Magic lurks at the margins in the short story I’m releasing to my Patreon subscribers this month–the margins of society (a Rainbow Gathering), the margins of civilization (Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), and in the margins between day and night. “Hat Trick” is one of a series of linked stories I’ve been exploring over the last year that are built around a … Read More
The Story Behind the Story: Sunshine
Marrying your best friend is a beautiful thing. But within those words “till death do us part” is a hard truth: one of you will die first. And the other will be broken by it. There are people who postulate that the evolutionary purpose of stories is to prepare us for threats we have not yet faced. If so, stories … Read More
The Story Behind the Story: “Spin”
I wrote the first draft of this short story around 1999 and revised it innumerable times over the years. Though it got me into grad school, the story racked up at least twenty rejections and remained unpublished until 2013, when a young editor at Bayou Magazine named Robin Baudier told her superiors that she wouldn’t take on any other project until the magazine decided whether or … Read More
