Cosmobiological: Stories

My first book of short stories forthcoming from Sundress Publications spring 2021

I won the 2020 Prose and Short Story contest held by Sundress Publications.

Every story, told on a long enough timescale, will eventually be co-opted. How many Rotkäppchens have had her plan sanitized (to use urine to distract and confuse the Wolf in order to escape), and eventually devolve into being rescued by a Woodsman? I am interested in asking who has been retelling these tales, and for what end? In her essay, “Renaming Blame: Full Moon in Scorpio,” Chani Nicholas says, “Anything suppressed gathers the energy it takes for it to be withheld. Anything suppressed actually becomes stronger, perhaps in a disfigured, near unrecognizable way.” The stories collected in Cosmobiological are not “fractured fairytales,” nor are they the lush and deadly remixes of Angela Carter. Using the storytelling techniques of fairytales, such as repetition and the investigation of one’s expectations, I aim to create modern mythologies that illustrate the human condition, and yet do not simultaneously suppress women’s inherent power; but, instead, celebrate it.

From the press release:

Of this collection, judge Saba Razvi, author of Heliophobia and In the Crocodile Gardens, says, ”The stories in COSMOBIOLOGICAL celebrate the resilience of the human spirit and the tricky net of narrative structures that connect us to each other and to the inexplicable realities of a world sometimes unreal its expression. Just as our mythologies remind us that energy is reshaped in the universe in unexpected ways, the energies of these multidimensional characters and their refractory worlds ricochet and resonate like cosmic blooms, reminding us that what is broken can sometimes still cut with the jagged edge of beauty even after the breaking.”