![]() ![]() ![]() Like her boyfriend Riley, she is devoted to cosplay. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The White Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Lunch Ticket, and The Feminist. Another is Paris Larkin, who longs for a superpower to "make herself visible" (10). In Nafissa Thompson-Spiress final story, Whisper to a scream, we meet Raina, a young black high school student who makes ASMR videos. Born and raised in Southern California, Nafissa Thompson-Spires earned a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois. Then, there is a visual artist Kevan, who is hundreds of miles away from the main action in the story, but would later draw images of Black men, like Riley and Brother Man, killed by police (8). Another Black man, referred to as Brother Man, "was burly but not violent and rather liked to regard himself as an intellectual in a misleading package" (4). One of the characters, a young Black man named Riley wears colored contacts and bleached hair, and, as we're informed by the narrator, "this wasn’t any kind of self-hatred thing” (1). The narrator takes the time to give us brief, in-depth takes on the movements, choices, and thoughts of four characters. In Nafissa Thompson-Spires's story “Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines, and No Apology," we are introduced to four characters whose individual stories intersect on a day that two of them are shot by police. ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() In the months following the Breaking Moon, a cold descended upon the world as if to numb it for the carnage of a burgeoning war. There is no record of the village referenced in this entry. From the journal of Jonah Lancroft, 1867 ![]() When this siege is over, there will be another. They come in from the forests to claim what they see as theirs. The wolves don’t give a damn about this village or about the hopes, dreams, families, or friends of its people. They move in, lapping up our scent, salivating at the prospect of separating limbs from our bodies. Perhaps they know, perhaps they don’t care that I am here. The wolves are coming in from the forests,circling the village that is under my protection. And the only possible outcome at the end of the ultimate war is total extinction. ![]() But power-mad traitors from the ranks of their own kind could doom humanity’s valiant efforts to survive. ![]() Skinners, partners, lovers, Paige Strobel and Cole Warnecki know Armageddon is at hand, and seek a union with the mysterious European blood hunters, the Gypsy Amriany, as a final, desperate means to preventing the monster apocalypse. The police and the military are helpless, and only the Skinners can forestall the tactical nuke strikes the Army has planned as a last resort. The human race is under siege-with shapeshifters, vampires, and half-blood werewolves freely prowling the streets of the world’s cities …and Full Bloods about to descend en masse from out of the dark wilderness. ![]() ![]() ![]() For me, the sentence length is effectively the length of breath that any piece of writing asks for. How does a writer go about using language and grammar to achieve a desired composite effect?Ĭhristian Kiefer: I think the easy answer here is by consciously reading with language and musicality in mind. I found it interesting how you articulated conditioning these components with the shape of prose itself. Of Lauren Groff’s writing, you say, “The style of her sentences … are the gears and wheels of her genius.” Often, when we talk about craft, we’re looking at aspects of the form-point of view, exposition, characterization. Photo by Christophe Chammartin.įWR: Let’s start with your pieces for Literary Hub, where you focus on grammar as craft. Norton), One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide (Nouvella Books), and Phantoms (Liveright/W.W. ![]() Christian Kiefer is the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ashland University and is the author of The Infinite Tides (Bloomsbury), The Animals (W.W. ![]() |