By Katy Scarlett • In 1979, Rosalind Krauss published her now-famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which explored how new forms of three-dimensional art-making borrowed from sculpture, monument, architecture, interior and landscape design. She writes, “as the 1960s began…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
Elvia Wilk’s nonfiction debut, Death by Landscape (out July 19, 2022, via Soft Skull Press), investigates how we might displace human-centered narratives. Through literary immersion, research into spectral encounters and virtual reality, reflections on her own physicality, and first-person…
In The Witch Hare, a witch’s familiar—a curious young hare—goes on a globe-hopping journey to help her sad companion learn to live life to the fullest again. As the hare ventures out to seek adventure, she shows the witch…
In Hollows, Tommy Dean’s first full-length flash fiction collection, the narrative lens captures everyday humans at a pivotal moment, where one decision will change everything. Three boys enter the woods carrying a gun. A divorced teacher borrows money from…
The nature center has five baby sea turtles, each in their own 20-gallon saltwater tank. When I see them for the first time, I have to fight the impulse to plunge my hand into the water and scoop one…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…
January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…
Riding the night streets wrapped in our tight young skin, brave-stupid and untamed, magic bursting from our pores like new stars. We met under the sign of the flying horse, the vacant shell of an old gas station, our…
My grandfather was murdered in his hardware store early one spring morning. It was a few weeks before high school graduation, and I’d been out with my friends drinking beer and cruising Main the night before.
We lived in a tiny farm town in the middle of nowhere. Murder was something that happened on television, not in our town, not to people we knew. It was shocking, as I imagine most murders are. Beyond the disbelief and anguish, my family also had to reconcile the gruesome nature of his death—he was stabbed almost fifty times by an unknown assailant.
Forty years later, I struggle to write about it. Time hasn’t diminished my emotions; they’re still too raw. My drafts bounced between extremes, lurching from melodramatic clichés to clinical, distancing phrases that never captured even a hint of what I’d hoped to convey.
My (eventual) solution was to view the writing from an alternate standpoint. I’ve always felt at home in the realms of science fiction and fantasy, and I participated in a workshop on speculative memoir a few years ago. Why not borrow speculative imagery, reframe my memories in a fantastical setting?
This shift in perspective changed everything. It gave me distance from the overwhelming emotions, and permission to explore my questions from a more comfortable vantage.
The mythology of the Wild Hunt was the first thing that came to mind when remembering my teenage friends and our pregraduation antics, how we’d paraded through town, and that uncanny fog (another thing we’d only ever seen on TV). Like participants in the Hunt, we fancied ourselves to be a bit sinister, unafraid and invincible, the fiercest, coolest creatures in existence. In fantasy language, we were the Unseelie Court trooping to battle, a Faery procession on the spring hunt. That night, we were teenage magic.
Shifting into this fabulist mindset didn’t magically ease the trauma, but it did help me place the opening sentences on paper, in language that felt more true to me than any of my previous drafts. And it conjured a new question: what did my grandfather think of the fog? Did it bring him a moment of wonder? I hope so. Maybe that magic is the last thing he and I shared.
I decided this new image is the one I want to hold onto. And with that decision, the final lines of the story fell into place.
MYNA CHANG’s work has been selected for Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), Best Small Fictions, Fractured Lit, X-R-A-Y, and Barren Magazine, among others. She has won the Lascaux Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the New Millennium Writing Award in Flash Fiction. Find her online @MynaChang.
