Tag: Voice

Graftings by Stella Lei

By Stella Lei | Fiction, Short Stories | March 4, 2022

alt text: image is a color photograph of a peeled orange; title card for Stella Lei's short story "Graftings"

Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…

And a Single Day by Randy William Santiago

By Randy William Santiago | Fiction, Short Stories | February 18, 2022

We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…

Interview: Lan Samantha Chang

By Guest Author | Interviews, Books, Classroom | February 1, 2022

alt text: image is the book cover to Lan Samantha Chang's novel THE FAMILY CHAO that features a black backdrop with red font; title card for an interview of Chang by Candace Walsh

In The Family Chao, publishing today from W. W. Norton, Lan Samantha Chang presents a contemporary Midwestern family in fascinating crisis. I was fortunate to work with Sam in 2018 during the final semester of my MFA studies at…

Interview: Randon Billings Noble

By Guest Author | Interviews, Books, Classroom | January 18, 2022

As a writer and professor, I am often on the lookout for books on craft to expand my thinking when I write and to expand my explanatory powers when I teach. A new anthology edited by Randon Billings Noble…

When We Drowned by Leigh Camacho Rourks

By Leigh Camacho Rourks | Fiction, Excerpt | December 3, 2021

PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…

Contingencies by Susan Perabo

By Susan Perabo | Flash Fiction, Fiction | November 12, 2021

This is what you do if he wakes up sad. This is what you do if he comes home angry. This is what you do if he stops taking his medication. This is what you do if he stays…

Interview: Robert Lopez

By Guest Author | Interviews, Books, Classroom | October 12, 2021

Robert Lopez’s fiction delves deep into those devastating moments which bring into question how it is we survive this strange, oftentimes volatile, experiment we call life. His characters are real people with real problems, many of them confused as…

The Night He Said I Love You by K.C. Mead-Brewer

By K.C. Mead-Brewer | Fiction, Short Stories | August 20, 2021

Shelly died first. Some combination of tuberculosis and an ancient family curse. Then her ghost killed Dan, strangled him with his own bed-curtains. They both agreed to leave Good Boy alive—the game is Ghost Children, not Ghost Dogs. Shelly…

Daughter by Isha Karki

By Isha Karki | Fiction, Short Stories | June 25, 2021

The day you killed your mother, you wished your father dead. A whole life of could-bes glittered in your mind. A beauty parlour for your mother, reams of thread and pots of sticky wax. A lunchbox business, stacks of…

Wolf Girls by Allie Dokus

By Allie Dokus | Fiction, Short Stories | May 28, 2021

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…

Author’s Note

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.