom link to those who’ll be attending live

• Read the story once, sit with it, annotate if you wish. Everyone will be given the opportunity to share, but if you’re more of a lurker (high-five) that’s totally fine too.

During the actual session:

• We’ll do quick introductions

• I’ll share a brief presentation to assist our close read

• We’ll read out loud specific sections of the story and dig into them together

• Among other things, we’ll discuss what Link is doing with the fairy-tale bones, where the strangeness is coming from, the nature of whimsy vs. the surreal vs. logic in her tale, how larger themes like love and grief are explored without cliché

• Open yet structured conversation

I want this to feel like the best kind of workshop classroom. The part I’m most looking forward to is where it opens up into everyone talking about the story, and about what literature is doing right now.

The session will run for about 60-90 minutes. If the conversation is thriving I won’t end it prematurely, and anyone who needs to drop off at the 60-minute mark is free to do so (ought to go without saying that I won’t hold you captive before this either, but I want to nurture a sustained space for conversation and analysis, so I’d encourage you to stay for the full 60-90 minutes at least).

The session will be recorded. Paid subscribers will get the recording afterward, so if you can’t make it live, you’ll still have a way in.

Subscribe now

Alrighty, well…we really aren’t sure if there will be any interest at all, so there might be just 3 of us hanging out together. But something tells me there are more of you out there who appreciate the Close Read and want to invigorate your own reading and writing practice.

Without much further ado then, you’re invited to join in on the first ever Strange Pilgrims Club!

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we’ve got an essay that could be a short story or a dreamy sweet forest-drenched fever dream, or an ode to bears, and it’s probably all of that—dive in!

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I. Bear is a form, Bear is form

I consider their noun-y-ness, their letters and rhyming potential, how they hold space between the roof of my mouth and my tongue. When I call to them, my lips begin pressed together with a certain expectation, so I can really pop that b. I open to let the vowels out until my lips curl back for a consonant that might linger as long as you’d like it to. They sound like what we breathe. They end with a softness like fur we might wrap ourselves in. Though they never needed us to call to them to know they are there, that they are real.

I. 1. Bear as animal

Before human, before our language, there is fur and maw. Fifty-five million years ago, a dog becomes heavy-set (I get it), their teeth blunted. They remain small until they do not. Sun and sloth rise. The giant-short-faced bear towers. Brown and black, panda and polar, spectacled, too, all become. They are them long before we are us.

I. 2. Bear as noun

We begin to make them ours, as we try to do to everything, language being a certain kind of possession. In Old English, we name them bera. In Proto-Germanic, we name them bero—literally, the brown (one). RuPaul might quip, Why they gotta be brown? And he’d be right. They don’t, Ru. They really don’t. If you’re feeling thirsty, Middle Dutch and Dutch have you covered: from bere to beer, respectively. Some German, too: Bär. I’m parched. Let’s go! Apologies, I can’t help myself. I’m drunk on an idea and its evolution, just not quenched, not sated. Will I/we ever be?

I. 3. Bear as myth(ology)

Where there’s a little flesh and some mystery, there’s a narrative waiting to write itself out of hibernation. Somewhere, lonely in the woods, they lumber, and we begin to imagine them. We make them like us, our creations intertwined.

I.3.a. The Mother Bear

There are so many versions. A girl lost in the forest is forced to wed a bear and have his bear-children. Yikes! In another, the young woman consents to marry the bear, becoming one herself by story’s end. Callisto is tricked raped by a god and then turned into a bear by another one. (It gets worse.) More recently, her porridge is too cold and her bed too soft for a curious young girl lost in the woods. (So many forests of narrative so full of lost girls.) In all of these stories, a mother fiercely protects her cubs. Some instincts defy the boundaries we draw with words like animal, species, human. I see a velvet sack on my father’s mantle, understanding who fills it. She wanted a girl, and she got me. Close enough we might giggle together now, if she weren’t quiet as ash. I am not a girl, but I am lost.

I.3.b. beast of the “frontier”

We come for them—their ears and their maws, their pelts and their claws. Men who look like me, we name them grisly and grizzly, make a monster of a thing which we only desire in parts: skin and head on the wall, a story of slaughter shared over whiskey and firelight, a product sold to a customer. Even their excess becomes a commodity. Fat rendered into oil; we call it bear grease. We cook with it. We waterproof with it. We lubricate. We use it to repel insects. So many pests in this wilderness, so many instructions. You will not encounter a bear, but you will carry the bear spray. Call out to them to alert them to your presence.“Hey bear” meaning “away beast.” When you see them at a distance, do not lose them. Maintain your distance. When the bear is thirty feet away, deploy the bear spray.

I. 4. Bear as sacred

It is not always this way; there is not always a monster to excuse a violence. What one might see as a threat or a means, another understands as a symbol for something beyond themselves, of something greater. We might call this spiritual or sacred. We might call this a different epistemology towards bear altogether. I sit in the car with a poet who identifies as Iñupiak-Inuit, and we gab over our respective adoration of bear. When I mention the attempts to loosen restrictions on hunting grizzlies in the West, she says, We do not kill bears.

I. 5. Bear as river

In Utah, they flow like a jagged U around the northern edge of the Wasatch Range. They lumber towards a death—an ancient sea made more ancient by each growing season. A man once saw them there fishing in the river, so what we named them, he named the water. Now they make a valley fertile. They seep into the earth so hay and alfalfa might rise into the mouths of hungry even-toed ungulates. The cow moos and the sheep bleats so pastorally after they are fed by the bear. To reach this verdant pasture, the river is not lost; it is taken.

I. 6. Bear as human

Jane Bennett once said a “touch of anthropomorphism” is okay, so let’s lean into that for a moment, shall we? I’ll try to put my finger on it—not the animals themselves (risky business!), but that line we draw between us. Like how when we kill them, we call it hunting, and when they kill us, we call it tragedy. Like when I button up my costume all billowy and soft in the late October chill, I remain a man merely wanting. Some love might call out to me Hey, bear!, and I’ll come running. Some child might ask for candy, and all I have are fresh berries dying my hands like a sweet bruise.

I.6.a. an unbearable human

The paradox here is not lost on me, and they are beginning to pile up with so many meanings, so much signification percolating around here like salmon bones in peak hyperphagia. Here, a human kills the vibe, flies into a rage, is so uncouth and ill-kept one names them truly feral with our four precious letters. I shudder at this misappropriation; I render it obsolete. Take that! I don’t mean to be difficult or moody or unpleasant, but linguistics can really get me going. We can spare the animal here and name a miserable man what they are.

I.6.b. a sizeable, cumbersome man

We are getting closer to my sweet spot with this one. Maybe there’s even some honey in our future. I drizzle it in my oats each night and look forward to the work it does in the morning. The oats, the milk pressed from soy beans, perhaps each fed by that river or some other source. I mix them all together here in my bowl. They enter my body, the bear and his decadent resonances. I once watched a lumberjack competition on television (don’t ask), and all I could see was bear. Bear with axe. Bear in flannel and tight denim. Bear with chainsaw. Let me tell you, these men loved wood, but perhaps not as much as those who follow.

I.6.c. a burly, hairy gay man

We love a belly! We love fur! We love bear all burly with his bodacious biceps and beard. Just seeing one in the wild is a balm, a blessing, and becoming one, too. I’m bumbling towards a brutish beauty. Call it my bearing. I read james mckenna’s poem “signify me, daddy,” and daddy is a bear in my unbearable mind. Not a fist, but a paw. Not a mouth, but a maw.

I. 7. Bear as form

I am meandering with a purpose, I promise. We have so much ground to cover here, and an essay (or a collection of them) seems as apt a space as any. See, bear is not territorial. This home range is shared between me and you and you. And though we can’t see one another right now, I’m not avoiding you, as bear might another bear with whom they share their range. But I might be avoiding something, refusing something. We’re just going to amble and lumber for a bit, taking care not to miss an arousing scent, a memory, or the ghosts that fill every absence. There is a velvet sack on a mantle, a face that changes shape in the mirror.

II. Bear is action, Bear is performance

If you’ve been feeling a little reverb from these noun-al dissonances, I get that. What I offer you now is straight all verb because, when we bear, we are doing. We are occurring. We are in the predicate, and thus, we are predicated. How do we make these four letters do; when do we make them occur?

II.1. Bear becomes verb

Much like their noun-y counterpart, bear’s action is of an English Old—beran. Even then, the verb was so vers: to carry, bring; bring forth, give birth to, produce; endure without resistance; to support, hold up, sustain; to wear. Bear has so much possibility, they’re always doing what they’re doing in one kind of drag or another. Even the sounds of this etymology are ironic, paradoxical. The Dutch beren, the Old High German beran, the Gothic bairan, and, of course, the Old English beran all in such close proximity to today’s barren (bear, too, if I’m being honest) that one might suspect to find this as the punchline of the cruelest and most misogynistic of a centuries-long joke. A homophone that means its antonym, only a man could have conjured such nonsense. It appears as though he was French, and Old.

II.2. Bear carries

a history and a load (many loads), even clothes. Sometimes that history is not true; sometimes I misremember you. I conjure Teddy Roosevelt and the toy stitched in honor of him, of his refusal to kill a snared cub. Another myth(ology) emerges here, right on the surface, in these lines. We dress him as a war hero so tidily: that hat, those gloves, those boots to boot, and all that tan fabric. I’m dressing this bear in words so I won’t forget the bloodied cub that did not survive. On my feed (lol), a bear carries her cub in her mouth across a two-lane highway in Yellowstone, drops him (presumably) on the other side of a concrete barrier, then climbs over herself. Watching this, I see a boy dragging a brown stuffed animal across the beige living room carpet. There’s a woman in the doorway saying, It’s time to go.

II.3. Bear gives birth

to a child. I am my mother’s son, though come early. I do not lie on her chest after they pull me from the cut through her abdomen into her uterus. They take me away to the incubator where I stay. I do not see her dirty blond curls, not freshly permed but not too stale either, on the other side of the acrylic compartment. I imagine her hands reaching through the openings for me, touching my smallness, my not-ready-ness—the first tenderness I’ll never know. This is not a memory, only having been relayed to me later when I might understand. But my father remembers what happens days later when the insurance no longer covers my mother’s room and bed, and so she goes home that night, but returns each day. She was so angry. She was so pissed, he says. Bear remains with her cub until he is ready. She brings me home, my name in her mouth, my body in her arms.

II.4. Bear possesses inherently

even when that is an impossibility. Another paradox. Another essential characteristic. There are so many of me here: the I these hands construct who takes us through the chaos, the you I once was before a fracture, the you I imagine I might become, and me here now in these fleeting moments, embodied. What might be inherent to all of me? A hyper-awareness, an anxiety. All my selves abject, narrative as they may be. Don’t get me started on the land, honey. Don’t let me drift to the culture. So many ideas we want to make ours and ours alone in this our shared range. A man once tried to possess my body, brutalized it like an animal or the land he claimed as his own. Even that summer afternoon did not last, and I learned how

II.5. bear sustains

even when it seems dire. The long months without light, without nourishment—the heart slowing lonely and quiet in some cavern or on some hospital bed brought into a home, into a bedroom. Even this feels unsustainable, this bear as form, these words like cancer that refuse to stay in one place; they just grow and grow and go where they don’t belong. A disease that does have an appetite for a pancreas, for the land because, if I don’t live there, no one must. What we can’t sustain, what we lose in winter (or on October 4, 2012), we try to restore when we wake from our comatose. Sometimes restoration is just another hunger. Sometimes restoration is impossible. Sometimes all we have left is language.

II.6. Bear endures

my melodrama and the caricatures. Winnie’s got his hand in the honeypot again. Smokey’s all about prevention, and not just forest fires anymore, birth control, too. A child is not a fire, but he can be flaming. Even before he’s there, before he’s him. We love a gender reveal party. No, we don’t. See, I caught you there. Some things are ridiculous, especially when they make the world burn. He’s chewing on rainbow gummy bears because he loves every color, especially when they’re fruity. Though he’s no bear yet, he’s still consuming himself, a version of him consolidated in high fructose corn syrup. But I’m worried for bear and what I’m doing to them here. Can they bear their bigness, their sprawl, what so many of us admire in them, and what we take from them?

II.7. Bear has a relation

to something else. A likeness, really. Some might call this relationship figurative, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, honey. When I worry this becomes all about language and not what it possesses represents, I cry out write, Metonymize me, Mommy! Synecdochize, Daddy! Because, I’m silly. Because, in so many ways, this is really about the simultaneous, the polytonal. Bear becomes so much to so many. Even as I must choose line-by-line, image-by-image, story-by-story, bear does not. Bear is bear. When I write I am bearish, I mean it. Still in my mother’s maw, she carries me across any road to anytime but now. Here I am eating bear-caught salmon off a chipped plate with a fleur-de-lys that I won’t relinquish because of who gave it to me. I feel like the river’s skeleton picked clean.

III. Bear is large, Bear contains multitudes

My obsession with bear is figurative and literal, etymological and animal, noun and verb, queer and unqueer. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I’m hardly the first to try to extract meaning from these four letters. The Oxford English Dictionary offers 67 definitions for bear as verb and 21 definitions for bear as noun. Of these, 16 are labelled obsolete. How dare they!

III.1. Bear as vers(e)

Bear is top and bottom, so as a piece of language, we might call them decidedly vers. Certainly, one of the vers-iest words out there. For a lover of puns and play, the profusion of bear affords a frontier an orgy of linguistic possibility. A poet might consider their layered meanings and call them poetic. A non-poet might read their wistful lumbering, their quiet winter as prosaic. (Hopefully lyric at the very least). A question of genre and aesthetics. They are all the things. Some stories begin to sound like song, and a poem might be an exercise in syntax. That lineation is feeling bearish, sweetie. Meaning ferocious. Meaning hungry for some fruity enjambement.

III.2. Bear as epistemology

One of those things being understanding. I think of the social—human and more-than—how so much triangulates through bear. Perhaps then, they become a space where knowledge and empathy are shared between us and not taken (for granted). We might each sit by the river and think of it differently—its coldness and its histories, what it grows and where it ends. We might all of us gaze at the animal lumbering across the ridge parched golden in the later afternoon light and all of us misunderstand bear.

III.3. Bear as multiplicity

I want so many things. They are so many things. So then, don’t I want them? But this isn’t all about me; I’m not the only one to see bear and swoon, to become bear and wonder. If Whitman contained multitudes, bear is those unceasing multitudes. Not everything, but an abundance to a lot of beings—human and more-than-. A furry container of rhizomes touching one another, bear refuses any singular position, any teleological definition or purpose. The matrices they foster bring not just me, but all of us, towards some notion of our (deconstructed) interconnectivity. I love bear for this queerness. Bear, too, is this love—the obsession I endure carry abide by, my intentions naked as letters on the page or how a word rhymes in the mouth with care.

References

“Bear, n.1 Meanings, Etymology and More.” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/dictionary/bear_n1?tab=etymology&tl=true.

“Bear, v.1 Meanings, Etymology and More,” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/dictionary/bear_v1?tl=true.

Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Mckenna, James. “signify me, daddy.” Quarterly West, Issue 104. Online.

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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?

MATTY LAYNE GLASGOW: I suppose I’ve been drawn to language as a means of play, performance, and refuge since I was a child, figuring things out as they say. I journaled intermittently throughout childhood but always jotted down ironies or observations that felt meaningful. My parents were quite funny, often biting in their humor, so I feel like our discourse as a family informs my tone and playfulness in much of my work. While I enjoyed writing poems, short stories, and some essays in my high school and undergrad eras, I don’t think I began “identifying” as a writer until later in my twenties after some of the events alluded to in this essay transpired—the passing of my mother and an experience of violence, in particular. At that point, writing was more of an outlet to keep me well, to grapple with grief, to think about my own relationship to the world around me a bit more critically. I still remember a digital storytelling workshop a poet and friend Sara Cooper facilitated in Houston in 2014. That was a profound experience for me, and the community she fostered for us made we want to create across genres and mediums as a more committed practice.

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?

MLG: As an August Virgo, this is such a challenge for me. I do desire some structure and regular writing rituals; alas, my routines themselves tend to be more feral and less domesticated. I do write alongside my students during the semester when we practice in-class activities or immersions across campus, and I think that’s important to maintain my relationship to language. Those little bursts often arise from an observation, an irony, or a tension that’s lingering. A good friend Jess Tanck often organizes 30/30 Writing Challenges in June and December when many of us have a reprieve from the academic calendar, and those have been vital for me since finishing my PhD program. I’ll often build out those shorter exercises into drafts. Voice and tone are very important to me, and I’m frequently trying to negotiate various tones in poems and essays, so in those months I can spend a bit more time in a project, I’m thinking through how those tones work alongside one another (or don’t) and any productive frictions they might generate—sonically and theoretically.

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?

MLG: I do think the various constructions of “the self,” especially how those dynamics shift across genre with the speaker in a poem or the narrator and characters in prose, has been an interest and preoccupation I just can’t quit, try as I might. I remember telling myself after my first book that I needed a break from writing so personally for my own well-being, and here I am. Now, I think, regardless of the perceived content or subject of the project, what I ultimately write about is going to be inherently personal because I’m not going to put work and time into something that isn’t meaningful to me—though the depth of that commitment certainly has its ebbs and flows. Queerness, desire, and environment seem to always be lurking in my work. And harnesses of late. I adore a fetching harness snatching myself or my partner at the nexus of queer domestication and ferality.

If not a writer, who would you be?

MLG: I am a teacher, and I’d want to do that even if I wasn’t getting to teach creative writing. I taught high school math briefly as well, to the horror of those students and many of my friends. In an entirely different life, I think I’d find joy in curating the craft services table on film sets, or happy hour spreads more broadly. One of my friends in grad school, in addition to writing multiple beautiful novels, made the most decadent charcuterie boards for us all to enjoy and pretend like we weren’t struggling through existential writing and financial crises daily. I’d love to shepherd production assistants and actors and whomever through their own existential crises by providing them with homemade sourdough, a thoughtful balance of hard and soft cheeses, and an aesthetically pleasing array of fresh fruits, vegetables, and sweets. I’ve also learned how to shuck oysters, so we can bring that and a fierce mignonette game to the table, too.

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?

MLG: One of my beloved mentors during my MFA, Deb Marquart, explained to me early on that writer’s block does not, in fact, exist. I found this quite compelling, and I think it has lowered the stakes for me quite a bit in just trying to get words down on the page when I make the time and have the opportunity. I’m not scared of a shitty draft. If I were, I’d be living in an endless horror series given that I’ve written plenty of them. I fear not putting enough work in after the draft or getting so comfortable in revision I never imagine the piece moving forward, which is another kind of block that inhibits growth. I’m always thinking about that balance and getting the piece to an iteration that excites me. I think writing fearlessly and being willing to take risks—whether those be formal or otherwise—are vital for any writer, emerging or otherwise. Paisley Rekdal is another truly inspiring mentor on every level—as an artist, as a human, through her activism and community engagement. Making a mark beyond the writing itself is vital for me, and I think it’s important for emerging writers to understand the breadth of opportunity to contribute to our literary community and our culture’s well-being.

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

MLG: I am currently attempting to revise and refine a collection of lyric essays in which “Etymology of a Bear” plays a central role. It was my dissertation, but it’s evolving since my emergence from doctoral hibernation. I am hopeful, but I’m certainly navigating a tension between desired experimentation and a palatable reading experience. I do not want my potential reader to be miserable, I promise. I’m excited about some research I’ll be doing for my next project this summer, which is thinking about the mythologizing of queer bodies and a re-telling of Narcissus through the lens of consent. I fear Freud might have been a touch harsh in his pathologizing of his character, so I’m hoping to offer one of our OG twinks a more nuanced literary experience.

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?

MLG: Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass is stunning. Both her writing and mentorship while I was in Utah changed my understanding of what prose can do—the mimetic possibilities, how we conceive of fabula and story, to what extent we must privilege narrative in any form we navigate. Renee Gladman’s work has also been transformative for me recently, and my students and I have been reading Plans for Sentences this semester as part of a more expansive understanding of the relationship between language and art in the practice of ekphrasis. There’s a fascinating resilience to the repetition and texture of linguistic architectures. I think queer theory has also recalibrated my relationship to time, space, and taxonomies (including genre and narrative). Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Stockton, Muñoz, Halberstam, and many others tend to make me question any fixed or normalized structures and expectations. I don’t see myself as particularly narrative-driven in most of my prose (though I enjoy reading narrative!). I’m interested in the lyric fissures that manifest on the page from the pressure we’ve put on genre distinctions for so long.

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.

MLG: I love the artist Yescka, the public-facing nature of his work in Oaxaca, and the timeliness and tonal variety of his imagery that critiques fascism, capitalist corruption, and violence in its many forms. I also admire Maria Britton’s textile-based works, which she calls “Draperies.” There’s an intriguing tension between the softness of the materials and its layering rather than patchwork that interrogates the domestic space, labor, gender, and environmental toxicities. And while Golden Hour might be the most-acclaimed album by Kacey Musgraves, I do think the camp and quirkiness of her sophomore project Pageant Material offers a light-hearted, yet genuine irreverence I aspire to on my better days.

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MATTY LAYNE GLASGOW is the author of deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His poems and essays appear in AGNI, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Southeast Review, Strange Hymnal, and elsewhere. He’s an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston where he’s the CNF Editor for swamp pink.

Notes on Art

We paired this piece with The Bear Dance by William Holbrook Beard1, a wild painting depicting bears at a picnic dancing in a circle as some of them play instruments while others watch from trees or just…be bears. I love art like this because it feels so sweetly ridiculous and sincere at the same time. And that I think is the same spirit in which in which Glasgow’s essay ought to be held and read. This lush fixation, a lush fixation, a gathering of everything bear can hold, come alive through language and the ineluctable attempt to define and understand.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I’m excited to share our fourth flash fiction piece, a beguiling tale that veers prophetic and comical and liturgical and musical all at once. I also love how the most seemingly commonplace things spring up alongside the most chaotic. I hope you enjoy it!

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The radio man claims it is his birthday, bringing him ever closer to his Saturn return. The radio man rinses his hands with rubbing alcohol. The radio man hollers good morning to the hinterlands. The radio man reads his own palms. The radio man delivers with disarming calm an advertisement for a national therapy corporation. The radio man starts to share the weather and then refuses. The radio man shouts out the moon. The radio man, in a fit of boredom, calls for the execution of the station’s weatherman. The radio man guffaws when a caller, an apostle of the weatherman, begs for peace. The radio man talks shop with a hitman. The radio man plays the hits. The radio man sneaks a song from his sister’s band into the broadcast, pleased as a pig in shit. The radio man speculates that the war on the moon rages still. The radio man wanders away from the mic, on the hunt for sparkling water or pumpkin seeds, and his voice, spilling out of him like rabies, grows thin.

His absence breeds yawing opportunity: a woman’s voice ekes out of the silence. She blankets his listeners’ living rooms and cars and earbuds with an old song.

She is their neighbor, same as the radio man.

She is ever in his wake.

The woman sings of the country where it rains. A young girl survives in that country, and she stands on a tin roof, wearing her dead father’s boots. In the street below her, floodwaters roar by. Her house is ripped from its foundations, and it splits open, like sutures failing, walls and shingles and paint peeling from its frame. The radio man does not hear the woman’s song. Across the room, he digs in his tote for a salty treat. He is oblivious. If he did hear, he might not even recognize her voice, or the song. He might find the story moving. He might cry. He might try and save the child. Shelter and feed her. He lives there, too, after all—that country where it rains. No, he does not hear, but his listeners do. They lean forward in their seats. They rise from their beds, sweaty and bright-eyed. They whisper about the child, about how familiar she is. They crowd the radio man’s booth, shoulder-to-shoulder, like the people gathering around the girl on the tin roof. The woman is in the booth too, sitting in the radio man’s chair with her back straight, a bugle made of living flesh. She croons, her lips inches from the mic. The people do, too, they hum alongside her. The girl on the tin roof watches the brackish water carve through town. Icy water and blood cling to her hair. Her father’s boots swallow her feet. She fears she won’t be able to outrun the water. The radio man finds his treat. The flood surges. The tin roof vanishes in the water. The neighbors try to keep the girl’s head above water. They fail.

The woman’s voice fades, and the people’s humming does too, like headlights on a cold dirt road in winter, until they are pale yellow pinpricks in the dark.

The radio man returns, already chewing on the seeds. “Gosh,” the radio man says, “I found these year-old seeds, we’ll see.” The radio man swallows hard. He sucks in a long, hot breath. The listeners, in their beds and sports bars and in the black dry forest, hold each other. The voice of the radio man fills every corner of their lives. So does his hesitation. The radio man clears his throat. He carries on. The radio man wonders whatever happened to the sun. The radio man decries meteorology. The radio man yearns for spiritual relief. The radio man shares the story of the world’s end, at least according to a push notification from his astrology app—the frogs will fall from the sky, the app says, and the bombs will emerge from nowhere, already exploding. The radio man weeps. The radio man is handed an advertisement for a fast food restaurant. The radio man chokes on the ad copy. The radio man thinks of his mother and cries again. The radio man recalls an evening, deep in the throat of a long lost summer, his mother dead and his heart beating with fury and lust, when he hugged a toilet bowl in a gender neutral Taco Bell restroom. The radio man slaughters a deer on-air. The radio man attempts to describe what he sees: the light fading from the deer’s eyes, the soil bubbling out of the floor like a soda pop. The radio man says, “Turn that stuff up!” and the death of the deer, its desperate brays and the irregular beating of its heart, rattles out of the trees of the hinterlands and the listeners’ pores. The radio man trails off. The radio man is dead quiet. The radio man tries to speak, the treble of his voice straining to rise above the deer’s wheezing. The radio man tremulously reports thirty-eight days have passed since the last human death in the hinterlands. The radio man claims he has won, his voice erratic, his eyes, which the listeners can feel interrogating their spines, watery and seething. The radio man babbles. The radio man killed the deer on this day, his birthday, he says, to secure peace. The radio man believes he has ended death and misery across the hinterlands. The radio man prays that the misery never returns. The radio man opens a Sprite and loudly sips from the can. The radio man taps on the mic. The radio man pauses. The radio man smiles. The radio man coughs. The radio man declares the war has ended.

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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?

BRANDON BROWN: Around when I was eleven, I wrote a story about Cloud Strife (main character of the video game Final Fantasy 7) hiding the Wing Gundam (a giant machine from the anime New Mobile Report Gundam Wing) outside of Midgar, the industrial city at the center of Final Fantasy 7's story of ecological disaster. It was a page long, maybe? I did not know what fan fiction was, really. But eventually, I ended up on the website Final Fantasy 7 Citadel and its forums, where folks were doing text-based roleplays based in the world of Final Fantasy 7. I spent the next decade and change writing that way—shout outs to all of the online communities that held me during that time. That was the environment in which I learned to write: communal, collaborative, and in correspondence. It started as a lot of us asking "What if?" about someone else's story and eventually gave way to sprawling stories lousy with our own inclinations and concerns. If I learned anything on those forums, it was how to listen to people, and how to build something in community.

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?

BB: I'm a creature of habit, no question! I wish I had a routine, or a circumstance that guaranteed the writing would happen, but I really do not, at least not as I understood "routine" for a long time. It's an exciting question, though, because the space we make in our lives for writing infects the writing too. I have come to think of structure as a set of parameters. When I was younger, I set really strict parameters: write this many hours, write this many words, make sure this is the message of the story. I was often miserable back then, and I never finished a damn thing. Now, since I work from home, I drag myself to a coffee shop for a few hours and roll the dice. Thinking about word count helps sometimes, but not always. The coffee shop is not my environment, so I can relax a little. I'm elsewhere, and elsewhere is the place for writing. And I trust my gut, or try to—not always an easy thing to do. You know, all of these parameters are dials. There are a bunch of them, and they can all be played with. The key is to listen to yourself, and to be responsive.

And stories often start in a similar place! I love a prompt, especially one that places a constraint on the work. Like I said, parameters can shift, so the minute a constraint is not serving me, I give myself permission to start ignoring it. But beyond that, I find that chasing an image is how I manage to get my teeth into a story. I sit with it a while, and I try to put language to it. Somewhere in that tension, voice creeps in. The body, too. And I am always thinking about the world of the story! What kind of place has an image like that in it, and what is it like to live there, you know?

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?

BB: Yeah, what is rattling around in here, anyway? I think that each of us takes reality for granted, and the less stable it is, the harder it is to keep a straight face. We stay convinced by it, too, but we know that the bottom could fall out. This probably doesn't feel like much of a stretch here, right now—even if there is a lot of hope in our present situation (and there is!), the world can feel like a parade of horrors. In my last answer, I was talking about the world of a story—what is it like to live here, right? What is it like to live knowing the world is somehow deranged, and splitting apart? My work is concerned with the material conditions of living here, I think: the cruelty visited on our bodies and minds, the fracturing of community, the glimmers of what can be good too.

If not a writer, who would you be?

BB: A stage manager, or maybe an actor? I spent a few years pursuing a degree in theatre. Easy to imagine a life where I stuck with it, honestly. I would be okay with it, too: all of my favorite jobs have been intense, emotional, and highly technical operations that involved coordination and collaboration. I'm good in that kind of space.

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?

BB: Someone once said, "Don't get a big head," after a decent workshop of a story. And another mentor, as I was beating myself up for falling short of something I said I'd do, encouraged me to be easier on myself. Neither of these things seem life-changing, I know, but you have to understand: I was putting a lot of pressure on every page I wrote, every turn of phrase. There was no play, no lightness. I digested their advice into something like: let it go, at least a little. The work will be good, I have come to believe, but only if I try not to worry about that part. I have to be good, like, I have to be okay. And—is it all right if I'm a little corny?—somewhere in the dark of me, I can often hear Stephen King saying, from the end of his craft book On Writing, "Getting happy, okay?"

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

BB: I am working on a short story cycle about a small town besieged by climate change and eroded reality. The form of a cycle is so fascinating, magical, and impossible. A few years ago I was working on a pair of stories—one about a girl watching an orphanage burn to the ground, the other about sisters in the wake of a wildfire. I came to understand that the stories were related. And my first instinct was that the fires must, in fact, be the same fire. I tried to line them up, but the stories resisted this. I relaxed and allowed the details to wander a little: an orphanage in the one story, a forest in the other. The towns of these stories drifted, too, but they had the same name. Eventually, I set an intention to find out how much further I could push these contradictions—what was stable, and what was always slipping? The project feels like a stupid, bonkers thing to do, and it is a ton of fun.

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?

BB: When I think of the people who are formative and what work of theirs had an impact on me, I am thinking about: Frank Herbert (Dune), Stephen King (The Dark Tower), Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Girl Utena), Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Tori Amos (Under the Pink, Boys for Pele), A.S. Byatt (Possession), Friends at the Table (Twilight Mirage, Partizan), Yoshiyuki Tomino (Turn A Gundam).

This is a kind of disparate list, but each of them has contributed to the content of my work. What I have learned from this knot of humans and their work is that stories are about people and the context in which they live—and that we ignore that context at our own peril.

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.

BB: The real answer is: please go watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is available from Nozomi Entertainment on YouTube in its entirety. If you do, take care of yourself—it is not always an easy watch. But a lot of folks may bounce off of that, so here is another shoutout, a real crowder pleaser: Ryan Coogler's film Sinners is a m a z i n g.

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brandon brown has an MFA in Writing from VCFA—what they call their “MFA in strange stories.” Their work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, khōréō magazine, and BFS Journal, and they are a 2025 recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. They are from South Carolina and live in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Felix, their loudmouth cat.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Remedios Varo’s Nacer de Nuevo (1960)1, in which a figure tears through a wall all wild-eyed and naked and reaches for a chalice of moonlight. Some scholars read the torn wall she comes through as the birth canal. Indeed, Varo was obsessed with liminality and what is more liminal then this strange beautiful space between being born and dying? brandon’s piece conjured a similar mood for me, as the painting and prose share a connective tissue in essence. Who knows, maybe they’re happening on the same canvas, in different dimensions.

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Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

While reading for our Gabo period is underway, we’ve been cooking up another fun new way to get all our creative spirits surcharged.

Starting this April, for the first three days of every month, we’ll open for a free, themed writing challenge. One winner — who we feel has written the Micro of the Month — will be selected and published on the last Sunday of the month alongside an editor’s note and a contributor’s note. The winner will receive $30.

We want to explore what makes a piece of writing stand out when the room is small. What happens when you strip a story or a fragment or a moment down to 300 words or fewer? What survives? What can’t help but be there?

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

April’s theme: The Fool!

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.

We’re going to open a day early today, just for you! Submit your micro here.

Can’t wait to see what you make.

Yours,

Shannan & Karan

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What an upside-down world.

The gentleman: town confessor, listening ear, advisor on marital discord, financial predicaments, and cosmic questions, has been shuttled outside to stand alone in a vicious storm.

The people of the mountain are conflicted. Some have closed their curtains and sit silently by their fires with the weight of what they’d done. Others watch out their windows, silently mouthing their gratitude and asking for forgiveness.

The gentleman stands against the large fir across from Marvin and Bros Mercantile & Post, drenched, his ragged shirt melting from his body, his lips pulled back as though he is asking, What have you done to me?

That summer, there’d been a terrible drought. Crops dried up, animals died, babies cried, and dust coated everything: food, clean laundry, the insides of noses and mouths.

It was near midnight, and the moon was behind clouds, so nothing could be seen on Main Street but a candle’s flame in the window of Marvin & Bros Mercantile & Post.

Birdie was talking to the gentleman again, sitting near him in the corner, where dust collects.

This heat! she complained.

It was unbearable, and her apartment above the shop was stuffy, and on top of that, she’d outgrown her affection for her wife, who was prone to rambling on and on—in stuffy apartments, of all things. Also, Birdie’s wife was lazy, frivolous, and a slovenly eater. There was a time, Birdie told the gentleman, that she found Minna enchanting. What happened?

It would help, Birdie said, if she would speak with you as I do. But truthfully, she lacks the ambition.

The gentleman looked sympathetic, baring his teeth in a frown, his painted blue eyes focused on some distant thought—likely a thought about Birdie’s wife and her fallen status, and especially a thought about Birdie’s unfortunate entrapment.

Anyhow, you’re a good egg, old fellow, and a much better listener than Minna, said Birdie, looking energized after such a lovely chat.

She took her pocket knife and snipped off a sliver of the gentleman’s fingernail, then placed it on her tongue where it sat sharp and unpleasant, though not all that different from chewing one’s own fingernail, all things considered.

Upstairs, in her stuffy little apartment, Birdie found Minna sleeping on the sofa, flushed in the heat. She must have been plucking a button on her dress—it now hung loosely from its thread. Her dusty slippers were marking up the cushion Birdie’s mother made when she was small—a stiff little pillow, fern-green velvet on one side and embroidered dogs on the other. Birdie marched over to the sofa and pulled the cushion out from under Minna’s feet, and Minna opened her eyes.

Oh, Birdie, how lovely. I thought you’d be working all night—

This is my mother’s cushion. She made it.

Yes. I know. Funny little dogs…

The dogs were terrible, vicious-looking creatures, with tiny open mouths and gargoyle eyes. They used to give Birdie nightmares. She’d always kept the embroidered side flipped over, but now look. They had dirt on their poor little faces!

That night, in Birdie’s dream, the gentleman walked toward her as smoothly as a living person walks. His eyes were the same bright blue, only real and shining and so full of kindness, Birdie felt she would break open like an egg, spill out all her innermost thoughts and deepest feelings.

She rose from the bed and slipped downstairs with her candle, nearly expecting the gentleman would be sitting comfortably near the stove, cheerfully lit, and drinking a cup of tea. But he was standing, as he’d always been, propped in the corner, and the stove was dark.

Birdie told him about her dream. Then she told him about other dreams, specifically the one she frequently had as a child where she floated off like a balloon on a great wave of wind into the sky, watching her home grow smaller and smaller, then barely there, then gone.

The gentleman is a sublime listener.

When people speak with him, they feel he expresses concern when they are overburdened, or quiet laughter when they are being humorous, or sympathy when they are downcast.

No one knows how old the gentleman is, because he has always been there, in the memories of the people and their parents, and so on. His clothes are simple, handspun, and in a great state of decay. His eyes, long since dissolved by the elements, have been replaced by smooth stones painted with bright blue irises, and his lips are drawn back to reveal small brown teeth.

There are rumours: he was once a great philosopher in London, whose brain was meant to be studied upon his death, but when a terrible storm hit the city, he was stolen by a friend, or a cousin, or a lover, and brought across the ocean, packed in a steam trunk. Or, he’d been a world-famous clairvoyant, and after his death, was carried over the mountain trail by a travelling circus, then sold to a hermit, who was in need of a friend after discovering that his solitary existence was far more lonesome than it was spiritually enlightening. Or, he was a mountain mystic, a wanderer and a teacher, found in the caves over which Mr. Haas’ grand old house now resides, where he’d starved himself in a final act of protest against the War of the Succession in Austria, his homeland.

In any case, the people of the mountain know the gentleman to be wise, brave, sympathetic, and sharp-minded, with an appreciation for the delicate beauty found in human frailty, like a goodly doctor or patient teacher.

Minna was doing many things at once, and she didn’t care one whit that she was sweating like a boiled kettle while doing it. She was painting the banister fern-green, she was eating a hearty sandwich (roast pork and cabbage), she was listening to the gramaphone at its loudest volume (some orchestra playing some wild thing), and she was thinking about Birdie, who put up with so much, and was the most intelligent girl Minna had ever known, and was a real go-getter in every sense of the word, and a prime example of modern womanhood (working, thinking, planting her heel, et al), and an all around exemplary human being whose only real flaw was working too damn hard!

Minna was grateful for her wife, who put up with it all. Meaning Minna’s Problem.

Minna was prone to the worst stomach pains, and there was nothing really to soothe them. Though she’d tried. Rosehip tea, prickly tobacco, Pink’s Treatment for Female Pains and Inconveniences, hot compresses, cold baths, standing on her head while breathing the steam of stewed nettles. When these pains came, and they did with some regularity, she found that eating dry crackers was about the only thing to bring the slightest relief. That, and lying with her feet propped on a pillow and her head flat.

When Minna didn’t have The Problem, she was filled with reckless excitement, a frantic and bumbling energy, as if her body alone couldn’t quite believe she was free, if only for a moment. Free to do things and go places and see people. And so, when Minna was well, she painted banisters, scrubbed floors, read from her worn copy of Greek Myths and Legends, washed the dust off fern-green velvet pillows with embroidered dogs, baked cakes and brought them to neighbours, listened to Birdie’s gramophone at the loudest volume, went on vigorous hikes, and talked at length with anyone she ran into. She had ideas, and wrote them down (or, in her excitement, forgot them), she planned plans (which she rarely fulfilled, due to the inevitable next bout of Problems), and she ate ravenously, to make up for the diet of dry crackers that sustained her when she wasn’t well.

Throughout it all, her love for Birdie changed, but it did not diminish. When she was laid up, her love was grateful, a soft and quiet longing just to be near her. When she was well, her love was free. A vivid display of admiration, a real joyous and overflowing affection. But in either case, it remained strong, and big, and everlasting.

She wondered, as she painted the final brushstroke on the last spindle, what Birdie would think of the new colour. She imagined her smile growing with each step up to their little apartment.

Few had come to the shop that day—the heat was oppressive, and concerns over dying crops were too great. Birdie took down the open sign in the window and sat next to the gentleman, her brow damp and her dress sticking to her in the evening heat. In the candlelight, his skin looked yellow, like polished wax. His mustaches were mostly gone, but what remained were long, in the fashion of some bygone time. Fitting of a true gentleman.

Perhaps, said Birdie, you were once a professor. In tweeds. Spending your days in research at some ancient library.

The gentleman looked pleased to hear this. Perhaps she was right, or perhaps he was simply acknowledging that, given the opportunity, he would have made a top-notch professor.

Birdie placed her chin in her palm. Or you were a great adventurer. Exploring ancient ruins, feasting on monkeys’ brains. Discovering rare reptiles.

The candle sputtered, and outside, a dog howled from some distant farm.

I’ve always been here, raised there. She rolled her eyes upward to indicate the apartment. As you know. Such a small town. And I feel large! Like I should be sailing the seas or walking city streets or…

Birdie spoke with the gentleman until the candle was only a hissing nub. Then she went upstairs in the dark, where paint fumes assaulted her like poisonous air. When she touched the handrail, her fingers came away sticky with thick paint. Oh, Minna!

In their room, Minna was sleeping, splayed in the middle of their small mattress. After scrubbing the paint off her hand, Birdie brought a blanket to the sofa where the green velvet pillow was placed neatly against the arm, freshly cleaned and pressed. She turned it over so she didn’t have to look at those hideous dogs.

Throughout the next day, several came to visit the gentleman. Mrs. Bakshi confessed that she was becoming forgetful, and her hand shook so noticeably that she was forced to hide it beneath her other arm. She wondered if she should prepare her children for her inevitable departure? (The gentleman clearly agreed that this was the most responsible choice.) Mrs. Beddoe said she was more often than not left in a gentle stupor from her prickly tobacco, and she preferred it that way. She asked the gentleman if perhaps she was not made for this world, considering she needed to remove herself from it as often as she did? (The gentleman assured her that she was not removing herself from the world, but rather immersing herself more fully in it, and so she was free to enjoy the prickly tobacco as often as she wished). Mr. Cates confessed that he felt a stirring when he looked upon sweet Mrs. Kovalyov, and had taken to visiting her when her husband was away. (Of course, this was normal—healthy even—and nothing worth burdening oneself over.) And so on.

And each confession was followed by a sort of prayer to the gentleman—to please, if it was at all possible, put a stop to this wretched drought! After which, the visitor took up the little knife hanging by a piece of yarn, and sliced the teeniest bit of the gentleman to place on their tongues: a bit of hair, a bit of earlobe, an eyelash or a callous. A long strand from his moustaches, a short hair from near his navel. Wanting to preserve his dignity and, some would say, his handsome appearance, most avoided marring his face. And so, if a person were to lift his tattered and rotten shirt, they would find countless nicks all over his torso, little slivers of skin tidily excised and consumed for prosperity, love, luck, vigor, good weather, health, wealth, and (occasionally) vengeance.

Minna had another good day, following three bad ones. Good in body, that is, though she felt a small disturbance in spirit. Birdie hadn’t seemed herself in some time. And Minna couldn’t quite place her finger on why.

But she put that aside, and let herself enjoy the buzzing energy of a person who had been ill and now wasn’t. She cleaned the apartment, picked wildflowers for the dining table, the corner table, the bedside table, and the windowsill. She sat in the sweltering park and read her Greek Myths and Legends (poor Icarus!!), made cold chicken salad, played the piano, brought several jars of soup to Mrs. Bakshi, who was laid up. But beneath it all, lay a constant current of her concern: Birdie was not happy. Finally, after she could stand it no longer, she spoke with the gentleman while Birdie delivered a package.

It felt strange. She’d never gone near him before, always catching glimpses from behind the counter or the bottom of the stairs, from where, to Minna, he looked like a gruesome sort of doll. His eyes, though skillfully painted, of course, were a little too bright, a little too direct, his mouth curled back in a way that seemed, from certain angles, unfriendly. Minna began to speak to him, stiff and halting, but it wasn’t long before she felt the unburdening of her soul, the softening in her spine.

I love Birdie so much, she whispered, fanning herself with an old book of songs. I love her so much my heart feels enormous, filled to the brim, but I fear— she leaned in, close to his ear and lowered her voice further. I fear I’m a burden to her. I fear she doesn’t love me in return. She told him there was a time when they laughed and talked and dreamed of their futures all throughout the day, without tiring of each other. And at nights, they dipped their heads beneath the blankets, and didn’t resurface for hours.

But now we feel like strangers!

A little hair twitched, and a tiny beetle crawled out of the gentleman’s ear. Minna flicked it away and sat back to regard him. The gentleman stood in a ray of sun from the window, and his eyes, once so startling to her, had taken on warmth and light. Further, she was certain he smiled, as if to reassure Minna. As if to remind her that real love is rarely demonstrative and never simple. Eros waxes and wanes. Like a candle’s flame, philia is sometimes steady, and other times it flickers, yet it remains to guide their path…

He seemed to go on in this way, and when Minna left, she felt healthy and refreshed, as one does after spending the day near water, in a lovely breeze, while feasting on fresh fruit.

But now it was late. The shop below closed hours ago, Minna was alone, and the chicken salad had congealed into something ugly and inedible.

At picnics, and parks, and during school recess, the children sing:

Gentleman, gentleman, where have you been?

I’ve been to London, to see the queen.

Gentleman, gentleman, what happened next?

I was a war hero and came back a wreck.

Gentleman, gentleman, what was in store?

I followed the railroad, feeding the poor.

Gentleman, gentleman, what then, if you please?

I went on to cure illness, sad plights, and disease.

Gentleman, gentleman, what’s on your mind?

You, my dear friend, for we are entwined.

Birdie had poured the gentleman a cup of cold tea, wondering how she hadn’t thought to do it before. How rude! She apologized, and he looked humble, but not at all put out.

Do you suppose, she said tentatively. Do you think it’s possible that this place is too small for me? Her spine straightened with a current of excitement. I mean, this place, this store, this town. Minna. Do you think that, out there, in the wide world, there’s a better shop, something more interesting than dried beans and bolts of brown calico? Do you think there’s a better girl for me? Someone more interesting. More willing to do things and go places… and be, I don’t know. How to say it. Affectionate? Clever? Less laid up.

She felt many things as she spoke. Guilt. Strength. Fear. Excitement. The gentleman was looking directly at her. In the candle’s flicker, his eyes were lively and certain, as though he were saying Birdie was meant only for greatness. A notion reflected in her very name. Do birds survive long in cages? No. They live short lives, dull lives, friendless and unchallenged. What Birdie was feeling, the gentleman seemed to say, was the very natural impulse of all winged creatures, and she would only be truly free when she obeyed this impulse to fly away.

Birdie smiled, her cheeks flushed and her heart fluttering like the very bird’s wings the gentleman was almost certainly telling her about. She was so happy that when a new light filled the room, it took her a moment to realize it was Minna with a lamp, and not her happiness, that created the glow.

Hello, Birdie, said Minna, seeming a little uncertain. I made dinner, if you…

Birdie was not hungry, but she was also rarely rude. She looked at the gentleman, and he, of course, was still looking at her. She stood and took the little knife, then sliced off a bit of tough skin over his knuckle, placing it on her tongue, then turned to Minna, who she once loved so furiously. And she followed her up the fern-green stairs.

That night, while Minna slept, Birdie packed her bags.

Though nearly everyone on the mountain had implored the gentleman to put an end to this drought, nothing changed. Crops and rivers dried up, Misters Pike and Kovylov lost two cows, and Irving’s horse dropped dead under the scorching sun. Maybe they needed to do more than beg. Maybe they needed to help the gentleman help them.

Minna, not usually known for being subtle or sly, planted the idea so expertly that no one was quite sure who came up with the plan to place the gentleman outside, directly in the very weather they wanted him to influence. But, as Minna watched, alone from the little window above the shop, they did just that. She continued watching until they hammered the last nail through his tattered clothes into the great fir, then she let the curtain fall.

And, three days later, when the skies turned black and the rains rushed in to flood streets and pool in fields, she suggested that, given the calm of his expression, the softening of his posture, he prefered to remain outside. Look at him! The people agreed.

And though Minna never visited him again, she set a chair directly in front of her bedroom window, where, when she wasn’t ill, she watched the gentleman, her heart as empty as it had been full only days before.

The gentleman, back when he had a real name, now forgotten, back when he was five and out for a swim while his mother picnicked on the bank, found a pretty little leech on his belly. The leech squirmed, shimmery and black in the sunlight. The boy went to touch it with his finger, gently so as not to scare it, and as he did so, he thought maybe he could bring it home with him. Keep it safe in a little bowl of water. Name it!

Frederick, he whispered.

Someone gasped—his mother, who flew at him and ripped the leech off, throwing it into the pond. Blood ran down the boy’s stomach like water, and he cried because he thought it was the leech’s blood and that the leech had died. And further, though the leech couldn’t speak, and had no face for expression, he felt certain that it had been friendly and wise.

That’s your blood and that filthy worm was stealing it! said the boy’s mother. Oh, stop crying. That leech would kill you without a second thought, if he was big enough for it.

What an upside down world.

Though he was too young to reason it out or form it into a clear thought, the boy absorbed this notion of upside-downness. He absorbed it like moss absorbs rain, and on through his young years: Good people become sick. A horse can’t heal from a broken leg. Old men are the most talkative and the most lonely. Salmon berries are the most beautiful, and the most sour. School makes you dumb, not smart! Teachers are mean.

Some mothers are angry. Some fathers are gone. Some children are as lonely as old men.

The gentleman’s soul became swollen with the rot of unfairness, and by the time he was old enough to mull things over and create opinions, ideas, and life philosophies, he didn’t much care which way the world was turned, and certainly didn’t want to think about it. Sure, the world might be upside down (or maybe it wasn’t), but he was upside down, too (or maybe not, who’s to say). Maybe everyone else was upside down, and he was right side up. He didn’t care.

The gentleman burned down his first house at twelve. The gentleman went to jail eight times. The gentleman laughed when his mother became sick. Why? Because she looked all funny and yellow, because she turned as skinny as a broomstick. (Of course, in a hundred years or so, this laughter would be viewed through the lens of psychological understanding, and people would recognize it as a thick coat of armour over top a sad and rotten soul, but by then the gentleman will have been forgotten and so this benevolence is lost to him)

The gentleman died face down in a farmer’s field, all drunk and piss-pants, his little brown teeth showing through grinning lips. The gentleman was embalmed by the new young doctor with new modern methods. The gentleman was stolen in the wee hours from the embalming table, and put on display in the corner of the new general store, where Birdie’s great-grandfather, Marvin P. Coates, instructed them to place him in the corner, where, to make up for his incredible debts, folks paid a penny to view him. And, after his debts were paid, the gentleman continued to stand, silent and still, as the people gave him a piece of their minds once and for all.

The gentleman isn’t meant to be out in the rain. He swells. His skin peels off in soggy sheets. His little brown teeth fall out from rotting gums, and his painted stone eyes slip from drooping sockets.

The people of the mountain continue to visit during the rains and after the rains subside. They share their problems and joys, their fears, dreams, and petty complaints. And though he no longer has the brilliant blue eyes with which they can feel truly understood and regarded, they’re convinced, in the end, that eyes aren’t all that essential. They are still relieved when they walk away, and they are still comforted by a sort of clarity of mind, having purged their dark thoughts and fretful distractions. And the gentleman, drooping now, with one arm slipping out of his sleeve, and with his neck bent sideways, and his toothless mouth gaping open for creatures to nest in, seems to say he believes every good thing will come to every person, and nothing bad should befall them, and all will be well at all times, and further, none of them have done anything wrong, nor will they ever…

And the people take the rusted knife, now tied to the great fir the gentleman is attached to, and snip off a little piece, place it on their tongues, and walk away quite pleased.

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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?

ANGIE ELLIS: I started late! In a serious way, that is—I’ve always dabbled. We had our family quite young and that, coupled with shift work and all the rest, didn't leave me with much time to pursue other activities. I think this worked out for me. Sometimes I wonder what I would have been writing in my 20s, and though it would have been nice to begin developing my skills back then, I needed to figure myself out a bit first.

I find that when I write, it's like tilling a garden, turning up all the questions, concerns, baggage, and curiosities lurking in my mind. It’s so satisfying to put words to those things that would otherwise remain unformed and unvoiced. And I love reading stories that provide that same experience. A story that asks questions, digs around in your subconscious a bit. In both instances, the writer and reader are on a journey together, thinking things through, a little uncertain, puzzling things out days later.

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?

AE: I’m a chaotic and completely inefficient writer. It’s a messy process of writing my way into tone, character, story, themes—letting those things emerge as I flail about. If I sit down with what I think is a clear idea or plan, I end up with trash. Every time. So, I flounder until something feels right and I get this little thrill, like, Oh! There it is! It's a matter of letting my subconscious do the heavy lifting, I suppose.

Because this is what works best for me, my starting point is always very, very small. A flicker of a feeling, a certain hairstyle on a faceless character, a type of house, or the blurry shadow of a relationship. I can’t start big. Especially with themes. Those have to sneak their way in pretty late in the process. It took me a long time to figure out how I work best—and it's interesting how different that can be from writer to writer.

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?

AE: I grew up with some pretty hard core religion, and that does tend to creep into my work—usually with a twist. I can recognize it quite heavily in The Gentleman, with elements of confession, communion, prayer, disillusionment. Death is often a big part of my stories. Repression. Some light nihilism. Hedonism is fun. Animals and nature often play an important role in my stories. Also familial histories, or generational trauma. And now, perimenopausal women with an axe to grind ;-)

I have learned that some of these can crop up out of habit and I do try to avoid that. For a while, I was writing a lot of middle aged women who were directionless, slightly dark, a bit off-beat, and I got pretty tired of that. So now I ask myself: Am I writing this because it’s easy? Because I've written it before? I want to watch out for that.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AE: So many things! An archaeologist. A set designer. A chef. Master gardener. I’d love to spend my life restoring some old abandoned house in France, honestly, but let’s face it...I’ll have to save that for another lifetime.

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?

AE: I’ve heard so many helpful things over the years! I like, “argue both sides” from author Colin McAdam. And from Tom Jenks, “If it's hot, write cool. If it's heavy, write with a light touch.”

I think both of these are important for new and old writers alike. The first helps you avoid caricatures, basic good guys and basic bad guys. The second helps you avoid melodrama.

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

AE: A collection of linked stories. “The Gentleman” will be included, so that gives you a taste of what I’m going for. It’s been a lot of fun, and aside from being a slower process than I'd like, it hasn't yet ruined my life at all! Maybe that'll happen when we start shopping it around ;-)

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?

AE: Oh boy, I feel like this list could go on forever. I recently rewatched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I find really inspirational in the "Why CAN'T you write that??" sort of way. You want a wholesome, singing, dancing killer cowboy that becomes a singing, floating angel? Sure! It's truly thrilling to see movies and tv shows that free themselves from the tired and expected. I'm inspired by surprise, and like to be surprised while I write as well.

Right now I'm reading The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock, where you'll frequently meet a new side character with a long, detailed backstory, and then never see them again. I love it. Somehow it works, but I feel like we're often told to rein in that sort of thing. I love seeing people fly through these imagined barriers in successful ways. I mean, why would we want to rein ourselves in? Weird.

I LOVED The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. She wrote it in a style that reflects old Norse sagas: distant and plain and almost monastic. You might think that couldn't possibly work for a long novel, but it's a beautiful book—one of my favourites. Because she chose to write in this ancient sounding way, the experience of reading it is completely transportive. And again, I think giving ourselves permission to choose differently can result in beautiful things. I want to be brave enough to take those chances.

Bo Burnham’s standup might not seem like a good fit for this list, but his work is so completely outside of what we've always seen, and still always see. He's created his own genre that's vulnerable, hilarious, dark, challenging, goofy, uncomfortable. I love that creative freedom, to go where your talents lead you, but also your anger, your questions, your insecurities, your weirdness. And it challenges me to ask: what can that look like in story?

Basically, I've been moved lately by broken rules, unusual arcs, wobbly structure, sparse language and flowery language, and the unique print that only that particular artist can leave on their work.

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.

AE: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It's a beautiful movie in every single way.

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ANGIE ELLIS lives on Vancouver Island, where she is working on a linked short story collection, which will include “The Gentleman”. Some of the other stories in this collection have been featured in Story Magazine and the Masters Review. Her first novel was published in 2025 and she is very grateful to have received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Remedios Varo’s Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle (1961)1. Women sit in a tower, stitching the world into existence — houses, rivers, boats — from threads that spill out the windows and become real. They’re enclosed, dutiful, working from a pattern someone else set. But the fabric has a life of its own. Angie’s story has that same quiet tilt: a small mountain town stitches meaning onto a body that can’t speak back, and the meaning spills out and becomes real to them. Birdie stitches a whole escape plan from a dead man’s silence. Minna stitches love onto everything she touches. The gentleman just stands there while the town embroiders him into a saint.

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Miscarriage (n): 1580s, “mistake, error, a going wrong”

At the first ultrasound the heartbeat was low. The doctor said, “Do not panic!” But she wanted to see me the next week. I made a mistake. I listened to her.

Miscarriage (n): 1610s, “misbehavior, wrong or perverse code of conduct”

At the second ultrasound, the heart rate was even lower. And I could hear it, too: an error in the heartbeat, one extra thump, repeating. The doctor said, “It’s not good news.” Her voice was very quiet. She did not give me the ultrasound picture. She said, “You can have the room as long as you need.” I did need.

When I finally made my way out of the exam room, I had to pass through the waiting room to leave. There was a very pregnant woman there, I guessed 8 or 9 months along. She looked pale and scared. I hated her.

Miscarry (v): 1300, “go astray”; mid 1400s, “come to harm; come to naught, perish.”

We just have to wait for the baby to die. My body still thinks I’m pregnant. Am I still pregnant? My brain does not know what to think. I am in my body and not. I move myself like a video game, step forward, sit, smile. I am standing in front of two paths: pregnant, not pregnant, and both dissolve in front of me. There is nowhere safe to step.

Miscarry (v): 1520s, “deliver an unviable fetus.”

All of the earlier meanings of miscarriage include the idea of failure, either the word itself (“fail to reach the intended result”) or implied. Everyone keeps saying “it’s not your fault.” I know it’s not. But I think about the word miscarry. I failed to carry them. Like, I dropped the baby. Or, I “lost” the baby. As if I left them somewhere and forgot. As if I would ever, could ever, forget.

It’s not my fault. Okay. Hurricanes, tornadoes, are not our fault—and yet, we always look for why. It feels better to have someone to blame, somewhere to put down the wrongness, the violence, the unfairness. It might as well be me. This is my job, I think, as a mother. To help carry my child’s pain.

There is no word that does not blame me. This is okay with me.

Abortion (n.): 1540s, “the expulsion of the fetus before it is viable,” originally both deliberate and unintentional.

We have a family vacation already scheduled so, with my doctor’s okay, we go anyway while we wait for our baby to die.

Every second I wonder if the baby is dead yet. I didn’t know miscarriages could be like this. I always assumed it would be like a car accident—blood, and then it would be over, sudden. But even car accidents are not car accidents.

I feel like a leper, a monster, a hearse, until my therapist tells me I am sitting vigil. “Vigil” comes from the Latin vigilia, originally a word for a soldier’s night watch. “Vigil” also has roots in “awake,” watchfulness. I am not a very good watchman. I cannot warn anyone when death is coming; I know it’s coming but I don’t know when. So instead, I’m sitting with the knowledge. All I have is the certainty of death. It’s not peaceful, exactly. But it is somewhat better to know how the story will end.

During a vigil, you sit beside a dying person and wait, watching, keeping them company. I sit next to, around, outside, inside my baby, with them while they die. It is an honor to watch this short life we wanted, to know it was here for a little while. I stay awake, so they can let go.

If you only had a week to live, what would you do? I take my dying baby on an airplane. I say, these are clouds! I take my dying baby to meet my family. I say, This is love! I take my dying baby swimming in the lake, playing with my older daughter. I say, This is fun; this is a sister! Dying baby, this is a s’more! Campfire! I breathe with my dying baby the bad air quality from Canadian wildfires, then the next night, clear air and stars. This is the world, I tell my dying baby.

Abortion (n.): 1540s, “the expulsion of the fetus before it is viable,” from the original Latin stem aboriri, used for deaths, miscarriages, and sunsets.

One night my cousin offers to take my older daughter for ice cream with her kids. It’s the first time I’ve let someone who isn’t my husband do this—take my daughter somewhere in a car—that isn’t school or home. I say yes, go.

My daughter leaves to eat bright rainbow ice cream with her cousins. Everyone else goes for a sunset boat ride, and I stay behind. I sit on the dock, alone, and think This is orange, pink, blue, sunset. I wait for one child to come home, and wait for two suns to set. My heart breaks. The light is spectacular, while it lasts.

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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?

JILL KOLONGOWSKI: I’ve been writing since I was a kid! That sounds made up but it’s true for me. I used to love pecking away on our typewriter, and my parents very kindly bought me many blank hardcover books so I could handwrite stories and illustrate them inside (first book: The Cat’s Birthday). I don’t remember ever consciously making a choice; it’s just always been the way I thought through the world. My interior voice is very loud, very busy, and writing has always given me a way to allow it some room. On the other hand, I’ve never been a great journaler, but I’ve always written down snippets of life that struck me as odd or memorable or something I didn’t understand yet, and the writing always helps me understand. I feel the same way as Joan Didion, that “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

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?

JK: I have two young children who I care for at home who always wake up at 6 or often earlier, so I do not have a routine. I’m by nature a very organized person, but having children has forced me to learn to be flexible. I write anywhere, anytime I can grab a spare hour or two: on my phone, on the back of a piece of paper in my purse, in my writing notebook. I cannot write at night anymore—my brain is cooked by then. But I do love a routine. When my older kid got past toddler age, I joined a wonderful community and coworking space in San Francisco, and I love going there for half of a day to do some deep work. If I’m writing a long first draft, or doing intense editing, I can’t do it at home, even with a dedicated workspace and a babysitter. My children are just little engines of noise and joy and I can’t disconnect from them if I’m home.

I write from sticky images. Even at my most tired and busy, I keep an eye out for things that surprise me, delight me, unnerve me, scare me, or confuse me, and I write them in my notes app. Sometimes those are generative enough that I jot down a quick paragraph right away that I can come back to later, and sometimes it’s just a word or a sentence or two, some sensory details. These are seeds that become essays later. Often, as I look through my notes, I find connections between things that seemed entirely separate, and a future essay can help me think through those connections. I love writing messy first drafts and first edits by hand; all the rest in old school Microsoft Word.

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?

JK: I’m always returning to the idea of what we do, and how we act when things go wrong. I love writing about disaster, large or small. But since having children, I discovered that my fascination with disaster was more of a form of anxiety, spinning tales of what could happen and how I might handle it. I am the primary caretaker for my children, and every month, I try to write something for my substack that is not focused on motherhood. Some kind of internalized misogyny makes me want to avoid even the word motherhood. I don’t even like writing it here. But that does my experience and my children’s lives a disservice. This is our life. It’s so much of my life right now. It’s worthy of telling.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JK: I’ve worn lots of hats, and I love so much about books that I think I could find a home in a lot of writing spaces. I also work as an English professor and as an editor, and I enjoy both of those things. I especially love introducing new writers to the magic of creative nonfiction. Outside of writing? I truly have no idea. A park ranger?

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?

JK: I’ve had so many excellent mentors, but the best piece of craft advice I ever got was from a visiting professor in graduate school, Susan Griffin. She said, “The problem with the writing is part of the story.” So, if you having difficulty writing a scene, make that difficulty part of the story itself. Are you avoiding writing it? Why? Is it painful? Is your memory unclear? Why might that be? At the time, I was workshopping an essay about a beloved aunt who died young, and I kept getting the feedback that readers wanted to see more of her, more clear memories. I hated hearing that, because while she felt (and still feels) very clear in my head, I found I had trouble articulating clear, full-scene memories of her. But thanks to Susan’s advice, the story of the essay became a story of memory—how I felt my brain hadn’t committed her to memory because I wasn’t ready for her to die.

One of my other favorites, one that I love to give to my own students, was not advice exactly, but feedback from my beloved MFA professor, the late Wesley Gibson. He once wrote on a final paragraph of mine: “I love this! But I don’t really know what it means.”

For new writers, my favorite piece of advice is that the only thing that all successful writers have in common is that they didn’t give up.

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

JK: God, I’ve been working on my second book for over ten years now. It started as my master’s thesis, and because I’ve changed so much since then, the book keeps having to change with me. The core of the book—how women survive the anxiety of living—hasn’t changed, but the focus of the book and my skills have changed so much that I keep having to rewrite it. My agent and I tried to sell it some years ago, and we got lovely feedback, but it didn’t sell. I’m not giving up on it yet, though, and hope you can read it someday. (This is a very calm, falsely measured response to what has been heartbreaking, heart-fixing work.) My Substack (including the piece featured here) has been key in forming my new perspective and path forward with the book.

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?

JK: I am a longtime Jo Ann Beard stan. To me, she is the master of specific detail. No one writes a scene like Jo Ann. Of the many things I’ve read, individual details from her work have lived rent-free in my head for years. I also love Lysley Tenorio’s and Ross Gay’s work—Lysley is a character-writing professional (again, his characters stay living in my mind), and Ross Gay is a sentence sculptor. Maybe it’s the season of life that I’m in, but I’m drawn to a lot of flash writing—to me it’s like looking at a fine still life, or a perfect miniature. Sarah Manguso and Beth Ann Fennelly are some of my most favorites. I work as an editor for YesYes Books and so I get to read so much fantastic poetry there that always rearranges my brain, and helps me think about the ways to break language to make what you want.

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.

JK: I’m obsessed with the TV show Alone. If you’re not familiar, it’s a reality-style show where contestants try to see who can survive alone the longest in really harsh environments. The difference is that they do not see another soul (except for periodic medical checks) and they are taught how to film themselves, so there is no production crew. I love thinking about what they choose to film and why, and at the same time think about what the producers must do with the hours and hours of footage they have. Most of it must be super boring, with moments of high-octane excitement (a storm, a predator, finally catching food, getting injured, finishing a project like a shelter or a fireplace, or lighting a fire altogether). To me it’s a beautiful insight into the ways we see ourselves, what we think is important, and how we like to tell our own stories. And I get to see lots of women being badasses with bows and arrows.

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JILL KOLONGOWSKI always said she would never be a professor or live in California, and now she happily does both. She is the author of Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017), and you can read more of her work in The Sun, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, and in her Substack Tiny True Stories.

Tiny True Stories

5-minute reads about everyday magic + Little letters of recommendation

By Jill Kolongowski

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital (1932)1, painted after her own miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Kahlo lies on the bed, tiny against white sheets, holding six red threads that connect her to the things she lost and the things that failed her — the fetus, a fractured pelvis, a flower, a snail. She arranged her grief into objects and gave each one a line. Kolongowski does the same thing with definitions. Every entry is a red thread tied to the same loss, held taut, kept in order. Both women know that structure won’t save them. They use it anyway.

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Werewolves! You know them: Hairy, slavering half-men, half-beasts, vulnerable to silver, slaves to the full moon, and for some reason, the mortal enemies of vampires. Yet if you look back to the werewolf stories of 100, 200, or 800 years ago, you find quite a different type of creature. In fact, throughout their history, there have been several distinct werewolf archetypes. In some periods, werewolves were heroic. Other times, they were usually female. And sometimes they were just plain weird.

The Werewolf Knight

While stories of humans transforming into beasts of various sorts go back to Greek mythology and, no doubt, further, the werewolf as we know it first appears in the romances of the Middle Ages. In this earliest incarnation, he is no bloodthirsty monster, but rather a genteel knight transformed into a wolf by some misfortune—most often through a woman’s treachery.

Several of these stories are so similar that they clearly stem from the same root story (now most likely lost). A knight has a beautiful but duplicitous wife. She convinces him to tell her his secrets, and he reluctantly confesses that there is a way to transform him into a wolf. This she does, trapping him in wolf form so that she can marry a secret lover.

Later, the king is out hunting when the transformed knight runs up to him and kisses his stirrup. The king is astounded by the wolf’s human-like behavior and has him brought to court as an honored pet. One day, the duplicitous wife and her new husband come to court. The wolf, which has previously shown no sign of aggression, attacks them. Surprised by this, the king interrogates the woman and the whole story comes out, including the secret to the transformation. The knight is transformed back and the wife given some suitable punishment.

Stories in this format include “Bisclavret” by Marie of France (12^th century) and the anonymous stories “Melion” (13^th century), “Morraha” (also 13^th century), and “Arthur and Gorlagon” (15^th century). The primary difference is what causes the transformation: Bisclavret must transform for three days every month but can be trapped in lupine form by stealing his clothes; Melion has a ring set with two stones, one of which transforms him into a wolf and the other of which transforms him back; Morraha’s wife has a rod of magic mastery which allows her to transform him into anything she chooses, but she also suffers from a bad case of indecision—she turns him first into a raven, then a horse, then a fox, before finally settling on the inevitable wolf.

The karmic comeuppances vary too, though Bisclavret’s is probably the best: In wolf form, he bites off his wife’s nose, and her descendants, suffering the curse of Lamarckian inheritance, are born without noses.

Retold over the centuries, these stories wend, entwine, and double back on themselves. Bits of other folktales wander in here and there. Sometimes the wolf is falsely accused of killing a baby, a clear influence to the tale of Gelert the Faithful Hound. Other times the same element appears in duplicate. “William and the Werewolf,” from the 12^th-13^th century, features not one but two child princes deposed by jealous women and reported drowned. The first, Alphonse, is transformed by his wicked stepmother into a werewolf, but manages to flee. He later overhears the plot against the second prince, William, and kidnaps him to keep him safe. After many adventures and battles, including an unusual (and implausible) sequence where William and his lady-love successfully disguise themselves by dressing up as bears and deer, Alphonse is restored, both princes are reunited with their grieving parents, both marry princesses, both are crowned king, and—of course—all the conniving women are punished.

“William and the Werewolf” has some unusual elements, but “The Werewolves of Ossory,” an old Irish folktale written down by Gerald of Wales in 13^th century, is more unusual overall. It tells of a priest who is approached by a wolf who explains that his town is under a curse: Two of its inhabitants must transform into wolves and wander the wilderness. At the end of seven years, they transform back into humans and another two people must transform. But his wife, the other werewolf, is sick, and he wishes the priest to perform last rites for her. To prove his story, he peels the wolf skin off his wife’s head, revealing the head of an old woman.

This story is unusual in several ways: The werewolf speaks, the werewolves are commoners instead of nobles, they’re elderly, and one of them is a woman—deeply unusual at the time (though, as you’ll see, this won’t always be true). The sympathetic role of the woman is also a break from a story type where women are usually portrayed as conniving and evil, even when depicted by female authors like Marie of France.

The idea of the werewolf as an evil monster wouldn’t emerge until the early modern era. When Christianity in Europe moved to homogenize and stamp out earlier folk religion as satanic witchcraft, werewolves also began to be seen as monstrous. Yet it was a gradual transition. The delightful case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun (1692) took place at this inflection point. Thiess was an alleged werewolf who took an accused witch to court, accusing her of breaking his nose. Thiess claimed that he and his compatriots were “hounds of God” who transformed into wolves and traveled to Hell to do battle with witches. (Why is this not a movie?) In the course of one of these battles, a witch hit him with a broomstick and broke his nose. The case was laughed out of court, but the judges later called into question whether a self-admitted werewolf was at odds with Christianity, and had him flogged and banished for his heathen practices.

The Werewolf Seductress

By the nineteenth century, the werewolf’s role as a monster was well established. In the Victorian era, it took on a new shape—and this time the form was female. These stories take place in remote, romanticized locations like Russian Poland or the deep forests of Germany. The werewolf seductress is a beautiful woman clad in white fur who appears outside a cabin in the middle of a snowstorm. The man of the house quickly falls in love, but something about the mysterious woman seems off. It turns out that she can transform into a white wolf—always a white one—and has been preying on the local villagers. Often her victims are children, and her unmatronly ways may be the clue that exposes her.

These stories are consummately Victorian in their overwrought descriptions and moralizing tone: Don’t talk to strangers, don’t get horny, and—just like the medieval lays—never, ever trust a woman.

You may be wondering “How many stories can there possibly be with such a wildly specific plot?” At least three: “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains,” which is a stand-alone excerpt from Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839), “The White Wolf of Kostopchin” by Sir Gilbert Campbell (1889), and “The Were-Wolf” by Clemence Housman (1896). Of these, “The White Wolf of Kostopchin” deserves special mention this instructive example of the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law:

“All I have is yours, Ravina,” returned Paul, “name, wealth, and the devoted love of a lifetime.”

“But your heart,” persisted she; “it is your heart that I want; tell me, Paul, that it is mine and mine only.”

“Yes, my heart is yours, dearest Ravina,” answered Paul…

“I am hungry,” she murmured, “oh, so hungry; but now, Paul Sergevitch, your heart is mine.”

…With a sudden, quick movement, she tore open his garments, and in another moment she had perforated his left breast with a ghastly wound, and, plunging in her delicate hands, tore out his heart and bit at it ravenously.

Moon lore becomes canonically associated with werewolves during this period, though it’s far from strict. In that same scene from “The White Wolf of Kostopchin,” we are told, “The moon was at its full, and shone coldly down upon the leafless trees.” “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” describes its wolf-woman on the prowl: “She was in her white night-dress and the moon shone full upon her.” But the moon seems to control their hunger rather than their form—both are human in those scenes. And in “The Were-Wolf,” the denouement happens under the new moon.

The 19^th-century romantic literature scene was a big one, however, and many voices fell outside this archetype. One is George MacDonald’s “The Gray Wolf” (1864). While she is beautiful and hungry and the protagonist does seem attracted to her, the denouement takes an unusual turn: “But the creature as she sprung eluded his grasp, and just as he expected to feel her fangs, he found a woman weeping on his bosom, with her arms around his neck. The next instant, the gray wolf broke from him, and bounded howling up the cliff.” MacDonald was a universalist, a type of Christian who believes that everyone goes to heaven. Thus, even a ravenous werewolf can feel remorse and be an object of pity.

Women were also an important part of the literary scene in this era. Some, like Clemence Housman, cleave closely to the standard misogynist depictions of female werewolves—even though she was an active suffragette in real life. But women’s werewolf stories could also push the mold. One of these is the misleadingly-titled “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” by Catherine Crowe (1846), which, despite the name, doesn’t actually feature a werewolf. Two 16^th-century cousins, Francoise and Manon, are bitter romantic rivals, but when a wolf begins ravaging the countryside, Francoise is falsely accused of being a werewolf and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But just before the sentence is carried out, “there came forward, slowly and with difficulty, disheveled, with clothes torn and stained with blood Manon Thierry, dragging behind her a dead wolf.” She had gone into the woods and killed the wolf to prove her cousin’s innocence, getting mortally wounded in the process. “Manon herself was much torn and lacerated; and on the spot where the creature had apparently been slain, was found her gun, a knife, and a pool of blood, in which lay several fragments of her dress”. Go Manon!

By the beginning of the 20^th century, werewolf stories were diversifying in many different directions. Saki’s delightful story “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909) demonstrates that werewolves can be funny. When the buttoned-down gentleman Van Cheele finds a nude youth basking first in his woods and later on his ottoman, he’s so concerned about the impropriety of the situation (he “hastily obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds of a Morning Post” to keep his aunt from catching an eyeful) that he fails to anticipate that his unwanted guest is a werewolf. When he finally catches on, he can’t figure out how to communicate it to his aunt: “‘Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf’ was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key.”

But a much bigger change was coming in the next few decades.

The Weird Werewolf

Weird fiction, an innovative branch of horror that emerged in the early 20^th century, propelled by a glut of pulp magazines, is better known for tentacle monsters like Cthulhu than for traditional creatures like werewolves. Yet if you look back at the weird magazines of this era, you’ll find that traditional monsters outnumber their newer counterparts. The bizarre visions of Lovecraft and his ilk did not leap from their foreheads fully formed—they were the result of a gradual evolution. And werewolves were part of that evolution.

In weird fiction, the werewolf (who, in this iteration, can be either male or female) comes trotting out of the remote forests of yore and into modern-day boarding houses, trains, and city streets, though it often has a heritage tying it to romantic locations like Russia and Romania. The protagonist (naturally, a bookish, skeptical young man) initially scoffs at lycanthropy as a silly superstition, but some bit of evidence casts the whole affair in a different light. Often, the story ends without him ever discovering whether the beast was real or just a fanciful story. We also see the first glimmers of the perspective of the werewolf itself.

“The Fisherman’s Special” by H.L Thomson (1939)—one of those cipher authors of the early pulps who never wrote anything else—is typical. A grizzled old man riding next to the protagonist on the train spins a tall tale about a man who fights a werewolf and drives it off after cutting off one of its ears. When the old man gets off the train, the protagonist notices that he’s missing an ear.

“Lupa” by Robert Barbour Johnson (1941) features werewolf who shares much in common with the werewolf-seductresses of the 19^th century. She is young and beautiful, she can transform into a white wolf, and a young man is in love with her. But this werewolf is determined not to harm anyone. She rebuffs her suitor, not wanting to pass on her condition. When she transforms under the full moon, she stays holed up in her boarding house room, telling concerned would-be visitors only “I’m all right.” But her affliction proves too much for her and she dies during one of these bouts. Police are astonished to break down her door and find a white wolf-creature lying in her place.

Greye La Spina, one of the great underappreciated workhorses of the pulp era, wrote about werewolves several times. One of her stories, “Wolf of the Steppes,” plays with the werewolf seductress but turns it on its head. Here is the beautiful woman who appears mysteriously in the wilderness, begging for help, but it is her guardian, not her, who turns out to be the werewolf. He pinned his crimes on her father, who committed suicide, leaving him free to sexually harass both her and her mother. He gaslights her and anyone who might hear her strange tale into thinking that she’s insane. Knowing the history of the genre makes this story more interesting: “Innocent girl menaced by male monster” is the expected story now, but as we have seen, prior to the pulp era it would have been the other way around.

In many ways, weird werewolf stories sound very modern. Yet there are many aspects of werewolf lore that weren’t yet prominent. Silver doesn’t play a role in any of these stories. They don’t fight vampires. And through all three periods, the werewolf appears as a wolf or large dog indistinguishable from any other wolf except through features like red eyes or general size and monstrousness. The now-ubiquitous bipedal wolf-man turns out to be a purely cinematic invention that would only appear in books after it was well established onscreen.

We also don’t see any sign of contagion from these werewolves, most of whom are extremely thorough about killing their victims. That’s a bit of lore that seems to have recently drifted over from vampire stories. Being bitten by a werewolf won’t turn you or your progeny into werewolves, though it may turn them into nose amputees.

And remember, if a beautiful woman in a fur coat knocks on your door in the middle of a snowstorm, you may at least want to check her ID.

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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?

GWEN C. KATZ: Like a lot of authors I began writing as soon as I could read. It just doesn’t occur to me to consume something without also wanting to contribute to it. If I enjoy video games, I want to make video games. If I like a painting, I want to paint.

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?

GCK: I’m really not a routine person. I do whatever seems right for that project. Some are handwritten. Some are composed entirely in the notes app on my phone.

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?

GCK: In nonfiction, it’s all about pulling the threads that are already there. That’s what was so interesting about reading so many werewolf stories: The emotional beats and themes aren’t always what you expect.

If not a writer, who would you be?

GCK: Oddly, since the fire I’ve been supporting myself primarily as a visual artist, which truly was not something I anticipated. Being in the creative arts is all about being ready to change course when you need to.

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?

GCK: My uncle, who is an editor, gave me one of my favorite pieces of advice when I was a teenager: “You can’t put all your good ideas in one place.”

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

GCK: One of my post-fire projects was learning to silk screen so I can design my own clothes. There's something wonderful about combining fine art skills with practical tools that make something you can actually wear. You can find my designs here.

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?

GCK: My favorite artist is Leonora Carrington, one of the women associated with surrealism. She’s well known as a painter but she’s beginning to be more widely recognized as an author of fiction that walks an interesting line between literary and speculative, always with strong feminist themes.

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.

GCK: Since we're on the topic of werewolves, I highly recommend the Brazilian film Good Manners (2017). It's a tremendously interesting deconstruction of werewolf narratives. Historical werewolf stories went interesting directions, but contemporary ones are going interesting directions as well.

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GWEN C. KATZ is an author, artist, and game designer surviving the aftermath of the Eaton Fire by writing and making art. You can find more of her nonfiction here.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Leonora Carrington’s Untitled1 (sometimes known as Mexican Jester) — a figure suspended against black, part bird, part trickster, part something that hasn’t decided yet. Thistles and flowers erupt from its head. Its hands end in claws and skeletal fish. Its striped wings are held open like a dare. Carrington spent her life painting creatures mid-transformation, bodies that refuse to settle into one species, one gender, one story. Katz’s essay traces that same refusal across eight centuries of werewolf literature — the knight trapped in wolf form by a treacherous wife, the white-furred seductress, the girl who locks herself in her room under the full moon. Every era gets the shapeshifter it deserves. Carrington’s jester looks like it could walk out of any of them.