In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Decatur
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Decatur
Your wonderful fiction piece, “Lies on the Lips,” shows your main character Nell’s quiet transformation into confidence (and a little past that) with the help of a pair of marker-drawn lips. Where did this idea come from?
The idea of Nell came to me first. I wanted to write about someone who doesn’t always express herself, but has lots of thoughts and opinions! Then, I started to think about what would have to happen for Nell to find her voice?
I love how the relationships within this piece are fleshed out so well, and you do that with little backstory and instead focus on the character’s interactions. What’s your process when writing these complex relationships?
First, I try to really understand how the protagonist is influenced by the others in the story. Since it’s a short story, I have to make choices on who the reader gets to really know. For example, Nell’s dad has a role in this story but he’s passed. It isn’t important for the reader to know Nell’s dad, but they do need to know how his absence has influenced those still there. Someone told me every character thinks they are a main character and you have to write them as such. So I wanted to write Nell’s dad that way as if to say, he may not be there but he has left his mark.
Both this piece and Come What May (published in Midnight Breakfast) flirt with the edges of magic realism, and yet still remain planted in reality. Is that something that you consciously develop as you write?
This choice isn’t exactly intentional. My writing centers Black characters and even if they are in a situation that reflects reality I try to push beyond the expected. I never want my characters to be bound to a specific narrative and sometimes that means sprinkling a little magic in there.
You utilize the setting of Shaker Heights throughout your work. What draws you to write with that setting? How does place influence plot for you?
I grew up in Shaker Heights! Shaker Heights, as I knew it, was developed in the 60s as a planned community to support racial integration. This purposeful integration and planning is rife for interesting storytelling. For example, two-family homes in Shaker only have one front door to remove the stigma of someone living in a multi-family. Shaker is also very relatable as a midwestern Ohio town, but very unique in its history.
What literary works and authors inspire you or your writing?
I adore Toni Morrison. She created worlds of Black characters without the white gaze. I hope my work does something similar. I also love reading Britt Bennett, Jesmyn Ward, and Celeste Ng.
What are you writing now?
I am currently querying for my novel, searching for the right person to help me bring it to market. I’m also writing another short story that is a little different. It has a little bit of suspense, but that slight hand of magical realism too.
Danielle Decatur is a creative director and fiction writer. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in English and literature and received an MFA from Bennington College. Her short stories have appeared in Northwest Review, Midnight Breakfast, and Silver Needle Press. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teresa Carmody
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teresa Carmody
Your beautifully braided nonfiction piece, “Reading the Deck with Zora Neale Hurston,” speaks about the trauma of growing up in a house where you were not accepted. You deftly layer personal details and history lessons, weaving “Their Eyes Were Watching God” throughout. What was the spark that made you blend these together? How did this piece begin?
First, thank you for these questions and the opportunity to speak about this essay; I’m delighted that it’s included in Water-Stone Review, in the company of such fine writers and artists.
“Reading the Deck” began with reflecting on who and where I was when I first read Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, which was the summer after high school graduation. I was a vibrating shell of unrecognized desire: I didn’t know myself as queer, or that I wanted to be a writer, or that feminism was even a thing. Instead, I had a lot of terrifying and guilt-inducing religious narratives, having been raised both Catholic and Evangelical, with all the spiritual trauma and household warring that implies. Yet I also sensed the world, including earth, as more than “dead” materials or resources, to be conquered and extracted, which is a narrative that serves capitalism and settler colonialism. I had, in other words, an intuition that took years to understand. To find the language for.
Some of the questions I was thinking about more broadly: How do you open yourself to change? Who do you welcome in as teachers and guides? This essay is part of a larger collection that centers some of the writers and artists who showed me other narratives, other ways to be.
I love the conversational nature with readers that you carry throughout the text. How did that voice develop?
I experience voice as frequency I tune into. With any piece of writing, my goal is to calibrate toward what is necessary and true, even as I consider writing as a kind of performance in language, with voice. I think of Djuna Barnes (another writer I focus on in this collection) who used to conduct interviews as “Pen Performer.” To me, this is a very exciting—and honest—nom de plume.
Sometimes, a first sentence will come into my consciousness, as if someone else, or a different part of me, is speaking. This happened with “Reading the Deck,” but that did not mean the essay came easily. I initially drafted it by writing topics or words on a set of notecards, which I drew randomly, like tarot cards, as prompts for freewriting. The first draft was rough and problematic, in part because I wasn’t interrogating my distorted white gaze. A friend (and the wonderful poet), Vidhu Aggarwal, pointed this out, along with some structural issues. Two years and more revisions later, I brought a draft to my writing group, and their feedback and insights helped me to finally land the piece. What I’m suggesting is that the conversational tone may come, in part, from the conversations I was having, literally about and through the writing, for several years. As I like to tell my students: even if we are sitting by ourselves, we do not write alone.
Also, the essay is also about gossip, so maybe it should feel a bit talky!
Looking at your process for a piece of this magnitude, how does the creation, as
well as the editing for all the layers, work for you?
This piece includes a lot of research—everything from one of my PhD topics (hello, gossip), to spending a week in Hurston’s archive at the University of Florida. I have taught Their Eyes Were Watching God repeatedly over the past many years, re-reading it every time I do (I also recommend the audio book, narrated by Ruby Dee). In some ways, I see writing itself as a process of layering, fueled by questions you are bringing to the work, and questions posed by the writing. What does the writing require of you? I am obsessed with the relationship between art and life, and much of my work is autotheoretical, so I also keep returning to ways in which the personal and the historical are always entwined. How every life is situated within a particular time and place, and just as political, social, and historical forces shape the physical landscapes we move through, so, too, with our internal landscapes, or imaginations. It is scary and wondrous to realize that our preferences and desires are malleable, even as each person is a unique expression of everything that makes them, from their grandmother’s oocytes to the food they eat and the media they consume.
I’ve wandered away from your question, I realize, even as this is often how my writing emerges. Slant.
While some of your deck interjections are based on writings of Butler and Hurston, what was your process in crafting the others?
I read tarot cards as part of a divinatory practice, but you don’t need a tarot deck to read cards. Many people have and do use regular playing cards, which are the cards referenced in Hurston’s song, or rhyme, that runs on the left-side of my essay. The right-side readings, or interjections, are some of my understandings of the cards—yes, in conversation with others, including Butler—but also in conversation with other tarot readers, like the writers Selah Saterstrom, Lou Florez, and Kristen Nelson. To me, cards don’t ‘predict the future’ as much as they signal questions and situations the querent is invited to consider. Today, for example, when I sat with your questions, I pulled the Queen of Swords, which corresponds to the Queen of Spades. I’ve learned the queens as mothers of the deck, the readers, the gate and the one who opens the gate. Swords for intellect, for the quality of air, for articulation. For attuning to intuitive logics set on your higher purpose, or reason of being. I think about adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: your evolution requires speaking yourself into existence, but also speaking your fears or bad programming into view. Which brings me to your next question…
I love how you talk about internalized misogyny and your story of being on a plane with a woman pilot; I had a very similar experience, and had to take a long look at my preconceived notions. How do you break down your misconceptions?
I think misconceptions, including fears, get stored in the body, which means the body is a great source for understanding the many social and cultural beliefs we’ve internalized, including the toxic ones. I mean, if you convince a woman she doesn’t matter and isn’t worth listening to, then she shuts herself up! And isn’t that convenient for white patriarchy?!
I can know something intellectually, but still hold the lie of misogyny within my body. And it’s a blessing, really, when moments like my experience on the airplane bring such beliefs into awareness, because that’s when you can release or transmute them. One bit at a time.
The philosopher George Yancy, who I reference in the essay, theorizes similarly around whiteness, which he describes as ‘insidious,’ rooting etymologically through the Latin insidiae, meaning “plot, snare, ambush.” As an antiracist white person, I’m perpetually caught within, and constituted by, the structural and material power of racial hierarchies. I’m paraphrasing Yancy here to note that those moments when my whiteness becomes visible, when I’m ambushed by my whiteness, are also profound moments for shifting misconceptions and harmful beliefs.
Two more guides in addition to names already mentioned: bell hooks and Marshall Rosenberg’s teachings around non-violent communication.
“Books are energies we draw to us when we are ready” is a line I absolutely love in here. What other authors, or their writing, bring you that inspiration?
So many! This particular essay is part of a longer collection that also focuses on Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Tee Corinne, their work and their archives, official and unofficial. These are just some of the artists and writers who have nurtured my artistic, political, and emotional growth over the years. In queer community, we talk about chosen family, often because our bio families refuse us. To me, that chosen family includes friends and the people I read, living and dead. My chosen mothers, and I count Zora Neale Hurston as one of those.
You have authored Maison Femme: a fiction and Reconception of Marie, among several other books, and your work appeared in numerous literary magazines. Where did your writing journey start?
I kept misreading this question as when, not where, and then resisting it, because I experience writing as beginning again and again, in a time of its own logic, outside of the Gregorian calendar (which I write about in The Reconception of Marie). I’m talking about writing generally, the way we are scripted and then, with grace and in dialogue with others, re-vision that script, repeatedly. And I’m also thinking about the experience of writing something specific, how a particular story or essay or novel unfolds in its own time, sometimes quickly, but sometimes over the course of many years.
To get to where: I was living in the Pacific Northwest, in Olympia, WA, when I gave myself, internally, to writing, deciding to study this art and to cultivate a writing practice, as more important than any day job. For me, the where of writing continues to be deeply internal, a site for the liberatory and radical work of reclaiming the imagination.
What writing are you doing now? What’s your next big project?
I’m finishing revisions on my next book: A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, forthcoming from Autofocus Books in 2024. It’s a novel-in-stories, or collection of autofictions, about Marie, the same-ish character in Maison Femme: a fiction and The Reconception of Marie. These three Maries share many qualities, friends, and background stories, but the form, tone or atmosphere, and even some of her specifics, shift from book to book, like how bodies change. To me, this is a question about auto-bio writing, what it means to “write a life.”
I often think about the book as a body, with its spine and feet-notes and head-er. And then the experience of knowing one’s consciousness, in some kind of steady or familiar way, even as the body changes, ages, sprouts pubic hair and later, bags beneath the eyes. But there is still the five-year-old inside you, and you knew yourself then, and you know yourself now. Differently but the same.
I’m trying to write that.
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. She is the author of three books: The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: A Fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). A collection of autofictions, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is forthcoming. Carmody is a co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. She teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency FMA program at the University of Nebraska Omaha.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rebecca Johnson
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Rebecca Johnson
“Daybreak Comes and I Offer Light,” opens Volume 26 of Water~Stone. Your poem speaks to watching a parent grow older, and the emotional difficulties that accompany that, a longing to return to an earlier time. What was the impetus of this poem? Have you done other work focusing on this theme?
I would say that a lot of my work centers around the sticky fluidity of time. I feel that I am often overcome with this intense nostalgia that influences my writing heavily, and as I am growing into “adulthood,” I am often reflecting on my relationship to my mother. It’s funny to see the ways I find myself replicating her in my day-to-day. Whether it be the way I make a certain soup, or what record I might put on. I cling to the parts of her that she has shared with me, and I think often about my mother’s resilience. She is such a maker, a sculptor. She has made a life, and that is never an easy feat. In my later teen years, I experienced a traumatic relationship that left me changed. Throughout my processing of what had happened to me, my understanding, compassion, and sense of community has developed in different, more complex ways. And I suppose, in this poem, I am exploring what that means—the necessity of community, how to continue creating, post-trauma, and an attempt to reconcile the binary belief of two existences—the pre-trauma child and the post-trauma continuation. Throughout this, even if she may not know, my mother holds me in healing and in this, there is palpable wish to pause time, rewind, hold her hand a little longer. But she pushes me to continue growing, enjoying life as it is happening.
The line, “And I practice peeling the layers of myself, in replication,” creates this beautiful, if painful, image of self-discovery. What sort of surprises of self-discovery do you find as you write?
I feel like writing, for me, is an attempt at meaning-making, so I am constantly in the process of understanding. And that’s ongoing; I don’t know if that’s something that ever stops—the work of understanding, I mean. In that, I think writing opens me up for greater compassion. A lot of my work is me sifting through feelings of connection, community—how I fit in the world. Writing, and poetry specifically, has allowed me a vessel to explore. I think it used to surprise me how often certain images or themes would crop up in my work, but now I greet them like old friends.
You’ve been on both the artistic side and the production side of literary magazines. What balance do you strike between creation and production in your own work?
I was lucky enough to work on The Tower during my undergrad at the University of Minnesota, and I truly loved my time there. I felt so inspired being surrounded by other creatives while working on its production. Balance between creation and production can be tricky, of course everyone has that internal editor, and it can be hard to turn that off when in your creative space.
What are some literary or artistic works that inspire you?
There are so many! For poets I would say some would be Natalie Diaz, Mary Oliver, Saeed Jones, and Alice Oswald. I am often drawing inspiration from songwriters such as Ethel Cain, and artists like Hilma af Klint.
What other projects are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a short story that explores the idea of “unbecoming” through a lens of trauma response, compassion, and roadkill.
Rebecca Johnson is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, where she studied English literature and Asian Middle Eastern studies with a focus in Korean. She held positions at The Tower from 2022 to 2023 as an art editor, a poetry editor, and a marketing director. You can find her on Instagram @teeny.bee.
A Conversation with Kathryn Savage—WSR Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editor
Water~Stone Review is a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor
This is a wonderful opportunity for our graduate student assistant editors to collaborate with renown writers in order to expand our reach and further innovation. Past Contributing Editors include Sun Yung Shin, Keith Lesmeister, Sean Hill, Carolyn Holbrook, Mona Power, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee.
In this post we introduce Vol. 27 Contributing Creative Nonfiction Editor, Kathryn Savage
Welcome! We’re delighted to have you as our contributing nonfiction editor for Volume 27. As a hybrid author and lyric essayist, how do you find the connecting threads of your pieces? Do you have a process for bringing your nonfiction characters to life on the page?
Thank you for the warm welcome! I’m equally delighted to be serving as a contributing nonfiction editor for Volume 27 of the very wonderful Water~Stone Review. A lot of what informs my approach to nonfiction comes from the dual influences of short fiction and poetry. Before I wrote essays, I studied fiction and poetry writing. Now, I apply what I’ve learned about plot and character, lyric precision, and the pleasures of language, to nonfiction. I attend to character interiority and descriptive language as I write. On finding the connecting threads—thank you for the question, I love it—I draw inspiration from Lidia Yuknavitch’s insights about the braided essay. In short, I try to understand the threads within essays as physical and woven, and, like strands of a braid, weave them together as I work.
You are an assistant professor at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where you teach creative writing courses. What are some essential craft lessons that you impart to your nonfiction students?
I encourage the nonfiction writers I meet in the classroom to trust themselves. To read widely, with respect to both form and content, and find ways to cultivate stillness and patience within their writing practice. I think nonfiction writers, all writers, have an innate wisdom about what we write about and the shapes our stories take. Even more exciting, I teach at an art and design college. The writers I meet at MCAD are illustrators, filmmakers, textile artists, photographers—I could go on! It was encountering Montaigne’s characterizing of essays as “attempts” that nudged me to radically reconsider what the essay is, can be, and what my relationship is to it. Now, I love thinking about collage and visual elements alongside nonfiction writing, and I actively encourage experimentation across various media forms. In my classrooms final writing portfolios have been accompanied with photography; poets have woven their words into textile installations; essayists have animated their memoirs. I draw inspiration in my writing and teaching from works that are hybrid or multi-genre, like Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle’s multi-genre memoir SIR. I believe it was Marilynne Robinson who said, “Find the dense warm urgent place in your imagination.” This is what I encourage in the writers I have the honor of working with: find the dense warm urgent place in your imagination, show it tenderness, and then see what emerges in your work.
When reading nonfiction, what elements often make you remember
the piece after you’ve set it down?
I think reading is incredibly intimate, and I find a feeling of closeness stays with me. Reading Natalie Diaz’s poetry; Lesley Nneka Arimah and Amy Hempel’s short stories; Teju Cole’s essays–how to describe it? I feel drawn in, close. Maybe more practically, aspects of interiority, by which I mean the reader’s ability to perceive a character’s thoughts, feelings, internal reactions, and impressions, is compelling. I am also interested in place. Currently, I’m reading Charles Baxter’s Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature and have been drawn to what Baxter calls wonderlands. Places where (I paraphrase), setting is as alive as the characters. (Think the Overlook Hotel in The Shining or the Manhattan apartment building in Rosemary’s Baby). There’s something psychically or psychologically supercharged in wonderland narratives. Whether the genre is horror or otherwise, tension held in the balance between what’s known and unknown, and known but unspoken, compels me. I had the honor of studying with Douglas Kearney when I was an MFA poetry student at the U of M, Twin Cities. I remember when he quoted Fred Moten in class about how poetry, inspired by music, can attempt to, (quoting Moten): “Get at what is essential to that music, perhaps it will approach the secret of the music, but only by way of that secret’s poetic reproduction.” The idea of something being invaluable yet beneath the surface draws me in. Related, here’s a wonderful interview between David Naimon and Douglas Kearney that gets further at some of Fred Moten’s ideas. I highly recommend their conversation!
Are you working on any new pieces now?
Thank you for asking! I am writing short stories and poems. I have a new idea percolating for a second work of lyric essays (it’s so fresh it’s mostly something I think about while walking the dog). I used to think, naively and mistakenly, that writers’ chose the genre they worked in, and never departed. But recently, I’ve drawn inspiration from Ocean Vuong and Diane Wilson and other writers whose work spans genres. Mostly, I’m focused on process now. Just making more time in the days to write. Reinvigorating my writing routine, and seeing what comes.
Kathryn Savage’s Groundglass: An Essay (Coffee House Press), explores topics of environmental justice and links between pollution and public health. Recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, her writing across forms has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Jerome Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Recent writing appears or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, BOMB Magazine, Ecotone Magazine, Guernica, VQR, Water~Stone Review, World Literature Today, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Currently she is an assistant professor of creative writing at The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).
A Conversation with Juan Carlos Reyes—WSR Contributing Fiction Editor
A Conversation with Juan Carlos Reyes—WSR Contributing Fiction Editor
Water~Stone Review is a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor
This is a wonderful opportunity for our graduate student assistant editors to collaborate with renown writers in order to expand our reach and further innovation. Past Contributing Editors include Sun Yung Shin, Keith Lesmeister, Sean Hill, Carolyn Holbrook, Mona Power, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee.
In this post we introduce Vol. 27 Contributing Fiction Editor, Juan Carlos Reyes.
Welcome! We’re thrilled to have you as our contributing fiction editor for Volume 27. When crafting fiction, what’s your key to finding the arc of a story? Do you craft plot or characters first, or do they develop as you write?
I wonder sometimes how answering this question might best inform young writers, particularly because so much of my process has always been to get going and try discerning what the character seems to want as the lines and paragraphs unfold, as I acclimate to the narrator’s voice.
I usually start with a premise, something like the opening situation, the character at the center of it, and what their most urgent relationships are. By urgent, I don’t mean that something needs to happen or that the character needs to go about doing something. Instead, I’m most interested in who a character feels themselves at odds with, who they’re mourning or who they’ve lost, and what they imagine will seal some rupture or help them relive some memory. Every decision they make to imperfectly claw at something leads the fiction from page to page.
What I imagine by “decisions” includes the choice, for example, of the language (word choice, syntax, etc.) with which to evoke a memory, who to be in touch with, how to move their body or speak their mind, and why they’re trying to determine what matters about the next thing they get into. This, eventually, becomes my plot, that series of choices that incrementally has more at stake and becomes more intense as we approach some end.
In this sequence, I often like to work numerically, in increments of three or four or five. When I first started writing, I didn’t consciously set out to work with pattern generally speaking, but I realized in the early going that pattern-making helps me track the momentum of a character’s life, at least the brief glimpse we have of them in the fiction I write. I don’t always set up this kind of rhythm, but when I do, it’s largely because I’m still working to understand who I have in my hands, the kind of person and the kinds of motivations they carry. Sometimes I revise to omit these explicit structures. Sometimes I revise to enhance their significance. But I find that in the drafting process, at least, they’re so helpful for me to understand how the choices they make are building towards something.
You are the executive editor of Big Fiction Magazine and an associate professor at Seattle University. What is a skill that fiction writers should work to develop?
Storytelling, in the broadest sense. We might enjoy the fiction we make, even the kinds of stories we find ourselves returning to when we write. But the story behind the story, the imagined narrative behind the fiction we write, is so very important, and it’s a skill we can learn to cultivate: not just an elaboration of why we write, but a considerable consideration of why/how we wrote to complete some particular piece.
I don’t think it’s enough to simply say that our process is mysterious, that we’re not sure how our characters emerged or where they got to. I think it’s important to acknowledge, almost like artistic therapy, what creative, personal, and social lineage (the fullness of experience) might have brought us to a story, its drafting and revision, the choices we made along the way and how completed it. Note here that I’ve emphasized “might have” because in this mining of ourselves, we really can only arrive to a set of possibilities that could have influenced or driven us into and through the creation of a text. We’ll never completely know, and that’s part of the real mystery of our process, how we discover what we do and how we choose to hold it, examine it, interrogate it, and draw correlations from it. This is the practice, I think, that can be most helpful to fiction writers. It keeps us in the practice of the form, and it’s an important skill to bring to the community, to share what we do beyond the texts we produce and to remind ourselves that investment in the form can be a full-body experience.
When reading fiction, what draws you in and holds you until the end? What do you feel creates the basis of stories you return to?
I’m finishing up right now Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, which feels like such a proper model upon which to base my answer. In the book, two narrators weave time and space together: a teenager who wrote a journal about herself and her grandmother’s legacy, and a writer who comes upon the teenager’s journal after it traveled the Pacific Ocean in a lockbox after the 2011 earthquake. The teenager has the prescience to direct her journal at some initially disembodied “you,” and it’s this imagined conversation between this girl and the writer that carries the box. Increasingly, for the writer in British Columbia who found the lockbox and journal and is insistent to not only try understand every word but try to find this girl and return the journal, this becomes more than just a reading and translation exercise. She’s invested in this girl’s story, and her life, for which she’s already become resentful for reasons that become clear as she narrates her life on this remote Canadian island of mainland, is also fodder for examination, interrogation, and correlation. And so the books that hold my attention feel like this, a single narrative or interwoven stories that unfold according to a narrator’s whims, in turns impatiently and patiently, in turns afraid and fearless, very much reflecting a mimesis of the real sounds and psychologies we imagine must be true around us, if we only spend some extended time with them to hear them out.
You’re working on a novel that focuses on the superhero genre. Can you talk more about that? What other projects are you working on?
I just revised the final draft of my first full-length book, Three Alarm Fire, due out with Hinton Publishing in fall 2024. The fiction collection comes together as a set of stories that explore our experience into and through violence in the U.S. We begin with a triptych that examines this notion of a bystander and, really, how we wrench ourselves from that and into walking beside one another. To begin with, three male-identifying perspectives, at three very different stages of life, are forced to confront the pain and trauma of women in their lives who’ve endured sexual violence, and from there the collection groups its stories and corresponding perspectives by the kinds of encounters they have: with the digital world, with downright horror, with love, with creative work. The collection culminates with a re-issue of my novella, A Summer’s Lynching, revised and built to more clearly fit into this collection. It was my publisher’s insistence to include the novella, feeling that it didn’t get the readership it could have six years ago, and I’m thankful to them for insisting.
The novel I will now venture into is that superhero story you mention, whose first chapter is a featured story in this collection. The title of the novel, also the title of the story included in Three Alarm Fire, is Tomorrow Everyone Lives. The novel will be about a migrant boy detained by ICE, who is then experimented upon by rogue doctors during a pandemic as they test different versions of a vaccine. The cocktail of chemicals in his body turns the boy into this freak with superhuman powers, and part of his transformation is very much a test of what vengeance means, what healing means. The book, I hope, will also be an interrogation of our decade-plus long fascination with comic book superheroes on the big screen, especially their willingness, eagerness, even, to be state actors, to test their mettle with big and sexy things, and their general lack of interest to address the injustices at the margins of the geo-political power they’re always caught up in. The book will very much test the Kilmonger theory of what role a superhuman should have, but Tomorrow Everyone Lives will, I believe, see that idea into grace and maturity, from something like anger into something like humility with necessity, even if, contrary to the title, not everyone survives to see it through.
Juan Carlos Reyes has published the novella A Summer’s Lynching and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander. He has received fellowships from the PEN America, Jack Straw Cultural Center, the Alabama Prison Arts & Education Project, and the WA State Artist Trust. His forthcoming full-length collection, Three Alarm Fire (Hinton Publishing), will release Fall 2024.