I first came across Kirsty Logan when I read her debut collectionThe Rental Heart, a queer reimagining of fairy tales, and have devoured all her stories full of magic and queer women. In A Portable Shelter Logan cleverly links her short stories through a framing narrative, a Scheherazade-like tale of two women, Liska and Ruth, who take turns telling stories in secret to their child growing inside Ruth. There are stories of selkies and fisherman of lighthouses and witches but it is the final story that I have never been able to forget. The premise is a sort of support group for people who see ghosts of loved ones and who want to disprove their existence. It’s a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of what it’s like to grieve and the role that death plays in the lives of the living. Logan writes, “If no one ever died, maybe we would never learn what it meant to miss them.” That this is the last story in the collection is fitting, a death to balance Ruth and Liska new baby, a poignant reminder to question how much we can prepare our loved ones for the harsher realities of the world. What portable shelters can we carry with us as protection? How safe can you make the world? How much of death do you need to know to truly live?
Collected in A Portable Shelter, Vintage, 2015
