Milk Candy Review

We recently published April Yu’s galactic “To Saturn and Back.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) The imagery throughout this entire piece is so beautiful, but what really hits me is that ending — what a powerful last line! Did you ever envision this piece ending in a different way?

Yes! I’ve always been incredibly inspired by music, and this piece was originally meant to be in the wistful, ethereal vein of “seven” by Taylor Swift. However, as I wrote, the relationship felt more like a patina of perfection than pure love. Although the partners knew how to make each other happy, the idea of dissonance between happiness and true fulfillment began filling in the cracks of the piece.

I’ve always been fascinated by how love can manifest itself and be perceived so differently in people. With the ending, I wanted to show that this love could be a storybook romance, but it has shadows as dark as the night in which the lovers meet.

2) The love story here is so shining, but almost painful. Do you think this is a first love for the characters? Or just a first love that feels like this?

I wrote this piece with first-time high school lovers in mind. As a high schooler myself, I wanted to encapsulate how that intrinsic adolescent confusion and turmoil wedges its way into any relationship. It’s the narrator’s first love, and they’re young; after a while, their definition of romantic love is how their partner treats them, even if their heart of hearts tells them otherwise. I think that can be true for any relationship, though, so I love that this story could be interpreted in many different ways.

We recently published Chelsea Stickle’s hot “Fire Is an Open Mouth with an Empty Stomach.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) This story is one of a series from you — the Screaming Meemies series, which is such a great name, by the way! I love the way you use detail here to give us more backstory on the psychic without requiring the reader to be familiar with the series to follow this one. How do you walk that line?

Thanks! When working with interconnected stories I pay extra attention to scope to make sure each story can stand on its own. Then I ask myself some questions. What details set the scene and establish character? What do you need to know to appreciate what the psychic is going through?

2) So … can you tell me who burnt down the psychic’s house? Or am I going to have to wait and see?

You’ll have to wait and see! That’s its own story. But I will say the psychic goes against her own interests to do the right thing and…you’ve seen the consequences.

We recently published Mary Grimm’s colorful “Live and Let Die.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1. These cousins! I love these cousins! I swear they are my cousins, except they are nothing like my cousins. But somehow they are still so familiar. Are these cousins based on any cousins you know?

My family was Catholic on one side and on the other long-time farmers (farmers needed lots of kids for free labor!), and so I have dozens and dozens of cousins. Quite a few of my aunts and uncles had 5, 6, 7 children (top number: 12, their own dozen). Cousins were 90% of our social life. The cousins here are kind of an essence of cousinness – but they’re closest to the cousins that my sister and I played with the most. We bossed each other around and tattled on each other and had secrets, made and broke alliances, loved each other. We had other friends from the neighborhood and from school, but we were each other’s favorite playmates.

2.  I love how you give such weight to this story with that opening sentence: “The remaining weeks were fairly quiet.” The implication being that something of importance must have happened, something unquiet. What do you think it might have been?

The honest answer is that I don’t know what it was that happened. When I started writing this, I started with that sentence as a self-imposed prompt – something to have the feeling of in medias res. But I’ve been writing a lot of what I think of as disaster fiction – the disasters are sometimes personal, sometimes more global. And I feel the unspoken disaster looming from behind that first sentence – something that made the cousins want to define themselves against it, a banding together. I imagine them looking over their figurative shoulders, but then turning away from whatever it was, turning instead toward each other. 

We recently published Nora Esme Wagner’s fierce “Why Renaissance Artists Never Got the Babies Right.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) I love how ferocious this story is — so many killer lines that just hit the nail right on the head! Do you think one of these muses (with their “singular bite”) would appreciate this ferocity?

Yes! I wrote this story in Italy, because, even while touring the most fantastic museums (The Uffizi in Florence, The Borghese in Rome), I felt bitter. Everywhere I went, I saw the same scene painted: Gabriel telling Mary that she’s pregnant with the son of god. In these depictions, Mary blinks placidly. Her eyebrows raise into crisp semi-circles. If we’re lucky, her mouth opens into an o.

Shouldn’t Mary have questions? Like: I’ve never had sex, wtf? Or: you have wings? Why isn’t she teary/baffled/furious?

Artists stifle their muses. They hate when they get candid, fierce. I imagine that a muse looks into their likeness and sees nothing. But maybe a muse would read my story and finally recognize their vinegar. I loved your story “Being the Murdered Muse” so much, how you capture what is violent and narcissistic about being “inspired” by the fierce woman you refuse to look at.

2) The muses here can never become anything more, for the artists, than inspiration. But at the end, the reader gets a hint that they might outgrow these artists. Do you think they will?

Absolutely. To inspire is to breathe in. The muses bloat their artists, so they’re brilliant and brimming with inventions and techniques and flourishes. But the artists are just vessels, bladders. Without a muse, their proud chests can’t puff.

But Frida Kahlo is more recognized than Diego Rivera. Scott Fitzgerald pilfered Zelda’s diaries and was still only half her genius. Muses are running, outrunning. And they don’t need to breathe into themselves. They only need to breathe.

We recently published Melissa Fitzpatrick’s haunting “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board.”

Here, we ask her two questions about her story:

1) This story is so evocative — I love how you conjure up these grade school/junior high sleepovers! There was something so magical about these rituals (or games, even), something so powerful. Do you think these girls still feel that power even now, all these years later?
There is something singular about the energy of young girls at a sleepover, isn’t there? The surviving friends are now well into middle age. When I wrote this, I imagined these women looking back on these memories through a lens of loss. They’ve lost one of their childhood friends to cancer. They’ve lost the youthful exuberance they once had. I imagine most of them are dealing or have dealt with other losses: health issues, divorce, estrangements, caring for aging parents, regrets and disappointments of all kinds. They are at a time of life when many women feel overextended and unseen. It might be hard for them to connect to the magic and power they once felt. But I do think that power is there, just waiting to be rediscovered. 

2) Such a powerful opening line! “By now, we have learned the real story of one of our deaths.” Do you think these girls have stayed in close touch with each other? Or was this first death something they learned of secondhand, through the grapevine?
I like to think this group of friends has been there for each other through it all. Through first loves and breakups, weddings, divorces, remarriages, abortions, miscarriages, young motherhood, career changes, health scares, death, all of it. I think there must be something amazing about friends who have known each other through all the stages of their lives. People who can see all the different “yous” you have been over time. I think these women visited and brought meals and found ways help when their friend was battling cancer. And they grieved together when she died. I like to think of them as older women. They meet for brunch each week. They are loud and raucous and laugh and laugh. And they lift each other up.