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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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.

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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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The Illuminarium never should have been built. We know that now. At the time of its conception, the Illuminarium’s makers were stupid and choked with hope. They were sad (the way all are sad), and so, they purchased a former cotton mill on the west side of town and they got to work.

Step One: Black out the windows with vinyl so no precious drop of light can escape.

Step Two: Buy up every halogen bulb from here to Rutland County.

Step Three: Plug four high-powered generators into the old mill’s electrical grid.

Step Four: Crowd into the mill. Bring nothing (when the happiness comes, the true-and-good happiness, there will be no need for material goods).

Step Five: Listen from within as, out in the vulgar world, workmen solder every exit shut.

Step Six: Strip off your clothes.

Step Seven: Turn on the lights.

They only wanted to feel the contentment they believed they deserved (do any of us “deserve” anything? Only if you believe in an ordered universe, but we digress). They only wanted mirth. They only wanted to banish the darkness; imagine, a life of only light! Free of fear. Free of shame. Light, light and only light. Without darkness there could be no suffering. Without darkness there could be no death. Holy glow, oh divine brightness, they would live forever.

Of course, we know now–from tabloid clippings and true crime podcasts–that the Illuminariasts were mistaken.

By the end of the first week bathed in light, light, only light they had begun eating their own hair, believing it to be the golden harp strings of angels. By day nine, they’d tried to carve the black, drunken pupils from their eyes. By the eleventh sleepless day (light, light, only light) the Illuminariasts were (though undiscovered for another week, yet) dead.

It was day eighteen when an electrical fire began in one of the overworked generators. The warehouse snapped into flames. Became a blazing beacon in the dark, a lantern, a star, a violence, until it burned to ash.

And then, only then, with forgiveness, did the blessed shadows come.

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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?

GennaRose Nethercott: You know, it’s funny—I was at my folks’ house over the holidays, and found some old reports from my preschool teacher, of all people. Notes home to my parents on how little me was doing at daycare, how I was relating to other kids, that sort of thing. And what she wrote was, “Genna loves telling stories, and the other children look to her as a storyteller. But she struggles with respecting my authority.”

And that really made me laugh. Because she nailed it, I think—I’ve always been a storyteller. I’ve always made sense of the world around me through narrative and theater and art and music. But what made me dedicate myself to *writing* as my medium, specifically, harkens back to that so-called “struggle” with authority:

There’s already so much conversation around the political elements of writing. The way it’s a mode for transmitting revolutionary ideas and freedom of thought. But I think something that gets left out is how the actual, physical process of writing is radical, too. Because oppressive systems can’t touch it. In a world ruled by capitalism, writing doesn’t rely on expensive tools or editing software—like film or animation. In a country with a failing healthcare system, writing doesn’t demand a mobile body—like dance or athletics. One could argue that to write requires access to education, but illiterate bards have been telling stories and shaping folklore for centuries. In short, I chose to write because storytelling is the only art that can truly and fully circumvent authority. Just like that precocious toddler would have wanted.

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?

GN: I have some real envy for writers with a “practice.” Bradbury used to wake up every day, sit down at his typewriter, and not stand up again until he’d composed a new short story. There’s that Ursula Le Guin regimen that went viral a while ago, which started with her waking up at 5:30 am to just “lie there and think” for forty-five minutes before she’d “get up and eat breakfast (lots).” Alas. Couldn’t be me. I tend to wake up closer to 10:30, and that’s only with an alarm set.

Basically, I write well with a gun to my head. I can go months without writing a word—but give me a deadline, and I’ll dive into a project like the deep end of a pool. I’ll literally text my friends, say “sorry, but see you in six months,” and stay submerged in my Word doc with my breath held until the thing is done. Only then will I come up for air. Which is what living in the world is, to me. That breath in. Taking in life and connecting with other people, so that when the time to dive back under comes, I’ll be able to stay there a while.

It’s not the most sustainable, energetically. And actually, the piece you’re publishing currently, “The Illuminarium”, is part of a project intended to disrupt that habit. I was experimenting with that Bradbury method of just sitting down every morning and seeing what came to me; in this case, I wanted to invent a different impossible, imagined museum each day.

As for story process—a premise always comes first. What if a staircase descended forever? What if an army were made of fog? Then, I’ll link that to a broader metaphor. What parallels this image, in the real world? An eternal staircase can be an addiction story. A fog army could explore the amorphous, intangible repercussions of war. And finally, the part I’m worst at: who are the characters in this situation, and what is the plot? These, I care less about. But unfortunately for me, characters and plot do tend to come in handy in getting a message across.

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?

GN: Goat fucking comes up more frequently than I personally would like. Erotic sheep and goat content. I read James Dickey’s poem “The Sheep Child” at too young an age, I think. It’s beyond my control. Your thoughts and prayers appreciated.

If not a writer, who would you be?

GN: The thing about being a writer is you actually can’t be *only* a writer. You have to collect experiences and skills in the outside world. Those are the colors on our painter’s palette. If all you do is write then what the hell will you have to write about? You have to be a person first and a writer second.

Of course, time management is an issue. And writing takes a lot of it. If I wasn’t writing, I’d probably spend more time making things with my hands. I love to sew and build things. Any excuse to learn a new craft, I’m there. Last year I spent far too much time creating a miniature Irish pub entirely from scratch, beer taps and all. Maybe I’d become a miniaturist. Or I don’t know. A sea shanty archivist? A marionette maker? The girl who operates the Spook-o-Rama ride at Coney Island? There are so many wonderful, bizarre things to do in this world.

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?

GN: In terms of “making a mark”—that is, getting your work into the world, rather than the writing process itself—let me start by saying: this is a truly idiotic source for advice, but I swear, it’s the most important principle I live by and I think about it all the time. So bear with me here.

There was this early 2000s Twitter account called Shit My Dad Says, in which this guy chronicled kooky quotes his father had said over the years. In one of these, set back when the son was a teenager, he was telling his dad about this girl at school he had a crush on. She was sexy and cool and he really liked her—but she was clearly out of his league, so he obviously couldn’t ask her out. To which his dad said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “Son, let women figure out why they won’t sleep with you, don’t do it for them.”

And honestly? That’s the best arts career advice I’ve ever come across. If the publishing industry wants to reject you? It will. If readers don’t want your work? They won’t read it. But that’s *their* job to decide—not yours. I know so many incredible artists who refuse to put their work out there because they’re afraid of rejection, or because they fear the work isn’t good enough. But honestly—that’s none of their damn business. Our job is to do the art, and shoot our shot. It’s the world’s job to decide if it wants to sleep with us.

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

GN: In October, I finished drafting a new novel—a contemporary New England gothic inspired by my tiny Vermont hometown. Haunted perfume. Cursed carnivals. Missing girls and secret tunnels. Theeeese are a few of my faaavorite things.

It ruined my life in that, while writing it, I had no life. As I mentioned earlier, when I’m in project mode, there’s nothing *but* the project. I spent nine months under self-imposed house arrest until the thing was done. But that’s okay. I’ve come to understand that there are things in life that make us happy, and there are things that make us feel fulfilled, and they aren’t always the same things. My out-in-the-world time makes me happy, but doesn’t always feel purposeful. My writing fulfills me, but rarely makes me happy. And a life needs balance between both to feel complete.

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?

GN: The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, always—monster as metaphor. Take the emotional worlds of the characters and make it the literal supernatural law of the world. And the blend of horror, tragedy, and winking humor.

The writer Kelly Link. When I first read her short story collection Stranger Things Happen, I thought, my god, I feel like I’m looking at the inside of my own mind. I’d never had that feeling before. Link’s work granted me this incredible sense of permission to write the way I actually thought, as uncanny as it may be. That was an unbelievable gift.

Endless more, of course, but those are what I always cite as my Big Two.

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.

GN: I’ve been re-listening to Anaïs Mitchell’s 2012 album Young Man In America recently. One of the greatest albums of all time, from one of the best songwriters of our era.

GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT is the author of a novel, Thistlefoot, a Vermont Book Award winning short story collection, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart, and a book-length poem, The Lumberjack’s Dove, which was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. A writer and folklorist alike, she helps create the podcast Lore, and she tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow). She lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery.

Note on Art

We’ve paired this piece with work from James Turrell’s “The Substance of Light”1 exhibition. Turrell builds rooms of pure luminosity—spaces where light feels tangible, where visitors report something close to religious experience. Turrell’s work asks what it might feel like to step inside pure light. Nethercott’s piece asks what it might cost to stay.