Hybrid Interview: Claire Oshetsky
Essay by Cavar Sarah • I have never understood the fear of birds. “Because they are so far from us,” I am told by well-meaning humans. “Because we lack ways to tell what they are feeling.” I try to…
Essay by Cavar Sarah • I have never understood the fear of birds. “Because they are so far from us,” I am told by well-meaning humans. “Because we lack ways to tell what they are feeling.” I try to…
When my widowed father was the age I am now, he married a woman the age I was then. The thirty-year difference didn’t bother his friends, though some objected to his haste, claiming he had but transferred my mother’s…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
“The 2024 election will be all about Taiwan,” our boyfriend, Jeremy, says. We’ve turned off all the lights except the one over the stove in the attached kitchen, and now we’re getting high on the plaid sofa in the…
The editors at CRAFT are thrilled to welcome Amelia Gray as the guest judge of our 2022 Amelia Gray 2K Contest, which is open to microfiction, flash fiction, and prose poetry pieces under two thousand words. Gray is a…
In the winter of 2014, Sadaf Ferdowsi took a creative nonfiction class taught by Dr. Sarah Fay. A longtime contributor at The Paris Review, Fay taught her the interview form while instilling a healthy suspicion on the limits of…
“The human life is individual; it is not unique.” —Bee Yang, via Kao Kalia Yang “There are two types of people in the world: them who have and them who will.” —Dad By Karen Babine • Over the years,…
Consider the personal effects one leaves behind, the way those objects, once laid out, recall the idiosyncratic logic of a life—is there more compelling inspiration for a novel? Authors Coco Picard and Sue Mell met through the BookEnds SUNY…
1. I’m on the 7 train on my way to Manhattan from Queens. My AirPods blast Cardi B’s “I Like It” as I squeeze my way through the crowded car, not liking the pushing and the pulling as I…
This final girl is fleeing like all the others, flinging open the front door of a small suburban house. This final girl is screaming, long hair streaming, all torn T-shirt and superficial injuries and sudden athletic desperation. But something…
The “final girl” has attained a certain pop culture celebrity status in the last few years, ironically referred to in films and on TV, and even referenced in songs like “Final Girl” by Chvrches. And writers like Meghan Phillips, in her final girl microfictions, and Cathy Ulrich, in her stories about murdered girls, have also sought to explore the gender and cultural implications of the final girl and the fact or lack of her agency and personhood. I’ve been loving all of this discussion, and how so much of it circles back around and references older final girl tropes from fairy tales and stories.
But I hadn’t seen anything written about final women—about the implications of an older woman, with power, with knowledge, and with the loss of a certain stereotypical desirability—playing that role. How it sort of turns the tables, culturally speaking. Violence against women has so much to do with power, with frustrated desire—and what if those things were missing? What if women’s sheer disgust, the kind of “give no fucks” that comes with age, could be protective? This is a fantasy, too, of course, but I thought it would be fun to play with in fiction—and to be in conversation with Megan and Cathy and all the writers and artists doing really interesting work inverting the tropes of violence against women, giving women a certain power and voice back, giving women a backstory.
Plus, it was just fun to write.
AMBER SPARKS is the author of three short story collections, the most recent of which is And I Do Not Forgive You: Revenges and Other Stories. Her fiction, essays, and criticism have been published widely and she’s currently working on a novel, a book of essays, and yet another short story collection. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and two cats. Find Amber on Twitter @ambernoelle.