What if the sun falls from the sky? What if it drips fire down down down and lands in North Carolina? What if you and Tammy switch clothes and pretend to be each other? What if Dad dies in a car crash on the way to Greensboro? What if the babysitter doesn\u2019t make a comment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9307"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9330,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9307\/revisions\/9330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9322,"date":"2026-09-21T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9322"},"modified":"2026-09-21T05:31:40","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:31:40","slug":"acid-green-velvet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/reviews\/acid-green-velvet\/","title":{"rendered":"Acid Green Velvet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Near the opening of Grace Krilanovich\u2019s much-anticipated second novel, Acid Green Velvet,<\/em> two youngsters give a bad man a good thrashing. \u201cI\u2019d only intended to smack him with a fence post, scare him a little,\u201d explains Paulette\u2014but plans go awry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The man is Paulette\u2019s father, and he deserves it. He\u2019s been using his daughter as a prop in his con games\u2014which might not even be the worst crime in this disturbing West Coast Gothic about power, survival, and how to trust what we know. It\u2019s set chiefly in 1870s California, where the two protagonists, Paulette and her co-conspirator, Kenneth, are just threads in a knotty tangle of political philosophy and sexual economy in which every character betrays someone else, the dead don\u2019t stay dead, and an attempt at a socialist revolution is seductive but impractical. As Paulette grows up, she writes steadily to her mother, and her letters are perhaps the most engaging part of the novel. A third-person narrative with multiple points of view occasionally comes into focus when Kenneth becomes obsessed with her, setting aside his involvement with a revolutionary leader. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some thematic elements may be familiar from Krilanovich\u2019s debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps<\/em> (2010),<\/em> in which a mentally unsteady, homeless teenaged vampire seeks a lost foster sister and a supreme high. It won the author a spot on the National Book Foundation\u2019s 5 Under 35 list, plus a legion of fans. They may find this one even more to their liking; it\u2019s a stronger, more commanding book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fictional Anzar, California, is \u201ca deeply unserious place\u201d and \u201csite of cosmic convergence,\u201d where so-called tramps and vagabonds are claiming public spaces and the wealthy Hasley family broods in an Aladdin\u2019s cave of a mansion. Paulette sees a chance at a secure life there in the arms of young Johnny Hasley, a faux socialist and wholehearted laudanum enthusiast who, frustratingly, puts off consummating their affair. Kenneth, meanwhile, sees a future in Anzar, if he can manage to correct the past\u2014and get a handle on Paulette\u2019s father, who turns out to be alive and into the ultimate con: politics. Before the agitators and Loganberries are through, a pitiless confrontation will end in heaps of corpses. By then, epic deeds and historic changes belong to characters with names like Violent Olga and Grandma Rat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No, it\u2019s not a nice world at all, but the electric language affords glimpses of beauty, horror, or truth in deceptively ordinary moments: \u201cGirls were draped across the entrance, lounging beneath fluttering sun dapples, eating black toast and smoking.\u201d Elsewhere: \u201cHis kisses were prim; in them I found Johnny\u2019s truest form, that of a monster, delicate as a mosquito.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Krilanovich\u2019s writing is gorgeous and gritty by turns; her characters have substance, and the plot is beyond twisty. But this is not an immediately immersive read. For one thing, most of the characters don\u2019t want to let anyone in; they emote about politics far more than about each other, and they seem chiefly bent on exploitation. Emotion is private\u2014a luxury, a weakness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then there\u2019s the oddity of anachronism. Terms such as luncheonette,<\/em> girlfriend, lifestyle, uncool,<\/em> and weapons-grade<\/em> either didn\u2019t exist or didn\u2019t have much purchase in 1879; they kick the fictive dream into the present, as if to say that nobody gets to leave the problematic present-day world behind simply by reading a historical novel. When the Loganberries, militant Pinkerton-style enforcers, patrol the streets and load the tramps into wagons bound for the railyard, it\u2019s impossible not to note that historical fiction is a product of both the time in which it\u2019s set and the time in which it\u2019s written. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Paulette speculates that \u201cA generation from now people would pretend to know what happened here [\u2026] Digging up the bones of our community[,] they would pretend to comprehend the story of alien ancestors, whose skeletons lay scattered in party positions in graves dug by drunkards and sleepwalkers.\u201d So end the dreams in which \u201canarchists in calico loincloths performed rituals on the plaza green, seeking to reupholster society, then sleep forever.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n She\u2019s just described the work of the historian, and the historical novelist, whose conjectures are complicated by the impossibility of quantifying the humanity that once animated those skeletons. It\u2019s easier to imagine ancient aliens than to reckon with the real costs of history. And in Krilanovich\u2019s universe, things are only going to get worse \u2026 except, oddly, for women, because sex work turns out to be less onerous than other types of labor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The new social \u201cupholstery\u201d of which the protesters dream is an unexpectedly haunting metaphor, apparently referring to a textile that manifests nowhere but the title. (Even the book\u2019s cover favors a red straight out of a tasseled bourgeois parlor\u2014or bordello\u2014and the yellow spine of a dime novel.) That vivid yellow-green helped define the Victorian era. Made first with highly toxic arsenic, it sickened wearers who craved its beauty; later, new aniline dyes could impregnate even a luxe fabric like velvet without distorting its texture, making that exciting synthetic green cheap and easy to acquire. Yet Krilanovich\u2019s characters don\u2019t acquire it. Let it stand for luxury, danger, or the unattained\u2014acid green faded with the century, coming back into vogue only during the equally turbulent 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like that aniline dye, Acid Green Velvet<\/em> sinks in where it touches. It\u2019s a sweaty fever dream rolled into a nauseous acid trip riding roughshod over its tropes\u2014a prickly, perverse, and often brilliant book.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Grace Krilanovich<\/strong> is the author of The Orange Eats Creeps<\/em>, a finalist for The Believer Book Award and the Indie Booksellers\u2019 Choice Award in 2010, and reissued in 2025 for Two Dollar Radio\u2019s New Classics series. Her work has appeared in Black Clock, The Rumpus, The Comics Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>, and elsewhere. She was a National Book Foundation \u201c5 Under 35\u201d honoree in 2010. She lives in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Susann Cokal<\/strong>\u2019s historical novels include The Kingdom of Little Wounds,<\/em> Mirabilis,<\/em> and Breath and Bones<\/em>. Her short work has appeared in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Electric Lit, Prairie Schooner, Gargoyle, Eclectica,<\/em> and The New York Times Book Review<\/em>. Her website is susanncokal.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Near the opening of Grace Krilanovich\u2019s much-anticipated second novel, Acid Green Velvet, two youngsters give a bad man a good thrashing. \u201cI\u2019d only intended to smack him with a fence post, scare him a little,\u201d explains Paulette\u2014but plans go awry. The man is Paulette\u2019s father, and he deserves it. He\u2019s been using his daughter as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9326,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9322\/revisions\/9326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9287,"date":"2026-09-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9287"},"modified":"2026-09-06T13:35:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T17:35:52","slug":"the-shitbird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/researchnotes\/the-shitbird\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shitbird"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with \u201cresearch\u201d defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Spencer Fleury<\/a> writes about <\/a> <\/a>The Shitbird<\/a><\/em><\/em> from Stanchion<\/a><\/small>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird<\/em>, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter. Even though I remembered the sequence of events that had brought me there\u2014a visit to the recruiter\u2019s office, signing the paperwork, going through basic training\u2014I still didn\u2019t feel I understood quite how<\/em> it had happened. I was fairly certain I didn\u2019t belong there, and deeply apprehensive about what awaited me on the other side of the ship\u2019s gangway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I joined the Coast Guard for what some people might say were all the wrong reasons: I had a newly-minted bachelor\u2019s degree but no money; the job market was, according to Tom Brokaw, the worst for graduating college seniors since World War II; and my parents (by which I mean, mostly my father) refused to let me live at home until I could get a little organized and figure things out. A couple of people had mentioned the Coast Guard as a potentially interesting diversion for a young man with no family responsibilities. So I let myself drift into it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McAllister\u2019s ship, the Stargazer<\/em>, is closely modeled on my own ship, the Campbell<\/em>. It\u2019s one of thirteen Famous-class cutters, all of which are still in service. I lived on that boat for the first year I was assigned to it, in accordance with ship\u2019s policy for junior enlisted personnel. Once I was allowed to live on the nearby base, I still spent more time on the boat than I did at home. It was just that kind of job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When, years later, I finally decided to sit down and write the novel I\u2019d been thinking about for so long, one that had its roots in my own Coast Guard experience, I naturally decided to set it on a ship much like the Campbell, and in the same era that I\u2019d served. The story itself is definitely fiction, but the scenes and anecdotes and characters I wanted to write about all sprouted from my time on that boat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It certainly helped that I\u2019d spent two full years of my life immersed in that environment, even if it was 30 years ago. I still knew the ship\u2019s layout, what the compartments looked like, how the routine functioned. Well, okay, I kind of<\/em> still remembered all that stuff\u2014it doesn\u2019t ever really leave you, but it does go dormant. Nevertheless, I felt confident I could write a detailed and accurate depiction of life aboard a 270 back in the early \u201890s without needing to do much, if any, outside research. So I got started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the earliest stages of the writing process, it felt crucial that I capture the shipboard environment as accurately as possible. I\u2019m not sure why; I\u2019d written enough fiction by then to know that there were more important structural questions to focus on, especially at that stage. Maybe it was because there\u2019s so little fiction (that I\u2019m aware of, anyway) written about the Coast Guard, and I wanted to set the bar as high as I could. Maybe it\u2019s because the novel\u2019s connection to my own experiences and to people I once knew well felt like an obligation\u2014to those people, to the service itself, to myself\u2014to portray it all as straight as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides, I knew there are readers who would judge the novel almost solely on those details. You know who I mean\u2014the WELL ACKSHULLY<\/em> type who wants to show how much more he knows about the subject than the author does. Perhaps you\u2019ve been one of these readers yourself at some point. I know I have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And you know, sometimes those readers have a point. It\u2019s not unreasonable to wonder if an author who plays a bit loose with details might take the same approach to other aspects of their work. Spending time on the fit and finish of a project\u2014whether it\u2019s a book or some stately wooden shelves to put it on\u2014is what you have to do if you are hoping to create something that is worthwhile, something to be taken seriously. Accurate details are a part of that, whether the reader knows they\u2019re accurate or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So I began the process of remembering as much as I could, starting with the most basic things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it wasn\u2019t as easy as I\u2019d been expecting. When I tried to mentally walk the decks from the fantail to the fo\u2019c\u2019sle, I found myself getting turned around. I couldn\u2019t quite remember how to get to Officer\u2019s Country, where all the officers\u2019 staterooms were. How did avionics connect to the deck below it? Where, exactly, was the armory? I couldn\u2019t see it. I\u2019d have to do some research after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, by then there was plenty of information out there. You might be able to find some simple, non-classified diagrams of the interiors of these ships, though I couldn\u2019t turn any up the last time I looked online. There\u2019s a documentary about the cutter Mohawk<\/em>, the thirteenth Famous-class cutter, that was made in the late 1990s and is freely available online, with lots of footage of the ship\u2019s interior spaces. And I found a small trove of photographs I\u2019d taken during my time on the Campbell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These photos don\u2019t have a lot to say about the layout of the ship\u2019s interior. They\u2019re mostly of my shipmates and me, either during operations or just screwing around during the downtime. There are some of a freighter that was on fire when we found it; these helped a lot for getting the blocking and tackling right in one of the climactic scenes near the end of the book, when McAllister decides to get the jump on his nemesis. But they were still incredibly useful to me, because they helped me draw from the emotional experience of those two years: what it felt like to be on that ship, to be a part of that crew, to see the things we saw and to live with and know those people the way I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s<\/em> where the roots of the story are. The narrative itself needed to carry some kind of core human truth, and I could only really get to that by better accessing the reality of my own lived experience aboard the Campbell. Correctly depicting the layout of the main deck of a Coast Guard cutter doesn\u2019t really bring the reader any closer to that truth. Where the ship\u2019s office is and whether there was a statue of a dog mounted to the bulkhead in the mess deck are details that have no bearing on the oppressive hierarchical structures of both the military itself and of unhealthy masculinity generally. I could put those things wherever I wanted to and nothing important about the book would change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I mentioned before, even though I drew extensively on my personal experiences to write this book, The Shitbird<\/em> is still fiction. It\u2019s not a secret memoir with a thin veneer of plausible deniability brushed over it. Colin McAllister and I are not the same person. But the only way to tell his story was to dig back into my own, to invest time and energy into investigating who I was back then, examining my feelings about that time in my life with as much objectivity as I could manage, and then using that understanding to build from scratch a character who, when placed in a similar situation, would do all sorts of things I wouldn\u2019t have.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spencer Fleury<\/strong> is the author of I Blame Myself But Also You and other stories<\/em> (Malarkey Books, 2024) and How I\u2019m Spending My Afterlife<\/em> (Woodhall Press, 2021). He lives in San Francisco and Portugal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Much like Colin McAllister, the narrator of my new novel The Shitbird, I arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts on a raw gray day in October of 1993 to begin my first assignment as a lowly seaman apprentice in the U.S. Coast Guard, at the very bottom of the pecking order aboard a 270-foot cutter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-researchnotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9305,"date":"2026-09-16T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9305"},"modified":"2026-09-06T13:30:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T17:30:39","slug":"an-all-consuming-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/stories\/an-all-consuming-love\/","title":{"rendered":"An All-Consuming Love"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \u201cI just don’t know if I can continue in this relationship if you keep acting this way,\u201d I told Janet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen you really love someone,\u201d she said, echoing our therapist, \u201cyou have to make sacrifices and accept them for who they are, warts and all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were lying in bed, talking in the same circles as usual. I was staring at the ceiling, thinking about how perfect she was for me in every way but that one that she couldn\u2019t control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I looked her in the eye and said, \u201cBut I can’t accept that you’ve been eating all my friends.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh please!\u201d she said, pushing me away. \u201cYou keep blowing this out of proportion! I have not been eating \u2018all\u2019 your friends. You make me sound like some kind of monster.\u201d She stormed off and slammed the door. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve dated a few kooky women\u2014a klepto, a narcissist, a personal injury lawyer\u2014so I was used to strange. But this, this was something else. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For the record, she had eaten two of my friends. The first was Freddie, who was visiting from California. He sat on the sofa in a Hawaiian shirt, strumming a guitar and singing Beatles\u2019 love songs. After he disappeared, she played dumb. When I found him\u2014or rather, found his bones, stashed in his suitcase\u2014I confronted her. She apologized and promised to never do it again. She nestled her head on my shoulder, wrapped her arms around me and said she loved me. Those magic words calmed me down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But not long after, I caught her devouring the fresh corpse of another buddy of mine, David, who had come over for dinner. I\u2019m certain David had in no way consented to being dinner. I told her again to please stop doing that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou’re holding me to an impossible standard,\u201d she said. \u201cYet you give yourself a pass every time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA pass for what? Not doing the dishes?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cYou think you’re so perfect? You do questionable things, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLike what?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat am I supposed to eat?\u201d she said, as tears started running down her cheeks. \u201cYou know I don’t like regular food. And I get so hungry. I feel like I’m gonna starve to death.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n With David\u2019s blood and guts smeared all over her face, she actually looked quite pretty in the golden evening light streaming through the window. She had such a sweet look in her eyes. I took her bloody hands in mine, kissed her, and said I loved her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I did stop inviting friends over, which made her irritable. She would snap at me over the slightest thing. That\u2019s when we went to couples therapy to try to work through this like mature adults.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI just want a partner who doesn’t eat all my friends,\u201d I told the therapist. \u201cIs that so much to ask?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere he goes again wildly exaggerating,\u201d Janet said, turning to the therapist. \u201cHe’s always making me feel like I’m a monster. It\u2019s not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He nodded at her a bit too sympathetically and turned to me. \u201cIt sounds like you’re trying to fit Janet into an idealized mold,\u201d he told me. \u201cBut here\u2019s the thing: everyone has flaws. Whether they\u2019re gamblers or workaholics or attention-challenged, loving someone means accepting all of their flaws. Think you can do that for Janet?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the session, we kept bickering. Janet grew distant and stayed out late without explanation. I apologized for making such a stink and promised I would do better. But I felt she was slipping away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then I found an envelope taped to the refrigerator one morning. She was leaving me, she wrote, because she\u2019d found someone who could accept her for who she really was. And that man turned out to be our therapist. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I wanted to move on, but I missed her and was willing to accept anything to get her back. If she had to eat my friends or anyone, including me, then so be it. I finally understood what it means to make sacrifices for the person you love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniel Krieger<\/strong> lives in New York. His fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres<\/em>, Flash Fiction Magazine, Scaffold and BULL<\/em>. Read more at danielkrieger.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI just don’t know if I can continue in this relationship if you keep acting this way,\u201d I told Janet. \u201cWhen you really love someone,\u201d she said, echoing our therapist, \u201cyou have to make sacrifices and accept them for who they are, warts and all.\u201d We were lying in bed, talking in the same circles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9317,"date":"2026-09-14T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9317"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:08:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T10:08:48","slug":"on-the-other-side-is-march","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/stories\/on-the-other-side-is-march\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Other Side Is March"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Translated by Marita Thomsen, On the Other Side is March<\/em> by S\u00f3lr\u00fan Michelsen is a meditation on the many losses of age and how these losses are balanced\u2014sometimes\u2014by insight and wisdom. This slim novel, which got under my skin and into my dreams, is also the first book by a Faroese woman to appear in English. I’m clearing my shelves in the hopes that there will be more.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n There’s reason to hope: The Faroes, an eighteen-island archipelago in the North Atlantic, produce more new books per capita than Ireland. Since 1950, this literature has mainly consisted of works in Faroese, closely related to Icelandic and Old Norse. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a series of vignettes interspersed with reflections, On the Other Side<\/em> portrays a woman in late middle-age whose life is slowly being subsumed into caring for her aging mother. Her own resources\u2014mainly money, but time too\u2014are dwindling fast. A nursing home is under construction. Perhaps soon a place will open up. Meanwhile the stresses of caregiving\u2014physical, emotional, financial\u2014are heightened by the stark fact that the person she’s losing is her mother<\/em>, the mainstay of all her attachments. Faced with evidence of her mother’s decline, the unnamed narrator frantically refuses it: “Not her. Not her.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Altogether the experience of looking after her mother is brutal. She attempts to put a good face on it. “As your days, so shall your strength be,” begins one section, in which she takes stock of her situation. Her focus soon shifts to her mother’s experience, what it must be like for her to live through her own life’s end. “It takes immense strength,” the narrator observes. “The strength to remain dignified and even-tempered even as your body so utterly betrays you. As your head slowly empties. As you lie there wet and soiled and have to put up with everything not uttered in words, but plain to read in other people’s eyes.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Mortality haunts her, but her sense of humor, inherited from her mother, buoys her and keeps the story balanced between the maudlin and the droll. “Now that we live so long,” the narrator says, tongue moving slowly but surely into cheek, “we have to squeeze childhood and youth on one side and very old age on the other. The rest is the middle,” a time that she describes, with sly ambiguity, as “the most expansive.” She doesn’t mean that it’s long\u2014or not just<\/em> that\u2014but that it’s excessively self-regarding, a vain period of life that “considers itself the most important.” A discourse on dreaming, seemingly plucked from the air, is even funnier. “Dreams are pent-up words set free,” she says. “Sometimes birds shit on them.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n The narrator is obviously stronger than she knows, and over the course of the book, her mother is revealed as the prototype, if not the source, of that strength. Even diminished by a stroke, her mother finds ways to enjoy herself. She paints her nails pink; she retails stories of a friend who, on nights when her husband was at work, set out a special lamp as a signal to a paramour. “Then the door would be unlocked,” she says. “Lively times indeed.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Caring for her mother, the narrator makes some discoveries about herself. She becomes clearer, for instance, about self-deception. “We are all feigning something,” she declares. “My pretend balloons float up there among all the others.” But the truth always “elbows its way down” and “sets its searchlights on me.” The book is studded with such recognitions. At times they float loose on the page, unanchored to ordinary novelistic stage business. Even dialogue tags are sparse. These dreamlike reflections might belong to the narrator or to her mother or to some consciousness that, in their new and strange closeness, they now share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even so, this contact will be brief, as the narrator is painfully aware. But something in the naturalness of the loss consoles her. Of her mother’s illness, she says, “I have gradually come to terms with the fact that the woman who was, is gone.” That woman now exists only in the narrator’s memory, where her parents are always “sitting on a rocky shore, she is hugging her knees. He is sitting close to her. Has one arm around her shoulders. […] He is looking at her. They smile.” The narrator “hangs” the picture in memory, “alongside the other ones in the wall-less gallery” of her mind. “It’s a good image,” she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a long passage, the narrator painstakingly imagines herself once again into her mother’s experience, this time of losing her balance as another stroke overtakes her. She will fall\u2014how can she not? But she will also “get back up again and again.” This resilience means “to keep smiling and not let your legs give way and let a wave of tears wash you clean.” This stubborn clinging to ordinary capacities\u2014rising, smiling\u2014finally becomes “the last weapon left in your arsenal. With your dignity,” this feisty, forlorn daughter says, “you play them check and mate.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n S\u00f3lr\u00fan Michelsen<\/strong>, born in T\u00f3rshavn, is a bestselling author known for her poetry, short stories, and novels for all ages. She won the Faroese Children\u2019s Literature Award in 2002 and the M. A. Jacobsen Culture Prize in 2008, and her novel On the Other Side Is March<\/em> was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2015. Her recent works include a historical trilogy depicting the lives of women in the Faroe Islands, starting at the close of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marita Thomsen<\/strong> is from the Faroes, where the wind often roars, and now lives in Keele, where it whispers. Her love of languages and stories has crystallized into English translations of Faroese authors, while her work as a conference interpreter satisfies her curiosity and wanderlust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diane Josefowicz<\/strong> is Reviews Editor at Necessary Fiction<\/em> and Senior Editor of Translation for The Adroit Journal<\/em>. Her second novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill<\/em>, was published by Soho Press in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Translated by Marita Thomsen, On the Other Side is March by S\u00f3lr\u00fan Michelsen is a meditation on the many losses of age and how these losses are balanced\u2014sometimes\u2014by insight and wisdom. This slim novel, which got under my skin and into my dreams, is also the first book by a Faroese woman to appear in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9233,"date":"2026-09-11T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9233"},"modified":"2026-08-03T08:23:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T12:23:38","slug":"grow-old-and-dont-die","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/researchnotes\/grow-old-and-dont-die\/","title":{"rendered":"Grow Old and Don’t Die"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with \u201cresearch\u201d defined as broadly as they would like. This week, Ari Phillips<\/a> writes about <\/a> <\/em><\/em><\/a>Grow Old and Don\u2019t Die<\/a><\/em><\/em> from Rand-Smith Books<\/a>.<\/small><\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.. While the mineral waters flowing out of the Appalachian Mountains just north of Shenandoah Valley aren\u2019t hot, they are a remarkably consistent 74.3\u00b0F year round. As the stifling D.C. summer set in, I packed the Prius for a long weekend in small town West Virginia, ready to escape into greenery and refreshingly cool water. I knew very little about Berkeley Springs other than that it\u2019s very small, home to under 1,000 people, and that George Washington used to visit the town, which was formerly known as Bath, and soak in the rejuvenating waters. For those in the know, Berkeley Springs is considered the oldest spa in the country, having been in use since Colonial times. The original one-room bathhouse was built in 1791 and the larger Roman Bathhouse in the early 18th century.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oh yeah, and I also knew it had a castle. Aside from the springs, the Berkeley Springs Castle is the town\u2019s other big attraction. I\u2019m no history buff, but I\u2019m not familiar with many castles this side of the Atlantic. The town\u2019s main street runs through a valley with a quaint central park (which is also a state park) serving as an anchor. Within the park is a swimming pool fed by the springs, a more rustic water play area where fish nibble your toes, and the Roman Baths, a long building with a mini-museum foyer and a row of tubs where you can pay for an official soak. Partway up the steep hill rests the castle, looming over the town at about one-tenth the size of the medieval Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, England, that it\u2019s modeled after. And it is a model; never meant to fortify anything, it was built by Samuel Taylor Suit, a wealthy late-nineteenth century politician, to woo a much younger woman to become his wife. The ploy worked, the only hitch being Suit died shortly after the castle was completed. Since then, the unique residence has revolved through many uses: An artist\u2019s retreat, a museum, and more recently the property of Peter Brimelow, the founder of the VDARE Foundation, an anti-immigration organization. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My young children loved wandering the spring basin, where crumbling pools, including the one George Washington once used, provide an ideal exploratory, if slippery, terrain. After passing the heat of the day by the water, we wandered the town, charmed by the assortment of local shops and the massive scoops at the ice cream parlor. But the business that stuck with me was a thrift store that doubled as an art gallery. The wiry owner, who also created the bulbous blown glass pieces lining one wall, sat at an overflowing desk in the front of the store. As he chatted with my kids and offered us a free upside-down wine glass (at least that\u2019s how it looked to me), I felt he could\u2019ve occupied the spot for centuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in D.C., the summer wound down and I searched for a book project to carry me through the year. I\u2019ve written five full-length manuscripts since COVID, and the book based on Berkeley Springs, Grow Old and Don\u2019t Die<\/em><\/a>, is my third to be published. I knew my writing improved and the process went more smoothly when I incorporated historical elements into the narrative, both to provide some guardrails and also because I\u2019m a journalist and working with facts makes me feel more at home. Also, I like to read historical fiction and I strive to write what I like reading. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I started fixating on the castle and its backstory. After Samuel Taylor Suit died, his young widow, Rosa Pelham, the 27-year-old daughter of U.S. Representative Charles Pelham of Alabama, became known for living lavishly and hosting extravagant castle parties. An 1891 newspaper wrote<\/a> that during one such event, she was \u201cattired in black crepe with an elegant train that gave her a queenly air in her efforts, in order that her guests be well entertained.\u201d Other publications mentioned mysterious deaths rumored to have occurred at the castle, including two of Rosa\u2019s lovers, one of whom either jumped or was pushed from the castle tower. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The foundation of a story took shape. As with my last novel, Earth Jumped Back<\/em><\/a> (published under pen name Philip Reari), time took on the role of a central character. In this instance, not in the form of time travel, but a spring\u2014not Berkeley Springs but another spring hidden in the nearby mountainside\u2014that acted as a sort of eternal spring, preventing anyone who drank its water from dying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n No authoritative history of the castle or the town exists, or at least none came up in my search. A good omen, considering I prefer under-the-radar events, but also one that made research challenging. I found a few old magazine articles, some news stories on things like changes of ownership, and a short bio of Taylor Suit, who also ran a whiskey distillery and is the namesake of the Maryland town Suitland. But I\u2019m not interested in accurately depicting historical events; I prefer to take a sparse historic scaffolding and create something new to fill in the space. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And so I began with an imagined scene of one of Rosa\u2019s lovers leaping to his death. When Rosa searches his pocket, she finds a note revealing the location of the life-giving spring. The second chapter flashes forward to the present, where Rosa\u2019s son Wyeth, who also drinks the spring water, operates a thrift store and mostly idles away the days having never recovered from the death of his best friend more than 75 years earlier. Enduring friendship was one of a few explicit themes I wanted to explore. Having that thematic tethering is critical in helping me navigate relationships as I write. The next chapter followed Pawpaw, a character named after the rare North American tropical fruit that grows from Appalachian pawpaw trees. She is the daughter of an oil industry scion (I work in the environmental world) who acquired several barrels of the eternal spring water through blackmail sometime in the late 1800s. However, he doesn\u2019t know water\u2019s source, and as his supply runs out he becomes increasingly belligerent trying to locate it. Rosa, Wyeth, and Pawpaw provided the three interweaning narrative threads. I pursued them through another chapter cycle before sensing the novel needed something else to justify the long story arc. That\u2019s when George Washington came to mind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of learning about the sliver of life Washington spent in Berkeley Springs, where I visited both his house and his tub, I\u2019d also read Ron Chernow\u2019s gripping biography of Washington and several other American history books that had emphasized his life and accomplishments. Also, I lived in his city, with his estate, Mt. Vernon, just south of town and his monument pretty much always only a head-swivel away. I felt I had a decent notion of his personality\u2014pensive, wry, willing and able\u2014if not exactly his thought process. So I gave him a voice to let him comment on what he saw below as he hovered above, trapped in some sort of purgatory where he could communicate with certain people while they bathed in the Roman bathhouse. Threads connected to other threads and eventually wove into something that clung together. I wanted to leave the reader tasting something of the bittersweet ache that reflecting on long-lost friendships evokes, and I tracked towards that emotion to help home in on the conclusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ari Phillips<\/strong> (www.ariphillips.com<\/a>) lives in Washington, D.C., and works for an organization trying to reduce industrial pollution and improve public health. He used to cover the environment for a number of news outlets and has published two novels under the pen name Philip Reari, Eat Your Damn Vegetables<\/em>, shortlisted for Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, and Earth Jumped Back<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I discovered Berkeley Springs because I had it in my mind to visit some hot springs within a few hours drive of Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-researchnotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9302,"date":"2026-09-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9302"},"modified":"2026-09-06T13:28:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T17:28:46","slug":"lost-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/stories\/lost-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Lost Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Lucy shows the signs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Her mother hovers. \u201cLucy? Lucy? Are you listening to me?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n She raises a vague gaze to her mom. Lately, Lucy holds most things that make their way to her (homework assignment, detention slip, boyfriend) in a similarly vague fashion\u2014lightly, poised to let them go. Finding them in her possession, she murmurs in mild surprise, \u201cWhat?\u201d before turning away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The relinquishing, she realizes, feels good. She closes her hands like lilies that fold in at night. <\/p>\n\n\n\n People get exasperated with her. They start lowering their expectations. Her boyfriend breaks up with her. She doesn\u2019t seem to notice. She\u2019s so\u2026inattentive. Unambitious. Out of reach. One morning, she gets off the bus only to wander down the road. The principal watches her pick the asters alongside the ditch. He hears her humming. \u201cI give up,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, people leave her alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucy\u2019s relieved. She enjoys not giving a shit. If anyone needs her, oh well. She\u2019s unavailable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jasmine\u2019s been paying attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There are found girls everywhere. They dress just so and grip their phones the way Jasmine\u2019s grandma holds her rosary beads. Influencers teach them how to stay found. It\u2019s not easy, Jasmine realizes. Success rides on their losing weight, helping others, applying makeup, being a good listener, furthering fashion trends, developing talents, securing friendships, all while straddling sweet seductiveness and bitchless sass. They do sex right. They excel academically. A bad test score, come to find out, might be as high as a B. Found girls wonder if their teachers will offer retests. In time, the minus after an A bothers them. Still, they smile. They join clubs. They exercise. They know how many calories lurk in a cookie. They interpret the intricacies of a boy\u2019s gaze, when to meet it, ignore it, fear it, feed it. They do important things with their hair. <\/p>\n\n\n\n They\u2019re found, all right, but Jasmine can tell they\u2019re unhappy. Unhappiness surrounds them, as obvious as the perfume they dab on their wrists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Jasmine decides discovery isn\u2019t so great. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One morning, she gazes in the mirror. Her hair is flattened on one side and stands in frizzy puffs on the other. A good look for getting lost. She leaves it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sutton reads regularly, fantasies mostly, writes poetry, eats heartily. She ignores social media. Her favorite pastime is sitting and thinking. When the mood strikes her, she gets out her watercolors and paints portraits of her dog Zucchini. Sometimes she dabbles in spells. She has lived lost for a while now. Not in Neverland, of course. This<\/em> is Neverland; that\u2019s obvious enough: this world ruled by male unruliness, by boys who refuse the limits of found, play war with pirates, and, in truth, need the war, endless war, to justify their power and exclusive brotherhood and gleeful whatever-the-hell-they-want. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Girls in Neverland? Jealous pixies, sexy sirens, oblivious virgins, cute caretakers, all found. In Neverland, a girl\u2019s either found or invisible, and those aren\u2019t even her options. They\u2019re designations. There is no choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sutton was briefly found. She didn\u2019t like it. But invisibility, she learned quickly, was a punishment. So she built a third way of being and turned inward. This is how she managed to leave Neverland. These days, she keeps her mind unmapped. That\u2019s the secret to being lost. So long as she does that, she stays free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Melissa Ostrom<\/strong> is a teacher and ceramicist and the author of The Beloved Wild<\/em> (Feiwel & Friends, 2018), a Junior Library Guild book and an Amelia Bloomer Award selection, and Unleaving<\/em> (Feiwel & Friends, 2019). Her stories have appeared in many journals and best-of anthologies. She lives with her husband, children, and dog Mocha in Western New York. Learn more at www.melissaostrom.com<\/a> or find her on Twitter or Bluesky @melostrom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lucy shows the signs. Her mother hovers. \u201cLucy? Lucy? Are you listening to me?\u201d She raises a vague gaze to her mom. Lately, Lucy holds most things that make their way to her (homework assignment, detention slip, boyfriend) in a similarly vague fashion\u2014lightly, poised to let them go. Finding them in her possession, she murmurs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9290,"date":"2026-09-07T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9290"},"modified":"2026-09-08T18:34:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T22:34:26","slug":"the-cut-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/reviews\/the-cut-line\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cut Line"},"content":{"rendered":"\n Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line<\/em> is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive relationship. The soured relationship provides the lens through which Pihelgas invites the reader to consider larger questions about boundaries and borders. Sometimes the distinction between a permitted incursion and a subtler, more malign encroachment is very fine indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is not to say that the novel is didactic or abstract. As a story of one woman’s journey toward a contented solo life, The Cut Line<\/em> is in fact perfectly satisfying. Pihelgas shows Liine doing the work, earning her happiness by learning to be both safely alone and with others. But as Liine extends her escape to the family’s cottage in the countryside, the rural idyll is interrupted by the noise of an expanding nearby military base, evidence of a growing wider conflict with Russia. Like her abusive ex-boyfriend, Tarmo, the neighboring country also pushes boundaries and behaves in provocative ways. These intrusions invite reflection on the ways in which Liine, like Estonia itself, has been repeatedly invaded and overrun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Appropriately for a book that traces a series of shifting boundaries, Pihelgas begins slowly. The slow burn brings Liine into focus, anatomizing her interiority as she grieves the loss of her long-term relationship. Despite its obvious awfulness, her fourteen-year relationship with Tarmo was substantial, and Liine has much history to revisit. Mainly what she mourns is the idealized future she had imagined for herself. This future, she now feels, “has drowned, sank to the bottom and no longer exists. The most awful thing about breakups is losing what you imagined.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite her efforts, Liine finds peace elusive. The cottage is a family property, and family members do come to visit, disturbing Liine’s recovery. Her irritating mother shows up early with clanking bottles of wine, many sausages for the grill, and unannounced plans to renovate the garden. “Mom’s in full swing,” Liine observes ruefully. “She carries branches and old half-rotten planks to the campfire site and saws up a dried-out guelder rose bush.” It’s just like Christmas, Liine reflects, a sad and empty time when “the spruce branches went up inside and the lights were up, but there was no Christmas feeling.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Soon Liine’s mother is finding things to criticize about Liine and pestering her to get back with Tarmo. The onslaught unmoors Liine. “I’m like an unknown continent,” she says. Partly the problem is that she feels herself to be a stranger in the cottage, a place with a long history that precedes her. It’s something she holds in common with the cottage, as she comes to learn. Like her internal landscape, the cottage is a place “where everything already exists and where the paths have long been trampled on.” From here it’s a short step to self reflection: “But the explorers who arrived by ship have given the rivers and lakes and mountains names that are unsuited to them; they’ve infected me with their language, they’ve colonized me.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n Liine returns obsessively to her decision to leave Tarmo. His abuse has left scars that are so deep, she is still arguing with him in her mind. Her conversations with herself still include Tarmo, as here: “I need to go back to my beginnings and I need to rediscover my own eyes and purge myself of your judgments.” Of your judgments:<\/em> With this dizzying slip, from monologue to direct address, Liine arrives at something new, a fresh task: “Purge myself of Mom.” Beyond her problems with Tarmo, Liine has unfinished business with her family of origin. She has come to the right place for concluding that business. The family summer home holds many secrets. As Liine\u00a0 digs deeper into the history of the house and her family’s history in it, she finds that she must also lay those ghosts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Liine’s interior landscape contrasts with the universe of the woods around the bouse. This classic expressive contrast\u2014Thoreau, for one, famously relied on it\u2014is here refreshed as Pihelgas turns her attention to the details of the Estonian countryside, a place of nettles, marigolds, wasps, cranes, “veteran trees,” and above all, vast fields of waist-high cow parsley that approach the family cottage. Climate change threatens all of it. But the cow parsley continues to flourish. It always needs to be cut back, but because it belongs there, the procedure is more than a chore. It’s a ritual. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But there is more going on here than a drama of personal growth. Marshy and forested, Estonia is located north of Latvia on the Baltic. To its north is the Gulf of Finland, and to the east is Russia. In The Cut Line<\/em>, loud and disturbing military exercises are occurring on this latter border all the time, perpetually reminding Liine of historic threats that persist into the present and raising questions about how to live in the face of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To these question, Pihelgas suggests there are no simple answers. The novel bears an epigraph by the Argentine writer Ariana Harwicz who, like Pihelgas, holds violence as a central concern: “The reflection of the first knife \/ I ever dreamt of was in my hand again” (translated by Carolina Orloff). Restated less poetically, the point seems to be that people really can be haunted even by the boundaries they have needed to set for themselves, by all the hard decisions they’ve learned to make in order to save their own lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carolina Pihelgas<\/strong> is a prize-winning Estonian writer, poet, translator, and editor. In 2020, she was appointed Tartu\u2019s City Writer Laureate. The author of seven collections of poetry, she published her first novel Vaadates \u00f6\u00f6d<\/em> (Watching the Night<\/em>) in 2022. The short novel The Cut Line<\/em> is her second work of prose and her first work to be translated into English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Darcy Hurford<\/strong> translates from Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian into English. Originally from England, she is now based in Belgium, where she worked for more than a decade. She studied modern languages at the University of East Anglia and comparative literature at \u00c5bo Akademi University in Finland. Her translations have appeared in Asymptote<\/em> and Ellipse Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Diane Josefowicz<\/strong> is Reviews Editor at Necessary Fiction<\/em> and Senior Editor of Translation for The Adroit Journal<\/em>. Her second novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill<\/em>, was published by Soho Press in May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9278,"date":"2026-09-02T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9278"},"modified":"2026-08-31T09:54:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T13:54:05","slug":"the-last-straw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/stories\/the-last-straw\/","title":{"rendered":"The Last Straw"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \u201cYou\u2019re a corn stalk in a field of soybeans,\u201d he says. This, from a most vulnerable position, down on one knee, peering up at the cheer captain. In his open palm he\u2019s holding a Ring Pop. It\u2019s still in the packaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEw,\u201d she replies, with a sideways glance. By now a small end-of-the-day crowd has gathered around their lockers, which have been alphabetically contiguous three years running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Confusion rotates around his features like a slow pinwheel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI mean you stand out. Sure, you might look like the others now, but you\u2019ll shoot right past \u2018em. Will you go to prom with me?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fact that she, too, thought about him<\/em> amid the rush of teenage hormones was a secret she\u2019d been ready to take to the grave. There were rules. Her social stratum had the approval to date athletes\u2014mostly football players\u2014and maybe the occasional bad-boy druggie if they were known to share. Farm boys were out of the question. Social suicide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Instinctively, Jessica gives the crowd a shrewd once-over. Wolf-whistles. Kissing noises. Why did he have to make such a spectacle? It left her little choice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She studies the boy, bottom to top. Steel-toe Caterpillars. Wal-Mart jeans or worse. Camo windbreaker. Hat that says Born to Fish, Forced to Work<\/em>. A boy wider than tall. Country strong. And that face. Sincerity itself. Everything she was not, yet knew she would need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCan I think about it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her answer stuns the crowd into silence. This was not a \u2018no\u2019. And did girls have the power to send boys to the purgatory of \u2018maybe\u2019? This one did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But you\u2019d have thought Eddie had just won the Powerball. He smiles as wide as a pole barn, nods, and says: \u201cI\u2019ll leave you to your thinkin\u2019 then.\u201d With that, he stands up, pockets the candy, and shoulders his backpack in the direction of his F-150.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The next day, Eddie\u2019s the one to discover American Gothic<\/em> affixed to her locker door, his face and hers photoshopped over the pair. He\u2019s about to yank it down, but she instructs him to leave it up. That\u2019s when she unlatches her locker. It bursts open, a cornucopia of straw pouring out like water, a golden delta spreading across her Chelsea boots. She doesn\u2019t move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again, he\u2019s down on his knees, raking in thousands of bright straw stalks, mounding them in front of his own locker. He\u2019s especially careful uncovering the buttermilk suede of her boots, his calloused hands removing the chaff piece by piece. He does not risk an upward glance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All the while, she\u2019s watching him, her pastoral prize. She fingers the keys in her pocket, borrowed from her cheer coach, who\u2019d asked no questions about why she\u2019d need to get into the building so early.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The crowd begins to swell\u2014blinking, murmuring, pointing. She can hear it. The sea change. Public opinion swaying. Now this would be a match made in defiance. Now rules could be broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mark Abdon<\/strong> hails from Indianapolis, Indiana where he teaches Creative Writing at Indiana Wesleyan University. His stories are popping up in places like The Pinch Journal, The Offing, Catamaran, X-R-A-Y, Chautauqua<\/em> and others. He also reads for Harvard Review<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cYou\u2019re a corn stalk in a field of soybeans,\u201d he says. This, from a most vulnerable position, down on one knee, peering up at the cheer captain. In his open palm he\u2019s holding a Ring Pop. It\u2019s still in the packaging. \u201cEw,\u201d she replies, with a sideways glance. By now a small end-of-the-day crowd has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":9268,"date":"2026-09-01T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/?p=9268"},"modified":"2026-08-23T08:22:46","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T12:22:46","slug":"an-interview-with-chandra-grace-johner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/interviews\/an-interview-with-chandra-grace-johner\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with Chandra Grace Johner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n As a lover of the retelling of history to promote the female gaze and\/or reshape a less sexist heroine, and of travel writing in general, I picked up Chandra Grace Johner’s debut collection Naked in Turkey<\/a><\/em> (AOS Publishing<\/a>). Blending what is said to be fiction (though after talking to the author, I see some non-fiction elements) and fantasy, Johner has created the perfect companion to any solo trip to Eurasia as well as a wonderful \u201cwoman becoming\u201d collection. Prior to reading this fiction novel, I had only read Johner\u2019s poetry (I am a poet myself). I am always interested in an artist who writes across genres, so I reached out to Johner to pick her brain a bit about this book, what inspired her writing journey, and how she ended up Naked in Turkey<\/em>. +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rachel Turney:<\/strong> Tell us briefly about your collection, Naked in Turkey, which beautifully combines fiction and fable. What inspired you to bring those two ideas together?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chandra Grace Johner:<\/strong> This book began as two separate projects that merged into one. The first was a travel journal I intended to adapt into a collection of short non-fiction, or maybe autofiction, while the second was a collection of folktales from my travels. Eventually the collection of short pieces became a novel and as I began formal research on Turkish folklore, I discovered The Dede Korkut, a collection of tales regarded as the Turkish Brothers’ Grimm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Dede Korkut, which translates into \u201cthe scary grandfather\u201d, took me down the proverbial rabbit hole with the area\u2019s lore and mythology. The stories could be traced back hundreds of years with various origins throughout the Mediterranean and Asia. And as I peeled back each layer of each story, and of the tales I\u2019d recorded during my journeys, the layers of Naked in Turkey started to deposit themselves. Ultimately, the fiction project and the folklore project melded in my mind into this strange hybrid\u2013totally unlike anything I\u2019d originally planned, yet somehow exactly the story I needed to tell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> What do you hope readers will take from this collection? For me, I felt there were many elements designed for the empowerment of women, especially young women. <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> This is a book about stories: how they are shaped, by whom, and for what reason. It examines the stories of women as living things continually shifting based on perspective and power. We believe the stories we\u2019re told and none more so than the stories we\u2019re told about ourselves. My big ask of the audience is to at least revisit your own personal history and see where others authored your tale. Did their contributions serve you? Or does their version of your story serve them? How much could you gain by seizing control of your own narrative? You deserve to be the main character of your own life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I could take my ask one step further, I\u2019d implore everyone to revisit the narratives they have heard about women\u2013historically, politically, etc.\u2013and peel back the layers. Use the book as a map, if you will, and pick a place to begin to explore. Whether it’s Amazons or Ada of Caria, you\u2019ll be amazed at what you discover. And don\u2019t stop there. Look up Grace O\u2019Malley, Jeanne de Clisson, and Ching Shih, or dig into Kyoto University\u2019s work with the Onna-bushi of Senbon Matsubara. And while this story shares the journey of a woman who happily begins to figure all this out while young, it\u2019s never too late for anyone of any age to seize the pen and edit, re-write, and continue to write their own story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> What is your connection with Turkey? <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> In 2004\/2005, I lived in Izmir, Turkey with my husband. As he hadn\u2019t had the opportunity as a boy to travel much throughout his birth country, we spent a lot of time exploring wherever and whenever we could. It was a \u2018golden time\u2019 with a lot of adventures, misadventures, and really just the stuff for good living and great writing. We were able to travel the Dodecanese, as well, and it was a really magical time. I often look back and wonder in disbelief at some of the things that happened on those journeys.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was my first time outside of North America, and I was on my own a lot of the time once my husband started working, though we took regular sojourns when we could. As a fairly solitary creature by nature, I was very comfortable navigating this new world alone and it felt closer to home than home ever did, even though I could only ever be a perpetual outsider. It was a unique perspective and experience to have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> Given your background, the reader has to wonder how much of this book is actually based on real events vs. fiction. What can you reveal about that? <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> I don\u2019t want to reveal much about that. We often never know where the line between fiction and reality exists. That\u2019s the power of legend and lore. People\u2019s personal lore is no different. Some people will recognize certain aspects or events or people in the book as part of my personal lore, but then there is also a lot I never previously shared about my experiences, as well. I think it\u2019s best to leave it at that. I do appreciate that question though.<\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> Tell us about your interest in fable and storytelling. <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> I\u2019ve always considered myself a reader first and foremost. Fable informs and inspires a lot of what we read as children\u2013it certainly did for me. As you grow up, you expect to leave those stories behind, but as I continued to read, I kept travelling back to the fabular, to the fairytales, folktales, myths, and legends of childhood. They showed up in my favourite fantasy, horror, sci-fi, comic, manga, and literary stories. Whether those stories were on the page or on the screen, fable, folklore, and fairytale permeated the narratives and I felt compelled to get to the bottom of their prevalence and relevance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do we keep telling the same stories over and over? Maybe new generations need new iterations of old tales. Maybe sometimes it is that simple. But, more often, it is much more complex. Fable and storytelling are powerful rhetorical tools because they scratch a deep and universal itch in our brains. The deeper you go into the layers of storytelling, the more it becomes about who controls the prevailing version of the story and their intent. And more often than not, it is about the power of controlling belief. Nothing grates my nerves more than people saying literature, film, and television aren\u2019t political. Everything is. Language is political, story is political, and they can be used to influence our perceptions of others and of ourselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> What is your favorite piece of folklore included in the book? <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> A very difficult question. The tales in the book are so important to Avalyn\u2019s story. We can see similarities between her and these folkloric women, so they aid in suggestions of character and backstory. They feed into the emotions of the plot and Ava\u2019s progression of experiences, and much more. But I have to say it is ultimately the story of Ay\u015fe that shaped the idea of the book. I initially discovered Ay\u015fe while living in Turkey and immediately was drawn to her story. It was so different and compelling. I was told a much simpler version at that time, but would dream about her nonetheless. When I revisited Turkey in 2010, I came across the story again when visiting Bodrum and this version was much more elaborate. When I began my research on The Dede Korkut and other folkloric representations in Turkey, I looked extensively for retellings of her tale, but it was conspicuously absent for a story that seemed so well known in that part of the coast.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her story really strikes the core of what women\u2019s narratives are and can do. What if girls and women were told more stories like Ay\u015fe\u2019s? Stories that told them this is not how you merely survive, but thrive in a world that won\u2019t necessarily take care of you or extend any empathy when misfortune hits? Not just told to avoid storms, or skip sailing altogether and stay landlocked, but instead shown that it\u2019s possible to weather anything that comes their way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> If you could travel to another country and learn about their lore, where would it be? <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> Not just one!! But if I had to choose just one, I would pack my bags and head to Japan tomorrow. I\u2019m fascinated by their death lore, their monsters, spirits, and tricksters, and much more. I\u2019m a fan of how legends are told, as style and structure can vary greatly from the western tradition. Kish\u014dtenketsu is something I like to work with. It originated in folktales, fairytales, and legends, and is a four-act narrative structure that emphasizes development, contrast, and revelation over conflict.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n It unhinges the traditional western narrative structure in favour of prioritizing atmosphere and worldbuilding over problems and resolutions, focussing on emotional or philosophical shifts rather than battles or confrontations. Contrast is used to reframe tension, unlike western storytelling models that escalate tension, and harmony, revelation, and integration are valued over more traditional resolutions like victory and conquest. Kish\u014dtenketsu definitely informed the structure of Naked in Turkey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> You also work in poetry. Indeed, your book has many lines that read like poems. Any plans for a poetry collection in the future? <\/p>\n\n\n\n CGJ:<\/strong> I began assembling a collection last year, which was temporarily shelved so I could focus on completing the book last autumn. Folklore and fable figure largely in my poetry, as well, though the tone is generally darker than the optimism of the book. The optimism of my prose as a body of work tends to come from writing as an act of service, whereas the more pensive and often moody tone of my poetry tends to be a product of writing for my own self. So I\u2019ve always been surprised by how engaged readers and editors have been with it, and feel very fortunate that it resonates, because years ago, I never would\u2019ve conceived of publishing a collection. I look forward to getting back to it after focusing on the book and some other short fiction\/non-fiction projects for so long.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n RT:<\/strong> I am intrigued to see what you could bring to a poetry collection! I hope we see that book in the future too! Congratulations on your debut fiction book Naked in Turkey! <\/p>\n\n\n\n +++<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chandra Grace Johner<\/strong> is a Canadian writer who completed her MLitt in Creative Writing with the University of Glasgow. Her debut book, Naked in Turkey<\/em>, is available from AOS Publishing. You can find more of her work in FLEET, From Glasgow to Saturn, Sybil Journal, Livina Press, Midnight Ink,<\/em> and Feral<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n +<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rachel Turney, Ed.D.<\/strong> is an educator and artist located in Denver, Colorado. Rachel is on staff at Bare Back Magazine<\/em> and is a reader for The Los Angeles Review<\/em>. Rachel is a poetry mentor for AWP. She runs the popular online reading series Poetry (in Brief). Her debut book, Record Player Life (the b-side),<\/em> is available with The Poetry Lighthouse. Website: turneytalks.com<\/a> Instagram: @turneytalks<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a lover of the retelling of history to promote the female gaze and\/or reshape a less sexist heroine, and of travel writing in general, I picked up Chandra Grace Johner’s debut collection Naked in Turkey (AOS Publishing).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]![\"\"](\"https:\/\/necessaryfiction.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/9781953387653.jpg\")
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