Author: Audrey Champelli

Categories
Issue 4 Nonfiction

Mouseblood

White crown floating by strings

In its early stages, this piece felt almost like three distinct parts crammed together even though it isn’t long enough to support that. The most helpful feedback I received was to compare those sections to find out what was making them feel different from each other and then to try to bridge those those gaps until it was one continuous story. We realized some of the divide was coming from the fact that most of the interesting creative stylistic choices about grammar and style were concentrated in the middle of the piece; incorporating those throughout helped with cohesion. Now, those stylistic choices build throughout the piece until you get to the end which ends with a kind of standalone poem.

Categories
Fiction Issue 4

Dream Sweet

Tea cup steaming on top of a table with a plant and computer next to it.

The piece is surrealist fiction, and there is a recurring theme of the narrator character looking at people and not being able to recognize their whole face. She looks at people and “catches an eye, an upper lip, maybe a smile line, but the whole picture never comes together.” In my original ending, the narrator looks at her mother and recognizes her whole face. Someone asked me what I’d think about carrying the facial blindness through to the end rather than neatly resolving that tension. This helped me think deeply about what my point was. It’s creative fiction writing so it doesn’t have a thesis or argument in the academic sense, but I do have a core idea/theme.