A thing I know I need to work on in my own writing is warmth. It’s not to say that I’m not an emotive writer or not capable of deep emotion in my work, but that stuff takes work for me whereas the ideas stuff—the structure, the setting, the plot—spills out of me with gleeful speed. When I need to remember how to tap into the heart of emotions, I return to Marie-Helene Bertino’s work because she is so good at doing both the ideas stuff and the feelings stuff. Her latest novel Beautyland is an exceptionally good example of that but her short fiction is so weird and funny and loving towards its characters and its worlds that I always find my writing stronger for having revisited her prose. Plus, this one is a great example of how to do genre stuff (vampire story!) in new and exciting ways that might even convince non-genre readers to read it.
First published in The Bennington Review, 2023. Read it online here
A Personal Anthology 