Interview by: Zoe Presnal

A.A. Balaskovits is the author of the short story collections Magic for Unlucky Girls and Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet. Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet is a collection of captivating contemporary fantasy and folk stories.  In this interview, we discussed Balaskovits’s writing process and inspirations for Strange Folk You’ll Never Meet.

Zoe Presnal (ZP): What was your process like for writing and organizing this collection? Were there any other stories that you considered including but ultimately decided not to? If so, why?

A.A. Balaskovits (AAB): Many of the stories in Strange Folk are short-shorts, or stories less than 1,000 words long, so a lot of the process was almost experimental: limiting myself to that word count. It did make the ordering of this collection challenging, as a handful of these stories are extremely long (“The Mad Monks Weeping Daughter,” “Strange Folk,” “The Skins of Strange Animals”) and I had to make peace with having the “tall man” and “short man” next to one another. I do worry that it creates a sort of whiplash for the reader, but perhaps it is a relief, as well? I adore short-shorts, how they come in, stab you in the belly, and then leave. Robert Hass’ “A Story About the Body” is one of my favorite pieces of writing. It’s so concise, so perfect, so devastating. I’m currently writing a far-too-many-words-already novel, and I must constantly remind myself of the lessons I learned while writing this collection (and which I am failing at): say more with less.

Funnily enough, a handful of the stories in this collection were the ones cut from my first book, Magic for Unlucky Girls. The last story, “A Girl, A Bird, A Rocket to the Moon” was originally written for that collection, but it didn’t fit in tone-wise with the rest of the stories. It may not fit in with the rest of Strange Folk either, but I wanted to end this collection on a less devastating note. Not to say it’s a peppy, happy story by any means, but it’s less awful than “Mama Floriculture,” a tale of a woman who keeps snipping off parts of her babies.

ZP: What, if any, stories/folktales from your life inspired you to write your own fantasy? What inspires you to add your own twists on classic fairytales?

AAB: The stories about adoption—“Home Belly Wants” and “A Tale of Two Adoptions”—are directly inspired from my own. I am adopted, and my sister is as well. Most fairy tales don’t cover this topic, and certainly none of the famous ones, and if they do it’s the tale of the changeling, from the perspective of the parents, and seen as a disaster. Fairy tales tend to be obsessed with the “true” child, or “true” mother, or “true” princess (The Princess and the Pea), though truth is a complex affair. The traditional literature on the subject, geared usually towards the adoptee or adoptive parents, is full of how the child was “chosen,” given up by the birth parents (who usually have little to no role in the text; they disappear, as though they were cuckoos) and gifted a warm, loving home. The reality is far more nuanced. 

Adoption is an incredibly tenuous subject, which I believe we are only now beginning a cultural reckoning with, as adoptees are beginning to be given a platform to express the complexities of this practice—see The Rumpus and their Adoptee Awareness archive. My experience was a delightfully positive one, but I have known plenty of other adoptees to know mine is the exception, not the rule. I want to read fairy tales about adoption, told by adoptees. I want them to be as messy as the reality. 

I have come to believe that fairy tales are stories of political violence. I was first inspired, as is everyone who reads her, by Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber opened up a venue of literary discourse I had not realized was still being utilized. Fairy tales are often relegated to children’s literature, thanks in part to Disney in today’s age, but they are also tales of power: they inform behaviors, dictate what is good or evil, and (usually) end quite happily, a merry justification for any suffering the characters experienced. I’m not the first to revision fairy tales and I will not be the last. These tales endure in part because they are simple guides on how to live a “moral” life, but they are also minaciously malleable. Kate Bernheimer identifies the four elements of fairy tales in “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale:” normalized magic, intuitive logic, abstractness and, crucially, flatness. This flatness of these characters means that any artist who reimagines them puts their own biases, anxieties, and desires into these characters. 

 ZP: You use names like “the mother” or “the grandmother” in many of your stories. How does using feminine nouns further the identities of your characters? What’s your vision for conveying the characters in your stories as roles rather than with names?

AAB: My first instinct for this answer is pure laziness. But when I think about it, my first instinct is informed by my second instinct: people are often defined by their roles. Every company I have worked for, I almost never know the names of the higher ups—they are the CEO, the President, the Dean, the Boss, etc. Similarly, I didn’t know my mother’s or grandmother’s names until I was older.

It’s a convenient shorthand to call someone by their title as opposed to their name. Names can tell us a little bit about a person, but a role or a title comes with assumptions about who they are. The CEO is a leader. Mother or Mom or Grandma is typically considered a warm, caring, giving, feminine person— The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein is, perhaps, the pinnacle of this depiction in literature. I enjoy playing with those assumptions. Not every mother is warm, or caring, or giving, or feminine. Not every grandmother is a font of wisdom. But they are all people, and people are messy folk.

ZP: On a similar note, I really loved how a lot of these tales use themes of womanhood, motherhood, and childhood. What inspires you to write about the experiences of womanhood and motherhood? What’s the significance of illustrating women with “missing” parts of themselves (“A Woman With No Arms,” “Get Bent,” “An Old Woman with Silver Hands,” etc.)? What else about the image of motherhood/birthing in general intrigues or inspires you to write?

AAB: This is a lovely question, thank you! I write about womanhood and, by default, motherhood, a lot. Every story of mine that involves motherhood is aching towards that ultimate anxiety of mine, that I will become a mother. I have no desire for it—I have never had a desire for that responsibility and control over another person—but society certainly has that desire for me and other people who can conceive. Elon Musk is currently leading that call, but so did Nicolae Ceaușescu, and so does the Quiverfull movement, and every politician who is currently anxious about abortion access and birth control in this country and beyond. I am inspired by the historical place I occupy, and others like me, as a person who can create life in my belly, and equally inspired by how that gift has been used to punish, to injure, and to control people like me.

Birth is a process I consider absolutely miraculous and horrific in equal turn. One utilizes the same muscles to bring a child into the world as one does to take a shit, and often one does defecate on the birthing table, or pool, or wherever one decides to do it, or is decided for them to do it—in America, that sometimes means in handcuffs, if you are unfortunate enough to give birth in prison. After the birth, the body continues to bleed and bleed and bleed, while the baby cries, letting you know they are alive, alive, alive. Beauty and the grotesque are bedmates, and I think it does a disservice to separate them.

As for the stories that have ladies and missing parts—the series that begins with “A Woman With No Arms” and continues into two other tales is based on “The Girl Without Hands,” a lovely tale found in the Grimms’ collection (and others) about a woman who escapes an evil wizard by cutting off her hands and crying over them (I guess wizards aren’t into that) and then she does some wild things with her neck. A lot of my work deals with body horror in some way, which is not strange considering the medium—fairy tales have countless examples of this. For these women, in my stories, and “Get Bent” in particular, it is less about the “horror” of missing a part of you, but how you bend to overcome what was taken or given up. 

There’s a lot of graphic and violent imagery in your tales. Do you find it difficult to write gore in vivid detail? What’s your process for working through violent imagery? What do you want a reader to feel or take from these images?

It is natural for me to write about gore and violence; how awful is that? I watch an obscene amount of horror movies, and I was part of the early internet, so shock websites like rotten.com and their ilk were ones I looked at. My process is witnessing it in some manner, in some form. For my novel, one scene involves slaughtering a pig, so I watched countless videos of that practice, from cutting its pink throat to hanging it up to bleed out, pouring boiling water over its skin, and sticking a sharpened pole up its rectum and through its snout to hang the carcass over a fire, waiting for the flesh to tighten and crisp. I don’t watch everything—I read a far lot more, but even I have limits and make do with my imagination. 

However, violence and gore are everywhere. We’re living in an age where we can livestream genocide, a thing I once believed we all agreed was bad. Why would I write about people except as we are? We are a violent people and a violent species. Glorious experiment though it is, the entire internet is rotten.com. And we, the people, are the internet. I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is a mirror. What another person does, I too am capable of; kindness or cruelty, or something in-between. That’s a part of who I am, and who you are, a capability to go either way, held back only by choice and circumstance. 

The way I see it, when we tear one another open, as we are often inclined to do, there’s a lot of squishy, gross stuff inside. We all share this. We all take a shit, too, so why is putting that on the page distasteful? It is a great unifier, in birth, in death, and ideally several times in-between. Nothing the body can do or has inside of it feels off-limits in art. 

As to what I would want from a reader: ultimately, it is up to them what they take from my writing. Once you put it out into the world, it is no longer yours, and the reader can do or not do whatever they feel like. For some, that is to get sick to their stomach, and I understand that. I’m sickened, too. 

ZOE PRESNAL is a Creative Writing student at Western Michigan University. With an editorial internship at Third Coast Magazine under her belt, she feels more than ready to work when it comes to uplifting fellow writers. After graduation, Zoe plans to use her BA to further her work in publishing and editing. When she’s not reading or studying, Zoe enjoys scriptwriting and honing the craft of on-screen storytelling. 

Review by: Corinne Perry

the breakup journal, 2024, paperback, 296 pages.

ISBN: 979-8873885046

“The important lesson being: Pain, like any other entity or energy in this world, just wants space to exist, to be. When we close ourselves off to it, we essentially tell pain that it isn’t allowed to be. Like any other entity that wants to stay alive, it will fight. This fight is often what causes us suffering, not the actual pain itself.”

-Jaymen Chang, i love this version of myself that you brought out.

In I love this version of myself that you brought out, Jaymen Chang offers a memoir intertwined with self-help, rooted in his personal experiences of heartbreak and healing. From the start, Chang draws readers into his intimate world with truth and honesty. His approach combines introspection and actionable insights, guiding readers through their own journeys of love and loss. 

Chang’s vulnerability in recounting the emotional aftermath of relationships resonates universally. Through essays, letters, journal entries, and poems, he reflects on the complexities of heartbreak in ways that are relatable and thought-provoking. 

A standout feature of this book is its seamless blend of memoir and self-help. Chang not only shares personal stories but also transforms these experiences into lessons, encouraging readers to apply his insights to their own lives. This is not just a memoir of heartbreak; it is also a guide filled with actionable advice that readers can take to help rebuild their lives. This approach sets the book apart, offering a practical framework for growth.

One of the most poignant sections titled, “Lessons in Love – The Three Heartbreaks That Taught Me the Most,” showcases three pivotal moments that shaped Chang’s understanding of love. Each heartbreak provides distinct lessons, illustrating how such experiences contribute to personal evolution.

Most notably, in “Part 2: To Be on the Receiving End of Heartbreak,” Chang offers a detailed account of his first experience as the one being hurt, rather than the one doing the hurting. He captures the emotions of rejection and disillusionment:

“This was the type of heartbreak that was world shattering, appetite destroying, sleep depriving, and stomach turning.”

Reflecting on his initial reaction, Chang admits to vilifying his ex-partner as a defense mechanism, and he spares no detail in recounting the struggle to come to terms with the fact that someone he loved chose to walk away. He writes:

“At this point in my journey, I had only broken someone else’s heart, so this was my first experience ‘being on the receiving end of heartbreak’… I would constantly tell myself ‘how bad of a person she was’ and how ‘evil’ she was, and it really helped me frame myself in the context of my first heartbreak. I was constantly jealous that she loved someone else and that her hurting me was some universal statement of her morality. I was wrong.”

This moment marks a turning point in the book. By recognizing the futility of blame, Chang reframes his perspective, showing how growth begins with self-reflection and acceptance.

Healing, Chang explains, is about creating space for pain rather than resisting it:

“The important lesson being: Pain, like any other entity or energy in this world, just wants space to exist, to be. When we close ourselves off to it, we essentially tell pain that it isn’t allowed to be. Like any other entity that wants to stay alive, it will fight. This fight is often what causes us suffering, not the actual pain itself.”

As Chang delves deeper into his healing process, he uncovers a valuable insight about the nature of pain itself. He emphasizes that pain “wants to be loved as well.” This means allowing it to exist without judgement, accepting it as a part of the human experience, and nurturing it in a way that allows for transformation. 

This insight is central to Chang’s message. By embracing his pain, he stops projecting his trauma onto others, allowing him to see his ex-partner as a fellow human rather than a villain:

“It’s only when I recognized this, and was finally accepting how broken I actually was, that I could break free from my own trauma. The moment I accepted that she wasn’t a bad person but simply another human, was the moment I realized I was one too.”

Chang’s suggestion to write down one’s experiences of heartbreak fosters a deeper understanding of personal patterns and emotions. This exercise reframes heartbreak as a shared human experience, highlighting connection over isolation. 

Ultimately, Chang’s story serves as a beacon for those struggling to find themselves again, encouraging readers to embrace their pain, learn from it, and eventually, love the version of themselves that emerges from it.

CORINNE PERRY is a recent graduate of Western Michigan University, where she studied English Literature. Perry has interned with Third Coast magazine and serves as the English department’s student representative. She reviews Jaymen Cheng’s memoir, exploring its blend of self-help and themes of identity.

The Third Coast Poetry and Fiction contests exist to elevate the creative endeavors each of us as writers make. Often, the work in itself is the only reward we can expect. Through the contest, readers and judges give careful attention to the work of each author. We are grateful to shine a light on the work we found most compelling.

Poetry Winner: “A Lesser Evil” by Saba Keramati

Here’s what judge Jamaal May had to say about Keramati’s poem:

“A Lesser Evil” is as complete a poem as I’ve ever seen. The music sounded so natural it felt like it was written for me after a few days. It was in my body—in my field of resonance. The repetition of “lie” works like a moving anchor as the syntax, which is wonderfully varied, pushes the word around. It has been said that poetry isn’t just about pattern. It is about pattern and variation. The poet knows just when to shift the pattern on us at every line. The nimbleness of the poem belies some of its complexity as well. There is a well-done turn near the midway point that increases the stakes before making them personal. It’s a move from the public to the private that Carolyn Forché could be proud of. Approaching the end, the poem works toward the interior before closing on a moment that brings the public, private, interior, and exterior into weave with the closing music. That weave tightens into a raised fist as the threads ripple back through the poem while resonating outwards.

Poetry Runner-Up: “I Drag My Shame Into the Bathroom and Kill It” by Alejandro Lucero

Here’s what judge Jamaal May had to say about Lucero’s poem:

“I Drag My Shame Into the Bathroom and Kill It” arrests attention at the title, then goes on to reward that attention. The skill shown with imagery means this poet could have gotten plenty far with just that in their toolkit. Yet, they go on to demonstrate others, such as the ability to enliven an abstraction, use line-length to ebb and flow the music, and introduce subtle links and psychological interactions through diction.

Poetry Finalists

Aaliyah Anderson, “Decimation” · Moriah Cohen, “In the Emergency Room after my Son Shattered his Elbow I Catalogue Units Below Which Measurement Becomes Meaningless” and “Proof of Life Holding the Associated Press March 2024” · Clayre Benzadón, “Qué Guay” · Saba Keramati, “Notes On the Archive” · Carolene Kurien, “Mirrors” · Daphne Maysonet, “After Julie London’s ‘November Twilight,’ 1956”· Danielle Garcia Tubo- “Aking Panahon: This, too, is Legacy” 

Fiction Winner: “Crisis Actors” by Melissa Yancy

Here’s what judge Misha Rai had to say about Yancy’s story:

There are stories that storytellers tell over and over again. The reasons for this are varied, but in, “Crisis Actors,” the winning story of the contest, I saw how skillfully the writer complicated the reader’s understanding of the aftermath of a traumatic event—an event that has been mined in fiction quite often—and the grief that goes with it. Each time I thought I had a handle on the kind of story I was being told, there was a shift in the narrative and suddenly I was in a different story, but also in the one I first began to read. This is not an easy feat to pull off though “Crisis Actors” pulls it off and with such great aplomb that I found myself at the edge of my seat every time I read it.

Fiction Runner-Up: “Where There Can Be No Breath At All” by Aida Zilelian

Here’s what judge Misha Rai had to say Zilelian’s story:

I was instantly taken in by the command of the first-person voice in “Where There Can Be No Breath At All.” The child narrator is watchful, innocent, and in the end, full of gumption exhibited in a manner that raises the stakes of the story exponentially. The ending is beautiful and as the writer puts it, with a kind of “truth (that) can hollow your heart…sometimes it’s best not to know the answers.”

Fiction Finalists

Jasmine Jones, “Zombie Boy” · Dalton Sikes “Head Hunting” · Bill Smoot “The Scream”

The Books Arts Center of Kalamazoo preserves book-making traditions. While the shift in printing processes post-Industrial Revolution made books widely accessible, Jeff Abshear founded The Book Arts Center of Kalamazoo to keep the art of traditional book-making alive. Visit kalbookarts.org to learn about upcoming workshops, events, and more.

Amanda Gatewood: How did you get your start in book arts? 

Jeff Abshear: My background as a student is in art and literature. I studied both when I was an undergraduate. After I finished my undergraduate degree, John Ridland introduced me to the work of Harry Duncan. Many people have referred to Duncan as the father of fine press printing back in the 1920s. When the industrial revolution had pretty much abolished hand printing and replaced it with mechanical printing, he had gotten an old-fashioned press, like some of the presses that we have here. Duncan started publishing books of poetry, including a book by William Carlos Williams. He did the whole thing with hand set type, on an old-fashioned press, and in small editions that were hand bound. I was inspired by Harry Duncan’s work, and that was what got me interested. 

I proposed to do what was my very first book with John, which was was called Palms: Six Ballads. I did a very limited work, only 75 copies. I did a series of aquatint etchings that went in the book, printed all the pages, and bound all the books by hand. After that Western Michigan University gave me a fellowship to come here and set up the letterpress studio. Then I worked as a graphic designer for many years. In 2005 a lot of things came together to start the Book Arts Center. I gathered together a bunch of people in Kalamazoo that were artists, writers, paper makers, book binders, and printers. We didn’t have much of anything except for Paul Roberts’ paper studio and very basic equipment for doing book binding. That was 20 years ago and gradually it grew from there. 

AG: Do you believe that it’s very important to handcraft a book? So often publishing houses just put them into a machine and you can almost feel that there is not a human touch to it.

JA: That is correct. I think when a book is made by hand, when somebody reads that book, it’s a different kind of experience. They tend to read more carefully. I think it’s a more intimate experience. 

AG: Especially since so much of the publishing industry is just pushing out copies.

JA: Of all sorts of stuff. Maybe you read it and then you throw it away or, you know it gets lost or whatever. Or even if it doesn’t, they use very cheap materials. The books fall apart or the paper has a lot of acid in it and so eventually the pages turn yellow. A book like the kinds of books we make, with archival materials, will last a long time. Books the were printed with movable type on handmade paper in the Renaissance are still perfectly good today. 

AG: How does your process differ from historical bookmaking processes?

JA: If you go all the way back to the very beginning of bookmaking, people were making books with animal skins. In the 19th century, with the industrial revolution and the mechanization of book production, books were made by machines, sewn by machines, covered by machines. Often made with cheap materials in order to make a lot of copies quickly and cheaply. The quality of book production kind of fell down. Contemporary mechanically-made books I’d say are better made now, because people have realized that the old books from the 19th century and early 20th century are falling apart, so they take more care. But we [at the Book Arts Center] are sort of anachronistic. We go back to another age, printing and sewing books by hand. We use materials and techniques that would have been used in earlier times.

AG: What are the steps that go into building a book by hand?

JA: It’s kind of difficult for me to just describe it. There are different ways of making books. There are different kinds of book forms depending on what kind of book you’re going to make. If you’re making what we call a casebound book, which is a hardcover book, going from the very beginning, you start by folding the pages in half. You have to lay out the book so that you can put the pages into groupings of pages together, which are called signatures. 

Then you poke holes in the fold and sew it together. Take glue, put the book in a clamp, put glue on the spine, and put fabric on that. Then you make a cover out of book board, which is a kind of really compressed cardboard that you cover with cloth that’s specially made to be resistant to the glue, so the glue doesn’t come through the cloth backing. You then glue the book into the board. Once everything’s glued together, you have to put it into a press so that it dries and comes out flat.

AG: You’ve mentioned in class and on the website for the Book Arts Center that you are a researcher in Venice and that was part of your education. Do you believe that’s helped you in this field?

JA: Definitely. I was a Fulbright scholar in 2007, after the Book Art Center had been established for only two years. I had been making books already, going all the way back ten to fifteen years. When I went to Italy that first year, I ended up making contacts with some of the studios. I still bring students to work in some of the studios that I made contact with all the way back then. 

AG: Is there any other information you believe people should know about the industry of handmade books?

JA: Here’s one thing that there’s a fairly recent kind of development in book arts. In the last 50 years or so there’s been a kind of explosion in the development of what are called artist books. Where an artist will create a usually very small edition of books, sometimes just one single copy of a book. Often the emphasis is on the book form as a medium for the artist’s expression, so the artist will often write whatever text is in it to create images. Sometimes the books are handmade paper, or they use hand printed imagery. Sometimes they’re even sculptural in different ways. So, the way the book is presented and packaged can be an experience in itself, like experiencing a piece of sculpture. 

AMANDA GATEWOOD is a student at Western Michigan University, majoring in art history and creative writing. She is pursuing a publishing career through her Third Coast internship and has a poem in Moonstone Arts Center’s New Voices 2025.

Reviewed by: Taylor Mroz

In his radiant collection of prose-poems, Degrees of Romance, Peter Krumbach creates a playground for imagination in a neighborhood near reality. In his own words, Krumbach writes with the intention to “follow the logic of the unconscious,” and perfectly captures the absurdity and playful profundity of a dream. With sharp wit and dry humor, he invents surreal situations—a man finding Tchaikovsky under the bed, a divorcing couple slowly turning to wood, a newborn baby running away from the hospital—and uses them to deliver touching meditations on themes such as secrecy, stagnation, and parenthood. The poems wind through wandering paths of the mind, creating a distance from reality which is introduced early on in “Nightshift in Produce”: 

Big Sal tells me again how he loathes not only the way I stack, but the way I shelve. His words have a rhythm. They become a 5-mile-long train. I nod in triple time, then cut myself adrift, entering a space with no verbs, a field where the past, present and future exist at once. … I need to tell Big Sal that my soul is out back, playing chess against the loading dock crew, that his soul is marked down, bottom shelf, aisle 8. 
(5)

The disconnect between the speaker’s thoughts and physical existence is typical of the entire collection and how it moves away from corporeality in order to reach a plane of poetic enlightenment. The body is anchored to one place—in this case, the grocery store—but the mind slips away from the linear logic of reality, looping around to a state of wonder. The reader is urged to consider the absurdities of desire, connection, and loss, and invited to find meaning within them.

Krumbach employs accessible language that is craftily tilted on its head to form compressed bursts of imagination, which are easy to digest and latch onto because of their brevity. Through use of justified text, the poems are mostly square, framed by the page like vivid scenes painted on a museum wall. These scenes, full of bizarre premises, mainly occur in mundane, everyday locations —in a kitchen, on a park bench, on a highway—but their unique scenarios set a playful tone that can be peeled back to reveal layers of deep sincerity. In “Fugitive,” Krumbach weaves a tale of a runaway baby who flees the hospital to go “running with the bulls” in Pamplona, take a “selfie with pope Francis in the Vatican Gardens,” and launch a memoir from Simon & Schuster (8). The poem’s opening lines set a grim tone, initially implying a neonatal death by describing the infant as “lost” and “gone.” This seriousness is then subverted as the poem’s true meaning is revealed, and humor takes over with the imagery of a baby driving a getaway car or running laps in the womb. Ultimately, though subtly, the poem circles back to the themes of loss—not from death, but from being left behind. The parents are forced to wrestle with both the joy of their baby’s adventures and the sting of the baby’s absence, and the reader is confronted with the bittersweet realities of watching a child grow up.

Although Degrees of Romance refuses to give easy answers about these big ideas, it embraces absurdity as one way to cope with them. In “Explaining Marriage to an Alien,” which aptly describes its own premise, the paradoxical nature of human relationships is explored through dialogue:

Does it cause happiness? Yes, a great joy. A heat that grows homicidal. Don’t most of you divorce? We do. And those who don’t? They’ve thought of it. So, you marry why? Love. The hand of a hundred fingers. (7)

Zooming out to an alien’s perspective allows for an objective consideration of how many human behaviors don’t seem to make sense. Every relationship ends, whether through separation or death, yet we love anyway. We act on emotion, defy logic for spontaneity, hold superstitions, procrastinate to our detriment, and dream for mysterious reasons. The best way to address these contradictions is through art, and the human element of the surreal situations Krumbach conjures is the thread that ties the collection together. Whether a poem is from the mind of a bird, or God, or a well-mannered bear, it spins the yarn of fundamental human experience out of seemingly unrelatable fibers.

Among its other delicate takeaways, Degrees of Romance teaches us to pay attention to the world around and inside of us and see it in new ways. It is part instruction manual, part insightful acid trip, part confusing dream, and part shout into the void. It first makes us comfortable, offers a cup of humor and suggests we put our feet up, then pulls out the rug from under us to reveal the aching vulnerability of the human condition. As its layers unfold, the book itself becomes “a span which renders truths we’ve sensed but deemed invisible visible,” and, much like with dreams, its lessons are whatever we make of them.

Cited: Peter Krumbach, “10 Questions for Peter Krumbach,” interview by Edward Clifford, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 61 (Spring 2020), www.massreview.org/node/8935. 

TAYLOR MROZ is pursuing creative writing at WMU and plans to work in the publishing industry. Her work has been selected for The Laureate and she currently lives in Kalamazoo.

The University of Georgia Press, 2024. 240 pages ($28.95).

ISBN: 978-0-8203-6736-1

“Recalling involves overwriting. A memory is a copy of a copy. The more often we recall a real time and place, the further we get from the real.” 

-Jay Baron Nicorvo, BEST COPY AVAILABLE

Reviewed by Latifa Ayad

The cover of Jay Baron Nicorvo’s BEST COPY AVAILABLE describes it as a True Crime Memoir. This categorization is only partially true. Yes, the crimes of the rape of Jay’s mother, Sharon, and the molestation of young Jay at the hands of a babysitter, are the black holes around which this story orbits. As Nicorvo writes, “Like the force of gravity, abuse bends space, torques time. The greater the abuse, the greater the gravity.” 

However, the primary investigation of this memoir is no police procedural. It is not centered on the profiling and tracking of a criminal. BEST COPY AVAILABLE is as much about “true crime” as it is about the essential but impossible nature of truth. When Sharon is raped, she tells her young children that she was mugged, but seven-year-old Jay senses that something has been omitted. He “can’t help but feel, at the deepest level of awareness, a compulsion to know, if not alter, the distortion.” When the truth of the rape finally comes out, Nicorvo writes, “What lodges in me is the lie. By a shameful leap of kid logic, a lie looms greater than rape.” Jay’s emotions and understanding develop with age, but he continues to hold the truth as sacred, and, in his own household as a parent, the adult Jay is carefully honest with his son about the molestation he was subjected to as a child. For Jay, “Home is the place without secrets.” 

Nicorvo meditates on how, even in the act of writing, he is recreating. “Writing focuses recall. Disciplines the mind. Trains it to see and hear things, things that aren’t actually there.” And, “Recalling involves overwriting. A memory is a copy of a copy. The more often we recall a real time and place, the further we get from the real.” 

Yet the act of memory, recording, storytelling, is as essential to puzzling out the crimes portrayed in this book as it is to the act of “pulling down that wall—brick by brick, word by word—and rebuilding something, rebuilding this book, from the salvage.” 

BEST COPY AVAILABLE is as formally flexible as the malleability of memory demands. The text makes use of interview transcripts, police reports, and photographs. Part II of the book switches, jarringly, to a second-person address, the object of address often morphing without warning from one male character to another. The unconventionality pays off as the reader begins to connect the “you” to a series of potential father figures for Jay, from his absent father Tony, his mother’s boyfriend Van, TV’s Roc Emerson, an oft-doubted God, and eventually Jay himself. 

In the examination of truth, Nicorvo must reckon with all the difficult facts, including that Sharon, Nicorvo’s mother and a white woman, was raped by a black man. Sharon develops a fear of black men which the young Jay subconsciously picks up on, judging his mother as a racist until the truth about the rape comes out. A conflict between two watershed movements of the recent decade, #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, meet in a muddle with Sharon’s truth. Nicorvo does not solve this muddle, but he carefully contextualizes it. “Abuse is the serpent that eats its tale,” and Nicorvo is hesitant to completely lay blame. If anything, Nicorvo blames American systems of race, wealth, and masculinity.  As we read, we come to the realization that this memoir is “true crime,” not as much in its examination of the rape of Sharon, nor of Jay’s molestation, but in its incisive investigation into the crime of being poor in America. Nicorvo highlights the bleak correlation between poverty and abuse. “The cause, poverty, and the effect, abuse, are so intimately united in this country that they’re nearly the same damn thing. Poverty is abuse.” BEST COPY AVAILABLE is an indictment of the structures that uphold the cycles of abuse as much as the men who perpetuate that cycle. 

Intense and propulsive, the pages of BEST COPY AVAILABLE are binge-worthy and saturated with horrific beauty and nostalgia. Nicorvo writes settings which are rich and revolting: an oil blackened beach in Jersey, a cockroach infested kitchen in Sarasota, each place an artifact of poverty which is colored halfway-charming by the childhood joys of a Christmas dirtying fingers in the cold sand, by a Nintendo room where the hours are whiled away. Vulgar but not irreverent, there is much this story holds sacred. The strength and love of two women raising three boys. The brave act of telling the truth. In a world where father figures, “Dodge taxes. Ditch sons. Assault Mothers. Molest kids. Knife grandfathers,” Nicorvo questions, “This what it means to be a man in America?” But ultimately the book is hopeful and courageous, offering up the possibility to rewrite the survivor’s script.

2024 Fiction Contest Judge Misha Rai tells Third Coast editors about how the support of contests has influenced her career, what hooks her when reading submissions, and the blurred lines of literary and genre fiction.

How has support from writing contests helped to shape your career? What value do you see in submitting to writing contests? 

Misha Rai: For me, the support from writing contests has been career changing. Even being longlisted or shortlisted in a contest has resulted in editors from journals/anthologies emailing to ask for my work. There are agents who have reached out wanting to read a manuscript, and they’ve offered me representation. This is definitely one way to be legible as an artist in the writing/publishing community and the larger reading world. 

Then there is that absolutely necessary confidence boost that you get from placing in a contest. I think that last part is super important. 

The other thing is a writer must also make a habit of submitting work, collecting whatever response comes their way, and then doing it all over again. This too is a muscle the writer has to exercise. To say you’re a writer is to say I will put my work out there for someone to read, think about, hopefully be entertained and moved by, and only then make a choice to publish or not publish the work. I think contests are a wonderful way to put into practice what is an essential skill a writer has to become good at practicing. 

As a judge, what kind of work do you find most often piques your interest? Is there anything in particular you’d love to see from entrants? 

MR: I am a sucker for musicality of language, but that sort of beautiful sentence in and of itself is not enough. Within a really well told short story those sentences are magic. Honestly, what I want is to be able to lean in as I read, as if I was around a campfire and someone was sitting across from me telling me a story. 

I read rather widely, eclectically, and I am never sure of what will hook me where subject matter or even genre is concerned, so I’m excited to read the submissions with an open mind. 

Where do you stand on this commonly given piece of writing advice: “write what you know?”

MR: I both agree and disagree with it. Since I am a writer as well, the best version of this advice means mining an emotion you feel and putting the depth of that feeling in a character you’re working on, whether or not the circumstances of your life and the life of the character you’ve imagined run parallel. For example, everyone knows what disappointment feels like but what makes my sense of disappointment different will also make how the character expresses it particular to them. 

That being said, the whole point of writing fiction is to write FICTION! We have a license to imagine. What a poor writing life it would be if we were to allow ourselves to only “write what you know.”

What book is on your bedside table right now? 

There are a few. A little while ago I began to read several books at once, which is a new thing for me. Anyways, here is what I have been staying up at night with:

• The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024
• Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato
• Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy
• Orbital by Samantha Harvey
• Dengue Boy: A Novel by Michel Nieva
• Lonely Planet Guide to Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest

Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated writer whose prose has been supported by the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, MacDowell, Ucross, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. Her short story, “Twenty Years Ago” is a Distinguished story in the 2021 Best American Short Story anthology. In 2022 her fiction was longlisted for the Disquiet Prize. Her essay, “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire,” winner of the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. Her prose appears in a number of journals and anthologies. Misha was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India where she first worked as a journalist, and then, later, in human rights for the National Human Rights Commission, The International Labour Organization, and on projects run by the Ministry of Women & Child, India, and the UNICEF. She currently edits for the Kenyon Review and teaches Creative Writing at Sewanee: The University of the South.