I was really happy to hear my honors student Gracie Garrett read from, and talk about, some of the thoroughly unsettling short stories that she's written for her honors dissertation in English: she toggles between realism and what she calls "environmental surrealism" - in the spirit of Karen Russell, so far as writerly influence goes, but also very much prompted by Ron Nixon's theory of "slow violence." For she writes about the natural world gone askew: morphing; decaying; combusting; turning up in the wrong places. One never quite knows whether she's writing about hallucination; or invention and imagination; or, most scary of all to contemplate, a kind of future reality. Conceptually, she's driven by the question of how - in the frame of a short story - one might narrate "slow violence:" the dispersed effects and slow accretion of environmental damage.
Or, to put it another way, it's been great to be fed a bunch of brand new short stories; read them - comment on them, yes, but it's been a whole lot of fun.
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