Chapter One I. At dawn, Mom says not to wake the others, but I don’t think anyone’s sleeping. We crouch beneath the low tarp shelter that’s tied to a fence post with the wire of someone’s earbuds. It is…
I go to churches because they’re quiet. The world is too loud. The first time I went, I was hiding. I’d been paying for a flat white at the café near my old office when my ex-fiancé and his…
Esther was sixteen the summer that all the bees in her father’s hives died. Those were the days when she was in love with everything. The curtains in her room, billowing with the morning breeze; the spongy hills leading…
In David’s previous life, he was a mad scientist. According to him, I was a lab rat. I’m chopping the remaining half of a watermelon and am more concerned about the ant infestation I had eliminated yesterday because I…
Content Warning—domestic abuse He likes to wear a cowboy hat when he fucks her. She is eighteen, wears her hair traditional—its length snaking down her athlete’s body, a body slowly giving way to womanly curves. She doesn’t know enough…
“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…
In the gathering dusk of an afternoon that still lingers, I followed my father into the woods. He had not prospered in his first attempt to start a nursery business, the crimson-budded azalea liners withering only days after he…
In Hollows, Tommy Dean’s first full-length flash fiction collection, the narrative lens captures everyday humans at a pivotal moment, where one decision will change everything. Three boys enter the woods carrying a gun. A divorced teacher borrows money from…
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
PROLOGUE: RANA Rana cannot speak. She’s eight years old, but Rana is incapable of yelling out to her sister that a smell—a smell not quite like gasoline spilling from the undercarriage of a rusted out four-wheeler, a smell darker…
In 2013, Bayou Corne, a nearly unknown area of South Louisiana, was met with one of the largest man-made ecological disasters at the time, and no one outside of the direct vicinity seemed to know or care. A salt cavern, created during injection mining in one of the state’s huge salt domes, failed. As a result, a sinkhole opened. Growing quickly, it swallowed land and life like a famished mouth. There are internet videos where you can watch whole trees, whole copses of trees, pulled down, down, down into the earth. Homes had to be evacuated. A whole town lost. Today the sinkhole spans roughly 37 acres, and is estimated to be 750 ft. deep.
This is how the first bits of my novel-in-progress, When We Drowned, appeared. I had never been to Bayou Corne, but it was only an hour or so away from where I lived at the time. I read one local news article about it, then another, watched YouTube videos, began to take notes. I became a little obsessed. I had questions, like when did the residents of Bayou Corne realize something was wrong? How scary was it? What do you do in the face of something like that? I once had lost everything to a natural disaster, too, but nothing so final.
Nothing so terrifying.
Most of my stories start the same way, with me reading the news. Rarely the national news, which is in many ways so impersonal. Instead the local news spurs my imagination, everyone in it could be someone I know, someone I love, could even be me. Reading the news is my first advice to writers. Get to know your world.
But this was different.
It terrified me. Like a horror movie.
I couldn’t approach the story the way I had been taught—through stark realism. I tried. But the sinkhole, the strangeness of a swirling swamp disappearing into itself, simply would not be contained.
It was just too weird. It felt better suited to something else.
Something I had been wanting to embrace for years, had skirted and flirted with in my stories, but had never fully leaned into.
It felt magically real.
I love “genre” literature, but I’ve been afraid to write it. In the same way I once tended not to write many Latinx characters for fear I would step too far from what seemed to define the “literary.” I also shied away from stepping over the boundary of strangeness. But for this story, it seemed impossible not to do so.
And if I was going to step over one boundary, I might as well step over many.
In writing, When We Drowned, I’m embracing my truest storytelling self. I am writing a story from the people of my homes, Miami and South Louisiana. I’m writing crime fiction. A thriller. Magical realism. This is grit lit with Southern Latinx characters and a mystery and a monster. Luli’s hallucinations are real. Anything at all can happen.
I’m still scared this mismatching will fail, but failure is simply not an option in writing. It is an inevitability of the process, and so one might as well take risks. It is the brave writers who catch our eyes; and it is those truest to their own vision, I believe, who catch our souls.
LEIGH CAMACHO ROURKS is a Cuban-American author from South Louisiana, who is an Assistant Professor at Beacon College in Central Florida. Her debut story collection, Moon Trees and Other Orphans, won the St. Lawrence Book Award. She is also the recipient of the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award and the Robert Watson Literary Review Prize, and her work has been shortlisted for several other awards. Her fiction, poems, and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Greensboro Review.
