I started boxing because of writing. I was working on a novel about young queer women being angry and boxing their way out of their small town. I needed terminology, so I went to a boxing training class. I…
Essay by April Yee • How do we reconstruct a self that has been erased? Whether the erasure is the result of forces macro (a police state) or micro (an abusive parent), what remains is the need to fill…
A girl is trained first and foremost to satiate and please, to induce salivation from: boys, men, priests, teachers, plumbers, fathers, brothers, dogs, occasionally horses. A girl is trained to survive others’ pleasures, others’ desires, her own saliva…
On the Big Island of Hawai‘i, Honokaa is the town tourists drive through to get to Waipi‘o Valley. At the top of the valley is a scenic overlook, which provides an unobstructed view to the black sand beach, river,…
By Mark David Kaufman • James Joyce once observed that he had included so many “enigmas and puzzles” in Ulysses that professors would be preoccupied with the book “for centuries”—an effective way, he added, of “insuring one’s immortality.” Such…
A woman in a spruce-blue tracksuit enters my bedroom with a pickax and chips a hole in my wall. She collects smooth, fist-sized rubies from between the studs and places them in a music box, ribboned with dark grain,…
There are mornings we just manage it. We rise in the weak gray light and take our coffee with our notebooks open. A sliver of meditative silence. Are you writing about me? you ask. No, I lie. Are you…
7. And They Lived Happily Ever After Every day, her father begins with the end. He draws out their meetings like he is Scheherazade, and Death the king. It’s so transparent, but June simply holds her iPhone out. Recording.…
I can’t recall why I first picked up the old hardback copy of Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories at the Akron Public Library. The cover was creased, the color of chimney smoke, speckled with sticky black dots and abrading at…
At the time, she was Xandra. The decapitated torso of Alexandra. Her given name was Mary, but do you see Marys anywhere but behind the fluorescent Market Basket checkout, looking depressed and forty? September, seventh grade, the Latin teacher…
I set out to write a magical story about Slenderman, and then I turned Slenderman into a wolf, and somehow the story ended with no Slenderman, barely any wolves, and no magic. I begin most my failed stories with the earnest hope they will become absurdist and magical and good. Most of them are the former, but never the latter. I want to write magical stories the way my middle school self wanted to find a gilded pendent in the forest. Despite the generalized nomenclature, I think a lot of “wolf girls” and “horse girls” are all seeking a sort of supreme individualism that comes with being a main character. Certainly, middle school me is guilty of this. Like the characters, I spent a good amount of sixth grade recess weaving a “wolf brothers” story with the only friend I had. Most of these scribbles are lost to the wheel of time, so it remains in my memory an epic that could rival Christopher Paolini’s Eragon. But either way the die had been cast: I wanted to be a writer. And what better way to immortalize my wolf brothers past with a cool bit of magical wolf fiction?
So, in the first draft the girls run all the way to Alaska, summon Slender-wolfman and end up dueling or something—it got messy. In the next iteration, Maeve dies and comes back as Xandra’s dog when she’s a recent college graduate. In another draft they fend off a hermit. Eventually I toned it all down, but at the very end, their wild suffering is rewarded by the sight of a huge black wolf atop a vista… but somehow, even a somber yet wise wolf didn’t feel narratively satisfying. I knew something had to happen in those woods, something that would make them not come back the same. Eventually I realized that besides the very dramatic, the worst outcome for two girls looking for a storied adventure is nothing at all. And so, we were left with no magic and no wolves, but our characters confronting that the world is what you see.
I hear a lot that writing is an escape—it was in middle school and it’s certainly an escape now. And in middle school, my wolf epic was certainly an escape from the mundane. But especially after grad school, writing became less of an escape (I mean, ideally it’s a career at this point) and more of a confrontation. This confrontation really crystalized when I moved across the country during the pandemic to help sell my childhood home, to sort (and burn) relics of my wolf girl stage. Why was middle school so particularly awful? Why were all my female friendships, but especially this middle school friendship, so weirdly charged? Why did I stop talking to my friend from sixth grade? And now, looking back on this story, I have to add one more to the list—why do I want my fiction to be magical?
ALLIE DOKUS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Before that, she was a Sandwich Artist at Subway. Now she lives in Massachusetts and is working on a novel inspired by Dance Moms.
