while we yellowed in the pale strobes
rumors began to arrive
of a wide floor blown open
...
"I tell Rudy that we really really need a new mattress and watch his mouth twist—he's never thrilled about buying anything, much less a mattress that might take as long to pay off as a new car. The old one was supposed to last twenty years, and Rudy's hell-bent on getting every last night. But honeybun, my aching back and the yellowing receipt agree: the twenty years are up."
—from "I Don't Need It, I Just Want It," Volume 64, Issue 3 (Fall 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Like most writers, I’ve been at it a lifetime, but the first consequential work I produced came when a high school teacher assigned Light in August and then asked us to write in a Faulknerian voice. I don...
"Caught between Sister Eustace’s fingers, my ear is close to ripping off as she drags me through the schoolhouse and toward the steps that lead to the Mother Superior’s room. This is the only part of the morning that hasn’t gone to plan. I focus on the comforting weight of the silver dinner knife tucked into the waistband of my skirt. Its cold length digs against my hip bone and reassures me. My trip upstairs won’t end like the others. All those girls who have gone before me. I will come back down. I will slay the monster waiting up there. I will kill the Mother Superior, ear or no ear."
—from "Mother Tongue" by D.K. Lawhorn, Volume 64, Issue 3 (Fall 2023)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote...
There is thought behind those eyes, said my head
when it saw itself in the Polaroid held in my hand.
My face was being eaten by the glow that dissolved
my forehead into a luminous window because I was
overexposed. This is no metaphor.
—From "Exposure," Volume 64, Issue 2 (Summer 2023)
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My poetic family tree would definitely have a Polish branch, where Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert would roost, with dark jackets and glinting eyes and the intelligence of crows. And there would be a dusty evergreen Portuguese branch where José Saramago & Fernando Pessoa would settle into the dusk. And I've always loved Borges and Simic, too.
...
Chaya Bhuvaneswar: Tell us the journey of how you came to write the stories in this wonderful, unsettling collection. Were there some that came quickly and others that took more time?
Vauhini Vara: For me, everything I write feels like a living document, up until the time it's published in a book, and I’m no longer allowed to change it. I love going back into the same pieces over and over, getting them closer to what they’re meant to be. I began writing about half of these stories in 2008, when I entered graduate school. At the time, I didn’t conceive of them as belonging to a collection because I was just starting out as a writer. The revision process was really long—ten to fifteen years—for all of the stories I...
Front Cover by Tariku Shiferaw
King Kunta (Kendrick Lamar)
