Aries

The Ram / Courageous, Adventurous, Independent / Domineering, Selfish, Arrogant

Congrats, you made it to the New Year! I wasn’t sure if you would still be in one piece (I kid, I kid). According to these tea leaves, the 2020s will be your best decade yet. Start it with a bang and make some big changes in your life. No need for olive branches in January—instead, put that courageous spirit to good use.

But first, read this excellent story pic:

• A Bird that Hums, by Alec Prevett

• Teaser: “Morbid
  curiosity is what compels you to take the body. Such a quick and fleeting
  thing; how many can say they’ve held one in their palm, known the stillness of
  something which never seems to be still?”

Taurus

The Bull / Loyal, Friendly, Resourceful / Self-Indulgent, Possessive, Greedy

You had your fun in December, but now, it’s time to cut the holiday chord and get back to business. Try your hand at some much needed reflection. Focus on your goals for the New Year; i.e., stop avoiding those pesky family obligations.

And check out this story set when you’re definitely not procrastinating.

• After
  Dinner / Girls in the Woods, by Jacqueline Doyle

• Teaser: “When the
  battered maroon pickup slows and the pale-eyed man with the red baseball cap
  leans out the passenger window and calls, Want a lift, ladies? they laugh and
  shake their heads. No, better not. They hurry on, giggling.”

Gemini

The Twins / Intelligent, Adaptable, Creative / Moody, Opportunistic, Inconsistent

It’s Jumpstart January, friend. This means you can ditch the drama from 2019 and start fresh. After all, your adaptable nature is perfect for reinvention. Climb out of that cocoon so you can leave your haters—er, I mean “friends”—in the dust of your success.

Start by reading this gorgeous story pick:

• The Fox Witch, by J. Motoki

• Teaser: “The old woman awoke in a bed of snow. She
  lay on her side, curled like a centipede, with ice brushed over her kimono,
  rough and thinning from long summers.”

Cancer

The Crab / Honest, Generous, Faithful / Insecure, Needy, Crabby

Since it’s officially the New Year, you’ll be in hyper-nesting-mode. Change is a bummer for most people. I know it tends to make you nervous, hence all the decorating and baking and cozying. Give in to your urges this month, but don’t let them consume you. Set up some friend dates and get some fresh air. Or, you know, breezy ocean air that is probably freezing. Whatever rocks your boat.

Emerge from your den for a truly stunning read.

• Blood Histories, by Tara
  Stillions Whitehead

• Teaser: “When she was
  fourteen years old, the girl’s anatomy teacher had told her that a woman’s
  blood holds all of the trauma of the her past, of the past preceding her past.
  Really, of all time.”

Leo

The Lion / Cheery, Noble, Imaginative / Demanding, Boastful, Melodramatic

They say ever-balanced Libras can be great partners for lions like yourself. This month, take the opportunity to declare some romantic intentions. Knowing you, the whole affair will be ritzy—like the cracker—and just a tad extravagant. Be true to yourself, but maybe don’t spring for that couple’s sky diving date.

This story pick can give you a similar rush without the plummeting to the ground part. Just saying.

• The Girl Who Could
  Float,
  by Pete Stevens

• Teaser: “When Jonathan first witnessed his wife
  float, tiny bullets of sweat popped out across his forehead, under his arms.
  She’d sat him down on the sofa, told him to open his eyes and shut his mouth.”

Virgo

The Maiden / Practical, Diligent, Kind / Obsessive, Self-Righteous, Compulsive

Man, you’re killing it, Virgo! Winter looks like it’s shaping up to be a stellar time for you. The stars were aligned in your favor last month, and January seems to be continuing the trend. Having said that, there might be a pinch of negativity toward the end of the month (come on, don’t groan). Stay true to the course and be your kind, diligent self.

Oh, and indulge with this beautifully written story.

• Seedling,
  by Erin Calabria

• Teaser:
  “Each of us will carry the seeds. They
  say we will know when to plant them. They say we must keep them safe. My sister
  never wanted to be safe. She wanted to know things. It must have been
  unbearable not knowing what the seeds were for, because one day she swallowed
  hers one by one.”

Libra

The Scales / Compassionate, Trustworthy, Peacemaker / Disorganized, Materialistic, Indecisive

Some butter-side down days will hit in the New Year. Bad news aside, you only need to put in 50% effort to turn that frown upside down (sorry, dad humor again). Spend some extra time with loved ones to make up for it. And treat yourself to a little TLC around the end of the month.

My recommendation? Read this lovely story pick:

• The
  Hunter Speaks His Name, by Dmitri Christopher

Teaser: “His true name lies buried in a sunken coast, washed from the lips of she who last spoke it. The one that raised him, lost to the storm rains on his fifteenth year. He never speaks her name, nor his own. He does not ask the names of others.”

Scorpio

The Scorpion / Purposeful, Charismatic, Cunning / Aggressive, Manipulative, Possessive

In January, you’ll want to float into the sky. Honestly, the holidays can have that effect on the best of us. Keep your feet on the ground with some tough love and good ol’ fashioned discipline. You tend to shine in autumn, but you can dazzle in winter, too.

When you need a break, here’s a monthly story pick that’s just for you:

• A Gentler Sky, by Amelia Sirina

• Teaser:
  “In the stories Grandfather told, the
  rain-makers always turned into mist before the last drop of the drums and right
  after the first drop of water onto the thirsty earth.”

Sagittarius

The Archer / Straightforward, Optimistic, Adventurous / Careless, Impatient, Hotheaded

Let’s be honest: December was rad. The bee’s knees. The best thing since sliced bread. You gave in to your wild urges and outran everyone else—talk about feeling accomplished! This month, though, you’ll be coming down from that sugar high. In fact, indecision may visit you in kind of a debilitating way.

Combat flavorless January by stocking up on good tea, cozy socks, and fabulous stories. Speaking of…

• She’s
  Been Living in the Attic for Who Knows How Long, by Steve Chang

• Teaser:
  “And there’s a hole through the puffy
  insulation below—at her feet!—through which she looks down into the home, at
  her family, and how it’s changing. The sweet-smelling baby is a boy, a teen,
  and a man. Her husband is old now, his muttering a mystery.”

Capricorn

The Mountain Sea-Goat / Traditional, Responsible, Ambitious / Unforgiving, Blunt, Pessimistic

I probably don’t need to tell you this, you responsible stick-in-the-mud—just kidding!—but January is your month to shine. You’re going to feel on top of the world for the next 31ish days. So, put that ambitious nature to use, and don’t hesitate to go after what you want. You’ve earned it, kiddo.

You have also earned this utterly fantastic read:

• The
  Astronaut’s Wife Considers Perspective, by Cathy Ulrich

• Teaser:
  “The astronaut’s wife knows that she is
  actually in space, too. Knows that the stars are always there, masked by blue
  sky. Knows that the sun is a star, that the stars are suns. That there are
  other planets like this one, and thus other astronauts and other waiting wives.”

Aquarius

The Water-Bearer / Intellectual, Open-Minded, Outgoing / Unpredictable, Self-Conscious, Chaotic

It’s time to work it, Aquarius! If there’s something extra you’ve wanted to take on, this is the time to play your hand. You’ll be hit by a confidence boost in the New Year, which will hopefully inspire you to smack down any insecurities.

Let’s cap this snow-dusted month with a mesmerizing read:

• The Sugar
  that Comes from Funerals, by Avra
  Margariti

• Teaser: “Most summer afternoons,
  after lunch and before coffee, when the salt from the sea bakes our sun-tanned
  bodies, we eat the food of funerals. Wheat grains, powdered sugar, golden
  raisins, walnuts, sesame, fresh parsley.”

Pisces

The Fish / Charitable, Intuitive, Artistic / Timid, Impractical, Indolent

Start the new decade with a bang. December was a bit wishy-washy for you, but January will be a full-steam-ahead kind of month. Break out your New Year’s resolutions and embrace 2020 like it’s going out of style. Change is ahead, my friends. Don’t freak out—that’s a good thing.

Be sure to spend some time in the sun with your reflective story pick.

• Eternal Sunshine, by Tom McMillan

• Teaser:
  “It occurred to me for the first time
  that good marriages can fail and bad marriages last, and that even if there was
  no rewinding time they must have had something great, something binding, to
  shine their eyes a decade later, and as I drove home and cracked a cold beer, I
  wished that I loved someone that much.”

Published on May 7, 2019 by Harper Voyager.

Going into W. M. Akers’s debut novel Westside, I assumed I’d be relatively familiar with its world—1920s New York would mean tenements, speakeasies, possibly a brawl or two. Yet the first few pages quickly indicated that I was hopelessly (and happily) out of my depth, as the streets and buildings about which I’ve read countless times were both familiar yet utterly unrecognizable: “Damp moss broke my fall. Broadway was muffled by the sound of falling water. A silver cataract cascaded down the crumbling façade of an abandoned tenement, pouring over broken windows, splashing onto the moss-blanketed street, and rushing into the gutter. I have scaled that unsteady building, and seen the source of that waterfall, which bubbles straight from the peeling black tar roof. It is an impossible wonder. Such things are common here.”

In Akers’s Manhattan, the disappearances of thousands of people on the city’s west side have left Washington Square Park filled with trees towering three hundred feet tall, while Broadway is bisected by a thirteen-mile fence made of iron, steel, and barbed wire. The fence placates those on the east, who fear the strange phenomena and ever-increasing disappearances on the west, yet leaves “fifty or sixty thousand too brave or mad or desperate to flee, who stayed behind the fence, intent on living their lives.”

Among those thousands is the novels’ protagonist, Gilda Carr, a detective who’s spent her career solving what she calls “tiny mysteries”—“little questions . . . the mysteries that spoil marriages, ruin friendships, and curdle joy.” This is what she’s done ever since the disappearance of her father, a police detective turned private eye, years earlier. So when she agrees to find Edith Copeland’s missing glove, she thinks it will be like any other case. After she witnesses the murder of her client’s merchant husband, however, she realizes she’s stumbled upon something much larger.

At times, the book feels very much like a tour of the richly imagined world Akers has created, as Gilda follows leads and flits from subway tunnels to empty docks to abandoned theaters. The Westside, with all its grit and magic and inexplicable ways, is her home, and readers are able to see its strange beauty through her eyes. The book’s strength undoubtedly lies in its worldbuilding, which continues throughout the entire story; a little over halfway through the novel, just when a reader may think they’re getting used to Gilda’s world, they’re thrown for quite a loop. 

As you’d expect from any mystery set in 1920s New York, there’s plenty of bootlegging, smuggling, and corruption; as Gilda unravels how it all connects, however, it’s difficult to feel as though it’s not a bit overdone. Nearly every character is involved in something criminal one way or the other, which leads to everyone’s behavior feeling slightly less . . . thrilling. There are only so many times one can read about illegal rotgut whiskey before it loses some of its illicit appeal. 

That said, the book features an intriguing and eclectic cast: a woman who makes moonshine in the subway tunnels beneath the city; a man who strives to make the Westside a bourgeois utopia yet does so at great expense; a gangster who lives in a penthouse, loves jazz, and is looking for the name of a tune he’s been whistling for decades. Like any good mystery, there are plenty of possible suspects as well as motives; as the novel progresses and Gilda encounters more characters—many from her father’s past life—it becomes harder and harder to guess who did it, and why.

The big reveal is anything but expected, although it relies equal parts on the world created as it does the characters. And the story is paced relatively well, although it tends to drag in parts; again, because the book oftentimes feels like a tour rather than a classic whodunnit, there are certain stops at which readers may be inclined to spend less time than they would at others. Yet nearly all of its loose ends are wrapped up by the end.  

Gilda also has a fantastic voice—sharp, no-nonsense, and clever. I knew I liked her from the moment I encountered this on the very first page: “’Girl!’ he barked. I did not turn my head, for that is not my name.” In the world Akers has created, where streets shift in the night and entire rooms disappear on a whim, a steady protagonist with a good head on her shoulders feels necessary. And if there are parts of the story that drag, then readers at least have Gilda’s wit to get them through.

Westside is a fantastic debut that will appeal to lovers of fantasy more so than mystery, yet fans of both genres will find myriad reasons to immerse themselves in its pages. 

As societies around the world dip their toes in authoritarianism, we’d like to elevate authors of speculative fiction who imagine alternatives or help us demand the impossible futures of our dreams. In the Resistance Writers interview series, we’ll hear from a handful of writers from the 2015 anthology, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Each writer elaborates on sources of inspiration and how activism informs their work. Our hope is to provide a source of guidance for aspiring writers of visionary fiction.

Thomas Chisholm (TC)

How did you get involved with the Octavia’s Brood project? How did the editors, Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, discover your work?

Bao Phi (BP)

I have been a spoken word artist for a couple of decades, and Walidah and I had crossed paths in that community. She’s a very accomplished spoken word poet; she’s part of a duo along with Turiya Autry called Good Sista/Bad Sista. I had heard many good things about adrienne maree brown but we had not worked together before Octavia’s Brood.

TC

What was your inspiration for “Revolution Shuffle?” Was it a piece you were already developing or did it come about once you were asked to participate in the Octavia’s Brood anthology?

BP

It was something that I was turning around in the back of my head. Just an idea, you know? I had been reading a lot of zombie and other post-apocalyptic fiction and wondered for a while what a story would be like coming from a Vietnamese American, or Asian American, experience. But it was just an idea. I probably would never have written it down or worked on it if not for Octavia’s Brood. I’m thankful to Walidah and adrienne for the opportunity.

TC

“Revolution Shuffle” was one of my favorite stories from Octavia’s Brood. It’s ending was so powerful and made for an excellent introduction to the anthology. You’re primarily a poet and have put out little prose. Can we expect more fiction from you in the future?

BP

That’s very kind of you! Especially since, coming into it as a poet with very little prose experience, I initially turned down the offer because I felt like I didn’t have the chops. I tried to extend this short story into a full-length novel, and it was a disaster. From time to time, I think about going back to those pages and doing a huge overhaul of it to see if there’s anything worth salvaging. No pun intended. 

TC

What kind of impact have you seen Octavia’s Brood make since its publication in 2015? What role do you think politically motivated fiction can play in today’s climate?

BP

I’ve loved sci-fi, fantasy, mythology, legends, and comic books since I was an adolescent refugee growing up in an economically poor neighborhood in Minneapolis. I think there’s potential in such things to help people understand the present, as well as imagine what a future could look like, for better or worse. In simple terms, fiction can be a place where you can work out ideas, examine humanity and imagine collective movements. You can be critical and creative. I don’t know what impact OB has had, but I know I’m honored to be included.

TC

In the current climate the United States is in, I see a lot of people (myself included) criticizing the powers that be, while taking little action. How did you find your voice, and your place within activist circles/movements? How have those experiences shaped your writing? What guidance might you give to aspiring artists/activists? 

BP

No one is born a perfect activist or artist. It all takes work. All of it is a process. As a young person I was a knucklehead, I was egotistical, and not willing to do a deep dive into my own contradictions and complicity in systems of harm. I was fortunate to encounter at least some people with the patience and wisdom to nudge me, to be invested in my development.

In my opinion, I think it’s important to find your people. To find the people who will support you and who you can support. Who will push back when you’re being stupid and who you can challenge, who you can disagree with respectfully, and who you can grow with. I think the best thing we can do is resist both the idea of a perfect activist and also move away from “hero” activism—where it’s about putting a couple of people up on a pedestal or something. As others smarter than me have pointed out, we need to get away from the idea of scarcity—where we’re fighting each other over scraps, where we’re stuck in rigid ideas of hierarchy regarding struggle and oppression, where we commodify “wokeness” and allyship.

TC

What kinds of fiction or what particular authors have shaped your thinking? When writing fiction, what comes first: the concepts and ideals you want to explore, or the characters? Do you write with a political goal in mind?

BP

I really admire Octavia Butler, Victor LaValle, Gene Yang, Jose Saramago, Stephen King, Gloria Naylor, and Emily St. John Mandel. As well as comic series’ like Saga and The Walking Dead. The list goes on and on. I read a wide variety of different authors for different reasons. Regarding my own attempts, usually it’s a combination of scenario and character. For example, with “Revolution Shuffle,” it was both the world that popped into my head and these two specific characters inhabiting it. Who are they? What made them? How do they react, and why?

TC

What are you currently working on, politically and/or creatively? 

BP

Honestly, I’m doing my best as a single co-parent with a full-time job, while managing my writing career to stay alive and be a good dad. As I get older and my life changes, I’m continually wondering if there are different ways I can contribute meaningfully to the various movements I believe in. I might not be able to make every single meeting or every protest. But that’s not the only way to make a difference. And of course, others before me and along with me are asking these same questions.

C. Robert Cargill has always operated in a strange place (and not just because he was one of the lead screenwriters for Marvel’s 2016 Doctor Strange). Horror and humor, pain and peace, sickness and satisfaction—these are only a few of the binaries Cargill shamelessly stews together in his stories. He’s an author that thrives in the In-Between spaces, in the uncomfortable and uncertain; an author that derives just as much pleasure from writing as he does from playing with his readers’ expectations. He’s an author who, in short, writes weird. His newest book, We Are Where the Nightmares Go, fits squarely in that tradition. And it absolutely doesn’t disappoint.

We Are Where the Nightmares Go is a collection of ten short stories, ranging from the terrifying to the fantastical. No doubt intelligently designed by Cargill to break traditional genre boundaries, the only thing safe to say about the collection is that it is fiction. Of course, for most readers that’s about as useful as saying it’s printed on paper and has two covers. The stories perhaps skew more towards horror, but Cargill refuses to limit himself in what spaces he chooses to explore. He deals as comfortably with angels and demons as he does with dinosaurs and even Death. But it is this willingness on the part of Cargill to challenge tradition and enthrall his readers by throwing out the writing rulebook which sets his collection apart.

Cargill’s prime source of strength in We Are Where the Nightmares Go is inextricably linked to the depth of the imagination displayed in the book. There’s an originality to this collection that is almost palpable on the page. Each story seizes the reader, submerging them into settings that are entirely alien and fresh from the one that came before. And even when Cargill leans into well-known tropes, he does so in such way that reinvents them for the reader to keep them entertaining. Take, for example, one of my favorite stories in the collection: ‘Hell Creek’. Most people would think that zombies are a trope which has (pun intended) been done to death. And yet Cargill approaches it from a direction entirely original. Dinosaurs. Specifically, zombie dinosaurs. Now while the premise might sound ridiculous—and trust me, I hear it too—somehow in the space of forty or so pages, I found myself not only enjoying the Jurassic adventure but invested in the harrowing journey of its prehistoric protagonists.

Another example presents itself in ‘As They Continue to Fall’. Who knew angels were actually assholes who terrify and torment children for fun? The story takes the conception of a ‘guardian angel’ and shoots it out of the sky. Not unlike its protagonist whose job is to assassinate them, in fact. Cargill goes beyond simply twisting traditional fiction tropes: he straps them to a table and systematically dismembers them (It’s horror, remember?). Even so, he does it in a satisfying, intelligent, enjoyable way each time.

And every story in We Are Where the Nightmares Go is just as imaginative as the two above. It’s the ability by Cargill to enthrall his readers by defying them which also contributes to the collection’s success. The stories can—and often do—change radically in the space of a single phrase, tantalizing the readers with thinking they know exactly how the story is going to end. Only to leave them shocked, and even more satisfied, strangely, with the ending he chooses to create. We Are Where the Nightmares Go very much plays on the reader’s innate expectations, allowing us to think we’ve found it out when in reality we haven’t seen the real ending from a mile off. For a lesser writer, such twists might seem contrived or flashy, but Cargill pulls it off expertly.

All in all, We Are Where the Nightmares Go is clearly the work of a mad genius at the peak of his craft. In an era where authors more often cater to their audiences than risk originality and tropes are recycled rather than reinvented, Cargill dares to approach his readers and his work on his own terms, in his own way.

The result is fun, fantastical, suspenseful, enjoyable, horrifying, and, yes, just a little weird.

“If this is a memoir, it’s a faulty one.” In the introduction to Retablos: Stories from a Life Lived Along the Border, Octavio Solis illuminates the unreliability of memory. He notes that the act of remembering trims away inconsequential details, which endow what’s remembered with greater clarity, weight, and significance.

The marriage of memory and fiction is successful throughout the book. When an abandoned truck full of narcotics is found in the middle of the Rio Grande, a literal tug of war breaks out between Mexican citizens and the US Border Patrol. It’s cartoonish and difficult to accept. Yet after such a magical and cinematic scene of defeat it no longer matters how much is embellished. It’s just so much a microcosm of US/Mexico border relations, with each side pulling the other towards itself. When you’re so busy laughing or smacking your forehead in disbelief, it’s hard to care whether it’s true or not.

At sixty, Octavio Solis’s memories from youth began feeling more like dreams. He chose to write them down in an act of reclaiming them as authentic. But as he wrote, even his most accurate memories began to take on a strange unreality similar to his dreamlike past. Solis ultimately gave himself creative license to embellish. His goal in writing Retablos was to depict the events of his life “as a means to identify and limn the mythology of being brown along the US/Mexico border during a specific time.” He wanted to share those resonances with people his age, and with people coming of age along the border today. That intended audience is evident from his prose. Throughout the book, his text oscillates back and forth between English and Spanish, with the vast majority written in English. Yet when he incorporates Spanish it’s often slang, and sometimes slang that’s specific to a family or tight-knit community.

Solis came of age in El Paso, TX, located in the remote easternmost tip of Texas, in the Chihuahuan Desert. As he wrote, he began to suspect that this place was what was truly surreal about his work. Solis suggests that the city is even more peculiar than its geography. He considers it divine, “though not the divine we are taught to believe in.” Across the Rio Grande is Ciudad Juárez, the largest city in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Before the establishment of the present United States/Mexico border, El Paso and Juárez coexisted as neighboring communities. That relationship still existed in the period Retablos captures, the late 1960’s and 70’s, when citizens of each nation flowed through the sister cities with ease. Many inhabitants of Juárez worked in El Paso during the day and crossed the Ysleta International Bridge back each night.

Solis is shaped by the dizzying experiences that make up Retablos, that come from a life lived in between. The collection is full of contradictions: Though born in the United States, as a small boy Octavio is harassed by Border Patrol agents who profile him as someone who’s crossed the border illegally. The Border Patrol agent that profiles the young Octavio is Hispanic himself, and quizzes the boy on his Spanish. The agent assumes that if Octavio knows Spanish, a language that the agent is also fluent in, Octavio is not a US citizen. Later, Octavio crosses into Juárez with his friends for a night of partying and is refused service by a bartender who tells the boys they’re nothing but gringos to him.

Through these retablos, the reader learns how painful growing up can be, and how one learns from mistakes and can be transformed by them. Retablos is ultimately a coming of age story—but one pockmarked with incidents of pain that only a city on the border could create. These moments of pain are when the real world seeps into childhood and rough truths are bestowed. As an adolescent playing hide and seek in the tall grass, Octavio meets a girl a few years older than himself hiding out in a culvert. Her clothes are ragged and dirty; she’s just barely made it across the border. Octavio fears how easily his life could have been hers. A few years later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service raid the greasy spoon Octavio and his father work at. His friend and an older kitchen-staffer both get deported.

Though he is a celebrated playwright, this is Solis’s first book. His prose is subtle yet bursting with metaphors and masterful turns of phrases. In a truly traumatic scene, a young Octavio flees his home with his mother and siblings as his father shoots at them from behind. Solis points out all of the bullet holes are in the floorboards, that his disgruntled old man meant to miss, like he was only killing off their shadows. After the police leave without making an arrest, the shaken Solis writes, “I’m still standing by the station wagon, wondering what happened to my shadow.” It’s a shocking anecdote that Solis frames as the only instance of physical abuse by either of his parents. Solis sees this one act as a reckless display of frustration. He doesn’t try to excuse or condone his father’s actions, but illustrates the omnipresence of violence in border communities as a result of the classism and racism their people must endure.

From the high ground of hindsight, Solis avoids the pitfalls of confessionalism. He’s able to relive trauma, embarrassment, joy, and misery without the melodrama of a diary. He’s able to contextualize his past and show readers how it made him the man he is, all the while illuminating how absurd life on the border has always been, despite what may be the most cartoonish present we’re stuck in.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, or so the old adage goes. But what about the far less obvious: don’t judge a book by its genre? Sure, we’ve all stumbled on those intellectual young adult novels, those hilarious horrors, that rare gem of realistic sci-fi. But women’s literature? By its very definition, it’s a genre that alienates half the population. You toss in a colorful cover, a fun loving title—like Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots—and two female protagonists obsessed with food, and we all know what we’re about to read: predictable plots, self-absorbed narratives, and some cheesy romance.

If this is what you think, you’ll be wrong. I certainly was.

Tomorrow There will be Apricots by debut novelist Jessica Soffer is, to say the least, an unexpected treasure. Perusing the book blurb, you’ll learn that this story focuses on two main characters: Locra, a girl obsessed with gaining her chef mother’s love by recreating an obscure middle eastern dish, and Victoria, an elderly Iraqi Jewish immigrant who starts hosting cooking classes in the wake of her husband’s death. You’re already starting to see how the narratives intertwine, right? Now, throw in the fact that Lorca’s mother is adopted and Victoria and her husband still mourn the baby they gave up, and surely you see the whole plot forming before you: a story of families reunited, haunting secrets released, laughter and joy rising like loafs of bread in the oven?

Wrong again.

This book is not the powered-sugared treat we expect. Like the best cuisines, Jessica Soffer has concocted a work of intense flavors, some so sour they are almost implantable. However, it’s precisely these thematic zingers that make this novel so brilliant. From Lorca’s dark obsession with her mother’s happiness—and the self-afflicted pain she uses to cope with it—to Victoria’s pull toward death and mortality, each of the characters in Tomorrow There will be Apricots is deeply troubled.

With an utterly stunning mastery of language, Soffer slowly intertwines the narratives of Lorca and Victoria. As the two narrators grow closer, we finally begin to pierce the delusions that dominate their lives. As each new truth is revealed, we watch these two characters—who are connected only by their love of food and fascinating with death—bond in thrilling ways, finding both pain and solace in their hours cooking together. Through the lenses of both young and old, Soffer bravely peers at death, mortality, addiction, and, most frightening of all, family.

Tomorrow There will be Apricots is not a light literary snack. It’s not even a rich hearty meal. In fact, after your last bite, you’re going to feel a little sick to your stomach. Because you just consumed something real—no artificial clichés, overdone flavors, or cookie-cutter characters. No, you just read something gritty and brave and utterly substantial.

Ignore the packaging. You’re about to bite into something brilliant.

Soffer on Tomorrow There will be Apricots

When Jessica Soffer and I sat down for this interview, I launched into an ode to Tomorrow There will be Apricots—one much like the review you’ve just read—exalting her ability to transcend the genre of women’s fiction. Immediately, I feared that I’d said something wrong. Soffer’s angular face tightened. “It’s funny that you say women’s literature,” she began, “because I’m very conscious of that label.” Launching into the story, she explained that she’d just received the proofs for the potential paperback, one that marketed the book with a chick-flick angle. “I’ve never thought about myself as a writer geared toward women or someone interested in women’s issues—in the way that we’ve come to understand women’s issues in literature. I definitely have reservations about it being pushed in that direction.”

In fact, although her novel has a primarily female cast, Soffer’s inspiration for the novel had nothing to do with women’s issues. When Tomorrow There will be Apricots was in its inception, Soffer only knew she wanted to write a book about her father’s culture—Jewish Iraqi—and food. “I’m big foody,” she explained, “though I’m hesitant to say that, because I feel like everyone in New York City is a big foodie, but my obsession with food stems from my father’s mother, who is a healer in Bagdad. I grew up with a particular attunement to food, how it nurtures your body and that sort of thing.”

Both her protagonists being female was simply a result of the creative process. Lorca, our teenage narrator, was inspired by a short story Soffer wrote years before. Like Lorca, that story centered around ideas of pain addiction, and how difficult it is to overcome regardless of age. However, Soffer was sure to add that Apricots is not autobiographical, “I was never a cutter myself,” she explained, “but I find addictions to release pain to be fascinating. I don’t think of it as a way to escape but as a way to feel more.” Laughing, she admitted that pain addiction mirrors her relationship with reading: not escapism but a way “to be more fully inhabited in your own skin.”

Although this connection allowed Soffer to identify with Lorca, she still found writing her character to be very difficult: “That nervous, teenage energy, youthful love, open wide-eyed-ness…that’s never something that I had. I felt like writing her needed a element of translation. I’d have to come up with Lorca’s ideas, translated them into words, and then translate them into the way that a person of her age and mentality would say them.

In contrast, Victoria’s character—elderly Jewish Iraqi woman—poured out of Soffer. “I definitely identified with Victoria. I’ve always felt like I’ve been in a much older skin.” In addition, Soffer is fascinated by the same themes that plague Victoria: mortality, regret, and nostalgia. “Those are the sort of things I’ve been thinking about since I was a little kid. I mean,” she added with a smile, “I was eighty when I was four.”

Although writing Lorca and Victoria was very different, what Soffer was particularly drawn to were the moment’s when their narratives intertwined. “The bond, the connection, the thread—what made writing about both of them, not necessarily easy, but important—was that they are looking at the same thing, but from two different places.” As Soffer sculpted those moments, she was able to look at death—an issue she’s fascinated by—through the lens of both the young and the old. “In very different ways,” she added, “they are looking into the same abyss.”

Soffer on Writing and Publishing

When I asked Soffer how she got into writing, she explained that she’d always been obsessed with words and rhythm. “I wrote a big creative writing honor’s thesis in college and then applied to MFA programs when I was still there.” While at Hunter for her masters, Soffer focused on writing short stories. Although she was producing good work, she didn’t get noticed in the industry until she published a story in Granta, “It was a really tiny, tiny little story,” she explained, “and for whatever reason, it got some attention—I think because it was so short—and that was really helpful because, when I was ready to start searching for an editor, I already had a lot of contacts.”

Of course, before she could use those contacts, she needed to transition into the world of professional writing. Reflecting on that move, Soffer said, “I wouldn’t have called myself a novel writer—I guess, I didn’t even call myself a writer until I had a publisher—but I was more concerned with short stories. I think this was in part because it felt like a more accessible form…so that was my first real inspiration.” However, her professors all encouraged her to put short fiction behind her—bemoaning the unsellable nature of story collections—and begin work on a novel. Thus, Soffer started Tomorrow There will be Apricots.

The hardest part about transiting into novels for Soffer was the plot structure. “When I started writing the novel, I think I was intimidated by the form, by the quantity of writing I’d have to do, so I didn’t really think about the architecture of the book. Next time around, I think the book will be much more about architecture. You know, seeing things from the outside in instead of the inside out. Tomorrow There will be Apricots is so internal, and I don’t think I had the faith in myself as a writer to take a step back and reimagine the novel in a different way, but now, I know the mistakes that I don’t want to make again.” Laughing, she added, “Though I’m sure I’ll make another one.”

Despite the issues this lack-of-structure caused, Soffer did find something beneficial about it. Pointing out that writers can become overwhelmed if they try to focus on everything at once—architecture, plot, and character development—Soffer advocates just focusing on one thing. “In the beginning, I set out to write as much as I could about these characters without really knowing where it was going to go. And I believe in that, in the power of the unknowable, following your nose…so much of the whimsy can be lost if we overthink it, especially from the get-go.”

As we began discussing the writing process in depth—lingering on the moment when “your characters grow their own legs and starting moving on their own”—Soffer paused, telling me how easy it is to forget about the actual writing now that her book is published. “I keep finding that I’m at a loss of words for certain things. Like the weirdness of this moment: you know, people having opinions about your work, how strange those opinions can be, and how even the most eloquent, generous opinions cannot penetrate because of the “bigness” of having your work out there. You lose sense of it.”

“Everyone—my agent, editor, and my publisher—have been brilliant,” she explained, “but, regardless of that, the novel is a precious thing to a writer. You can’t forget that.” Juxtaposing a writer’s relationship to his or her work against Soffer’s recent marketing angst, we turned back to the potential paperback cover. “Because it gets branded as women’s lit, I think a lot of readers feel like they are being hoodwinked,” Soffer confessed. “I don’t know if it’s the cover or the marketing, but whatever it is, they got into this book thinking it’s really a redemptive story, a whole positive one, upbeat, cheery, all of that—and yes, there are moments of that—but they’ve been really disappointed and felt like the rug was pulled out under them when they got to the dark bits.” Of course, Soffer doesn’t want this. Like every writer, she wants to find the reader that will love her work for the actual content, darkness included.

In an inspiring display of humility and grace, Soffer simply shrugged her shoulders and smiled at me. “At a certain point,” she said, “I had to make the decision if I was okay with this novel not being read by the masses…and I decided I was. This was the book I wanted to write. I came to the realization that a lot of people weren’t going to like this book. It wasn’t going to be a bestseller, and that was okay…Really, all you can do is feel good about the work you’ve done. And I do.”

Excerpt from Tomorrow There will be Apricots

I was pretending to read the paper. I thought that if I didn’t say anything, my mother might stop glaring at me, burning a hole in my face.

I was home from school. I’d been sent home.

And though I hadn’t gotten myself caught on purpose, as soon as Principal Hidalgo said “suspended,” my first thought was of my mother waking to the smell of homemade croissants. I’d be in an apron, piling the hot pastries high in a breadbasket, just beside the cranberry-sage brown butter I’d whipped up. I was suddenly happy, hopeful, thinking of the time we could spend together.

Then I came home. The fact that she refused to look me in the eye made me feel more like a nuisance than a disappointment.

“Kanetha told your teacher that you looked drugged,” said my mother, biting a nail, then examining it, the picture of calm on the couch, as if we were talking about leftovers. She had a green towel slumped on her head, and her long shiny legs were spotted with freckles I’d never have. I’d never have her perfect eyebrows either. They were like the feathery finds of her famous pan-roasted sea bass.

I went quiet. She did too. I had to remind myself not to say a word. I talked too much when I was upset. I had a habit of asking her is she loved me. She had a habit of not answering.

“Kanetha’s a sneak,” I said. “She writes equations on tissues and pretends to blow her nose during tests.”

More words bristled against my tongue. My mother’s silence baited me. I wanted to tell her that Kanetha didn’t always wear underwear and that she flashed the boys during American History II. Kanetha Jackson, eighteen-grade busybody. She said I’d been standing in the stall and not “making.” So she’d kicked open the door with her neon sneaker. I hadn’t even known she was in the bathroom. The stupid thing didn’t lock. She found me with my skirt up, my tights down, my shoeless foot on the toilet seat, the paring knife to my thigh. Her lips were stained with fruit punch.

I wanted to ask my mother is she knew the paring knife was hers. The Tojiro DP petty knife, her second favorite. I’d taken it off the counter that morning.

“I wasn’t drugged,” I said, “I’ve never done drugs.”

I held my breath and looked down at the obituaries. “Mort Kramish, Celebrated Hematologist and Master Pickler, Dies at 79.” Still, silence. I could feel it without looking: my mother’s low, growly simmer. I gave in.

“I’m fine,” I said, wanting and not wanting her to believe it. “I won’t do it again.” I wanted her to ask me to promise. I waited for it. She swatted the newspaper out of my hands. It cracked as it closed against my knee. She stood up. Her hands were heads of garlic, tight to her sides.

“I could have left you in New Hampshire, you know. You could have grown up with nothing, no one.”

She meant that she could have left me with my father. Sometimes, she called him pudding. “He’s as useful as box pudding,” she would say.

“I’m a good mother,” she said so quietly it was like stirring the air.

“I know,” I said, “You’re a great mother. That’s not the point.”

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop talking.

I was sorry and I wasn’t. I had the urge to hug her and I didn’t. I told myself to be less selfish. She was so busy. She had a “staff of thirty-five and an untarnished culinary reputation to uphold.”

The towel sat like a turtle on her head, its feet pushing and bending her ear. She had perfect ankles. Her eyes were the color of ripe pine trees. She made no sound when she cried. Like women in the movies. I was a blubberer. Full of watery snot. Aunt Lou said that when I cried it looked like I was about to throw up.

I put my hand on my thigh, willing her to forget. The scabs were pomegranate seeds, tiny and engorged.

“You’ve always been like this,” she said.

There are good books, bad books, and then there’s Demon Freaks by J.R.R.R Hardison.

Bing, Ron, Kaitlyn, and Meat are supposed to be studying for the SAT—if they don’t want to spend the rest of their days flipping burgers at McDonald’s, that is. But after their history teacher tries to kill them with an ancient dagger, studying is the last thing on their minds. Captured by evil golfers intent on summoning a world-destroying demon, the four must find a way to stop the coming apocalypse. In the night that ensues, toothy monsters from the dark, possession-by-sentient-dagger, and a covert McDonald’s paranormal investigation unit are only a few of the challenges they’ll have to face. And that’s not even to mention the SAT…

If the plot above sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Demon Freaks is a novel defined by its absurdity. Of course, many novels test the limits of convention and still succeed, sometimes wildly so. Those few novels which do, however, succeed because of the skill their authors bring to bear in telling the story believably—a skill which author J.R.R.R Hardison simply doesn’t display here. The novel lurches from one chapter to the next; Hardison clearly has an idea of where he wants to go but lacks the imagination of how to get there in an original, or even somewhat plausible, way. In all the cabins in all woods in the all world, for example, Bing and Ron’s evil history teacher stumbles into theirs…and then attempts to kill them for no reason at all.

The two are then rescued by their friend Kaitlyn, who comes crashing in with her car just in the nick of time. Further into the story, right as they are about to be devoured by supernatural monsters, Bing and Ron are saved by the appearance of a McDonald’s investigation unit. Each encounter seems to sink deeper into the ridiculous and contrived until, finally, the convenient revelation of the two’s parents as directors of that very McDonald’s unit makes the reader want to throw up her hands and ask exasperatingly: “And why wouldn’t they be?” It leaves the author’s universe feeling flimsy at the best of times; the sheer impossibility of the events which occur leaving the reader fatigued rather than immersed.

Demon Freaks’ biggest flaw, however, boils down to its style. There’s a mismatch between the market audience Hardison designs the plot to appeal to—kids—and the style he uses to bring that plot to life. Few adults will think it funny that the main villain is “Santa Claus,” but few kids will be able to endure far enough into the book to even meet him. Long, winding, description-heavy block paragraphs drag down the pace of the story and give readers every excuse to find something else to enjoy. The language, with vocabulary like “voluptuous” and “surreptitiously,” is simply not appropriate for young readers. Demon Freaks sways unsteadily on the boundary of young writing and adult writing, uncertain of which side it should land.

Lastly, what Hardison seems to bet heavily on to make his novel a success is its humor. It’s a smart strategy. Humor can often save a story from being damned, if done well. Demon Freaks tries to present itself as a humor-based book, but consistently, the novel’s humor misses the mark—sometimes disastrously. Perhaps this has to do with the difference in age between the target audience and myself, but the tears of laughter the author might have expected when revealing that the Golfers Association and “Santa Claus” were the main antagonists didn’t materialize.

The novel tries to achieve too many things at once—being both absurd and funny, appealing to both adults and children. In trying to be everything, it becomes a mess of half-things, which ultimately leaves its readers satisfied with nothing. With pared down language and jokes directed at its own absurdity, the novel might have achieved a self-aware humor that could have been clever while appealing to the younger audience Hardison seems to be aiming for. Furthermore, self-deprecating humor could have served to refresh the clichés Hardison employs, granting new license for their use. Unfortunately, the novel simply stumbles along, unsure of itself or its message.

All-in-all, Demon Freaks is an uncomfortable book to say the least. There’s an old cliché that writers only write for two things: for money or for the love of writing itself. Let us hope Hardison didn’t write this book for the first.

It can be a strange thing, revisiting old stories. Though the text remains the same, perspective shifts around it, lending new wisdom to old characters or reminding us how the evils of the past never really fade.

Such is the core belief of Stephen King’s newest novel, Doctor Sleep. A sequel to his classic 1977 novel The Shining, this one finds King writing at the fulcrum between new thrills and old terror.

The novel begins with Dan Torrance—former inquisitive and semi-psychic haunting victim—wandering an aimless and drunken path through America, his adult life still tormented by his late alcoholic father and the demons that drove him to attempt murder upon his family. Though he finds solace in Alcoholics Anonymous and the hospice job where he uses his telepathic gift to ease residents into the next life, there is a kind of anxiety lurking beneath the surface of Dan’s life. Time and studious adherence to the tenets of AA have brought him to a point of tenuous balance with the skeletons in his mental closet, but reminders of his torment loom dark and bloody around the periphery.

Dan finds a kind of mental communion with Abra, a young girl whose shining makes Dan look like a failed reality TV medium. Her powers are both telepathic and kinetic: she knows when her beloved great-grandmother is ill, and the anguish of the fact sets off a mild earthquake at her family’s home. Here, too, King works in the confined space between the natural anxiety of adolescence and the altogether uncommon frustration of limiting one’s own power.

Meanwhile, Abra becomes target to the desires of a roving band of vampire-like wanderers called the True Knot, who live through centuries by feasting on the mental energy of kids like Abra, who expel their power as ‘steam’ at the moment of agonized death. For the Knot, Abra is more than a simple dish—she’s a smorgasbord, the kind of meal that makes normal humans languish on the couch for days. King renders these strange folks with almost unmarred villainy, giving them comedic names that play on their supernatural talents. Though we feel the urgency of their hunger and the terror of their subjects, these offbeat soul suckers never rise above basic depravity. We’re made to understand that they’re evil, and that’s all we get to know. Their interactions are lucid and their backstory intriguing, but it’s not hard to hate rich people who eat kids.

So if the villains aren’t particularly nuanced, King’s reimagining of his favorite trope—good vs. evil, meeting in battle—is as compelling as ever. Though King’s scope is wide, the novel works best when it focuses on our two protagonists. Doctor Sleep is an occasionally frustrating, sometimes mesmerizing piece of character development. We feel empathy for Abra’s struggle through the waters of adolescent self-discovery, only made more turbulent by the supernatural gift for which she never asked and the family who tries to understand it. Dan provides the novel’s shaky moral foreground, attempting to make good on his life’s shame while never forgetting the horror that bleeds through his memory.

Ultimately, it’s a novel about perspective—about looking back while moving forward. That’s really all any sequel can ask for.

Ideology is a strange thing. It permeates every aspect of modern society, from the media to art to education. It is the basis for every major political action since the dawn of organized government, guiding decisions both personal and public. Sometimes it is pure, but more often is joined inseparably with less intellectual motivations: greed, racism, revenge. It is both obvious and obscure. Everyone sees it, but no one wants to talk about it.

This is the guiding premise behind Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, the new novel by author Dave Eggers. The novel takes the form of a set of dialogues between a man named Thomas and several people whom he has kidnapped and held captive in an abandoned military base. A deeply troubled but seemingly intelligent young man, Thomas insists that he means no harm to anyone, and that he simply wishes to talk. He has questions, and he needs answers.

He begins with an astronaut, fresh off the national disappointment of the canceled Space Shuttle program. Thomas then takes a congressman, a teacher, a police officer, even his own mother. In each case, he begins a discussion that seems pointed less at any particular issue and more at some general feeling of dissatisfaction with American life in the 21st century. He claims to have questions, but they are nonspecific and generally misguided. What becomes clear in the early going is that though Thomas is intelligent, he has been steered wrong. The question then becomes: how? And who was at the wheel?

The form of the novel presents a particularly challenging issue for analysis. Completely devoid of unspoken narrative, the book’s entire worldview is filtered through a very limited set of lenses. Eggers combats this issue by building metaphors directly into his characters. The astronaut represents American expansionism, the Congressman America’s violent national past. Each captive is a stand-in for a particular issue that seems to be nagging at Eggers. While this is an interesting and sometimes effective way to tackle difficult questions, it tends to disservice the issues through the sin of underrepresentation. We quickly understand what Eggers means to say, but the resulting dialogue is never quite lucid enough to draw a meaningful conclusion.

But American exceptionalism is hardly a simple topic. Eggers uses his captives to break down the American ideal into its myriad components in an attempt to bring specificity to his metaphor. At times, this works. For instance, the most interesting moments of the novel occur when Thomas seems so frustrated by his own dissatisfaction that he can hardly articulate a real problem. He feels that something is wrong, and he knows he’s not alone. America is running an operating system with which Thomas is simply incompatible. From this sense of malaise comes a strange and intriguing discussion of mental illness, a topic that even the bravest of media mouthpieces feel uncomfortable tackling. For all its unspecific and sometimes even ignorant treatment of American politics, Your Fathers, Where Are They captures a sense of psychological unease that is uncommon in fiction today. Its politics are unconvincing, but Eggers’ take on the treatment of mental health in America is both enlightening and profoundly frustrating.

At its core, Your Fathers, Where Are They is a novel whose ideological scope is too grand for its own limited form. Honorable in premise but flawed in execution, it finds a great many questions to ask without answers to give. It opens the door, but doesn’t turn on the light. At times, it seems like Eggers is too dismayed by the ills of his world to press any further. You can almost see him throw his hands up in defeat. This sense of frustration is the most lucid aspect of the novel — one just wishes he’d picked up the pen again and taken it just a step further.

Drops of experience form the sea upon which our lives drift. From our passions and history to the books we read and the people we trust, we cannot separate our lives from these influences. Yet, when we tell our stories, these factors are the first to fall away, discarded in favor of the more comfortable “plot” that lends structure to our lives.

In his debut memoir The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Justin Hocking ventures to tell both accounts. He does not simply show us the events that make up this life, but also the seemingly nonessential elements that surround him. However, as we are pulled deeper into the plot, we realize that all of the additional chapters—the history of surfing, of Herman Melville’s literary career, of chemical pollution in New York—are vital undercurrents that propel the story forward.

As the memoir opens, Hocking seeks out an adventure worthy of Melville’s name. Just as Ishmael boards the Pequod, Hocking steps into the fast-paced, transient world of New York City. He leaves everything behind—his life in Colorado, the girl he loves, a life of family, comfort, and skateboarding—for the promise of constant movement, for the ever-changing ebb and flow of the city that never sleeps.

Yet he quickly learns that this motion is not done of his own volition. Like a vessel lost at sea, the city—along with the subways and culture and professional ladder-climbing that accompany it—is charged with currents that toss and sway Hocking, often against his will.

Without this freedom, Justin runs around the metaphorical deck, slowly losing his grip. He skateboards for five hours at a time, until he can barely move. He tucks his surfboard under his arm and runs into the freezing and polluted waters of Rockaway Beach. When he’s moving, when the adrenaline is pumping through his ears, he can forget that he’s trapped: that he is stuck in “the pit” professionally, that love and happiness are the promise of land his ship might never reach.

Narrated with a stunning and confident voice, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld chronicles Justin’s misadventures, his struggles against relationship addiction, career indecision, and the poisonous effects of New York City. Yet, through this vast ocean of challenges, an incredible resilience begins to surface.

Hocking finds strength in unexpected places—in the pages of Moby-Dick, in the calm and violence of surfing, in grungy church basements. Joined by a motley crew of artists and athletes, he navigates the troubled waters of identity, searching for his place in the world. And through it all, the words of Herman Melville, the history of his family, of the sports he loves, of the city where he dwells, reach out to guide him, pushing him closer to the decisions that will reshape his life.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld. This unique memoir challenges the conventions of storytelling, immersing us in the tumultuous storm of young adulthood. With each new battle, we are reminded of how essential the subtle influences in our lives can become, and how we can use them to navigate our way to shore.

I first stumbled upon Josie Sigler’s work last year, reading the winning stories for Hunger Mountain’s yearly competition. I only had a few minutes to scan through, trying to gauge if this was the sort of contest I should recommend to our TBL writers. With a steaming cup of tea beside me, I opened “A Man is Not a Star” and started to read.

By the time the story had released me, my tea had grown cold in my hand, tears were sliding down my cheeks, and I couldn’t stop smiling despite them. I remember thinking that this, this story, is why I write, why I read, why I still believe words have power. Lofty remarks, I know, but they are no exaggeration. In only twelve pages, Sigler had immersed me into a man’s entire life. I struggled with him as he tried to support his family, even after his job at GM fell apart, even after he lost the house, had to move into the trailer. I watched in horror as his children grew up too quickly, his wife forced to support them, his pride tangling dangerously with his heartbreak. I saw how desperately he wanted to be the man he thought he should be: a man’s man, a man his father would be proud of. And at the end, I felt when the pain became too much, and I wanted to scream out that he could still fix it, that I knew he was a good man, that I knew him, but it was too late. The story was over. All I could do was stare at the blank white space under the last line, wishing desperately for more of Sigler’s words.

That moment of bereavement follows so many of Sigler’s stories, making her debut book, The Galaxie and Other Rides, one of the most powerful short story collections I’ve ever read. Just like “A Man is Not a Star”—the story that concludes the collection—each tale focuses on the outskirts of society, the men and women our affluent world has pushed aside. Told with beautifully diverse narrators—one even written in second person—Sigler penetrates through the grit of her characters’ existence, and unearths truths both beautiful and horrifying from their struggles.

But what perhaps makes her stories the most unique is what parts of their lives she lets us see. Short story writing 101 tells us to write about the day that is different: the moment where our characters are tested, hurled into action. But Miss Sigler has moved beyond that. With the same thrill of conflict we come to expect, she instead tells the story of all the days that were not different, the days that pile up upon each other with such gritty reality, that the collapse is unavoidable. And in all her stories, whether heartwarming or heartbreaking, we are left with so much more than a snapshot of her characters’ lives. Instead, as our tea has gone cold, time disappearing with each word, we see a life in a snapshot, one we wish desperately would last just a little longer.

Sigler on The Galaxie and Other Rides

Sigler’s upbringing in deep Michigan inspired many of the stories in The Galaxie and Other Rides. She explores an array of characters living on the fringes of American society, from women trying to escape a future of raising unplanned children in the trailer park to horse healers failing to balance their careers with their lovers. Although Sigler emphasized that most of her characters are fictional, some stories have more than the setting in common with her own life. Raised as a “GM brat,” Sigler grew up with the myth that if a man could obtain a job at one of General Motor’s factories, he could create a good life for his family. When the recession hit and layoffs shook Michigan, this paradigm shifted radically. “Things got really bad,” she explained, “and people were killing themselves in these very violent ways.” It was one of these deaths—a friend of her father’s—that inspired the closing story, “A Man is Not a Star.” “That story was really a product of feeling utterly outraged,” Sigler explained, detailing how fervently she poured herself into writing it. “It was certainly one of the most draining stories [to write] in the book.”

Since “A Man is Not a Star” was my favorite from the collection, I was eager for Sigler to walk me through its conception. She explained that when she started writing, she clung onto the line “a man does not set himself on fire.” This led to her narrating his life as a list of things a man does not do, juxtaposing how the character thinks he should act with the choices he actually makes. Although she fictionalized the main character’s life, the tough exterior of a man in that time was inspired by her father and how “if you gave him a couple beers, he could open right up.”

Since this was a very radical narrative device, when she finished, she didn’t realize she’d achieved what she set out to do. It was only after she tried rewriting the story with a more conventional third-person narrative that she realized how much of the true story she’d been able to capture with her new style.

“A Man is not a Star” is not alone in The Galaxie and Other Rides in this respect. “I’m really interested in perspective and view,” Sigler said, walking me through the very different narrative voices that make up her collection. From the second-person—yes, I said second-person!—narrator in “The Johns” to the distinct Michigan dialects used in her first-person stories like “Breakneck Road” and “The Last Trees in River Rouge Weep for Carlotta Contadino,” Sigler is constantly pushing the boundaries of voice and narrative distance. She even entirely eschews quotations marks, relying on language alone to indicate when something is spoken or thought.

Given her penchant for voices, I was not surprised to hear that, when she first started out, first person came naturally to her. “I could get into the voice of the character very easily,” she explained. But I was surprised when she explained that this ease actually obviated underlying issues with her work. “One of the earliest critiques I got of my work was that I was depending on the snappy voice to carry me through a story that wasn’t really that good.” After getting over the initial outrage we all feel when our work is questioned, she realized that he was right and went back to strengthen her plot contraction.

As our discussion of form continued, we began to discuss her balance between narration and use of literary devices. In contrast to either plain story-telling or those rich with metaphors and descriptions, Sigler’s stories have a straight-forward, voice-driven narrative, interspersed with beautiful metaphors that seem all the more powerful embedded in her otherwise smooth prose. Those metaphors, she explained, come very easily to her—as does description—but she works to minimize them as much as possible. “I tend to drown myself in details…so when I write, there are a lot more of those lines, then I have to go and choose between them…if it [a metaphor or description] makes it to the rewriting, and if I still like it, I think ‘yeah, that image is really working’ and I keep it, but I’m really brutal with myself. If I’ve liked it everyday, but then today I don’t, I put it in brackets and see if I like it tomorrow…if not, it goes…I try to read something over and over again until it’s in my gut, and I can see when something isn’t helping.”

Sigler on Writing

To say that Sigler is a prolific writer is an understatement. The list of her literary awards and publications spans two pages (in 12pt font, single spaced), spanning over a decade of work. When I asked Sigler how she maintains this kind of stamina, she explained that she works hard to be consistent with her writing. “I try to write everyday,” she said, “even if it’s only just for fifteen minutes. You know, the real-writers-write-everyday kinda thing.”

As far as a set schedule goes, Sigler tries to write first thing when she wakes up, but since she’s gradually become more of a “night owl”—emulating the habits of her partner and her family—“first thing could be noon.” With a dedication that certainly makes me jealous, Sigler also prefers to work at home, somehow capable of ignoring the many distractions and settling easily into her writing. “Plus,” she added with a smile, “I don’t really like to get out of my pajamas.”

Aside from writing every day, Sigler also offers the tip of finding someone who can be brutally honest about your writing. Lucky enough to have a dedicated creative writing teacher when she first started out, Sigler explained how much those honest—and often negative—reviews were instrumental in her improvement. “[My teacher] would give my story a smack down, and then I’d rewrite, knowing that there would be another smack down, and another rewrite, and another smack down.” Sigler also stressed the importance of having someone willing to help one sentence at a time, one-on-one. This intense pursuit for perfection allowed her to develop the beautiful language that makes her stories so unique.

Excerpt from The Galaxie and Other Rides

A Man does not set himself on fire.

A man works. Strapped to the ceiling, dangling over a half-made truck, he welds, he solders, twelve hours, fourteen hours, weekends, overtime.

Thus, he is tired at day’s end. He does not lie awake, waiting out the dark hours open-eyed and jittery, shocked by the few quick splashes that haunt the bridge of his wife’s nose, headlights from the rare car out in this weather—folk coming home from the VFW hall a mile up the road.

A man enjoys a beer. His first beer, he enjoys the most. Twelve years old. Pabst on tap. Bunch of old drunks leaning over card tables, slapping him on the back. The women biting their Virginia Slims Menthols, hugging his boyish face to their breast. His father’s hand ghosting itself on the chilled mug and the beer was so smooth—

Or was it bitter?

Yes, that’s right. Before he was a man, he had looked around that hall and silently vowed never to go to war. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing a leg, the terror that rose in him whenever he saw the strange pattern of burns that moved down his father’s back like red-bellied snakes in the fallow cornfield—

No. A man is courageous. He is willing to fight. Sometimes he is just born in a good month, has the right letter beginning his last name, misses the draft, lands himself a fine job.

But this is not how a man’s memory works, the truth slipping back and forth like that painting thick with blue and yellow paint.

Painted by a madman, his wife had said.

Of course, a man pays no attention to art, and he should certainly not slip a bit in his chest over a damned painting. But maybe he could make an exception for this guy, crazy or not, who had captured so exactly the landscape of his youth, the blurred lights of distant smokestacks rising up beyond the hills, blazing in the night.

Those are stars, his smallest daughter said.

A man knows when he’s bested. He could have simply replied: Sure are.

Instead, he shrugged, turned his too-clean hands up and stuffed them useless into his pockets, wandered off. When no one was looking, he tore the painting out of the magazine and filed it deep in his wallet…

Literary works centered around the absurd have been gaining popularity, bringing us tales of the most outlandish characters and settings. However, as humorous and entertaining as a bizarre premise can be, the otherness often distances the reader from the characters, making it difficult to create a significant emotional impact. It is in this respect that Lysley Tenorio’s Monstress is unique. Bringing us stories of superheroes, leper colonies, and monster moviemakers, this exceptional short story collection shows us the humanity, and often the heartbreak, hidden behind these outlandish masks.

Monstress opens with the title story, inviting the reader into a fantasy world built out of toilet paper rolls, old tubing, and broken household appliances. From these meager supplies, monsters are constructed, space ships, squid children. “On film,” we are told, “everything looks real.” This is certainly true of the leading lady. In each film, she transforms into the grotesque monster her boyfriend envisions, her yearning to act in Hollywood romances hidden behind fake rubber boils and enormous wolf ears. However, as the two travel to America in hopes of saving their careers, the masks hiding their desires begin to slip. In a story as humorous and insightful as it is heartbreaking, we watch as the worlds of imagination and reality collide, leaving us yearning tragically for the illusion of film.

This unique story sets the pace for the following seven, each more outlandish than the last. However, just like in “Monstress,” behind the absurd situations, deeply authentic and moving characters dwell. From the secluded leper colony in “The View from Culion” to the fake-blood-spattered hotel rooms of “Felix Starro,” each story is united by a sense of bereavement. Often torn between lives in the Philippines and dreams in America, these lovable misfits struggle to find happiness in the most outlandish of situations. From superassassins to magical faith healers, from leper colonies to the VIP rooms in the Manila airport, Tenorio creates a sense of reality that few authors can access, one only made more potent by the strange world that surrounds them.

With sly wit and powerful prose, the reader of Monstress is not merely invited to watch as these stories unfold. Instead, Tenorio pulls us past the safety of the sidelines, holding us so close that we cannot help but experience the humanity simmering beneath the absurd. Certainly we laugh as three young men agree to mug the Beatles, as a boy describes his imaginary superpowers,kas drag queens assail a traditional Filipino household, but when we discover the desperation and longing behind their actions, the laughter opens into heartbreak. And at the close of each tale, their longing becomes our own, not only for the lives they dream of, but for the pages of their stories we have run out of.

Tenorio on Monstress

Tenorio was first inspired to write short stories when he took a class with Bharati Mukherjee: “I was just taking a lecture course on the short stories to fulfill a requirement.” When he found out Mukherjee had published several books of short stories, he decided to pick up a copy. The first book he bought was The Middleman and Other Stories, a collection that had won the National Book Critics Circle Award a few years before. “It just blew me away!” Tenorio explained. “Here was a woman, an Indian American author, writing about, for a lack of a better term, the American immigrant experience.” But what really impressed him about Mukherjee’s work was how she “stepped out of her own experiences,” writing not only from the perspective of an Indian American woman, but also from violent Vietnam veterans and Filipino aristocrats stuck in America. “That, to me, was so interesting.” After this inspiration, Tenorio began dabbling with writing, seeking to balance his Filipino American heritage with wondrous inventions of his imagination.

Although he said that his first years of writing produced some “really bad stuff,” he eventually found his rhythm by balancing characters straddling the Philipines and America with the outlandish circumstances that fascinated him. “It’s gotta be weird to keep me interested,” Tenorio explained, “but I understand that—or I’m paranoid that—my work could be read as too whimsical, too “lite”… And that’s the last thing I want.” This was one of the reasons he chose to steep so many of his stories with themes of heartbreak and bereavement, offsetting the strange and often humorous premises of his tales. Furthermore, Tenorio explained that since “conflict is the root of a good story,” he wanted to give those conflicts emotional depth. “I actually like the challenge of taking something seemingly unbelievable, unreasonable, or ludicrous and trying to give it enough emotional weight that the reader can take those situations and the people that populate that space seriously, as deluded as they might be.”

Although his stories are always connected by ethnicity, he relishes writing about characters he has very little in common with: “Working on these stories is just a way for me to bounce back and forth between situations that I neither have the courage or the foolishness to find myself in. I love it.” In particular, his characters vary greatly, jumping between gender, age, and outlook. When I asked Tenorio if he struggled to develop these colorful voices, he explained that finding the right way to tell the story—tone, idioms, pacing—is never his first concern. Instead, he focuses on finding a narrator who has “the right kind of dynamic with the other characters.” After he finds this character, the voice comes naturally. This isn’t to say that the right person immediately appears to Tenorio. He went on to explain that in the story “Brothers”—the tale of a cross-dresser who passes away after revealing his life-change to his family on TV—he originally wrote the older brother as an older sister. This version was constructed around having her breasts removed after she is diagnosed with cancer, only to have her younger brother artificially gain what she had lost. Tenorio threw his head back and laughed as he recounted that original version, how embarrassed he was now that he “actually let people read it.” Fortunately, he eventually discovered that he was focusing on the wrong conflict in the story, and he rewrote the sister as a regular guy, “living a plain, empty life,” grieving for his little brother and the man—or woman—he had been too ashamed to get to know.

Another problem that Tenorio faced when writing the stories that make up Monstress was length. “My stories tend to be longer,” he added, “and because of that, they were often hard to sell.” For example, when he submitted the title story, “Monstress,” to the Atlantic, they agreed to publish it only if Tenorio cut out a third of the story. “I wasn’t adamant that the story should stay that long—I was just happy someone would take it—but that was really hard,” he said. “I found myself, after that, really conscious about page length and compression, trying to get as much mileage as I could from one scene or one sentence.” Even now that he is embarking on his first novel, he hasn’t forgotten those hard lessons about compressing form. However, he is greatly enjoying the “breathing space” the novel allows him. For now, he’s decided to not worry about page limits—at least in the first draft. “I’m letting the scenes flow as long as they need to flow, indulging in dialoged and moments of reflection.” He knows that he’ll have to go back later and condense and revise, but for know, he says the experience is “liberating.”

Tenorio on Writing and Publishing

Although Tenorio had much to say about the difference between writing the novel and the short story, he said that the way he begins any work is the same: “I usually have a situation, and I try to lay out a very loose plot, almost like an outline. It sounds horribly formulaic, but it works.” Since Tenorio likes to focus on plot, this loose outline gives him a sense of destination. With the end always in sight, he allows the characters and situational aspects to fall into place naturally. These loose outlines also give him the motivation to keep working: “Even if the writing is going horribly, even if I don’t understand the character—and that’s always the last thing that I get—I have no excuse to not keep going. So if I know, at the end, they’ve gotta jump the Beatles, I have to find a dramatic and emotional and psychological way to get to that point.” Although he admits that often he does not get it right the first time—“or even the tenth time”—knowing where he is going helps him greatly aids his writing.

Furthermore, until he gets his characters to that point, he does not move on to other work. “I have to immerse myself in a story,” he explained, “and if I maintain my interest, even after that first draft, after that second draft, I keep going until I think it’s done.” He does not start another story until all the revisions are done and he’s sent it off to potential publishers. Then, as he waits to hear back, he embarks on a new project. “So, for the most part, I don’t go back and forth (between stories). Plus, it’s hard to shift the voices and I become so obsessed with one particular story because, even though it’s just a story, to me, it’s an entire universe.”

Just as he chooses not to switch back and forth between stories, he also does not daily switch in and out of “writing mode.” As a result, instead of trying to carve out a few hours a day to write—as the majority of our Tethered Tidings authors do—Tenorio waits until he has prolonged periods of time to write. Since he works fulltime, he writes a great deal during his summer and winter breaks. Also, in the past, he’s been honored with several fellowships and artist residences that taught him to write during these larger chunks of time. “I find myself very reliant on these long stretches of time that are almost meant to cater to creating. I wish I wasn’t so reliant on those things. I wish I could write in the midst of everyday routines, but I haven’t yet adapted.”

As our interview drew to a close, I asked Tenorio if he had any advice for our TBL writers. “Always be careful of the advice you receive,” he answered immediately, joking about how very seriously he used to take others’ advice, even when it was completely unhelpful. Secondly, he stressed the importance of finding a few very good readers to review our work. Tenorio says that if one or two of them are writers, that’s very helpful, but most importantly they should know what’s good and what’s not. “I tell my MFA students,” he added, “that one of the best things you can get out of the MFA program is a reader for life…I got that out of my MFA. I don’t send anything out until they’ve read it.” Lastly, Tenorio stressed the importance of reading, but surprisingly warned of reading too much. “I think sometimes,” he explained, “when you are having a bad writing day, and then you read something really amazing, that you get a little discouraged. Read enough to be inspired, but not so much that you become crippled by the greats that came before you.”

Excerpt from Monstress

In our battle against the Beatles, it was my Uncle Willie who threw the first punch, and for that, he said, he should have been knighted. I didn’t argue.

We fought them in 1966, the year they played Araneta Coliseum in Manila. They were scheduled to leave two days later, andrector of VIP Travel at Manila International Airport, it was Uncle Willie’s job to make sure the Beatles’ travel went smoothly, that no press or paparazzi detain them. But the morning after their concert, Imelda Marcos demanded one more show: a Royal Command Performance for the First Lady. When reporters asked the Beatles for their reply, they said, supposedly, “If the First Lady wants to see us, why doesn’t she come up to our room for a special exhibition?” Then they walked away, all the newspapers wrote, laughing.

Uncle Willie took it hard.

He called me that night. “It’s an emergency,” he said, “come quick!” He hung up before I could speak, so I snuck two San Miguel beers from the refrigerator and headed out. “I’m leaving,” I told my father, who was on the sofa with his feet on the coffee table, staring at the episode of Bonanza dubbed in Tagalog. He nodded and gave me an A-OK with his fingers. There was a bag of pork rinds on his lap and empty soda cans at his feet, and the whole room was littered with dirty plates and unwashed laundry. I even caught a glimpse of a bright pink bra that belonged to some woman he’d brought home earlier that week. We had lived like this ever since my mother left for what she called her “Vacation USA,” which was going on its fourth year, despite occasional postcards promising her return. Uncle Willie was the one who watched over me, but I was sixteen now, too old to be cared for. Still, if he needed me, I was there.

I met up with my cousins, JohnJohn and Googi—they’d been summoned too—and together we headed to Uncle Willie’s apartment. When we arrived, we found him at the kitchen table, fists clenched like he was ready for a fight, and he only grew angrier as he recounted the story. “Those Beatles insulted the essence of Filipina womanhood,” he said. “Special exhibition. Scoundrels!” I told him to calm down, that the Beatles were just making a joke, but Uncle Willie said nothing was funny about Imelda Marcos. He pointed to the framed black-and-white photograph of her on top of the TV, then brought it over and made us look. “She is the face of our country. Can you see?” In the picture, Imelda Marcos was seated in a high-backed wicker chair frilled with ribbons and flowers, staring out into the distance, her queenly face shaded beneath a parasol held by an anonymous hand. The photo was a famous publicity shot—you’d see it at the mall or in schools, even some churches—but I always imagined that it was Uncle Willie holding the parasol, protecting her from the scorching sun while he did his best to endure it. He wasn’t alone in his admiration for Imelda Marcos—the country still loved her back then—but Uncle Willie didn’t have much else. His last girlfriend left before I was born, and the demands of work, he said, allowed no time for another. Coordinating flights with Imelda Marcos’s schedule was the closest thing he had to romance, and instead of treating his devotion with admiration and respect, our family laughed it off as a joke.

I took the picture frame from his hands and set it face-down on the table. “Yeah,” I said. “I can see.”

“Okay,” he said, “good. Then the Beatles will pay for their insolence.”