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.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims,

We wish Gabo a very happy 99th birthday and welcome all of you to send us your stories, essays, and flash pieces starting right now! Though the official reading period closes at midnight tonight (est), we will have a grace period of several hours for those in a different timezone. Still, if you’ve got a piece even somewhat ready, we encourage you to send it in sooner than later because this is a lightning-fast open call.

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With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

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One day, in the spring, I woke up, and was struck by all of these sudden dumb questions, like, how did we get here? and where do we go? I know it sounds vague, but that’s how it was. I couldn’t even define what I was asking. Let me put an ad in the paper, I thought, that’ll help me narrow it down. Then, like an idiot, I wrote, If Found Please Call, but wasn’t sure what to put after, so I attached a picture of a sunset, followed by a landline number that no longer works, and submitted it to my local tribune.

After that, I drove to a museum, because museums are full of questions and answers. I wandered around aimlessly, then stopped at an exhibition called Vacancy/No Vacancy but was ushered out for staring. It was actually just the restrooms. On my way out, a man approached me from across the street. Like a bad cartoon, he opened up his trench coat, and said, I have what you need, take a look. I lingered around his open breast until he admitted to his politeness, and said that he would have to kill me, if I didn’t just, please pick something, and exchange it with him for something of mine with a higher value. I gave away my watch for a few of his, and lost track of the following weeks.

I worked, I slept, I watched TV, and then it was summer, which made me angry. In a last stitch effort to reclaim my sanity, I extended an invitation of services to a doctor, a lawyer, and a specialized consultant. I asked them to consider my risks and liabilities, regarding these general inquiries. They didn’t know what to make of my existential blathering. My life coach suggested an intervention, a meeting of the minds, or something synergistic. Instead, I went to a pick-it-yourself farm in Michigan.

It was a farm close to The Great Lakes, close enough where lake-effect snow erases summer from winter annually. All around me were rows of cherry trees, and I ate myself sick beneath them. There were blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, and a local berry called the black cap, which the farmer had told me was too fragile to ever go to market. When the sun began to dip long and low across the rows of fruit, I panicked, thinking I may never be back there again, and put handfuls of black caps straight into my pockets, then ran to the car like an animal.

I spent the rest of the week at the lake, in my purpled pants, wondering about the geography of the Midwest, and what kinds of places across the planet shared the same climate, if you pulled the line of latitude across the globe. The way I figured, I could be in Eastern or Northern Europe and never know the difference. On the last day of my trip, I plucked the molten seeds from the pockets of my jeans, put them in a damp baggie, put the baggie in my suitcase, and put my suitcase on a flight back home. For three weeks, they sat in a junk drawer with open pens and too many gift cards because nobody knew what to buy me.

Soon it was the tail-end of August, and I was not any better. I had sunken myself into bottles of whiskey, rum, and gin. One night, when I was particularly lit, I went to the drawer and took out the seeds. I ventured out into an empty, muggy, midnight, crouched low to the ground, and pushed my fingers through an inch of soil. I planted those seeds into the void, then wiped my hands clean.

To my surprise, the next July, after a freak snowy winter, the seeds gave way to one-half pint of fruit. Which was not enough for jam, but I went to the store and bought other berries to make up the rest, because we live in the U.S., where more is always available. I followed an old recipe, using fire, sugar, and water, and sealed the jar tight. One week post canning, as if called by the strike of a gong, there was a knock at my door, and I acted like it wasn’t unusual for it to be you, standing there in the middle of my stupor, and for you to look so young. I had forgotten about all the people in my life in my personal quest for enlightenment. But you forgave me, because you had been away too, studying overseas, where you had learned new languages, danced with foreign men, and ate your fill of spiced cuisine. Yet you missed me. Although, you never said it aloud, only that you missed the old couch, which I had reupholstered after the estate sale.

When you walked in, the jam came out, and we spread it thick over bread that was dark with rye. It was just me in the kitchen, you at the counter, and a lack of shyness in the amount of bread, jam, and butter. Seeds got into our teeth, and there was a look in your eye that shined like the beginnings of a question. There was so much you could’ve asked about the time and space between us, like, where did you come from? or where will you go? But instead, you were quiet. I was quiet. All at once, I arrived at the question and its answer.

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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?

Aimee Wai: Hello, and thanks for having me here! I'm so honored to be part of Strange Pilgrims and share my work with thoughtful readers.

Well, I guess I’ve been writing ever since I was little. I was a sponge-like kid and had a tendency to soak up too much, so I needed a way to wring it all out. I kind of view writing similar to exercise or drinking water, because my health starts to degrade if I don’t give myself space to work through my thoughts. Most of my writing is actually housed in volumes of personal diaries, where I just ramble about observations of self or the world, and it helps unravel my overactive brain. For a long period of my life, I got away from writing and pursued what feels like a fraudulent version of myself. This version of me was tied to logic and perceived control and was terrified of expression. But a life without expression, isn’t really a full one. So I’m thankful to be writing again because I feel adrift without it.

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?

AW: Hmm great question. I don’t have a writing routine, although I’m hoping to create one. I would say that my focus right now is learning how to respect the craft. As I'm sure other writers can attest, creative energy can be hard to handle. Sometimes when I sit down to write, the sentences don’t finish themselves, words break off and float into outer space, and I’m just sitting here dumbfounded and trying to tether them back down to the page. In my mind’s eye, my narrative voice runs wild like a galloping horse. So like any wild animal, I’m learning a lot about myself as I build a relationship with it.

When I have an idea for a piece, it tends to hit me all at once. It’ll happen in the shower, or on the subway, or in the middle of a conversation with a friend, which is super of annoying in terms of practicality. Sometimes it feels like saying, “hey, I’m thirsty!” and then having a fire hydrant explode in your face.

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?

AW: Yes, lately I’ve been preoccupied with a feeling of homesickness and I’m not really sure where it comes from. I would like to think that homesickness comes out in this piece, For My Sister… that you've published, but it’s hard for me to see my own work. Readers will have to let me know :)

If not a writer, who would you be?

AW: Oof, hard question! Maybe I’d fancy being an architect. Or an anthropologist. Or a monk.

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?

AW: I’m not sure where I heard this, but I love the saying, "the work informs the work". Whenever I’m feeling stuck it’s usually because I’m resisting the work. Often when I just sit down and start writing, the next steps follow. It’s also good advice to lower any expectations, and just be yourself. Sometimes I find myself trying on other peoples shoes to see how they fit, but ultimately I know the ones I have fit me the best. Anytime my writing starts to sound less like me, I know I’ve gone wrong.

My advice for other artists is to allow themselves ample creative space to grow, without any expectations of the outcome. Value is inherent rather than created. It's less about making something from nothing, and more about discovering the something we've had all along.

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

AW: I’m laughing at this question! Why are writers always in ruin? It’s true, I’m being destroyed by my first attempt to write a novel. It’s not any good so far, but I’m sticking with it because I want to learn how to hold a big project. It’s been fun and also terrible. I don’t know why we’re like this.

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?

AW: My sense of narrative is always shifting and growing, but this past year I was obsessively reading Toni Morrison. She is a beautiful thinker, and I’m enchanted by the poetic quality in her prose, the way she writes about communities, and how she weaves the supernatural into her stories.

The film Spirited Away has a way of bringing me to tears, and it has changed meaning to me over time. When I saw it as a little girl, I was obsessed with its fantastical nature. When I watched it again recently, as an adult, I felt so heartbroken over the underlying story of diaspora. It is a truly beautiful and original film, and I can’t wait to watch it in another ten years to see how it’s changed again.

I’m also so inspired by the people all around me on the daily. I’m taking painting classes this year where I get to meet some amazing painters, and I also get to spend time in studio with my friend Jonathan Grado, who is getting back into his photography practice. It’s invigorating to be around artists in work. My favorite artists are the artist artists. Not sure if that makes any sense but it does in my head. I think when you meet one, you know.

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.

AW: One of my favorite sculptures is Bird in Space by Constantine Brancusci. This piece shows the trajectory of flight without all the feathers, and it’s been a focal point in my work for the past year or so. Check it out and let me know what you think! With love, Aimee Wai

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AIMEE WAI is a writer whose work explores transformation, relationships, and emotional complexity through simple language. Her writing has appeared in Dialogist and OnlyPoems. Learn more at aimeewai.com.

Notes on Art

Wayne Thiebaud spent decades painting rows of pies, cakes1, and deli items with the kind of devotion most artists reserve for the human face. His cake paintings treat ordinary American abundance with total sincerity, deluctable thick impasto frosting rendered with as much care as a Vermeer highlight. There’s something almost stupid about how beautiful he makes a cafeteria dessert case, which is exactly the register of this essay: a woman who goes looking for enlightenment at museums and life coaches and pick-it-yourself farms, and finds it spreading jam on dark rye bread with her sister.

Submission Portal

We’ve now read over 7000 submissions to Strange Pilgrims (and sent out 95% of responses from our first reading period). Stories and essays from six continents (still waiting on you, Antarctica). Flash pieces written, we suspect, in single sittings at 2 AM, and novel chapters trimmed to fit our word count like a foot squeezed into a glass slipper (yes, we notice, and no, we don’t hold it against you). Some arrived with cover letters longer than the pieces (not kidding…). Some arrived with no cover letter at all (totally cool). Some made us forget we were reading from so-called slush-pile on a screen way too late into the night.

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Mother of the Beast

The beast was her gift, an ugly thing given to pay for a pretty thing taken—to bed, to brood, to Italy. While her husband gave his mistress everything she was denied, Queen Catherine threw pitted plums through cage bars and watched the beast devour them, his beard slick with sweet juice. While her husband the king consulted his mistress on affairs of state, knowledge no doubt acquired at the cocks of previous consorts, Catherine the Queen commissioned portraits of the beast. She sent them to her relatives. See the fruits of your machinations. Though my husband has not given me a child, he has given me a beast.

I am Pavel of the Far Isles, the beast said. Please let me go.

Queen Catherine laughed, and flicked an apricot through the bars. Well Pavel of the Far Isles. I am Catherine of Italy, and see what that has gotten me.

For the first year following the beast’s arrival, noblemen and women pressed velvet pouches swollen with coin into Catherine’s plump palm just for a chance to see the beast, to speak to him, to paint him, to touch him. For more coin, Catherine left them alone with the beast. For a young man such as Pavel, pig-snouted and covered in hair, any attention was a gift, the only rational response, gratitude. To be a prized possession of the powerful is a privilege people would pay for. Though Pavel had not.

But the year passed, and with it, the beast’s novelty. Queen Catherine saved the plums for herself, plugged her ears with putty at night to drown out the snorts and sniffles that emanated from the cage. They said her husband had started a war, that his mistress walked amongst the soldiers, protected by the new bulge of her belly. Queen Catherine tossed in her goosedown bed, the beast on the flagstones at its foot. Queen Catherine dreamt of bellies and babies and beasts and beauty, and when she awoke, she knew what she would do next.

Wife of the Beast

The peasant girl Catherine trekked to the palace from the town. When she arrived, her muslin skirt was muddled with mud, hairline honeyed with sweat. In a long line of better-dressed hopefuls, the Queen pointed at Catherine and said, “That one.”

Catherine curtsied, and in hoisting her skirt, she revealed still muddier shoes.

“Clean her up,” said the Queen.

Catherine stood naked in a gleaming copper tub. The Queen’s hard-faced attendants scrubbed scrolls of skin loose with horsehair bristles. But Catherine didn’t mind the pain. She was transfixed by the room, by the sumptuous surfaces that beckoned in velvet, brocade, and silk. She felt she was inside a jewelry box, the kind she’d only seen in shop windows.

Once she was clean, the attendants rubbed her pink with thick, warm towels.

Legs crossed, clutching her nascent breasts, Catherine asked, “When will my family receive their money?”

But the attendant only shrugged. When she left the room, a key clunked in the lock.

Catherine stood in the center of the room until the attendant returned, water plunking in fat droplets from the tips of her hair. She worried a scabbed, red welt at the base of her neck.

The door opened again to a cloud of shimmering white. All that was visible of the attendant was her hand, hoisting the dress by its high collar.

As Catherine stepped into the dress, she asked, “When will I meet him?”

The attendant chuckled. “Sooner than you’d like.” She sucked her teeth and clicked her tongue. “Sooner than you’d like,” she repeated, cinching the dress tight as a vice.

Mother of the Beast

The common girl resembled her husband’s mistress in the same way all pretty girls resemble each other. The same pert noses and breasts. The same wide, surprised eyes. The same heart-shaped lips. The same placid skin, marked only by the occasional girlish flush of blood to their cheeks, a reminder of their physicality, of the pink that lay just beneath the surface of their skin. Queen Catherine snapped her fan open in front of her face.

The girl leaned forward as she walked down the aisle of the great hall, bobbing slightly with the effort required to drag her dress. She was weak. That much was clear.

When the girl curtsied, Queen Catherine snapped her fingers. “Bring out the beast.”

The cardinal bent his hatted head in acknowledgement, before disappearing behind the dais. Moments later, two shuffling sets of footsteps approached, but the Queen did not care to see the beast. Him, she had seen plenty. She fixed her eyes on the girl. She wanted to see the moment the pretty face cracked, the moment she saw what her beauty had bought her.

The girl inhaled sharply through her nose, lips pursing in towards her delicate cheekbones. Queen Catherine leaned forward.

The girl exhaled. Her lips blossomed back into a heart, face placid as a reflecting pool. The beast took his place across from her.

Long fronds of black hair swayed from every pore in his face, clipped artfully so his black eyes were visible in their deep sockets. His strange hands, gnarled in a claw-like rictus poked from the embroidered ruffs of his wedding costume. He extended them to the girl. She did not flinch as she took them, as the cardinal bound their hands together with a length of lace, symbolic of their eternal union. She did not shed a tear as the cardinal spoke the words to pronounce them husband and wife.

When the ceremony was concluded, the girl thanked Queen Catherine and said, “The money will be sent to my family today.”

Queen Catherine nodded and waved her away. Unabashed trollop. Concerned only with money. Beauty is no indication of character.

Wife of the Beast

Back in the jewel box of a room, the beast would not look at Catherine. She couldn’t look away from him. He removed his jacket, placed it on the back of a chair. Beneath the billowy white muslin of his tunic, hair was visible, thick as a second shirt. Still not looking at Catherine, he said, “I won’t touch you.”

Catherine said nothing, only sat and unlaced the ribbons of her shoes, pulled the heeled slippers from her feet, and began to massage the arches of her feet.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?” asked Catherine.

This, at last made him turn around. Beneath the fur, his eyes were glassy, his jaw clenched. “I know this isn’t what you want.”

Catherine turned her back to the beast. “Can you unlace this please? It’s quite painful.”

The beast fumbled his knotty fingers in the corset strings. As he worked the tight knot at the base of Catherine’s spine she spoke again, “I got what I needed. Just not how I expected.”

The knot sprung free, and Catherine peeled the boned cage loose from her chest. She turned to face the beast.

“What is your name?” she asked.

“Pavel,” he said, averting his eyes from the pique of her nipples beneath her undershirt.

“I knew it. I told my sisters you must have a name other than beast.” She sunk onto the edge of the bed, sighing. “Though I warrant I’ll never return to the village to tell them I was right.”

The red welt on Catherine’s neck glimmered with pus.

Mother of the Beast

Despite the beast’s relocation, Queen Catherine had not removed his cage from her chambers. Seated at her writing desk, she stared at it now, the threadbare mattress, spitting feathers on to the flagstones, the bars beside the bed worn shiny with the beast’s nervous ministrations.

“Is she with child yet?” Queen Catherine asked her attendant, who was also the village girl’s attendant.

“No, your highness,” the attendant said, hands full with a full chamberpot. “She’s just bled again the day before last.”

“Take that out, will you,” Queen Catherine responded, snapping at the malodorous pot.

“Yes, your highness.”

Queen Catherine returned to writing her letter to her mother.

The girl will be with child soon. A beast cannot resist such a pretty, young thing for long. What are beasts but men, and men but beasts, after all? I pray my next letter will bring tidings of miniature beast children. They will occupy me as the beast once did, pass the time until my noble husband, the king, returns from war. Perhaps you will visit to see the strange creatures as you did the beast? I miss you—and our home. All my love, Catherine.

Wife of the Beast

The room became their cage. It was bigger than Pavel’s previous cage, and had a better view of the lush fields and distant mountains, but a cage with a window is still a cage. Catherine spent long hours at the window. Pavel knew the difficulty of adjusting to a life of confinement, and so he spent hours speaking stories to her back, telling tales of princesses, dragons, knights, talking frogs, wishing wells, and spinning wheels.

After one story about a maiden who shed the skin of a swan, Catherine turned to Pavel and said, “How is it you know such stories? Are you able to read?”

Pavel shook his huge head, sending the fronds of hair dangling from his face swishing back and forth. “My mother.”

“And did she look like you?”

“No,” said Pavel. “But my father did.”

Catherine nodded. “Does the Queen know this?”

“Unfortunately,” Pavel said. Then, he asked, “And what of your family?”

“What of them,” said Catherine to the bees beneath the window.

“They sent you here,” Pavel said, but his statement was a question.

Catherine turned to face him. “I am one of seven sisters. We raised sheep.”

“Do you miss them?”

“As much as you miss your family,” Catherine nodded. “But we had too many sisters, not enough sheep. Something had to be done.” She shrugged, “I was the oldest.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pavel.

She shook her head. “Nothing is promised.” Her hand jumped to the puckered white scar on her neck. “Who knows? A worse fate might have awaited me.”

“Do you—” Pavel began to ask.

But Catherine interrupted him, “We used to tell stories while we spun the wool to yarn,” she said. “My sisters and I.” She turned back to the window. “So, I’d like to hear another story, please. If you know one.”

And so Pavel resumed speaking, his rumbling, tumbling voice joining the hum of bees outside the window as they pollinated lavender just out of reach.

Mother of the Beast

Queen Catherine could not understand the girl’s barrenness. Surely, the pair had consummated their union. Men could not resist, after all.

She sealed a letter to the King and thought of their wedding night. It had hurt to make him happy. But she had taken pleasure in the pain, pride in the successful fulfillment of her duty. She may never know the ecstasy of men, but she knew a fraction of it when she watched the King’s brow knit in pleasure, lips part and pant in satisfaction—satisfaction with her. Her pleasure, anyways, was in what the pain promised. She would never be king, but she could create her own kingdom from what lay between her legs. A kingdom of love within these castle walls unlike any she had ever known, its only subjects her, her husband, and their children.

She pressed the wax seal to the parchment. Her attendant approached as she wafted the letter in the air, letting the seal set. When it had dried, she placed the envelope in her attendant’s hands.

“See that he gets this,” she said.

And as the attendant’s head bobbed in a curtsy, something flashed in her placid face, something the Queen did not like at all—a swift, sad smile.

The Queen would consider the appropriate punishment for this insubordination later. Now, she had visitors.

Wife of the Beast

Pavel was finishing a story when the attendant opened the door to their bedroom. She never knocked.

“Guests,” she said in that flat-as-a-pan voice so unlike Pavel’s.

As the two followed the attendant from the room, Catherine slipped her hand in Pavel’s. He flinched only slightly before letting his fingers relax around hers.

The attendant did not tell them which guests were visiting or why. It did not matter. These visits always proceeded in more or less the same fashion, varying only in degrees of horror.

Today, it was only a mother and her two daughters. Catherine watched Pavel’s shoulders relax, though he still flinched at the children’s shrieks. Catherine had never asked Pavel about his past. She had not needed to. She knew enough from her time in the village to recognize the prints left by pain.

“Oh my,” the noblewoman exclaimed, pressing her white palm against the crepey wrinkles of her bosom. She lifted a bottle of smelling salts from a gold chain between her breasts and waved them under her nose, repeating the admonishment. Oh my.

Her daughter burst into tears and buried her face in her mother’s skirts, begging her mother to put it away.

The boy ran in circles around them chanting gleefully. Beast. Beast. Beast. Beast.

These noble people were so wearily predictable, Catherine thought. Pavel, at least, was singular.

Back in their room, when the attendant closed the door, Catherine did not release Pavel’s hand.

She brought her other hand to the thick fur on his cheek. He flinched away.

“It’s what she wants,” Pavel said. “Little beasts.”

“I know,” Catherine said, stroking his face. “But it’s what I want too.”

She moved in closer, but paused, her pillowy lips inches from his furred ones. “I don’t want to be like her,” she whispered.

“You’re not,” Pavel said.

“You want this?” she asked.

And Pavel kissed her.

Mother of the Beast

Queen Catherine watched the peasant girl writhe on the bed. She was shrieking for Pavel, but though it was a beast’s birth, there were still standards of decorum to uphold. Men were not permitted in the delivery room. The King had not been there, after all, when the Queen delivered her first child, or her second, or her third. He had been visiting foreign dignitaries. And hunting. She did not know where he had been for the fourth, and final, stillbirth, but it was soon after that he sent Queen Catherine the beast.

The attendants’ hands probed amidst the blood and excrement to extract, first a head, and then a body, and then tiny, flailing legs. The girl shrieked and heaved and gasped like a cow, like a beast herself. But then the attendant wiped the baby with a towel, and Queen Catherine had eyes only for it.

She took the beast as the girl reached for it. It was everything she hoped for—covered tip to tail in thick fur, but with the same bland beauty as its mother. A pink gem of a monster in miniature. A truly singular creature, one lords and ladies would travel far and wide to see. Even the King, she thought, might be compelled by such a temptation. Or, perhaps, her family?

Wife of the Beast

Bella, named for Catherine’s mother, was barely a month old when Queen Catherine opened the family’s room for public viewing. Noble friends from far and wide visited to see, as Queen Catherine called her, “The Incredible Miniature Monster.”

Catherine was forced to nurse the baby while onlookers peered at her child’s furry face. The Queen advised them to observe the flare of the nostrils, a tell-tale sign of a developing snout. She pointed out the size of Bella’s ears, turned out in the manner of an elephant from India. The knuckles! The curl of the lips! A bump on the backside! Could it be a tail?

And Catherine remained silent throughout it all, clutching Bella, as if her arms could shield her child from the onslaught.

Mother of the Beast

When the child was six months old, Queen Catherine received a visitation request from another Queen, the wife of a King of a neighboring kingdom. Queen Catherine accepted happily. The miniature monster’s fame was growing, to garner such a visitor. Soon, she thought, her husband the King would visit. Or her mother.

Queen Catherine ensured the creature was dressed in the embroidered blue velvet of her house, displayed in a hand-woven bassinet, frocked with lace. The mother of the beast lurked like a swollen shadow. Childbirth had not treated her well. Everything about her seemed to spread and sag—her features, her breasts, her hips. With her lips turned down in a sullen frown, she completed the picture of the bestial little family.

The visiting Queen tittered appreciatively when she saw the three of them arranged so in the room. It was a gruesomely satisfying tableau, one which Queen Catherine knew would supply months of anecdotes for her visitor.

But, the visiting Queen wanted more.

After a few rotations around the bassinet, stalked by the sulking shamble of the beast’s mother, the visiting Queen turned to Queen Catherine.

I would like to buy the little beast, she said. How much?

The neck of the beast’s mother snapped at this statement, eyes fixing fast on Queen Catherine’s. Queen Catherine was surprised, but not displeased. The peasant girl was already with child again. The attendant had informed her. Clearly, the couple could not control their animal instincts. A little market of beasts. It would make the castle a compelling attraction. Important people may come from far and wide if they know they could not only behold a beast, but have one for themselves.

That could be arranged, Queen Catherine said. Let us retire to the parlor to discuss specifics.

A low growl escaped Pavel’s lips. The visiting Queen hitched her skirts like a shield, stepping back from his bared teeth with a simpering disgust.

After all this time, I thought he was domesticated, she hissed at Queen Catherine.

Oh he is, the Queen assured her, shooting a chastising glance at Pavel. She did not want him to disrupt this potential deal.

Well, said the visiting Queen, releasing her skirts, and relaxing somewhat. If you’re sure. I’d have to know they could be domesticated, you see. She pointed at the baby. If I’m going to have that one around my children.

The baby’s furry paw protruded from the bassinet, reaching for its mother. It let out a tiny, strangled cry, like the mewling of a cat.

Wife of the Beast

It wasn’t Pavel that leapt at the Queen then. It was Catherine. There are beasts that are born and beasts that are made. Beasts beget beasts. Beasts birth beasts. But Catherine thought of none of this as she leapt towards the Queen, vaulting over her baby’s bassinet. Claws clamped on corset until they found purchase. Teeth sunk into skin. The white, fluttering flesh of the Queen’s neck, one of the last beautiful bits left of her, was shaken loose from the red wet of her esophagus.

Catherine’s head snapped back and forth, blood flying from her lips, spattering the squealing noblewoman who ran from the room, arms over her head, red speckling the pale pink of her gown. Queen Catherine fell, and Catherine fell on top of her, the two Catherines tangled upon the floor in a pool of blood that spread inexorably. Catherine stared at the growing puddle, head cocked, contemplating how this small wound might soon touch everything.

Mother of the Beast

And as Queen Catherine died, upon the floor where she’d once caged the beast, her lips spread in a small smile. Maybe this would be enough to bring her husband home. Or, at the very least, her mother. It had been so long since she had seen either of them. Since she was a girl, really. Not much older than Catherine. They would come soon. She smiled at the thought. Blood bubbled up her throat to line the spaces between her teeth before dripping like drool from her yawning jowls.

Wife of the Beast

Pavel brought Bella to her as she spit a scrap of skin to the stone. She took Bella in one arm, shielding her blooming belly with the other. In months, this second child would cleave her open. She wasn’t afraid. Life was demarcated by cleavings—from innocence, from family, from children. But not yet, not yet. Pavel hugged her, Bella, and her belly safe between their bodies. For now, for now.

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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?

Caroline Beuley: I came to writing because I have always love reading more than almost anything else. As a child I especially loved reading fantasy. I loved the magical worlds, and I loved how the words on the page worked their own kind of magic to conjure them. I had a very sad period in my life where I got lost in the wild woods of the corporate world and stopped writing, but even then I was always reading. Eventually, reading brought me back to writing. I've been writing consistently for the last six years, and it's been absolutely amazing. I think writing is the closest thing to real magic—the way simple words, when said in the right order, make a whole world.

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?

CB: I am obsessed with structure, deadlines, and to-do lists. I map out my week every Sunday night to make sure I have time to get my work done for my job, write two pieces for my Substack, and make progress on my novel. Occasionally, there is time for a short story, and it's always amazing when that happens. When I’m writing a story, I find that the concept usually comes first. For “Two Catherines,” for example, I read a piece on Substack about how “Beauty and the Beast” was based on a real genetic condition that causes hair growth everywhere. I knew I wanted to tell the story of someone with that condition. As I wrote, it became “Two Catherines.”

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?

CB: Shit is hard for women. I would say that is the theme/message that weaves itself into my writing even when I don't mean for it to. It feels more important to write about now than ever, and it seems I just can’t resist its pull!

If not a writer, who would you be?

CB: Something in fashion! After writing, fashion and styling is my favorite way to be creative.

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?

CB: The factor that will most determine whether you make it as a writer is not innate ability but rather your ability to keep writing after rejection. If you don’t let rejection stop you and you keep writing eventually you will be a published writer. My professor and mentor, Jason Mott, told me that. I think about it at least once a day. It’s so simple, but also so hard. You just have to keep writing.

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

CB: I am working on Hunted, a young adult fantasy novel inspired by fairy tales (very on brand). I described the concept to my friend and she said it sounded like “a much more violent Shrek,” which is now my favorite way to describe it. Basically, all the magical fairy tale beasts and creatures have been rounded up by humans and banished beyond a wall. The protagonist is competing to become a Huntsman, the elite force that patrols the wall. But as the novel progresses, the boundaries between good and evil, magic and humanity become much more blurry. I hope the novel will, in it’s final form, say something about who is allowed to live where, how we treat difference, and how magic cannot be conveniently divorced from the people who possess it. I’m really excited about it, but I’m on my fourth draft, so I’m also very ready to be done with it.

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?

CB: George Saunders’ craft book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain forever impacted the way I wrote short stories. Kelly Link and Karen Russell’s wildly imaginative short stories have really pushed me to be more weird and creative in my writing. I have always really admired Carmen Maria Machado’s ability to write a brilliant, engaging, story that floors you at the end with a resonant message about our world, so I always aspire to do the same in my writing. And, of course, fairy tales are probably my greatest and most impactful source of inspiration. I love to draw on the fairy tale aesthetic and imbue my writing with the magic, wildness, darkness, and bravery that are so emblematic of the fairy tale tradition.

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.

CB: My favorite movie this year was Strange Darling because of its creative structure and unique approach to storytelling. It’s a thriller told in six chapters, but the chapters aren’t presented in order, and its’ amazing to see how the chosen order and structure changes everything.

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CAROLINE BEULEY is an alumni of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and is pursuing a Fiction Writing MFA at UNCW. Her writing has been nominated for Wigleaf's Top 50 and Best of the Net. She is at work on a story collection and YA fantasy novel. She is co-editing an anthology, Between Our Legs, forthcoming from University of Iowa Press Fall 2026.

Fairy Tales by Caroline

Fiction, fairy tales, and essays, delivered every Wednesday and Sunday

By Caroline Beuley

Notes on Art

Lavinia Fontana’s portrait of Antonietta Gonsalvus (c. 1595) is a painting1 of the daughter of Petrus Gonsalvus, a man with hypertrichosis who was kept at the French court of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici. Antonietta is maybe six years old in the portrait, dressed in the brocade and lace of nobility, holding a letter that explains what she is.

Fontana was one of the first professional women painters in Europe, and there’s something in the care of her gaze that resists the voyeurism the portrait was commissioned to satisfy. She painted the child…as a child. The letter in Antonietta’s hand, though, tells you someone else decided what the painting was for. “Two Catherines” lives in the gap between those two impulses — the human gaze and the transactional one — and asks what happens when a woman caged by one system turns the key on someone else.

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There are good points and bad. No one ever seems to know what you mean the first time you say it; on the other hand, if you stand next to a ponderosa pine just before dawn in a thick snowfall you can catch a heady vanilla in one nostril and sharp clean winter in the other. There is an overabundance of big blocky-lettered logos on grocery items; your fellow participants so easily fall into hating one another; everyone has apparently agreed that efficacy is more important than both truth and delight, to the point of pretending the uniform duration of individual seconds is more real than how long or short each one becomes in its day. But there are wonderful boxes of heat and light where we put our beds and our dutch ovens and construct, based on centuries and millennia of accumulated knowledge, comforts our ancestors could never fathom.

A few of the more important gripes: no one has yet seen a unicorn. There seems to be an imbalanced agency mechanism, which means you will often feel that no matter what you do, the world passes by without seeming to glance up at you. At some point in your late twenties or early thirties you’ll notice that your heels and palms get weirdly dry and even speckle in places like a piece of igneous rock. Each year more of the items for sale in drug stores will be locked behind plexiglass sliding doors. You’ll be forced to acknowledge almost forty percent of the terrible things you do, and the lurking suspicion that more is going unacknowledged will eat away at you like the proverbial worm in the proverbial apple. Proverbs will seem less and less like public property, and more like something you imagined you heard one time when you were small. Your fingers (and at some point your knees, elbows, neck, ankles, upper back, wrists, base of the skull, hips, toes, and lower back, not necessarily in that order) start to ache when the weather turns cold. You don’t go all the places you want to go, but that one isn’t so bad, because you forget that you wanted to go some places. You wind up far more self-conscious of the things you say and do than you ever wanted to be, and the times this makes you proud of your actions are miserably few in comparison to the times this makes you aware even in the moment of your total social inadequacy. Insurance is a pain in the ass. You discover all the books you needed about six and a half years too late. Other people’s forgiveness doesn’t automatically generate your own. Everything breaks, even things you would never suspect of breaking, like ceilings or ovens or roads (these can even slide off into the creek sometimes, or crack open so badly in the changing seasons that they get closed down for nine months straight) and there will always have been signs the break was coming that you failed to recognize until way too late. Sometimes you feel like your body and your mind are not on the same team. Things you hate the first time you try them are surprising and good a decade later, and you have to wonder how many years you could have been enjoying anchovies or campari before you got wise. At least one of your fellow participants in any given room is a pain in the ass, always in a more inscrutable, unlikable, inane way than they first appear. Whole mornings will spin away in longing for something you can’t name. Everything is either tacky, drab, or gaudy on first perusal. Most objects are so enmeshed in the history of their form that you wind up making thousands of mistakes you’re never allowed to notice in which pictures you put in what frames and whether you use artichokes packed in water or oil for that appetizer and how you grabbed the winged corkscrew instead of the wine key to open the syrah for company. You will be constantly aware of the ways living at a different time would have been more comfortable (no internet to show you a better guitarist than you’ll ever be, no insurance companies profiting off of undeniably necessary fear, cleaner air, quieter days) and at the same time of the ways your life could not happen in those times (you will fall in love at least a little with someone who would not be accepted in yesterday’s society, you will need penicillin, you will confront the fact that milking a cow is weirdly hard, even if you technically know how to do it). Fellow participants you believe to be evil will have power over you. No one has recently encountered an angel.

I was all set to walk out with a totally negative review. I even tried to leave once, but I got caught in some brambles by the door and a few fellow participants convinced me to stick it out for a little while. Then recently (eight and a half years after I first decided to leave) I went to a used media store—physical media, which we’ve been saying for years is on its death bed, lying in its grave, spitting out the first handfuls of dirt, folding its hands over its chest, etc. I was flicking through DVDs and a worker came and started flicking through beside me. Assuming he was there to assist me, I told him I was getting rid of as many forms of internet as I could, one of which was streamed media, and that I needed to start a new DVD collection, and how would he go about building the core of that collection in my shoes. He stopped and turned to me—wow was he tall, and thin too, with hands the size of a light fixture—adjusted his glasses with a finger and thumb, and said “I’m doing the same thing.” Then he told me how he started with a couple of movies his parents loved but that he still hadn’t seen, two that he knew he could watch on a loop forever, a box set of his favorite sitcom, and the Jason Bourne trilogy. While he was explaining his choices I started grabbing movies that fit the same categories in my own life, and when I had them all he took the stack in one behemoth hand and carried them to the front desk, leaving me to keep poking around. I didn’t realize until I got home that he had not actually recommended anything; he had told me in an unpanicked voice about his own intimate preferences, the movie he watches when he’s sick, the one his dad loved that’s been looming as an obligation for years and even more so because he knows it shouldn’t be an obligation, will be a fun watch, but it’s been so long and so much pressure has built up for him to watch that movie; he named his favorite sitcom, which now roughly sixty percent of people would reject as outdated, problematic, and unfunny, without displaying an iota of worry that I would despise him for it. He had given me a way to reconstruct my own life in media, with no desire to sell anything. In fact, his other hand had carried away unnoticed the DVDs he had come to that shelf to find for himself.

This may not seem all that important in the face of the catalogue above. I guess I would just say that the bad points are persistent, but what is good in “Life” often is so because it was unpredictable until it happened; it does not fit neatly into a category of experience you’ve already had; unlike the bad, it is not dreamed of in sweaty, too-bright midnights. The good shows up like a ten-dollar bill in the pocket of your favorite coat from three years ago, and that means it is totally incomprehensible to our rational brains. So I’m going to say thank whatever holy you want to thank that we don’t have to decide whether to leave a good or bad review, because even in the last moment the incomprehensible could arrive.

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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?

Charlie Ericson: I’m sure there was a time before I used (my own written) syntax and narrative to understand the world, but that time falls somewhere before my memory begins. I know that I started to catch a hint of the possibilities inherent in writing when my first year English professor started close reading Paradise Lost aloud; on the other hand, I remember being overwhelmed by the flutter and flock of stimuli as early as middle school, and trying to organize my perceptions with grammar, character, and metaphor at least that early.

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?

CE: I’m always coming up with new routines, but in the end the work that has to get finished gets finished in odd moments while I drink a coffee between office hours and teaching, or at five a.m. while I snatch an hour of work while the rest of the apartment is still waking up. Usually the first thing I have to pin down is a set of perceptions, either internal or external, and how they relate to one another—what Ezra Pound would call “an emotional and intellectual complex”—but that comes into conflict awfully quick with the philosophical conundrum those perceptions have drawn up for me, and writing becomes the tracing of a narrow way between bland reflection and rote description. Pound would think letting conundrums intervene is a mistake, and it makes me breathe easier knowing we would disagree.

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?

CE: I guess I’m just a dualist living in a materialist's world, because I still believe it's worth trying to worry at the seams of our experience in the hope we’ll find something above or below existence without relying on a notion of the divine to get there.

If not a writer, who would you be?

CE: I truly can't sort out how many times the desire to spend all my days writing and reading sentences has shaped my decisions in life, but probably a hard drinking middle manager in a marketing department who's always talking about the things he did in his youth.

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?

CE: In Terry Southern’s interview with Henry Green (whose novels are every one of them polished, luminous little gems), Green says “one should never be known by sight.” Of course he’s being facetious, as he always was when speaking non-fictionally, but that facetiousness is toward the same goal as the sentence itself. Writing is about making something live using sentences. It has nothing to do with me as a writer, and everything to do with the sentences, well- or ill-crafted, that I write.

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

CE: I’m writing a novel on political violence tentatively called An American Suicide that relies on nested narrators and a vague utopianism to do a whole lot of overambitious maneuvers at once, and be all the while both serious about the questions it asks and appropriately silly about the weight we attribute to concepts when we’re faced with real, horrible, overwhelming action.

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?

CE: Henry Green, Sergei Parajanov, John Ashbery, Muriel Spark, Ali Smith, Percival Everett, Bohumil Hrabal, Dag Solstad, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, among others. The theme here is that silliness and seriousness co-exist, not sometimes, not possibly, but always, necessarily. Every insight worth having is deadly serious, and every sentence worth writing uses pith to make seriousness bearable. Of course, tomorrow I might disagree with this entirely.

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.

CE: Just one? Then Marc Chagall’s America Windows in the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Notes on Art

Marc Chagall’s America Windows (1977)1, a gift to the Art Institute of Chicago, is a wall of blue the size of a small apartment — eight feet high, thirty feet across, six panels of stained glass depicting music, painting, literature, theater, dance, and architecture. Chagall was a Russian Jew who fled the war to New York in 1940; thirty years later, he made these windows as a thank-you to the country that let him keep making art. The figures float through blue the way good things float through this essay, emerging as they need to and revealing their meaning. The windows were designed to change with the weather outside, bright off the lake one hour, shadowed by skyscrapers the next. You can’t predict what you’ll see when you walk in. That feels right for a piece about life’s incomprehensible strange arrivals.

One of the best books we read last year was THE FRAGRANCE OF GUAVA, a conversation between friends: journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Nobel-Award-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The book’s surprisingly not so widely read or even known from what I’ve gathered, but I’m so grateful to the bookworm gods for allowing me to chance upon this beauty in a used bookshop.

Now, before I dive into our 7 timeless Márquezian lessons, I’ll recommend to each and every one of you to please buy yourself a copy yesterday.

Paired with these, we have 7 Writing Exercises “Stolen” from the Master himself, complete with detail, examples, and direct quotes from Marquez. Though the lessons below are all free to read, the exercises are accessible to our paying subscribers only. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support our work and efforts here at Strange Piglrims towards indie lit.

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1. Imagination and fantasy are opposites

This is probably one of the most important thing Márquez ever said about making things, and almost nobody quotes it.

“Fantasy, in the sense of pure and simple Walt-Disney-style invention without any basis in reality, is the most loathsome thing of all.”

Every so-called supernatural event in his fiction traces back to something that actually happened. The yellow butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia in One Hundred Years of Solitude? When Márquez was five, an electrician kept coming to change the meter at his grandparents’ house. His grandmother tried to shoo away a butterfly with a duster, saying, “Whenever this man comes to the house, that yellow butterfly follows him.” This was the seed for Babilonia.

Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven? A woman in town whose granddaughter had run away in the early hours of the morning “tried to hide the fact by putting the word around that she had gone up to heaven.” Here, Márquez describes how he wrote the actual passage:

Yes, she just wasn’t getting off the ground. I was frantic because there was no way of making her take off. One day as I was thinking about this problem I went out into my garden. It was very windy. A very big, very beautiful black woman had just done the washing and was trying to hang the sheets out on the line. She couldn’t, the wind kept blowing them away. I had a brainwave. ‘That’s it ,’ I thought. Remedios the Beautiful needed sheets to ascend to heaven . In this case, the sheets were the element of reality. When I returned to my typewriter, Remedios the Beautiful went up and up with no trouble at all. Not even God could have stopped her.

The distinction matters more now than it ever has. We live in an age of pure invention — AI-generated images, endless fantasy world-building, content conjured from nothing. Márquez would have found all of it loathsome (yes, we’ll bet on it). Not because it’s technology, but because it’s disconnected from the lived world. The difference between imagination and fantasy “is the same as between a human being and a ventriloquist’s dummy.” (Sorry to break it all us hardcore fantasy lovers haha).

2. You only write one book your whole life.

Márquez believed every writer spends an entire career circling one obsession. Balzac did it. Kafka did it. Faulkner did it. His was solitude.

The Colonel waiting Friday after Friday for a pension that never comes. Aureliano Buendía waging 32 wars and ending up alone making little gold fishes. The Patriarch so isolated by power he’s no longer sure of his own name.

When Mendoza asks where this obsession came from, Márquez says, “I think it’s a problem everybody has. Everyone has his own way and means of expressing it.”

Then he offers the key to the entire Buendía family, maybe the most revealing single sentence he ever said about his most famous book: “The Buendías were incapable of loving and this is the key to their solitude and their frustration. Solitude, I believe, is the opposite of solidarity.”

3. A good idea can wait decades. If it can’t, it wasn’t good.

Márquez held One Hundred Years of Solitude in his head (and heart) for 15 before writing it. The Autumn of the Patriarch took 17. Chronicle of a Death Foretold took 30.

30 years.

When asked if this worried him, he said: “I’ve never really been interested in any idea which can’t withstand many years of neglect.”

He never took notes. “When you take notes you end up thinking about the notes and not about the book.” He waited for the missing piece — the tone, the structure, the one detail that made the whole thing fall blissfully into place. For One Hundred Years, it was the realization that he had to tell the story the way his grandmother told hers: deadpan, mixing the extraordinary with the ordinary, never flinching. For The Autumn of the Patriarch, the missing piece came from a book about hunting in Africa. He’d been struggling with the dictator’s psychology for years. Then he read a chapter on elephant behavior, and it unlocked everything.

In an era of content calendars and bi-weekly newsletters and AI drafts generated in seconds, Márquez is a standing rebuke. The most important phase of creation looks like nothing is happening. We’re systematically destroying our capacity for it.

4. The first sentence is a laboratory.

“The first sentence can be the laboratory for testing the style, the structure and even the length of the book.”

He said it sometimes took him longer to write the first sentence than the rest of the book combined. The famous opener of One Hundred Years of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”) contains the entire novel’s method in miniature: the telescoping of time, the melding of violence and wonder, the central character, and of course the charming storytelling voice.

5. Your grandmother is a better teacher than your MFA

When Mendoza asked who had been the greatest help in his long apprenticeship as a writer, Márquez didn’t name Faulkner or Kafka or Hemingway. He said: “My grandmother, first and foremost.”

Doña Tranquilina told stories about the dead walking through the house as if she were describing what she’d had for lunch. So it’s natural that “[Marquez] wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude using [his] grandmother’s method.”

This is worth sitting with. The most celebrated novelist of the twentieth century learned his method not from literature but from an elderly woman in a hot, crumbling house in a Colombian banana town who talked to ghosts. The technique that made him world-famous — treating the impossible as mundane — came from watching her do it every day.

He did credit Kafka with helping him realize he could be a writer: “When I read Metamorphosis, at 17, I realized I could be a writer. When I saw how Gregor Samsa could wake up one morning transformed into a gigantic beetle, I said to myself, ‘I didn’t know you could do this.’” The connection went deeper. Kafka, he said, “recounted things in German the same way my grandmother used to.”

6. Reality is wilder than anything you can invent.

“There’s not a single line in my novels which is not based on reality.”

He made a larger point about Latin America that applies well beyond it: “Everyday life in Latin America proves that reality is full of the most extraordinary things.” An American explorer saw a river with boiling water in the Amazon. Winds from the South Pole swept an entire circus away in Argentina, and fishermen caught the bodies of lions and giraffes in their nets. A boy turned up in Barranquilla claiming to have a pig’s tail, after Márquez had written about one.

“I know very ordinary people who’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude carefully and with a lot of pleasure, but with no surprise at all because, when all is said and done, I’m telling them nothing that hasn’t happened in their own lives.”

The lesson: if your work feels thin, you don’t need more imagination. You need to pay closer attention to what’s already there.

7. Protect the conditions for working. Everything else is negotiable.

Márquez was specific about what he needed: a quiet, well-heated room. 9am to 3pm . An electric typewriter and 500 sheets of paper. Yellow roses on the desk. He wore mechanic’s coveralls while writing. If the rose was missing from the vase, the words wouldn’t arrive. When he put it back, everything flowed.

He was also ruthless about what he didn’t need. He loathed television, congresses, conferences, round tables, and interviews. He stopped writing letters entirely after discovering someone had sold his correspondence to a university archive.

“I don’t hold with the romantic myth that the writer has to be starving and all screwed up before he can produce. You write better if you’ve had a good meal and you’ve got an electric typewriter.”

Mercedes, his wife, understood this completely. When he turned the car around on the highway to Acapulco because the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude had suddenly come to him, she took charge. He pawned their car. She got the butcher to extend credit for meat, the baker for bread, the landlord to wait nine months for rent. She brought him 500 sheets of paper whenever he ran out. She never read the manuscript. When it was done, she mailed it to the publisher herself, thinking: “And what if the novel turns out to be no good after all this?”

Serious creative work requires a kind of almost maniacal logistical protection, and someone — yes, most likely you, if you don’t have as supportive a spouse as Mercedes — has to build the scaffolding around the precious hours.

We hope these lessons were as invigorating to read for you as they were to create for us. Once again, we’d recommend you read the entirety of FRAGRANCE OF GUAVA. You can also access our practical companion of all 7 related writing exercises here:

With gratitude,

Shannan & Karan

Note on Art

The portrait1 used above captures something Márquez said about himself: that he was more superstitious than rational, more Caribbean than literary. The yellow skin echoes his famous obsession with the color — yellow roses on his desk, yellow butterflies in his fiction — while the closed eyes suggest the inward gaze of a man who trusted his grandmother’s ghost stories more than any writing workshop.

Everything below comes directly from how Gabriel García Márquez actually worked. Each exercise takes a principle from the book and turns it into something you can do this week to practically improve your writing or enter deeper into work you’re already wrestling with.

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It’s nine a.m. and everything has led me here. On the way, I drive past an oil refinery, past smokestacks and open flames. I drive across two bridges. I drive through a redwood forest and I don’t stop. I open my windows and sing and sigh. Something inside of me is ending. Something is ending and I can’t name what it is. I can only turn left and right and left again, turn for miles and miles until I reach the rugged coast. Me and my camera and a strange, bright feeling strangling me as I park the car and walk into the mist.

I head straight to the top. I’ve come for the military bunkers.

The trail is relentless up into the cliffs. I climb alone, leaving the surfers wet and black behind me, a handful of small shadows. The sky is surrounding. Not blue but ash—the color of pencil erased from a page with no answer. Halfway to the top, I crouch low to the ground, put my hands in the dirt, and examine a singular ice plant along the path. This is an invasive species in Northern California. A sign says, Warning: unstable landscape. Nearby, the San Andreas Fault splits beneath the sea.

I steady my footing. I’m thinking about a game my daughter likes to play before bed, tucked into the corner of her room. She turns into a kitten, an orphan, some creature lost and overlooked. Pretend I’m abandoned, she calls out, making her eyes big and her mouth sad, whimpering until I get real close. She likes it when I lift her body up to mine and whisper, Oh, you poor little thing. The game ends when she is found.

I’m breathing heavily now, a humming in my chest. I read once that grief is stored in our lungs. That we can, quite literally, suffocate from sorrow. But in the clouds there is so much air. I inhale the smell of stone, brine, bay laurel. The fog is dense and has a sound, distorted and damp. It wraps itself around the concrete walls, swiveling its hips, scattering light. What I think is a plane is the wind filling my ears. It pleads with me, tells me to run run run and so I do. I run through the open gates to Hill 88.

This place is not a prison, but it looks like one: a geography of walls built to divide the land from itself, cement dripping into the deep. Chain link fences hug the hillside, barbed wire pulled taut. A diamond quilt casting fractal shadows on the pavement. Thick locks tie the metal walls together, rust blossoming across the latches. They are lasting the only way they know how.

At the base of the hill, there’s a bronze plaque describing the structures in front of me. Cut into the coast in the early 1950s, Hill 88 was a radar station for a nearby missile launch area for two decades. Back then, we were at war with dark forces an ocean away, black mirrors reflecting each other’s dread. These towers and walls belonged to a contract of control and power—the last line of defense against Soviet attack on the west coast. A surveillance operation to detect and eliminate threat. A ruinous place, now a ruin.

I look around at the crumbling walls. I’m running through a citadel.

I have been running my whole life. The first twenty years, running toward everything I thought I wanted, everything I was told to want. The last twenty years, running away—from my family of origin, a traditional marriage, my career. From a life I lived on the outside and no longer wanted to hold onto. From my own body and all the ways it was changing, the ways it wanted to change.

It’s late morning and I run past a helicopter landing pad, fat yellow lines underfoot. In the hazy blur, I read graffiti scrawled across every surface. Mostly initials, unidentifiable tags. A Free Palestine! banner in red. FACT in capital letters on one side.Above, two handprints higher than anyone could reach alone. A wall nearby reads you are worthy of love!

When I was a child, I wanted to be Daphne, a Greek nymph who spends all her time in nature, limbs loose and bare to the sun. She desires only freedom. When the god Apollo falls in love with her, he pursues her through the forest. She runs and runs, prey fleeing predator, praying for escape. Suddenly, her father transforms her into a laurel tree. Breasts turn into bark, arms into branches, hair into leaves, feet into roots. Her heart beating still beneath the wooden flesh. She no longer has to run to be safe.

My father is not coming to save me. On this morning, he is six months dead, and I have become an archeologist, wandering the cliffs and excavating the strata. Dragging myself, my family, my Jewishness, my otherness, out into the light. Artifacts of addiction and mental illness, estrangement and violence. Generations of flight, of disconnection and severing. The near-constant building and building and building and watching it all burn down. My therapist says desire to control, drive for acceptance by way of perfection, self-hatred, self-hatred, self-hatred. She asks me where the fear lives in my body and I say everywhere.

As a teenager, I liked to sink my nails into my forearms. Dozens of crescent moons flashing red. I pinched my thighs and twisted my flesh in a thousand different ways. Bit my nails, my lips, the inside of my cheeks. Sometimes I put my fingers in my mouth just to feel the bones beneath my teeth. I liked it when it hurt. My teacher told me I had a bad habit. She didn’t see the way I smiled when the bruises bloomed.

On Hill 88, my spine is cold and I am damp and breathless. I stop running. I spin around, entirely alone, holding a film camera in both hands. It was given to me by my lover: a sturdy SLR from the 90s that makes a satisfying sound when I press the shutter. I don’t always trust my eyes or my memory, but I trust this machine. I like feeling its weight against my face and squinting my eyes through the viewfinder. I like focusing on an object through glass, the world contained in a tidy square. The camera blinks and captures what I want to see.

A cluster of thorny weeds growing through the asphalt.

A layer cake of rocks sloping down the ridge.

A mossy branch extending up where there was once a door.

I am drawn to scenes of rupture, threshold spaces. The texture of change. The architecture of things becoming something else. Of things in deep metamorphosis.

I’m here, I say to the flowers in their graves. They don’t say anything back.

I’m here, I say again, my words echoing down a long tunnel. It leads to a heavily fortified gun emplacement that is now filled with rainwater. The guns have been removed and California newts swim in the swamp. The green is very green against the gray. Lichen and moss spread across stone, across time. On the slopes, coastal sage, seaside daisies, boulders veiled in lace. Spotted towhee and redtailed hawk. Sometimes, a kestrel. There are waves in the bellies below, pushing against the shore. The planet is always pushing against itself. Always eroding.

I keep moving. I think of my daughter, begging to be seen. I think of my own small body, a trembling thing. At some point in the 1970s, men walked away from Hill 88. They did not undo what they had done. There were no wars but their wars.

The earth here is fighting no one.

It’s noon. Past the battery, there is a dead rabbit lying in the dirt. Everything silky and still except a hole below its head where a wasp is crawling in circles. Dried blood and weathered bone, ears gentle in the dust. Its fur is so tender I almost touch it. Its killer has left the body behind. I can’t stop staring at its tiny feet resting on the path.

Once, I found a rabbit’s foot keychain at a roadside rest stop during a family vacation. Rich cream, with a tiny dewclaw sticking out along the side. I begged my father to buy it for me and he did, laughing, certain it would not bring me luck. At night, I’d hide in my closet and rub the velvet fur against my cheek. I wasn’t wishing for anything. I just liked the way it felt.

At the top of the ridge, the wind has picked up. I sit down in the dirt and rest my back against the stone scripture, next to a small bush with mossy stems. I close my eyes and think about soldiers and ancestors. I think about the women who came before me, who folded my body into theirs like so many Russian nesting dolls. Mother to grandmother, great-grandmother and beyond. Eight years ago I grew another life inside my own and barely paid attention to the growing. I felt half-asleep through it all. I had no god and no magic and I did not see the ways I was becoming an ancestor myself. In childbirth, my insides were ripped apart, abdomen and uterus exposed to the sky, and I did not feel my body beneath it all, wet and leaking.

But on Hill 88, I feel everything. I feel how the land breaks again and again. I feel how the breaking means it’s still alive. I collapse in this familiar place of endings and beginnings, an upward spiral. My legs are sore and heavy but I am light, like the space between atoms rearranging. A molecular condensation and evaporation. I crave the mess of it all. The deterioration and abandonment. The contrasts and contradictions. The wild wild life climbing in the wreckage.

Below me, the battery wall is bleeding rust, the slow oxidizing of what’s been carried for too long. Corroded bolts, metal shutters warped open like tired eyes. Water collects in the wound. Before she died, my grandmother told me that she used to swim naked in the Atlantic at dawn. She was seventeen and didn’t know how to hide her Jewish nose. She said the salt water stung but wouldn’t show me the scars. I wonder if she held her breath the way I do. That fall, Hitler invaded Poland. My grandma shut her eyes and just kept swimming.

Up here, I open wide. I stretch my hands towards the darkest thing I can find and try to hold it softly. I listen to not-words, feel the edges of my body brush up against the world. I am learning what it means to stay inside my skin. To stop running from the impact. I breathe into my low belly, into the place where my daughter emerged. There is a thin white crescent from the incision, still visible all these years later. I like it when my lover places his hand over that fault line. That place where my body wants to remember itself.

I hike down to the bottom of the hill the long way, winding through Wolf Ridge Trail to Miwok Trail. Before the parking lot, there’s a small lagoon. The water is calm, no wind, nothing to ripple the surface. I glance left to look for oncoming traffic and see a coyote staring at me. Eyes narrow and sharp, as if it’s measuring my intentions against its own long memory of survival. I resist the urge to pull the camera up to my face. It turns and trots away, towards the coast.

I stand rooted to the moment, awake to the hunger coiling inside my body like a double infinity. Two figure eights in an endless loop. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, emptying my lungs.

And then I keep walking.

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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?

Hannah Levy: I began writing by journaling. My first journal (okay, diary) is from 1994, when I was 8 years old. I have a big box of notebooks from over the years, my prima materia. Confessions, short stories, endless lists of hopes and dreams. Existential wonderings. I was unfiltered, and I think I knew I was writing to my future self. I wrote to hold on to experiences and ideas, to capture them for later exploration.

I also devoured books. In the summer, with endless unstructured time as a kid, I'd go through 5-10 books a week. Reading felt like falling through a trapdoor to somewhere lush and wild, like spiraling toward the center of the universe and back into myself. I've always wanted to take people there, to that place of deep feeling, using only my voice on the page. Connecting with people across space and time through language is magic.

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?

HL: It's chaos over here. I have tried so many writing routines (morning pages, pomodoro technique, the list goes on) but frankly, what works best is surrendering to the energy I have on any given day.

Since ideas usually strike at the most inconvenient moments, I end up writing feverishly when I am anywhere but in front of a computer. I have hundreds of Notes app entries on my phone, some just a line or two, some sprawling thousand-word essays. Half stream of consciousness gibberish, half polished prose. I usually begin with place and setting, layering in detailed images before following the narrative thread from there.

When I feel stuck, I'll go on a hike and set a loose intention of opening my creative channel. It helps me glimpse all of the strange, intricate connections in the world. When I move my body and feel my pulse, I start to build on those connections. I'll leave myself voice memos as I walk.

When it's time to get serious about a piece, I sit at my laptop to write and edit. Usually at the same time, which I’ve been advised to stop doing, but I can’t seem to kick the habit. It’s a slow and dreadful experience. I love every moment.

I do have some guardrails slash guardian angels. I'm in a writing group called Gather, which offers both community and education. When it’s in session, we meet weekly for 12 continuous weeks. There are prompts for shaking things loose and opportunities to workshop drafts. I've also been working with Joseph Fasano, a poet and novelist, whose mentorship and editorial support has been transformative. I’m endlessly grateful.

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?

HL: Recurring obsessions include nonlinear time, memory, loneliness, abandonment, girlhood, grief, embodiment. Parenting as a portal. Water wells as a metaphor. Desire and eroticism.

I will often get very attached to a specific subject and research it relentlessly (see: black holes, electromagnetism, multiverse theories, cults, plant consciousness, ancient civilizations, mass extinction events). Sometimes those concepts surface in my writing, but not always. It’s more like I'm writing from beneath their shadow.

If not a writer, who would you be?

HL: I think I was born a writer and then proceeded to talk myself out of creative writing for most of my life. Probably why self-abandonment comes up a lot in my writing. I've spent the past 25 years (painfully, ecstatically) finding my voice and my way back to writing, so it's hard to imagine being anything else. But in a parallel universe, I’m living on a ranch. Riding horses, wrangling cattle, growing all my own vegetables. Letting my daughter have too many barn cats. Watching the sky every day.

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?

HL: Joy Sullivan once wrote, “A poet's true job is not to offer advice, but, rather, to aptly name the ache.” I think about that all the time as I'm writing. It helped me understand that my work doesn't need to feel conclusive. I don’t need to tie everything up with a bow. I can unravel on the page and that will be enough.

For writers “trying to make their mark": When I first started submitting my work to literary magazines and posting it online, I felt envious of the folks in my orbit who seemed to be moving faster, publishing in prestigious journals, getting book deals, growing their audience. Instead of fighting the feeling, I learned to use it as information. Envy is a signal: it clarifies what I want and gives me permission to reach for opportunities that might otherwise feel out of my league. The harder work has been in accepting that my timeline will not, and does not need to, look like anyone else's.

So my advice is to become a student of your envy and then respond accordingly. Submit boldly and take risks you might otherwise talk yourself out of. Then, try to stop measuring your progress against someone else’s pace. Stop looking sideways and return to yourself. The work only moves when you do.

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

HL: I am working on a lyrical essay about time and memory, about bodies of water and the water in our bodies. It’s also about becoming a mother and ancestry. The different ways we submerge and save ourselves. There are references to outer space and hypnosis and past lives and Greek mythology. It’s trying to ruin my life because I want to be a flood, but instead I am a faucet that drips and drips and drips all night. I'm writing and deleting and rearranging and color coding in Google docs, I'm workshopping singular lines and ignoring too-long paragraphs. It’s unruly. A necessary mess.

I'm also currently in the middle of vetting submissions for The Rebis, the tarot-themed literary magazine I started in 2022. The creative process could not be more different. I approach editing a publication with so much more discipline and structure than with my own work. With my writing, I am in the basement, staggering in the dark, learning by touch rather than sight. Editing The Rebis, I have a clear vision. I can quickly and easily see the shape of things. I work a more typical 9-5 schedule.

The Rebis is print-only, and I enjoy the creative challenge of making a physical, tactile product. Creating an energetic experience for the reader. I think of it as an antidote to AI, to screens, to quick hit social media consumption. I'm going for depth. Every issue we publish explores a single tarot card through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and artwork, and this next volume focuses on The Moon. It's a tricky archetype. The Moon is an obvious literary trope, so I want to give our readers something unexpected. I'm hoping to offer bewilderment, in the most provocative way possible. The mystique of the unknown.

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?

HL: I read Francesca Lia Block’s “Dangerous Angels” series in the late 90s and felt transported. The imprint was immediate and deep. (Weetzie Bat, be still my heart!) Block’s writing is intense, mythic, embodied. It was unlike anything else I had read at the time—my twelve year old brain exploded. It's a saturated experience, with ethereal descriptions of skin, scent, hunger, taste. She has a distinct mosaic style of writing featuring interconnected vignettes that really inspired my voice. Her books are also deliciously feminist and queer.

I’m drawn to the visceral, dreamlike, and radically intimate. Recent sources of creative inspiration include: Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting, Clarice Lispector’s “Água Viva,” Natalie Diaz's “Postcolonial Love Poem,” and Sophie Strand's spiritually ecological storytelling.

Finally… adrienne maree brown’s book “Emergent Strategy” dramatically altered my relationship to the world when I read it in 2019, especially their writing on attention, presence, and fractals.

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.

HL: “The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers” by Valerie June. One of my favorite albums. She’s otherworldly and a delight to witness in person.

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HANNAH LEVY is a writer and editor living in Berkeley, CA. She’s the editor-in-chief of The Rebis, an annual print anthology that celebrates the connection between tarot, art, and creative writing. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s hiking in the redwoods, horseback riding, and playing extensive make-believe games with her daughter.

//understories//

poetry & prose about intimacy, about deep feelings and meaningful lived experiences, about the exquisite aches of living and loving and parenting, about memory, and portals, and time travel, and private underworlds

By Hannah Levy

Note on Art

Tanning painted2 herself bare-chested in a hallway of infinite doors, a winged creature crouched at her feet, roots and vines scaling up her dress and body. Levy’s essay moves through a similar architecture—military bunkers returning to moss and stone, a body marked by incision and inheritance, the decision to stop running and feel it all. Tanning said she wanted to paint “unknown but knowable states.” On Hill 88, Levy photographs them: the “threshold”, the “rupture”, the “wild life climbing in the wreckage”.

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For too long has the suffering of Prometheus overshadowed the equal misery of the eagle.

It’s true that initially the great raptor was elated. When Zeus appeared before him—encircled with lightning and sporting the cavernous smile of the gods—the eagle could scarcely believe his ears. Free food for life and lobes of liver to boot? He was a gargantuan creature with a belly to match. All night he shivered between the snowy peaks of the Kaukasos and all day he scoured the desolate mountains for food. Countless hours of hunting on the endless craggy expanse, and for what? The occasional snack-sized mountain goat. Puny birds more feathers than flesh. Who wouldn’t be tempted by the hot, shimmering organ of a titan? The eagle agreed, and Zeus tussled his bronze feathers before disappearing in a thunderclap.

At first things went well enough. The eagle would wake late, yawning in the cool mountain air, and leisurely flap his way up the slope to where Prometheus was chained with his liver and skin magically regrown. The eagle would tear open the new flesh and gorge on the new liver, then head back to the nest for bed. Rinse and repeat. Sure, the chattering of Prometheus was irritating. The titan tried every tactic in the book to dissuade the eagle from his meal. Promises of riches. Appeals to their fellow outcast nature. Offers of other organs. But he was easy enough to tune out, especially with one’s head plunged in his warm insides.

Yet the same immutable laws that govern mankind hold sway with gods and monsters. One grows accustomed to anything. Even the rich liver of a titan starts to wear on the palate. And so it was that one day, as the eagle sank his beak into the familiar guts and the titan screamed loud enough to shake the mountains yet again, that a strange feeling overtook the eagle. He pulled out his blood-stained head. He looked at himself. Really looked. He had grown weak and lazy. His great wings that had once carried him around Greece and beyond to uncharted realms now could barely haul his engorged body up and down the short mountainside. Was this what his life had been reduced to? Hadn’t he once had dreams?

The eagle told Prometheus that he was free of the eagle’s torment. The eagle was off to start a new chapter in his life. Shyly, he thanked the titan for their time together and wished him the best of luck with loosening his chains. Prometheus was too shocked to even respond. He was silent as the eagle flapped away into the misty morning. The eagle felt revived. Didn’t the air feel somehow fresher? The sky more cloudless and bluer than it had been in years? His eyes pierced for miles, scanning the distant and exotic lands.

But the eagle’s excitement did not last. It was cold and he found nothing worth eating for days. Stability and security might not be glamorous, but so what? Most monsters lived brief and pitiful lives of hunger and want. Here he was throwing a good thing away for nothing. In the distance, he saw dark storm clouds rolling in. He told himself it must be Zeus coming to punish him. He turned back to Kaukasos. The waiting titan could only sigh.

Months passed. Years. Generations upon generations. The eagle was sad and lonely. He’d never known another creature like himself, having been born—through the chaotic logic of the heavens—from the womb of a dragon and the loins of a giant. His siblings included a three-headed dog and a many-headed serpent, completely unbirdlike in mindset and manner. And anyway, they never visited.

This great bird who had once known the entire skies saw his domain reduced to a single slope. With each meal, his body grew softer and more useless. He was swollen and mangy. His sharp beak, long his pride, had dulled from the titan’s thick skin into a knobby mess. Each morning, he awoke thinking that if he had any courage, he would starve himself to death and at least rid the world of one more useless monster. But he was afraid and hungry. Gods, he was always hungry. Had Zeus put a curse on him as punishment for trying to fly away? It wasn’t long before the eagle couldn’t even think such thoughts. He was a mere automaton now. Sleep, feast, sleep, feast, and sleep again. If his younger self—that glorious raptor so keen-eyed and joyous on the eastern winds—had flown by then would the old bird even have recognized his glorious former self?

We shall never know. All that is recorded in the songs is that time marched on until the eagle, deaf from the titan’s screams and blind in one eye, now slept beside Prometheus. He was too old and tired to even fly. He found peace only when engorged and sleeping, in the dreams in which he still soared across valleys and oceans in search of prey, a free creature riding the open winds, which is how they say the great and noble Herakles found the eagle, heroically slaying the sleeping beast with two arrows—one through the heart and one through the middle from beak to the tail—to earn his place among the heavens with the assent of Zeus, who had anyway long grown bored of the whole affair.

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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?

LINCOLN MICHEL: It’s always tempting to mythologize one’s artistic life, and I could spin a story about growing up a strange and lonely boy in a rural area of Virginia who discovered that books were a portal to a wider world and became a kid who hid novels in my math textbooks to read in the back of the class and found writing was the means to let out all the weird ideas bouncing around in my head. That’s somewhat true. But if I’m honest, I think I became an author almost by default.

I always wanted to be an artist of some kind—preferably a punk rock singer or Surrealist painter—yet found I simply wasn’t good at most art forms. I was a bit tone-deaf. Never quite found the knack for drawing or the resources for filmmaking. Etc. I didn’t start writing fiction until I was in college. It just clicked. I had a talent for it, at least more than other arts I’d tried, and I could execute the ideas in my head in fiction in a way I couldn’t in painting or anything else. I really was a voracious reader as a kid and was always fascinated by narrative even when I was obsessing over video games or album liner notes, so maybe in retrospect I was always going to be a writer. But I didn’t realize that until my early 20s.

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?

LM: I’ve always been bad at structuring my writing time, and today (working full-time plus being a father plus writing a newsletter and other freelance work) I don’t have the luxury of a solid routine. I write when I can. Notes on the phone in the middle of the night, a few hours at a café in the day, editing on the subway commute, and so on. I think most writers have to be time thieves in this way. You learn to smuggle away time for the art when no one is looking.

Unlike my writing practice, my writing itself is often structure-driven. I need to see the shape of the work in my head before I can write. For short stories, this tends to mean I think about the story for a while and get a sense of its form before I draft. For novels, typically I’m testing out different approaches and getting a sense of the project through drafting. Once I’ve written 30-50k of this, I understand the shape and can really write the book.

Otherwise, I find my work to be idea-driven. I don’t mean a message I want to convey, but a concept or a theme I want to explore. Voice is always central too. How something is expressed is inextricable from what is being expressed, for me at least.

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?

LM: When I was younger, I was working on a collection I was calling The Complete Chronicle of Confusion. It was a collection of stories, parables, myths, and paradoxes around that topic that I never finished and probably never will. But I think confusion, illogical rationalizations, sudden realizations, the lies we tell ourselves until they become our truths, the myths and ideologies and stories we create to try to make sense of existence… these are topics I’m always thinking about.

I also always try to keep a sense of humor and playfulness in my work. I was inspired to write by authors like Calvino, Le Guin, Kafka, Nabokov, and others who never acted like serious literature was incompatible with mischief and fun. I’m trying to have a good time writing and hopefully the reader has a good time reading.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LM: I said punk rock singer and Surrealist artist above. I also thought, for some reason, that I’d be a philosophy professor at one point. But who knows? Life is strange. Any of us could have lived infinite other lives, if our circumstances were different. I’m sure there are multiverse Lincoln Michels who would seem totally alien to me.

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?

LM: These are topics I’ve written about, so if you don’t mind my linking:

The best advice I’ve ever received is to finish things. Finish the draft, then revise. Finish the story, then write another story. Writers can easily get stuck in the swamp of never-ending tinkering and endless revisions. You learn more by finishing something and moving onto the next thing. Rise, repeat. My article on that:

Counter Craft

The First and Best Writing Advice I Ever Received

Whenever I’m asked for the single best piece of writing advice, I always answer with two words: “Finish things.” This is the best writing advice I was given but also more or less the first writing advice I ever received…

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2 years ago · 444 likes · 53 comments · Lincoln Michel

I’m not sure about making a mark, but good advice for emerging writers is to take your weirdest/dumbest/most insane idea and write it as seriously as possible. This is perhaps a way of saying “find your voice,” by which I mean leaning into your unique obsessions, concerns, and ideas. What’s the book that only you can write? It’s probably a strange one, but then you do have to take the writing seriously. Balance the Dionysian inspiration with Apollonian execution. A piece on that topic:

Counter Craft

Dumb yet Brilliant Books

There’s a thin line between dumb and brilliant. This is true everywhere in life—how many successful companies started with ideas that were dismissed as silly at the time?—but perhaps especially in art, where so often the avant-garde is the absurd treated very, very seriously…

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5 years ago · 18 likes · 1 comment · Lincoln Michel

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

LM: I’m in the middle of working on a novel about haunted houses and real estate. It is perhaps running my life in being a chaotically structured novel (see my above note about being a structure-driven writer) that is presenting unique challenges for me. But then the exciting (and/or horrible) part of being a novelist is how each book creates a whole new set of problems that require you to come up with new solutions. Who wants to write the same book twice?

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?

LM: Like any writer, I think my sense of story has been Frankensteined together from countless sources. For me, it’s some weird mix of Greek mythology, philosophical paradoxes, Fleischer Studios cartoons, Final Fantasy video games, hardboiled detective novels, Kafka’s parables, Southern Gothic novels, David Lynch films, New Wave science fiction, Gothic ghost stories, The Clash, Quest for Glory, Kobo Abe, Pale Fire, fairy tales, Leonora Carrington, Octavia Butler, Donald Barthelme, Borges…one could go on forever.

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.

LM: Picking something randomly from the list I just typed, how about Cab Calloway’s rendition of “St. James Infirmary Blues” animated in the 1933 Fleischer Studios Betty Boop cartoon Snow White. It's short and viewable on YouTube:

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LINCOLN MICHEL’s most recent novel is Metallic Realms (Atria Books). He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the novel The Body Scout (Orbit). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney's, The Baffler, Lightspeed, and elsewhere. He writes the weekly literary newsletter Counter Craft.

Counter Craft

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things

By Lincoln Michel

Note on Art

The eagle in Rubens’s painting1 is magnificent—bronze-feathered, powerful, wings spread wide as it tears into the titan’s liver. This is the creature Zeus promised eternal abundance, before comfort reduced it to something mangy and swollen, sleeping beside its prey. The painting captures what was lost: a glorious raptor keen-eyed and joyous, before the mechanical repetition of sleep, feast, sleep, feast transformed it into just another useless monster waiting for Herakles’s arrows.

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ABOUT THE VOICE ARTIST: Abdulsalam Joki-Lasisi is a Nigerian engineer and professional Voice Over Artist. From lending authority to multinational brands to breathing life into diverse animation projects, his vocal range is matched only by his passions for gaming, reading, and sports.

Raise a plastic fan and hold it next to your head. Turn it slowly, your head facing forward, until you start to hear sounds. The sounds change every night; running water, TV static, a stampede, whispers, a festival, but never turn your head to look. With your other hand, reach across your face and feel the air around the fan, closest to where you think the sound is coming from. Feel, until something licks you.

That is when you know you have found Them.

There are many stories about how She came to be. Some say She was born when lightning struck a boulder at the base of Shere hills. Aunties tell their nephew that She was a babalawo’s illegitimate child, created by the gods to punish him for his infidelity. All versions are useful, have power.

There is one story that isn’t shared as much. I wonder why. But, you’ll need this version to be able to get her to do what you want.

The story goes thus:

They were born dead, spirit hovering over their lifeless pudgy forms. 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.

“Thank you God,” the woman cried out, voice hoarse from hours of unaided labour.

Like a summoning, the zinc door flew open with a grating squeal and a man barged in. He nearly tripped over his hastily tied wrapper, almost bashing his head against the enamel tub. And They winced, annoyed at Their failure. He re-tied the wrapper hastily and loomed over the wife, smiling a smile that chilled Their bones.

“It’s a girl,” the mother whispered. And handed the body to her husband. The body that now lay so still, it was like watching a statue passing hands.

“Yes,” he said, his lips curling. “Yes it is.”

When you find Them, when they have licked your hand, draw it back. If you don’t, their teeth will follow. It is not time for the teeth yet.

You will feel afraid. Your heart will pound and nervous laughter will tickle your throat. Laugh and be nervous, sweat even, as you make dinner and think about what you want to do. What you want them to do for you.

But when you hear the gates swing open, when you hear Musa’s welcome sa! good evening sa!, compose yourself. Smooth your hand over your headtie as you walk to open the door. Hug your husband and inhale his Dior Sauvage like you have missed his scent all day, and cannot wait to have him all to yourself.

“Ah ah, is that how much you missed me?” he will ask.

Smile and say yes.

As you close the door, your eyes will find it. A red thong, leftover from your afternoon dalliance with Fatima.

Look quickly, to see if he saw, then swipe it with your toe, nimble as a gymnast. You might make a noise.

“Did you say something?” he will turn and ask.

Shake your head no. He will frown, like he doesn’t believe you, and your heart will start to pound. But don’t panic.

Pout your lips and graze his arm with your newly manicured nails. It doesn’t matter that you feel nothing, like touching a tap. Do it till his pupils dilate, and his breathing changes. Then leave him and go back to making dinner.

It always used to work on Rhoda, and it will work on him too.

That night, after he has fucked you (never the other way around), tell him you want to shave his beard. His smile will be confused, but rub his chest. Feed his vanity; make him think your fingers’ only purpose is to be glued to his body.

As you lather his chin, leave a small patch without shaving foam.

Shave the rest, carefully, stroking his face so his eyes flutter and he has a constant placid smile.

“Let me use my tweezers.”

Pluck the hairs, dark and short with their whitish root/follicle, and place them inside a square of tissue. Your heart will race, and your fingers will tremble, but force yourself to relax.

Later, when his snores make the windows rattle, and makes you want to slap him, grab your fan again. Reach for them, to the place where They are. This time, when you reach across your face around the fan, give them the tissue-wrapped hairs. Their teeth will graze your fingers, and latch onto the hairs, and a wet, cosre tongue will tickle your fingertips. Then they will disappear.

Seven days later, they will give you several pouches of powder, and you will poison your husband for the first time that night, watching with satisfaction as he swallows each morsel of pounded yam and laced afang soup.

Every time the mother had gotten pregnant, she’d had a miscarriage. That is what They are made up of, the spirit of each baby she miscarried. Each tragedy was an omen from the Old spirits, a warning that she should not have her husband’s baby.

You see, the mother and her husband had gotten married despite her parents’ pleas. They’d even locked her up in her room, threatening to sell her to the highest bidder should she accept the man’s proposal.

Everyone in the village knew who he was. They kept their daughters behind them as they danced forward every Sunday to drop their offering, or to receive anointing from his Goya olive oil bottle. No wife ever went to see him without her son or husband, and spiritual deliverances were always a family affair.

But the mother…the mother was different. She would go to see him alone, and each time returned to her parents’ house with a pious fire in her eyes, singing hymns and dancing tilll 3am when the neighbours would band their windows and say, “will you shut up!”

Her parents tried to talk to her. But they did so in discreet terms, words that made little sense to her, to anyone who would need protecting.

“Plangnan…haven’t you heard…he’s not…”

But the girl didn’t understand. He was kind to her, spoke in a soft voice and stroked the back of her knee every time she went to see him. He was handsome, skin like clay, and brown eyes that sparkled when he lit his kerosene lantern at night. And he was the first man whose touched moved her, made her skin prickle and her nipples pebble. A person that wasn’t a girl, that wasn’t her “best friends” over the years.

So, she believed then, that he must have some ungodly power, since no man had every drawn moans from her the way Shitna’an and Miriam and Blessing did.

She had gone to him for deliverance, for counselling, when she heard his first sermon condemning homosexuals, and she felt something ugly choke her chest. It was the same feeling that suffocated her when at 19, whispers began to follow her. At the river side, in the marketplace, in the village hall.

“Did you hear?” “Hear ke? I saw them with my own eyes! Her and that Deborah.” “Tufiakwa. And you did not kill them??” “What’s my business?” “Let me catch her first. If I don’t chop her up, change my name.”

She hated the words, hated the fear that took root in her, that fed on her apparently ungodly desires. So, of course, she’d gone to the pastor for help.

“You see,” he whispered as he stuck a finger inside her and she writhed, clutching her breasts. “How can you be gay?”

She married him, and the whispers stopped. No one ever whispered against a pastor and his wife.

Until she miscarried four times in a row, and the whispers arose again, triumphant, vindicated.

“When she has been doing rubbish with that other girl for years, what do you expect? I’m sure that’s why God closed her womb. Useless girl.”

She would lock herself in her wardrobe, and cry till her husband came home to berate her over semo and kuka about her childlessness five years into marriage.

They did not know that it was the spirits handiwork. Spirits pay attention, they see the future, written in the actions of the past and present. They knew what would happen should the man have a child.

Then one day, she took matters into her own hands, and fucked another man where eyes could not see, where whispers could not be birthed, and even spirits were oblivious.

And gave birth to her daughter, the girl who would be her downfall.

Your problem, your husband, will be like an overnight pimple. Irritating, disfiguring, and you will want to pop him as fast as possible.

Bide your time. Every day, you will want to increase the dose. Don’t. Be like Beatrice Achike, like Giulia Tofania. They were careful, and no one found out till it was too late, till their problems were dealt with.

He will invite his friends over for his 40^th birthday celebration, and they will drink all the booze in the house, till you have to send Musa to buy palm wine from around the corner.

“Please be fast,” you will say. Because you do not want them, him, to be sober.

You do not want him to be able to understand the looks that pass between you and Miriam, Bello’s wife.

The first time you met him, at your introduction, he’d seen the look.

You saw a look too, one that made you roll your eyes. As you walked past him from the front door to change out of your clubbing clothes, you took in his big-bellied figure. Greed, potent and oily, shone in his eyes and in the way he stroked his beard. He was nothing new. The newest in a long line of men who’d visited the house over the past two months, you thought you could dispose of him too, prove to be so hard-headed they would leave.

No matter how much money they stood to inherit from your oil tycoon of a father, no man wanted a headstrong wife that they couldn’t control.

So, when your mother called you from your room, you mad sure to emerge in only a towel, tattoos on full display.

“Sochi,” your mother said. “Come and meet Isaac.”

“No,” you said loudly, and the room fell into silence. Your mother’s mouth fell open and she rose, the beads on her arms and neck rattling. She raised her hand to slap you, and you flinched, closing your eyes. Nothing came.

You opened your eyes to find her wrist stayed by the man. The way he looked at you then was different from the other men. Pitying, triumphant, possessive. Your knees trembled and you bit your tongue. Real fear crippled your nerves and you fiddled with the edge of your towel.

“Let me talk to her alone please,” he said. Everyone agreed. Your mother, father, uncles, all filed into the kitchen, and silence descended between the two of you.

He said nothing, simply pulled out his phone and scrolled and tapped a few times, then handed it to you.

You threw the phone across the room. It burned your hand, and the picture collage on it was scorched into your retina, and angry tears welled up.

“How the hell did you get that?” you whispered.

It’s fine babe, Rhonda had said. No one will know. Yet, there the two of you were imprisoned on his phone, lips locked and hair tangled in one another’s hair, chest smooshed together. In another picture was one thathad you both staring at each other’s eyes, two girls clearly in love and damning the world.

Isaac smiled, and his oily wretched face turned triumphant in your sight.

“Marry me,” he’d said. “Marry me or I’ll tell everyone what a dirty lesbian you are.”

The skin on your arms pimpled and you hated him instantly.

“Tell them,” you said. The smugness slid off his face and for the first time, he looked unsure. You smiled, your confidence returning in bits, masking the fear that thrummed in your veins. Then he marched past you into the kitchen.

He told them, and the next week, you were married.

Two years now, and you still hate him, want him to suffer for the life he has trapped you in, a life created out of fear for your own life.

But he doesn’t know that your boldness has gone nowhere, despite the gold handcuff on your ring finger. You are still that girl in the towel, her tattoos now covered by bulbous bubus. It is that same boldness that led you to find a witch, one who didn’t fear your husband, who had his own army of babalawos, thanks to your father’s money.

“I can’t help you,” she’d said. “I will die. But I know who can help you, someone your husband cannot touch, because she is already dead.”

Thanks to her instructions, now you have the poison, and soon, you will be free. Maybe not to go back to Rhonda, who is married with two children now. But to live a life where you do not have to think of someone else when being fucked.

When Musa returns, Isaac’s eyes will be a little less glazed.

“What took you so long?” you will snap at Musa.

“Sorry ma,” he will reply. “E don finish before, but dem make new batch special for oga.”

As you transfer the palm wine to a jug, Miriam will join you in the kitchen.

“Let me help you,” she will say. Her voice is soft, and has always done something to your belly. This time, for the first time, her fingers will graze yours as she lines up glasses on a tray. They will linger, as will your eyes on her fair face, breasts hugged by sugar lace, and a mouth ringed in kohl. Then she will drift past you to the stairs, up to where she knows your bedroom is, where you have gossiped about your husbands. And their many girls. And whispered, coded desires. As she walks up, one shoulder of her dress will fall. There will be no bra strap. You breath will stutter and your eyes will remain on her till she disappears past the landing.

All that’s left is to deliver the palm wine, then join her.

You pause, then pour an entire pouch of powder into the jug. Because they are the same, the men drinking and laughing in the sitting room.

No one she told believed Her. Her grandmother had slapped her and said to stop dreaming up stories.

“You want the devil to use you abi?” she said.

Her mother hadn’t said anything, simply stared at Her till she began to doubt what had happened. Maybe I am exaggerating, she thought. No father would touch his daughter that way, the same daughter he fed strawberries at breakfast and made faces till she collapsed into breathless giggles.

You see, one day, Plangnan had come home early from church choir practice. That particular day, she was not interested in being fetted, fawned over and asked to deliver prayer points to her husband. She packed her bag and faked a headache, and left. Somehow she still ended up with two written prayer requests.

On getting home, she fished out her key from her purse, when a soft, whimpering sound made her pause. She stepped to her left and squinted to look into the window, wondering if there were thieves raiding their home so early in the evening.

What she saw stopped her heart forever.

On the couch lay her daughter, clad in her nightdress. Kneeling in front of her was the pastor, his hands beneath the nightdress, a smile on his oily lips.

Plangnan retched. Outside the door, she emptied her stomach of everything ever ingested. The lies, the faith, the sermons, the belief. Then she sat in the putrid mess and prayed, prayed she had mis-seen, because no father would do that to his own daughter.

She replayed her counselling sessions with him, how he’d fingered her. This time, she paid attention to the look in his eyes, not how her body felt, a body that now felt like a betrayal, a supreme lie. And for the first time, she saw it. The look. Punishing, triumphant, wicked.

She kicked the door, feet stinging, and swept on them. Her bag became a gavel, metting out justice onto her husband’s back. He cursed and tried to overpower her, lifting his hands. As soon as he did, she whacked his face with her shoe and scooped up her daughter and ran, locking them both in her room. Her daughter shook in her arms, tears glinting in the wam yellow light of the overhead bulbs.

“Plangnan!” he roared and pounded on the door. All night he threathened and shouted, voice going hoarse. Till he finally left, and her daughter slept, and Plangnan’s heart still did not resume its natural ryhthm

Naturally, she’d gone to her family for help, for solace and protection, the same people whose warnings had falling on her deaf ears, the same people now ho dismissed her.

How could a father do something like that?

Soon, stories of her accusation began to spread. People stared as she and her daughter picked out pawpaw and cashews in the market. Their eyes tracked her daughter’s movements, looking for the pastor’s fingerprints on her skin. And when they didn’t see any, when she looked normal, eyes burned with anger, lips curled, hissing. Plangnan hurled a few cashews, toppled a few pepper heaps.

Normal to them was not normal to her. She knew from how her daughter didn’t complain about buying overipe mangos, how she didn’t beg for boiled groundnut, how she pulled Plangnan away from every male trader, that her daughter’s scars lay in her bones, swam in her blood.

And she knew those scars demanded retribution.

She went home and performed for her husband. She pouted her lips, grazed his arm, caressed his shoulders as she served him dinner. She laughed as he joked, made he saw the heat in her eyes, made sure he mistook it for smoldering. Her daughter’s sadness and betrayed expression at the dining table clawed at her chest and almost broke her resolve.

That night, after he fucked her (never the other way around), and he dozed off, his stomach full of pounded yam and egusi, Plangnan steeled herself, took a knife, and plunged it into his fat kneck, where his rosary rested. And blood coated the cross, gargling till his struggles fell silent.

They saw, the spirits of the children that died in her womb. They saw what this woman had done in the face of what they had foreseen, the injustice that would have been committed against them too. And They smiled.

She went to wash her hands of his blood, and They descended, possessing the man’s body. He rose from the bed, a quiet zombie, blood leaking from his throat onto his night shirt. He walked out into the night, guided by Them under the watchful moonlight.

When Plangnan returned to the room, she screamed. Then she turned the whole house upside down, movenents frantic and deperate. She ran outside, searched the nearby bushes for him tilll the sun rose and her eyes were blood-red.

For days, she could not sleep. She waited for his resurgence, his resurrection and her subsequent damnation. For what dead man stood up and walked away ?

But weeks passed, and he didn’t return, and her confidence grew, even as people whispered about his disappearance.

The next time they were in the marketplace, the people stared, once more looking for the truth. And they thought they saw it, in the lightness of her daughter’s footsteps, the way she walked with her shoulder’s high like a layer of slime had sloughed off her. They thought her, the re-happy 5-year-old, responsible for her father’s disappearance.

Plangnan felt the fiery hate in their eyes, the pitchforks and torches that would come for her daughter if they believed her guilty. The fear tore at her throat, and her heart became irregular.

That evening, she called Deborah, who now lived in the city, a successful banker.

“Hello?” the voice pulled at something deep and long-forgotten in Plangnan and she had to stifle a sob.

“Deborah? It’s Plangnan.”

“Plangnan! Long time! How-”

“I’m going to die soon,” she interrupted. “And I want you to come and take my daughter away.”

Deborah was silent, shocked. “Why?”

Tears ran down Plangnan’s face. “You know what this village is like.”

She didn’t need to say more. Deborah agreed, and they scheduled the pickup for two days later.

That night, she went to Mama Iyabo’s beer parlour. She sat for hours, ordering cup after cup of burkutu. She poured them all over her dress when no one watched, so by the tme the moon graced the sky, she smelled like Katlong, the town drunkard. Then, heart thumping, she climbed onto the table. She took a deep breath. Then began to scream.

“I did it! I killed him! I killed the useless man.”

Jumping from table to table, kicking cups and plates, sending meat and booze flying. For the first time since she was a girl, joy filled her heart. She was no longer a dirty hell-bound homosexual, a stubborn girl, a barren wife, a lying wife and mother. She was a mother, fighting for her daughter, taking her protection into her hands.

It didn’t take long before people captured her, tied her up at the tree at the base of the mountain. And they stoned, hurled and threw until her body bled in all places. Her wrapper and clouse tore to shreds. But she laughed. Laughed because she knew her daughter would be safe.

As the life flowed out of her, and her connection to this side of life ebbed, she saw Them, and They reached out hands to her.

“Who are you?” she asked, voice cracked. Another stone hit her temple and destroyed her left vision.

“We were to be your children by that man,” They replied. “Join us, mother.”

Plangnan smiled, and the last stone hit, and she joined her children.

It will look like you will fail.

One day, he will come home to find you dozed off on the couch, phone hanging from your hand. He will take it and his body will go rigid. Fury will twist his dark face, till he looks like a pudgy potato.

The first blow will clear your sleep, and feel like nails driving into your cheek. The next will fold your stomach in on itself. He will grab your hair and pull you from the couch. Pain will explode at the base of your skull and tears will run down your cheek.

You will swipe helplessly at him, but pain has weakened your body, and the only thing you can do is scream and sob.

“I thought I told you to stop this nonsense!”

They will come to mind, Fatima’s red thong, Miriam’s lace-covered breasts, the countless women that have kept you sane, stopped you from taking your own life just to escape this prison.

He will do all these things, and your patience will break. This is where They will come in. They will come from the shadows and enter his body, replace his soul. He will jerk and try to fight. Then his fingers will unclench from your head, step back and watch.

He will tear himself apart, from hair follicle, to fingernail to skin flaps, till he is nothing but a mess of bone, suit scraps and blood.

Sometimes, there is no such thing as a clean ending.

Fear will try to overtake your body, will freeze you to the spot. Take your bags and run. Run towards your new beginning, one that starts with a plastic surgeon who will replace your face with an unrecognisable one, bland and mundane.

When they find his body, see what has happened, the insects living in his skin, they will call you witch. But not to your face, because it doesn’t exist anymore.

Witch, they will call you. Witch, they called women miracle workers. Divine, they called Jesus. Does it really matter? Witch, devil, they called Plangnan. She is the She they tell stories about, the witch they use for horror stories. Maybe they’ll use you for a story too.

And sometimes, for the sake of those who come after, our stories are more important than what they call us.

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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?

Plangdi Neple: Until 2020, I didn't consider writing as a thing I could do professionally. By then, Covid-19 had made me bored enough to try anything. Plus, I was unhappy with my chosen field of study: Chemical Engineering.

My real draw to writing came about 2 years later, when I was considering stopping for good. Until I found what I really wanted to do with words. I don't talk much, so, writing (and the accompanying research) is my preferred way of asking questions I can't say out loud, and for talking about important things.

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?

PN: 90% of the time, structure. Wildness can occasionally help and surprise (that's actually how “To Whom It May Concern” started out), but has more often led to incomplete drafts that taunt me every year. Structure helps because I need to have a clear road map. If not, I'll retread old/familiar themes and stories.

The thing that comes first is usually a question: what if...? Followed by a twist on something I've been preoccupied with. For example, I have a story that started as "what if I wanted to steal money on its way to an ATM?".

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?

PN: Oh my friends would have a field day answering this! The most consistent thing in my work (right now) is queerness. It wasn't always there when I was growing up, especially in Nigeria, and writing has given me the power to surround myself with it. Another thing is that a lot of my characters go to others for help/power. A part of it is that I think it's important to know when to ask for help (something I'm not very good at), and to understand the need for community.

If not a writer, who would you be?

PN: Probably an engineer, if my parents had their way!

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?

PN: The best advice I've received is from a friend: do it afraid. And it's the same thing I'd say to emerging writers. You already have so many things working against you in the world right now. Don't let fear be one of them.

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

PN: I'm afraid I'll invoke them if I speak. Oh well, what's a little curse. I'm working on a novel and a short story collection. One is about beauty, fashion, and the body, and one is about gender essentialism, surveillance states, and addiction. I'll give you 3 guesses.

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?

PN: There are so many people I can think of, but I'll stick to a few. Tee Noir, Cat Sebastian, Mina Le, Octavia Butler, Wole Talabi. I didn't really grow up questioning the world around me; I grew up Christian. These writers and creators gave me the language to express things I already felt, and exposed me to history and concepts I was otherwise oblivious to. They're also just really fun! Wole has a story (An Arc of Electric Skin) about a man using his skin to destroy the Nigerian political system. Delicious doesn't begin to describe that narrative.

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.

PN: Two very recent things come to mind: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Maison Margiela Artisanal 2024 show.

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PLANGDI NEPLE is a Nigerian writer. His work has appeared in several publications, including FIYAH, Cast of Wonders, Flame Tree Press, Afterlives 2024: The Year’s Best Death Fiction, and others. He is a Voodoonauts 2024 Fellow, a Tin House Alum, a member of the Clarion West class of 2025, a Nommo Award Nominee, and a Brave New Weird Award winner.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Wangechi Mutu’s The Bride Who Married a Camel’s Head (2009)1 Mutu builds hybrid women from magazine cutouts, medical illustrations, and ink—figures torn apart and reassembled into something fiercer. This bride kneels in tall grass, flowers erupting from her head like a crown or a wound, one hand raised as if casting or catching something. She’s ornamented and monstrous, trapped in a title that sounds like a folktale warning and a curse. And then we look at her face and realize, viscerally, that she’s not afraid. Neple’s story takes off from that look.