If You Must Know
a single-story chapbook
Burnside Review Press, August 2011
If You Must Know, a single-story chapbook manuscript, has won the Fifth Annual Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Competition and will be published fall 2011. The story was first published in the Southern Review.
Judge Kevin Sampsell, had this to say about the story: “The author takes a strange premise—a cicada burrows into (and lives inside) the arm of a young girl while she’s having sex with her boyfriend under an Oak tree—and beautifully twists it into a tale that goes beyond the typical loss of innocence. ‘If You Must Know’ drips with the humid sweat of a sexy and mysterious southern gothic, but also examines our young heroine’s loneliness and despair in a way that opens up the world in a new, fantastic way. It twitches under your skin like a true living thing.”
My thanks to artist Clair Hartmann for creating this amazing cover.
Judge Kevin Sampsell, had this to say about the story: “The author takes a strange premise—a cicada burrows into (and lives inside) the arm of a young girl while she’s having sex with her boyfriend under an Oak tree—and beautifully twists it into a tale that goes beyond the typical loss of innocence. ‘If You Must Know’ drips with the humid sweat of a sexy and mysterious southern gothic, but also examines our young heroine’s loneliness and despair in a way that opens up the world in a new, fantastic way. It twitches under your skin like a true living thing.”
My thanks to artist Clair Hartmann for creating this amazing cover.