Alison McCabe's "Heirloom" deftly trades in contrasts. Over the course of a few hundred words, the diction evolves from the colloquial to the lyrical, and the strangest of details—a cat toy mistaken for a rodent, a son-in-law's name long forgotten—are also the story's most humorous. We recently emailed McCabe to ask about her work, about how she approaches the drafting process, and about how she manages to move so dramatically in time and in tone in such a short work. Nate Brown: “Heirloom” … [Read more...] about Online Fiction Interview: Alison McCabe
Heirloom
Vermin everywhere, the old man said, and so he could not eat, didn’t matter if it was bread pudding, or his MumMum’s corn meal mush, or Tastykake butterscotch krimpets. Didn’t matter how toothsome, the old man couldn’t stomach it, not with all the mice. Too often he’d pick them up and toss them into the compost bin. And on top of that, the mice weren’t mice, but cat toys stitched of felt, feather, knotted yarn. “Catch o’ the day,” he said to his daughter and the gentleman whose name he no … [Read more...] about Heirloom
Online Fiction Interview: Kim Addonizio
Earlier this month, we brought you Kim Addonizio's "The Other Woman," a piece that depicts three people in a tight, tense orbit. Addonizio is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer, and we were curious to ask her about working across so many different forms, and about what leads her to write in one over another. Over the course of our back-and-forth, a few things became clear: the assumptions we bring to fiction—even pieces we think we've read carefully and several times—don't always match the … [Read more...] about Online Fiction Interview: Kim Addonizio
The Other Woman
It would end in disaster, everyone said, and everyone was right, but everyone was on the outside of the situation and therefore did not know everything. She was on the inside, living with a man and in love with another woman, loving the man but not being sure anymore she should live with him, loving the extravagant Italian meals he cooked and the way he stood frowning when he painted in the corner of their living room that served as his studio, loving his longish black hair on the nape of his … [Read more...] about The Other Woman
Online Fiction Interview: Sarah Gerkensmeyer
Sarah Gerkensmeyer's "Ramona," our online exclusive for April, is nearly a contradiction in terms. It's at once a tender-hearted, naturalistic reflection on adolescence and faded friendship and an utterly non-naturalistic look at the limits of embodiment. In this interview, we asked Gerkensmeyer about bending the rules of nature in fiction and, in the process, we learned a bit more about how she approaches a draft, a story, a novel, and key metaphors that are—at times—seemingly incidental to the … [Read more...] about Online Fiction Interview: Sarah Gerkensmeyer
Ramona
Ramona used to say, “When it's on the outside I feel self-conscious.” We did overnights at her house that summer. After finishing the sixth grade, we had stopped calling them sleepovers. Ramona had a full-sized bed, but I still felt scrunched up next to her when we were in it. We didn't press into each other while we slept, but I think I felt pushed up against her because of what I knew about her heart. About how sometimes it flipped and somersaulted and somehow ended up on the outside of … [Read more...] about Ramona