The Gateway by Kathy Fish
John and Lara’s daughter had up and married a perfect stranger. She’d met the fellow at a gallery opening only two weeks before. The nuptials had taken place in a courthouse. On the phone Liza told them sure, of…
John and Lara’s daughter had up and married a perfect stranger. She’d met the fellow at a gallery opening only two weeks before. The nuptials had taken place in a courthouse. On the phone Liza told them sure, of…
Jennifer duBois’s latest novel, The Last Language, published this month with Milkweed Editions, explores the ethically precarious choices of Angela, a promising linguist and young mother who’s lost everything: her husband, her second pregnancy, and her place in a…
When the night was over, and everyone else had gone, Cillian took me to an Irish bar, scratched the small of my back, and told me his theory of everything. He told me political polarization was related to wave…
In dreams at the backs of my eyelids, I was still twelve years old traveling in a car luminous with anger. I could feel the slow braking as we turned onto the county highway. I could see the horizon…
In this new interview, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponds with Laura Spence-Ash, author of one of this year’s most-anticipated debut novels, Beyond That, the Sea. Spence-Ash is also a former editor and cofounder of CRAFT, and we’re thrilled…
Set alternately in Yerevan, Armenia, and Queens, New York, Nancy Agabian’s novel The Fear of Large and Small Nations is a beautifully crafted interweaving of third-person storytelling with first-person metawriting and journaling. The main character is Na, a young…
Excerpted from Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading By Joan Frank • What is it, finally, about letters? Why does this old-fashioned form, even maimed and shrunken, volleyed mostly through ether…
She said she wanted me to meet her parents up in Squamish the week after I came back and that if I wanted to die it would be okay, but only after I meet her parents. So we drove…
just before dawn I. It started in the daytime, my sister says, I remember the light. We were watching TV. Mama and Baba were in their room, asleep. We heard noises that sounded like fireworks. It happened at…
Content Warnings—alcohol overdose, death Welcome to the Grocery Supreme Aptitude Test™. This test is divided into the following five sections: Commuting and Tardiness, Opening Duties, Product Management, Customer Service, and Long Answer Questions. A few important notes: You…
For several years I have been interested in taking everyday forms—grocery lists, posters, tests—and making stories out of them. In part, the inspiration for “The Ghost of Amy Winehouse” came from helping a student study for and take job aptitude tests for entry-level service industry jobs. The questions were absurd and seemed deeply unrelated to the work. I wondered about the people who wrote these tests and who, if anyone, reviewed them.
I am not someone who makes outlines. I have to muddle my way through. Over the course of a few drafts, the point of view, the format of the test, and the way the characters related to each other changed. Amid all these changes, the ghost was always the ghost of Amy Winehouse. I can’t put my finger on why—it just seemed right.
I wanted the structure of this story to mirror the claustrophobia I had felt while working as a server. In public-facing jobs, you always have to be “on”—no matter what is happening around you. Sometimes I look back on the years I spent working in restaurants and am amazed I held out for so long. Of all the fields I have worked in—publishing, teaching, and development—customer service was the most challenging. However, I didn’t want to solely focus on the misery and hardship of the characters in this story. I wanted to include moments of humour and tenderness because when I was a server my life was just as complex as it is now—with just as many joys and heartbreaks. The only difference is now when I tell people what I do for work they don’t ask me when I’ll get “a real job.”
JASMINE RUFF is a queer writer living on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published in The Ex-Puritan, just femme and dandy, and elsewhere. When not writing, you can find her scouring thrift stores for pottery and drinking bubble tea. Find her on Instagram @jasmineruff411.