For two years she turned out stuff nobody wanted. Since then six of her stories have appeared in literary journals and the feminist press, Inanna, has published her story collection, Silent Girl.She’s earned less in six years as a writer than she did in two weeks as a business exec. It just feels like more.
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Available NowSilent Girl takes us into the remarkable and poignant lives of fictional daughters, sisters, friends, lovers, wives, and mothers through a story collection inspired by Shakespeare’s plays. Set in twentieth and twenty-first century Canada, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand and the United States, these insightful stories portray girls and women dealing with a range of contemporary issues such as racism, social isolation, sexual slavery, kidnapping, violence, family dynamics and the fluid boundaries of gender.
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From “Who Should Be Waiting,” The New Quarterly, Fall/04
Dorian was quiet at the dinner table. Watching him clutch knife and fork as though playing the cello badly, she thought about how much work he'd take. His fingers were long and narrow like Neville's, almost to the point of deformity. His arms had outgrown the sleeves of his navy blue button down shirt.
"Do you play an instrument?" she asked.
"No," he said, nothing more. Not the lively conversation she had envisioned. Wide bands of late afternoon sun came through the kitchen window, revealing the marks her fingers and lips had made on her third glass of wine.
From “Disappearing Acts,” NEO, Spring/05 and Big Muddy, Spring/06
Although she didn't smoke, she knew enough to hold an ashtray for the much taller Colonel's Lady. They were standing side by side admiring a centerpiece one of the wives had concocted out of nylon net and gumdrops. You couldn't make your husband's career, Jodi had learned at New Officers' Wives Orientation, but you could break it. The trick was to behave so properly the Colonel's Lady hardly noticed you, or if she did, would go home and say, That Griffin wife is on the ball; are you doing enough for her husband? The Colonel's Lady was fortyish and gypsy-dark, her face bloated and blotchy, as if she spent her afternoons drinking.
From "Ashwin’s Rules," Room of One’s Own, Winter/05 and Hemispheres, May/07
On a breezy September afternoon, Ashwin Kapoor burst into an odorous, noisy, brightly lit world through the slippery channel of Leena whose milky-tea complexion and sleepy eyes he bore. From Prem, he took his melon-shaped head and wiry frame. He felt arms, legs, fingers and toes growing, as a tree senses its roots burrowing into the earth. He heard the whoosh of more than a thousand enzymes racing through his cells. Power seemed to radiate from his pores, reaching out to all else that lived.
From “Woman on the Wing,” The New Quarterly, Spring/06
She first materialized on the flight from Oahu to the Big Island, an illusion, Karin assumed, a trick of light. Karin often saw shapes in shifting clouds and shadows. But here on the flight back to Oahu was the woman again, stomach and face down on the wing of the Boeing 737, her hands gripping the edge against 500 miles per hour, her shirt and shorts white sails in the wind. The pressure to let go must be fierce. No point turning to Tully who’d wedged his square frame into the middle seat so Karin could have the window. He could brush by her a dozen times a day and not see her heart spilling out of her chest.
From "Kesh Kumay," Cicada, November/December/06
The first batch of tourists leaves and the second turns up, along with a young man on a high-stepping grey horse he has to rein in sharply. Kyal is outside grooming Aisulu. The man's horse is a natural racer, its body pulsing with energy. And oh, the soulful eyes -- almond shaped and hooded. Who chooses a horse so hard to control?
Aigul hurries up to her and whispers, "That's Jyrgal. Emil's brother."
He looks neither like Emil, whose features are too perfect to trust, nor like the American whose wide shoulders and straight teeth made Kyal weak in the knees. This man is skinny as a bishkek with a head so long and narrow, one might think his mother pressed it between two boards the moment he left the womb. The alpine sun has deeply scorched his once fair skin. A herder, Kyal thinks, disappointed.
From "Blind Letsky," insolent rudder, Fall/07
Not Monday, 9:27 p.m. Café on the Danforth. Alone @ small round table close 2 mic, scribbling on pad, pretending 2B music critic, instead of lonely, fat skag. Had friends B4 they got tired of me.
