In Manuel Gonzales’ surprising, irreverent story, Lucy Harrison, a performance artist trying to build something meaningful out of her family’s messy past, almost accidentally stumbles onto the redemptive power of making things. Lucy isn’t the issue’s only artist. If her story is one of creating meaning through layering, Ammi Keller’s Nine, an outsider artist and metalwork sculptor, finds her many protective artistic layers peeled away by the enforced loneliness and reckoning of the pandemic. What is left to our lives after such a shedding, the story asks, beyond an aging, fallible body and the inevitable shadow ahead? What matters in what remains? Mathilde Merouani, on the other hand, turns her gaze toward the beginning of an artistic life: a boy who likes to look at things is given a camera, and it becomes a kind of talisman for his future, the defining tool in his life, both the thing that lets him express his tenderness and the thing behind which he shields it. Reading this vivid, specific collection of stories—encountering Simon Han’s discordant twin brothers who almost seem to vibrate with the energy of their distinct individual identities; Alderdice’s Joan of Arc, casting her glow over pages in which she never directly appears; Ademoroti’s nameless “boy,” shining with casual beauty; Guo’s lustrous black chicken; Lucy, and Nine, and Lyle, that horny kid with the camera—we feel the quick clutch of being alive, what the poet Marie Howe called in a poem written for her dead brother, “a cherishing so deep.”
You can order this issue now, or subscribe to get three issues a year.
ASF Issue 83 Cover Art by Adrian Armstrong.