Best Debut Short Stories 2023 by Sarah Lyn Rogers

Author:Sarah Lyn Rogers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646222094
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

Faire Holliday is a writer with roots in Oregon and Washington. She draws inspiration from the varied experiences she’s been able to have, from working at a free restaurant for people experiencing homelessness to interning at the World Health Organization. She is the 2022 winner of the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for fiction and is currently finishing her first novel.

Editor’s Note

At Driftwood Press, we’re particularly interested in the extreme compression demanded by the short length of our fiction. In only nine pages, Alfonseca’s short piece paints a family with dense specificity, a gripping voice, and colorful detail, all while utilizing an innovative structure that balances location, interiority, and time’s weathering with unconventional modulation and a poetic sensibility. It’s this poetic sensibility that we’re so often attracted to in Driftwood stories—fiction writers who, as Faulkner once said of himself, are “failed poets.” Alfonseca may not be a writer of poetry in the conventional sense, but she’s written poetry here. The language on display pops with rhythm, with energy, surety, and conviction: “My tongue too fat inside my mouth. Words too slick for my tongue . . . Two islands on my tongue. Two Islands on my tongue.” And yes, the ever-trenchant themes of American homogenization hit home here, hard: “I am now a girl from the U.S. and not the islands on my tongue.” / “. . . my grandmother’s one-bedroom American dream.” Dailihana E. Alfonseca is handling enough threads here for a nine-pager, right? Not quite; this is that extreme compression on display. She deftly uses magical realism to bind her ideas in the tight space she’s allotted herself. “Iguanas would climb into bed with us at night to whisper stories of our ancestors in our ears, messages all three of us needed to hear.” “Spanish Soap Operas Killed My Mother” is one such whispered story: one you’ll be whispering in your sleep, long after reading.

James McNulty, Co-Founder, Managing Fiction Editor

Driftwood Press

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