I Jacob has been dead for years. Your partner, a seven-foot giant with a raucous laugh and freckled, sun-burned skin. The man who adored classical music and quoted Dickens with a British accent. Who bore, without a grudge, your…
As a fiction writer, I’m fascinated with the concept of time, how we can stretch minutes or shrink years. An entire life can fit into a handful of pages while a single day can comprise a novel. When I was a graduate student at Radford University, I took a class on Native American literature, where we often discussed that time in tribal religions was not sequential or linear; instead, it was presented as layered reality—past, present, and future existed simultaneously, woven together in a story quilt.
I imagine that all great literary works dwell in the realm of timelessness. We find them deeply gratifying and effective, having read and reread them at different ages. Not only do such tales focus on certain historical moments, they also manage to encompass eons by transporting us back and forth through millennia. Like Dickens’s ghosts, they allow us to glimpse our true selves during various stages of our life journeys—who we were, who we are, or who we might become. Such stories are never static; they defy gravity, reshaped and transformed with each experience that recontextualizes them, which is why homages to literary masterpieces have always been so popular. Each homage is a pilgrimage of reverence but also delight. We relearn and reimagine, re-examine and retell; the original story is a pristine mirror held against the other creations it has inspired.
As an immigrant writer, I live in the past, bridging the realities of my existence with fictional narratives. I must connect my younger self to the one who’s been living in America for thirty years. Like the Scrooge character, I must face the past and confront the present for the sake of the future. While Dickens’s Scrooge is an old, wretched miser who despises every joy life has to offer, my protagonist is a middle-aged man, who is lonely and confused, struggling with grief, haunted by the loss of both his father and his beloved partner. The mother is a loud, forceful woman, who dominates her son’s life in many obvious and implied ways. Yet, she’s also sincere in her hurt and her care, and the moment of tenderness between them at the end of the story is the only truth they have salvaged from the past, which affords them some kind of future.
It is hard to talk about the war in Ukraine; it’s even harder to write about it. But that’s what literary fiction does best—resists the injustices and bares the heartache, scavenges for beauty amidst the ruins, exposes wounds while attempting to heal them. Like the main character, I have Ukrainian friends whose families remain in their war-ravaged country, unable to leave. This story is for them. I have Russian friends, whose grown-up children fled their barbaric motherland because they refused to kill, to torture, to plunder. This story is for them. I have several dear friends who lost their spouses or parents to illness, giving up on hope and love. This story is for them.
During the third visitation, crawling through the snow, my protagonist glimpses a tombstone with his mother’s name but no date. “When?” he asks the Ghost. “How soon?” I now know the answer. My fierce, righteous, indefatigable mother died last January, during a blizzard. This story is for her.
KRISTINA GORCHEVA-NEWBERRY was born and raised in the Soviet Union before moving to the US. in 1995. She’s published over fifty stories and received eleven Pushcart Prize nominations, as well as four special mentions in the Pushcart Prize Anthologies. Her work appeared in Zyzzyva, Subtropics, Zoetrope: All Story, Joyland, LitHub, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Gorcheva-Newberry is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams Scholarship and the Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in Fiction from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the 2026 Shane Stevens Fellowship in Fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, was awarded the 2021 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was a finalist for the 2023 Chautauqua Prize and was picked by the New York Post as one of the best books of the year. It has been translated into many languages. Find her on Facebook at kristina.gorchevanewberry, Instagram @gorchevanewberry, and X @kgnewberry.
