I’ve heard other writers say that a story starts for them with an image, one that develops in their minds without any provocation. They can spring up like Vine videos, short six-second bursts of an image in motion. That’s how this story began for me. I saw a tattoo, or rather a fuzzy, blurry image of a tattoo, deep red in color. I didn’t know what it was of—some kind of animal, maybe. I thought it had legs, but I wasn’t sure.

Carl Linnaeus, the “father of modern taxonomy,” wrote this line in 1729:

The flowers’ leaves . . . serve as bridal beds which the Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such noble bed curtains, and perfumed with so many soft scents that the bridegroom with his bride might there celebrate their nuptials with so much the greater solemnity.

I think he was obsessed with both sex and flowery language. 

Readers of literary fiction have a compelling new anthology to read this fall. PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017 features twelve authors, selected by judges Marie-Helene Bertino, Kelly Link, and Nina McConigley. Each writer received the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers in this, its inaugural year. We’re pleased that Ruth Serven’s story, “A Message,” published in our Fall 2016 issue, was recognized.

Many of the stories in the collection are told by characters who break molds; they are outliers in their societies, and in reading their stories we understand something of what it means to endure in their worlds. These are unexpected tales that satisfy and perplex. In other words, they expand our narrative expectations.

Series editor Yuka Igarashi answered some questions for us about the collection, editorial work for literary journals, and the power of hearing stories read aloud.

This month Soft Skull Press reissued Jillian Weise's The Amputee's Guide to Sex in a ten-year anniversary edition, with a new preface by the author. This collection is an unflinching exploration of the human body as architecture, as aquatic animal or ambiguous cloud, which pushes rhetorical boundaries concerning “able-ness.” In her poems, Weise shows how bodies are constructed by flesh and language, by looking at others and by being gazed upon. In addition to The Amputee's Guide to Sex, Weise has also authored The Colony (2010) and The Book of Goodbyes (2013), along with numerous essays and multimedia art projects. She is an Associate Professor at Clemson University.

In your preface you state, “I feel like the disabled writer is always already expected to absorb the gaze of the nondisabled reader/audience.” In your poetry, did you want to turn the gaze back on the audience? Destroy it altogether? What would the poetry or fiction genre look like outside of the “able-bodied” gaze?

I didn’t have the intention, or the thought, “Now I’ll destroy the gaze.” It was more innate, more visceral. I read a lot of bad poems where the poet got bored, or lost, and plopped a disabled figure or metaphor into the poem. If poetry can do anything, and I believe it can, then why was poetry only doing the same thing, over and over, in regards to disability? It was like being stuck in 1580 with a bunch of Sir Philip Sidneys. He said there are only two emotional responses to disability: laughter or crying. Now it’s 2017, and yet many nondisabled poets, fiction writers and screenwriters still follow his lead, so what the fuck? Luckily, there’s a Dis/Deaf Uprising. We’re writing to change the art. I’m thinking of Constance Merritt’s Blind Girl Grunt and Meg Day’s Last Psalm at Sea Level and Cade Leebron’s “Model Patient.” I’m thinking of Bill Peace’s “Head Nurses” and Karrie Higgins’s “A Tape Doesn’t Change a Goddamned Thing.” Both were censored. You know you’re in an uprising when they censor your friends.

I wake up before you, as I always do.

This is a rented room.

Two days ago, you told me that I was emotionally manipulative. That I am always desperately seeking attention, how pathetic it made me appear. You told me things change, and people change, and the things people desire change. And then you told me to fuck off.

We couldn’t have children.

If you’re looking for a happy ending, you won’t find it here.

1.

The minute we started down this medical track, we knew we were going to lose. That was our problem. We were defeatists. The fight wasn’t in us.

Lorrie Moore famously said that "a short story is a love affair." Since May is Short Story Month, we're taking the opportunity to look back on some of our literary love affairs.

Seeking riches? Become the only raised presence in a field so any bird will know where to shit. Let a swallowtail alone on a sill to attract success. Do lunar blackouts yield sea levels upping the horizon

to god? Enticing, save for a bunch of dead species floating like maimed angels. Don’t start anything new. Crossed knives: duel with a neighbor that no one survives. Stray shots at a child’s surprise party

You can read a lot about what translations are or are supposed to be: different from the original text, a version of the original text, unrelated to the original text, work of cultural interaction, work of cultural invention, work that hustles along the search for global language.