Hi y’all,

My (very) short story “The Gift of Her Light” recently came out in Podcastle (audio and text). It’s part of a double episode, so it comes after “How I Did Not Make Friends With Teniel eu Letxie” by Bree Wernicke (which I really liked and which is my short story rec for this newsletter: it gave me a residual ache remniscent of college parties where I entered the identity-torment-nexus as I explained that I didn’t speak Spanish to people—in a good way).

“The Gift of Her Light” is a story that my beloved writing group would probably say is a very typical AnaMaria story. After all my moaning last month about how I didn’t know why or how I wrote those stories (“The Glass City” and “The Voice and Her Knife”), this one was pretty simple: I found a concept I thought was interesting and built on top of it. It’s a very short story (around 1400 words), so it didn’t need too much building.

What’s interesting to me about this story as an artifact of my process (the story itself is of course very interesting, and you should all go read it right now before I go on and on about writing) is the way it reveals my quick solutions, the elements that I tend to draw on when I’m focusing on a different part of the story. I needed a base character relationship: I picked a female friendship with homoromantic undertones in which the POV character is insecure about her role and her importance to her friend. I needed a setting where lighting mattered a lot: I chose the stage. Were these the right answers? Sure—it’s a good story. But were these the easy answers for me in that moment? Yes, definitely.

The whole story is about seeing, being seen, trying to see yourself, trying to know yourself and who you are to others. That’s part of why I write; my stories are the mirror I hold up to myself, the way I find where my preoccupations lie. I like being able to see what’s shifted over the last few years and what’s stayed the same. I’m excited to see what I draw on in the stories I’m writing now and what they’ll say to me about me when I eventually get around to revising and submitting them.

I hope you enjoy the story.

Love,

AnaMaria