Prologue I must begin by telling you that I am Black. This is a very strange thing to have to say out loud. It is usually something self-evident that goes without saying. But my light skin and blur of…
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
I hold the things I need in my arms. Since the pandemic, I don’t use a basket. Today, I’m cradling a bottle of Advil gel caps, blue mascara, and a ginger lemon kombucha. Customer service associate needed in the…
/fjuːɡ/ noun A piece of music popularized during the Baroque period in which a primary melody, or subject, is introduced by one voice, then systematically passed to and developed between others in a polyphonic, intertwined texture. 1. Subject…
In celebration of the inaugural Novelette Print Prize, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponded via email with Guest Judge Hanna Pylväinen, author of The End of Drum-Time. In the resulting interview below, they discuss choosing point of view, honoring…
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” —Alasdair MacIntyre No one would talk. It was as…
After three gin martinis, my mother-in-law spits out her teeth. “You’re a cannonball with a credit card,” she hisses. Her dentures glisten like pearls in her palm. Never, she likes to remind me, did she foresee her sweet son…
1. When my mother first came to the United States in the 1970s, she was disappointed by the treeless tenements my father brought her to. She had grown up on a bustling island beach in what was then called…
The approach I use in this essay does not come naturally to me, though telling one’s story through the lens of books, film, and music is immensely popular and effective. The inherent appeal of the method for writers is the legwork it does: readers either love or hate the book or film, or at least they have heard of it. Instant, if contingent, interest.
In my view, however, this perk never compensates for the heavy lifting of explaining not only how the art impacted me, but also how that art may reflect a broader reality. I, like every writer I suspect, make sense of my world through the media I consume. For me, translating that meaning has been difficult. In this case, the film finally allowed me to parse what has been so elusive, what has taken half a lifetime to evoke: how I, like daughters everywhere and all the time, am finishing my mother’s story.
Long before this conclusion, The Exorcist was a symbol for me. The story spoke to me with its iconic setting in my city of birth (I was born in Georgetown Hospital because it was the only place that would accept my mother without health insurance) as well as its petrifying religiosity (if god, I realized as a child in Sunday school, then also the devil). To later construct my mother’s experience of the film as part of a larger phenomenon, specific to a historical moment she mirrored and in which she was embedded, was a thrill, but it was also a late conclusion drawn from research; I didn’t know the connection was there. I had long wanted to write about my mother and the film, long before I knew there was anything there between them. Writing this essay felt like a kind of reverse engineering then. A conjuring.
A. SANDOSHARAJ’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Millions, Literary Hub, The Massachusetts Review, American Literary Review, Southeast Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and others. She has an MFA from The Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of Maryland, and currently teaches writing at Georgetown University. She also has two dogs and an unused motorcycle license. Find her on Instagram at @alissandosharaj.
