Content Warnings—alcohol overdose, death Welcome to the Grocery Supreme Aptitude Test™. This test is divided into the following five sections: Commuting and Tardiness, Opening Duties, Product Management, Customer Service, and Long Answer Questions. A few important notes: You…
1. The first ghost I ever learn about is God, circa 1998, in a kindergarten classroom in Queens, New York. My parents have sent me to Catholic school not out of religious devotion, or some need for strictness, but…
In every story we are precocious, fast, little mothers, little women living in questionable child bodies. Men stalk the straps of our training bras sliding off our shoulders. Our mothers scold us for getting ruined or dirty—always reminding us of…
Ugly, ain’t it? The whole fuck of it. The way the doctor’s fingers patted the rim of skin on Mummy’s concave chest. The twin rims where she, Doctor Small Tits, had cut off Mummy’s two breasts, golden brown to…
Pik-Shuen Fung’s Ghost Forest was first a visual artwork that evolved into a manuscript, which then became her debut novel. The story is a lyrical and tender one written in vignettes about a daughter grieving her father. The unnamed…
Fan Jou Suri Served at the end of a meal, fan jou suri isn’t a dessert. Or, technically, a soup. But for my brother and me, youngsters living in Boston in the early 1960s, parents pinching every penny, fan…
Ages 17–19 Aging English Rockstar Who Threatened to SueHe tells you about his daughter between mouthfuls of dragon rolls, dabbing the truffle off his upper lip scruff with the corner of a napkin. He lost her to cancer before…
Last Cut All firsts. You let me drive. You let me choose the radio station. You rested your huge head against the headrest, closed your eyes. Never a willing passenger. Seventy-five quiet kilometres to the London Regional Palliative…
1. Ambigram In isolation, I mark time by the movement of sunlight across my walls and floors. I awake each morning to the desert sun blazing through the east-facing back door. The sun conspires with the automatic pool cleaner…
A woman in a spruce-blue tracksuit enters my bedroom with a pickax and chips a hole in my wall. She collects smooth, fist-sized rubies from between the studs and places them in a music box, ribboned with dark grain,…
My father and my friends helped me cobble together this narrative through paperwork and memories, and it was a very therapeutic and painful exercise for all of us. I deeply appreciate each person’s willingness to return to such a stressful time in our lives. The last three years have been blurry, and writing this piece felt like a constructive and appropriate way to actualize them, especially since the only real record I have of that confused time is my writing. None of it speaks to the emotional and cerebral cloudiness I experienced at the time, and I’m glad for that. It’s comforting to believe I was faking focus in at least one area of my life.
I never thought I’d talk about myself in the same breath as David Foster Wallace and Sylvia Plath, and I’m still embarrassed to have the nerve, but it’s true that a large number of my favorite authors have had electroconvulsive therapy after years of difficulties with their mental health. Their challenges include depression, psychotic disorders, and self-harm. Obsession with detail, too, and I’m far from the first one to believe that perfectionism is a symptom of being a writer, or maybe writing is a symptom of being a perfectionist.
I think fellow creators would agree that this sensitivity is both a blessing and a curse. I suspect that most of them would refuse to part with this attention to detail and ability to be moved, if given the opportunity. It’s part pride and part prerequisite, maybe. I love that about writing, even when it makes me feel vulnerable or interrupted.
After writing “Face, Velvet, Church, Daisy, Red,” I don’t think any creative nonfiction is “safe.” I have only written one other piece that falls in this genre, and even though it was an innocuous two-thousand words about my high school marching band, it made me feel terribly overexposed. Writing, for me, is partly about escapism, and creative nonfiction is its antithesis in several ways that involve a revisitation, stylization, or “dressing up and down” of reality. People who admit to factual honesty when they create open themselves up to a type of defenselessness that I find very courageous. I thank every writer who is willing to do this. The world is better for your candor.
MARILYN HOPE is a queer writer and visual artist who studied English literature at the University of Denver, where she was a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her watercolor and oil portraits were featured in Chapiteux’s 2016 Winter Solstice Art Showcase. In 2019, she received first place in the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize, and has recently completed a speculative fiction manuscript. She has work forthcoming in Mud Season Review.
