This story is populated; the blurred street lights and indiscernible store fronts viewed from a taxi with a talkative and somewhat mysterious driver. Greenwell’s sentences bustle along with the atmosphere of a street protest and flashbacks of a first encounter with a former student, who the narrator finds an unlikely kinship with. I love Greenwell’s structure and style, the seamless and lyrical syntax set within lushish paragraphs. I don’t recall how I arrived at Greenwell’s work, but I do remember seeing a piece in One Story many years ago, ‘The Frog King,’ the title piquing my interest. Perhaps that is what stayed with me, the title and mystery of its contents. As I was completing edits for my debut story collection and frantically writing a new story to round out the collection at the suggestion of my editor this story, or chapter, entered my life. I had been searching for a form to harness the new voice that I was investigating, a voice and form that would propel me beyond the collection I was finishing, and which showed me the futurity of my work and practice.
First published in The Sewanee Review, Fall 2019, and available to read here. Collected in Cleanness, FSG 2020
A Personal Anthology 