Author: Inklette

Brinjals

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Illustration by Ashwin Pandya

Mrs. Kaul was one of those neighbours that made you hate the whole lot. She had quick eyes and a heavy face. She wore a lot of gold, and talked in a loud way about things.  Or maybe it was just that loud statements, when lacking substance, have a tendency to somehow end up even louder than intended. She had once been a hot shot in the media world and was the prime dolled up face that promptly gave the six o’clock news  some twenty thirty years ago. As was the way of things, her male co-anchor got promoted and she got a neat receipt of the expiry date of her shelf life. The following week she was replaced by a young just-out-of-college-something with a beauty mark on her jaw and some really bad pronunciations. The entire incident, I believe, was starched, ironed, folded and then neatly stacked up in the towering pile of wrongdoings that the world had done to Mrs. Kaul. The stack, in exchange, bred the tiny revenges she took from the world with her quick tongue, crafting tailor fitted slits of words, that knifed her audience where she knew they were their weakest. She hated all things young and hated all women who she thought were pretty. She loved saying that NEWS stood for knowing everything about the north, east, west and the south. Home of course, was always conveniently left out.

She had a husband. Had him. Like a handbag. He was there and she was there and  both of them knew they were far too old to be looking for the people they thought they would fall in love with. But more than age, it was the realization that they had each become some contorted version of their actual selves that blockaded their paths to domestic bliss.

He was a quiet sort of man. He had once worked in the government administrations but now channelled all his wrinkled energy in tending to his cottage garden. Brinjal plants ivied the floors and potato stems stood like stout little soldiers. Occasional chillies popped up like diseases and sunflowers burst with a neon roar. He spent hours in the garden, sowing, examining, trimming , evening out the trimming, cherry picking tomato seeds, and avoiding entering his own house. The reluctance to go sat like fat dew drops on each petal of each plant.  His suicide hardly came as a surprise. The maid found him hanging from the ceiling one morning.

Mrs Kaul became even more bitter over the next few months. She would come over to our house and her words hung in the air like wet vomit. Silence became the loudest response she got and yet sympathy was slapped over her like facial cream; she didn’t really resist. She went around her life like luggage on the moving belt that nobody had claimed. She left the house a few years ago. A family of five came after them. With a neat set of parents and three children that looked fresh out of a milk advertisement. The garden was occupying far too much space for the blow up balloon pool, so they mowed it. And besides, who grows brinjals?

MEHAR HALEEM is a seventeen year old student who writes for the editorial board of her school . She is a curator for Efiction India and her works have been published or are going to be published in the forthcoming issues of Alexandria Quarterly, The Noisy Island, Sprout, The Bombay Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, Inklette and elsewhere . She currently lives in New Delhi , India.

ASHWIN PANDYA is a sketch-artist and illustrator, whose work has graced many book-covers. Acknowledged for his digital art as well as musical compositions, Ashwin Pandya can sketch given any situation, description or character. You can visit his website here.

What Monsters Take and What They Leave Behind

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Illustration by Ashwin Pandya

There’s a monster in the lake behind our house. Emma and I saw it. Well, we didn’t technically “see” it. We heard a deep growl coming from down there and there was this big dark shadow over the middle of the water. “Look Julie,” Emma cried. “It’s Lassie!”

Dad doesn’t want us going out on the lake when he isn’t watching us. I think he’s afraid Lassie will get us. He doesn’t want to lose any more girls to monsters. We already lost Mom to some monster named Brandon. I never even saw it happen. Emma and I were in school, but I heard my father on the phone with him once. He said, “No person with a heart could possibly steal a woman away from her husband and children.” Every person has a heart, so Brandon has to be a monster.

We only go to the lake on Saturdays or Sundays. That’s when Dad has the time to take us. He’s always busy in his office on weeknights and he says we have to focus on homework then. On school nights, Emma and I sit at the window, staring out at the lake. Lassie comes out when the sun starts to set. He prefers nights and shady days. I asked Dad why that was. “He probably has sensitive skin,” he answered. Emma wanted to throw a bottle of sunscreen in the water for him. I told her no, that it’s safer for us to swim during the day if he’s afraid of the sun.

Loch Ness Monsters also like pickles. I think I learned that during Monster Week on the Discovery Channel. When we go swimming, we sneak pickles from the fridge and sink them in the lake so Lassie isn’t hungry for us. You should never swim without at least three pickles. That is just enough to make us look too large for his stomach to handle. No one misses the pickles. Emma and I hate them and Dad only ever bought them for Mom. Why he never stopped, I don’t know.

The monster came for Mom almost a year ago. I never saw him, but I sometimes hear Dad talking about him on the phone. Brandon’s a hairy giant. He took Mom all the way across the country to a place in the mountains in California. Giants like mountains because they’re both tall. Dad says Brandon is bad, like Lassie, but sometimes he lets Mom send us things in the mail. She says she is happy but she misses us and maybe someday she’ll bring us out there to see her. Emma says she can’t wait. I don’t think it’ll happen though. I think Brandon sends those things to make us believe everything is fine. How could she be happy living with a monster?

I can’t blame Dad for losing Mom. I don’t think he really believed monsters were real before Brandon came along. He wasn’t equipped with the knowledge of monsters’ behaviors and how to keep them away.

After we lost Mom, I started reading books from the school library about all of the different monsters. Our house is surrounded by tree lines, which for all I know, hide all of the worst kinds of monsters in the darkness at night. I recruited Emma to monster-proof the house. I sprinkled garlic powder all over the carpets in the house to keep the vampires away. I read that giants like beans, so Emma started sneaking her green beans from dinner into her pockets and we put them in the yard. The beans would distract the giants and they would forget that they had come to take us away.

I don’t want to lose Emma to another Brandon. Dad played a song once about a Purple People Eater and I didn’t know what to do about that one until he explained that that monster only eats people who are purple. None of us are purple but one night, just to be safe, I gathered all of the purple clothes in the house and threw them away.

I never found anything to defend against lake monsters though. I once tried to lure Lassie out into the sunlight with a pickle on a string, hoping the rays would burn him up into dust, like vampires in the morning. Emma sat excitedly by my side. Dad asked what we were doing with a pickle and Emma responded, “Fishing for monsters!” He sighed and went back to reading his book. Lassie did not appear. There wasn’t even a ripple in the water. We threw the pickle in and went back up to the house with Dad.

Every attempt made to trap Lassie failed. We could not catch a lake monster. The water was dark below the surface. Even our own bodies disappeared in the lake when we swam. I never made it very deep either, but the water seems to go on forever. It’s impossible to know where Lassie is below the surface. Not even Mystery Inc. could solve the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster in their movie, and they could solve any mystery. Every day he remained was another day we were all at risk.

When it seemed like we would never figure out how to stop Lassie, I asked Mom. I wrote a letter hoping that Brandon would know something, that maybe monsters knew secrets about other monsters. Dad didn’t like us sending things back to Mom when we got stuff from her, so I kept it a secret from him, and from Emma. I found her address on an envelope in Dad’s study while he was busy making dinner. I took a new envelope and copied it on there. The tricky part was getting it to the mailbox without Dad seeing. Every morning he looks through the mail that he is going to send before taking it outside. I just had to slip it in the middle after he checked through them. When he went to the bathroom, I tucked it right in. Emma watched, giving me a questioning look and I just smiled back, letting her know it was our secret.

Things are looking up. I have recruited the help of another monster who seems less dangerous than the one we’re currently dealing with. Since it’s Saturday, Emma and I get ready to go back down to the lake with Dad. I pack my bag with a whole jar of pickles, ready to throw some in the water before jumping in myself. Emma packs her inflatable ring. Dad walks us down the hill, book in hand, and sits himself in the grass while we head straight for the water. We throw our pickles in and follow shortly after them.

The lake feels cold at first, but I warm up as time passes. The sky was cloudy in the morning and the warmth of the sun hasn’t reached below the lake’s surface. The phone starts ringing faintly from the house. Usually Dad ignores it while we are playing in the water. When the ringing ends, it picks back up again and he lets it ring. The third time, Dad gets up. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he says, “Be careful.” Emma and I stay in the water. It’s the first time we’re in the lake and he isn’t right there with us. Emma is excited and starts splashing me harder with water. I return fire and it becomes a full-blown water battle.

Suddenly, Emma starts sinking a little. Her tube is deflating rapidly. Lassie. He has her. He went for her greatest weakness first, the only thing keeping her afloat. As he pulls at her feet, she starts going under water and popping back up, fighting back. She screams for me and I jump out of the water. Running to my bag, I grab the pickles. Opening the jar is difficult. My hands are slimy and pruned from the dirty water. They keep slipping on the cold metal lid. I get the lid loose and throw the whole jar in the water. Lassie doesn’t give up when the pickles hit.

Emma is still going under, disappearing longer each time. Protecting Emma from the monsters was my only job. I yell for Dad. He yells back, “Your mom’s on the phone. What did you send…” He stops when he looks down at Emma struggling in the water. He drops the phone, stumbling back down the hill.

Emma’s head comes up for another breath just as Dad dives into the lake after her. She goes back under into the darkness. I think it’s the end. Lassie will get them both. Seconds feel like minutes while I kneel at the edge of the water waiting. Dad comes bursting out of the water, holding Emma. She’s coughing and rubbing at her eyes. Dirt covers her face. He sets her down on the grass, whispering to her. I stay where I am, confused. Why did Lassie let them go? Mom must have told Dad the secret over the phone just before he came down the hill. I stare out at the water and watch as the flattened plastic of Emma’s tube drifts further and further across the lake.

BECCA BLAUCH, 23, lives in her hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. She earned her BFA at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College in 2015. She is currently completing her MFA at Chatham University. She has served at the nonfiction editor of Behrend’s Lake Effect for two years. Inklette will be her first publication.

ASHWIN PANDYA is a sketch-artist and illustrator, whose work has graced many book-covers. Acknowledged for his digital art as well as musical compositions, Ashwin Pandya can sketch given any situation, description or character. You can visit his website here.

Pushcart Nominations

Inklette Magazine is thrilled to announce its Pushcart nominees! Read on to know more about them and what inspired their work.

POETRY 

 

‘Pack’ by Bryanna Licciardi  (ISSUE III)

Inspiration behind Pack: When I first came across the story of Dr. Guthrie, what struck me most was how heroic he was depicted, and that his experiments were seen as inspirational. Not once did it mention, anywhere in this story, the pain and panic those dogs must have felt while being mutilated in the name of science. It struck me that Dr. Guthrie’s name has gone down in history, and yet those dogs have been left nameless. I figured they deserved a name. I figured I could give them that much.

BRYANNA LICCIARDI has received her MFA in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literacy Studies. Her work appears in such journals as Poetry Quarterly, BlazeVOX, 491 Magazine, Dos Passos, Adirondack Review and Cleaver Magazine. You can visit her profile on P&W or www.bryannalicciardi.com for more about her work.

 

‘Stillborn’ by Meghan Bliss (ISSUE II)

Inspiration behind Stillborn: Stillborn was not inspired by personal events and therefore happened somewhat by accident. However, I’ve known a few women who have dealt with miscarriages, and the poem evolved from the overall experience of loss that pervades every life, whether it’s the loss of a child, a friend, a marriage, a dream, good health, or even innocence. The writing process itself was simple. The opening line happened when I wasn’t looking for it, so I let it take me from there. I don’t think I can write about the loss of a child accurately, as I haven’t experienced it myself. But I wanted to provide whatever voice I could on behalf of every woman who has ever lost a child, and therefore feels like she has lost part of herself.

MEGHAN BLISS is a freelance writer, editor, and blogger from New Bern, North Carolina. Her poetry and nonfiction have been published in Rust+Moth, Naugatuck River Review, A Poetry Congeries, and Mary Jane’s Farm, among others. Her chapbook, The Little Universe, was published by dancing girl press in 2015. She is currently writing two novels and offering weekly writing, editing, and publishing tips to women at TheLadyinRead.com. She, her handsome husband, and their fur-child, Black Sabbath the cat, are expecting their first human child next summer.

FICTION 

 

‘Feathers‘ by Barbara Lane (Issue III)

Inspiration behind Feathers: Feathers was inspired by some of my favorite childhood memories, the many great stories my Dad gave to me, and a lot of blood and sweat. Much of the non-mythological narrative is true, but the mythology itself has a way of breathing life into the nonfiction. I’ve been drawn to the story of Dædlus and Icarus for as long as I can remember; when I started to work on my MFA thesis, I decided to figure out why. The writing process was beautiful and agonizing—as it should be. A lot of fantastically generous friends and colleagues read it way too many times and shared their honest thoughts. Draft after draft after draft. Eventually, I wrote my way into the realization that my Dad gave me so much as a child and that all of those “feathers” had led me to a life far removed from the labyrinthine faith of my childhood—which, in the essay, takes the shape of Icarus’ perceived death. First, the essay was a 12-page essay for a workshop class. Then it became a 7-page essay for the Narrow Chimney Reading Series in Flagstaff, AZ. Next, it was a three-page essay for another workshop. And now it is what it is. I’ve read it many times since it was published at Inklette, frustrated with the many ways that I could still revise it, but I suppose those are good ideas for new essays.

BARBARA LANE lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches English, enjoys local craft beer, writes about feathers, and hikes a lot. She earned her MFA at Northern Arizona University in 2016 and served as the 2015-2016 nonfiction editor for Thin Air Magazine. Her work has also appeared at Art House America and Queen Mobs Teahouse.

 

‘And They Lived’  by Sophie Panzer  (Issue III)

Inspiration behind And They Lived: I started writing the piece that turned into And They Lived as a response to Don Delillo’s short story, Coming Sun. Mon. Tues. I loved the idea of varying setting and small sensory details in order to convey how different events could have the same emotional resonance. It was like a choose-your-own-adventure story where all the choices ultimately led to the same place but also provided room to explore different possibilities. Using this technique to tell the story of a millennial couple was my attempt to both mock and celebrate some aspects of contemporary young adulthood.

SOPHIE PANZER is a history major at McGill University. She attended the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and won a national medal in journalism from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Her work has appeared in carte blanche, Germ Magazine, and YARN (Young Adult Review Network). She enjoys long walks with dogs, friendly arguments, and reading aloud.

 

‘Lovers Haunt’ by S. Winters (Issue II)

Inspiration behind Lovers Haunt:  Lovers Haunt was written in response to my own experiences as well as a few women close to me. Initially it had been intended as an explanation, but ended up a convoluted riddle of truths. Skye resides in the Hub City of Vancouver Island. 

S. WINTERS, pulled by the motion still symbols evoke, can usually be found among the old growth giants of Vancouver Island working on her novel. Her work can be found in The Portal, Vancouver Island University’s literary magazine.

 

Other Nominations 

 

FICTION 
‘…And it seems I’ve just woken up’ by Thomas Singer (Issue II)

Interview with Michelle Wosinski

Recently, Art and Photography Editor, Shweta Pathare, interviewed Graphic Fiction Editor and Contributor, Michelle Wosinski, for Inklette’s blog. Read this informal interview to know more about ‘Mitch’ and view her work! 

Inklette is now accepting Graphic Fiction submissions! 

MW: Hey I’m here!

SP: Oh great, then. Let’s start! Can you please tell us something about yourself? Anything, really! Just so I can know you better.

MW: Okay sure! Well, I’m Michelle, obviously. For some reason, in creative environments, I prefer to be called Mitch. Well, not really a preference but I just got used to it and I kind of like it; both are really fine. It started because last year when I went to UVA’s Young Writers Workshop. We had ‘Drag Day,’ so I needed a ‘boy’ name. I chose Mitch and it stuck, even all the teachers knew me as it afterwards. Besides that, some simple facts I guess I could share are: I was born and raised in Luxembourg but I’m Mexican American (with a Polish last name in the mix), I’m bad at introductions, and I love gluten free banana bread?

SP: Oh! I love vanilla flavoured bread, haha. That was a great introduction, really! It is great to know about you.

MW: Thanks! You too I’m glad we’re doing this (: (also vanilla is very underrated i love it)

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SP: So, Tell us something about your work, as in what inspired you to make them?

MW: Hm, well, in terms of why I started graphic fiction in general that’s a bit of a long boring story but I’ll keep it snappy. Basically I wanted to go to a writing camp (wow this again) and I found YWW, so I wanted to apply for fiction writing, but I ended up getting accepted for graphic fiction and nonfiction. I really loved comics and cartoons and it seemed like just the right combination of art and writing (two things I love to do) for me. Little did I know how much more it was than just a combination of the two, honestly it’s an amazing medium of storytelling and reading graphic fiction offers an experience unique from all other writing forms that I feel is grossly underappreciated. Anyway, that’s how I found my love for it, and ever since I’ve been obsessed with it.

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‘Savoir-vivre’

SP: That’s great in my opinion! Combining your interests is a great thing to do. What kind of themes do you include in your work? What kind of topics do you try putting into the pieces you make and that you would want to include in your future work?

MW: I’m not sure if you can really tell from my work you’ve seen, but I think a lot of my stuff revolves around, I don’t want to say ‘human interaction’ because I draw dinosaurs and I wouldn’t want to limit myself, but yeah, interactions between people. I think dialogue has always been my strong point, and that’s partially why I love doing graphic. Showing a relationship and everything behind it and trying to condense it into a small moment of interaction, all the implications behind things people say. The biggest compliment anyone can give me is when they say, “their voices sounded so real, like actual people.’ I hope that makes sense? I guess I’ve never had to word this before. Relationships are so interesting, not just long term ones like romantic and friends and family, but even the short lived ones between you and that guy that you made 7 second eye contact with at the grocery line. Anyway, besides that I like to explore weird stuff like the first comic i ever made was about a dude who got stuck in limbo and was mostly just chilling there in the white space, dealing with coping with a brand new reality around him and the new people he met there. When I think of the sort of writing that I aim for, I think dream of dreams I’d want to be described as a combination of David Wong, Joseph Fink, and Lemony Snicket (even if those are all fiction writers, still working on building up my graphic fiction repertoire).

Shit, interviews are hard.

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‘An Exchange’

SP: Wonderful, being inspired by real life situations and putting them into a comic form really catches my interest! So, um, could you tell us about the form of comics that you have selected, they seem to be fun and doodle-like, refined drawing rather than realistic renders. Is it because you want add an element of humour to them, even while you take up topics which might be a little sensitive?

MW: Oh, I can actually answer this one! Okay, well, first of all I’m not gonna lie, there is an element of artistic ability. Don’t get me wrong I sit down for an hour and draw a realistic face, but

  1. I am not gonna spend that much time on every frame that’s just a blocker and time waster, and
  2. That’s not the point of comics! (at least not all of them)

There are so many beautiful graphic novels with AMAZING illustration, but that doesn’t have to everyone’s style, and not everything you make has to be an artistic masterpiece. It depends on the focus of the comic. Look at Chris Ware, an amazing cartoonist. If you look up his sketches they are incredible in technique and realisticness, but his actually cartoons are very… well cartoonish (they still are amazing drawings though). Comics are flexible as well, you don’t have to even be ‘good at drawing’ to make one or even to excel at making them, that’s a myth.

Also, yes I do think that the way that I draw has somewhat to do with humor. Every detail put into my comics are a choice. I think you can even see most of my comics aren’t even the complete same drawing style. My dinosaur comics are a great example, the first three frames of An Exchange was actual real life dialogue I heard in a library said by two women, I could have drawn anything I wanted to to pair it with, but I chose dinosaurs. Why? Because it just felt right; absurd but still made enough sense to not distract too much from the dialogue. It took a pretty bland, regular moment and shifted the context to make it interesting, not to the characters, but to the reader. I love that, the characters just living their boring ass lives obliviously, while we eat that shit up. Writing the manuscript line was the very last thing I did, I just thought the thought of a brontosaurus writing a manuscript was funny.

Okay, that’s long sorry oops.

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‘Mitch Memory’

SP: Don’t be sorry for that, it was good to know the thoughts you put in! Oh, and when I first saw ‘An Exchange’ I found it funny, because it was the dinosaur’s manuscript (brontosaurus) and that thought of him writing the manuscript was funny to me since he cannot really write a manuscript. Since you have spoken about ‘An Exchange,’ I wanted to ask you about another piece of yours that I found really interesting, ‘Mitch Memory.’ Could you please tell us about the thought process behind it and why did you select a gay topic for the comic?

MW: That was actually an exercise from my summer workshop, I made it in about an hour. The exercise was to make a list of people you lost contact with and write everything you could remember about them, then choose one, change their name, and make a comic. I chose to do ‘Emma Berg’ because I thought it was a weird memory worth making a comic about, at least more so than the other people in my list. So yeah, if you didn’t know that is a completely true story from my childhood, I even showed it to my friend from the last few frames who gave me that ‘great advice.’ I think it’s funny because her first grade boyfriend actually turned out to be gay, ha, I didn’t put that in the comic, though, because it wasn’t really relevant. It was sort of refreshing to make an autobiographical comic because I’d never thought of doing it before, and I feel like this comic is very, very different from the style and tone of the rest of my work, but I decided to embrace it. The process of making it was very raw and I sort of loved it, making it so quickly and not overthinking it. Regarding choosing a gay topic, I didn’t really choose it I don’t think, it just sort of happened. I’m not hesitant to talk about being gay and I embrace (crave) any form of queer fiction to read so why not contribute. To be honest, I think writing about being gay and my childhood actually unconsciously inspired the style of the piece: the blocks of narrative writing above each frame. It’s more writing than I would ever usually do, and I think I was really channeling Alison Bechdel there, the lesbian queen of comics (look up her work you’ll see what I mean by her style, especially in her novel Fun Home). Anyway, childhood is weird and kids do weird shit, I’m more embarrassed about the lipgloss yearbook incident than anything else.

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SP: I think that is great, being confident about yourself and exhibiting it in your work. Gives me inspiration. This makes me want to ask you, What do you like about your own work? Anything in particular that you would never change about your work no matter what? It could be the way it personally connects to you or maybe the way you come up with them or anything.

MW: Oh, wow, huh. I guess I tend to be very self-critical so I don’t think about this much, but I guess if I had to choose something I wouldn’t want to change about my work it would be its authenticity. I hope that doesn’t sound pretentious or anything, but I just mean all my work come from a place of pure joy of creating comics. Whenever I make something that doesn’t come from ‘the heart,’ I guess, I just HATE it. I need to feel like it’s authentic to me, that I’m not doing anything for any other reason that because I love it. Even if I don’t love how a comic turned out, how it’s drawn or something just isn’t as good as it could be, if I can look back at it and remember making it and everything I put into it, I can’t not love it. And by ‘everything I put into it,’ I don’t necessarily mean hours of thought or work, but the intention behind it even if it’s a crappy doodle I made in a few minutes. Not gonna lie, even writing this I’m getting excited like I want to go grab a pen and draw something right now, like let’s fucking go. I don’t mean to give the wrong impression that making comics is all rainbows and butterflies (even though it kind of is), it’s annoyingly time consuming and frustrating as any other artform. I have stayed up hours and stressed cried over making a piece, and writer’s block is just as much of a thing. Worth it, though.

 

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‘The Watchers: Prologue’

SP: You are very very VERY enthusiastic! Wow! Maybe 1 or 2 more questions, if you don’t mind. Can you tell us something about the way you make your pieces, as in the tools or maybe materials needed and how you prepare the final images?

MW: Every person is different, but the way I make my comics mostly goes like this: After gaining some sort of inspiration or idea, whether it be from real life or out of nowhere. I start with either dialogue or drawings, depending on what inspired me, it doesn’t matter a whole lot. I doodle for a while, I like to sketch the characters several times with little text next to them of things I think they might say to gain a better sense of their character and voice. Then I make thumbprints and more sketches, exploring all sorts of factors like the framing and angles and everything, before moving on to drawing the final piece. I draw it really big on A3 sketch paper no matter what the comic is, so that when I scan it no matter what size it is on the computer it will never show up blurry. I use a photo-blue pencil (which appears invisible on the computer when you scan black and white) and then ink over it with pens. I’m a pretty bad inker, I make a lot of mistakes, so then after scanning the final inked piece I clean everything up on photoshop. That’s basically it.

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‘The Watchers: Page One’

SP: That is a pretty good and tedious process. So for my final question, how do you hope to take this further in the future? Do you want to continue making them as they are or would you like to use this method and create such pieces for something specific?

MW: I would love to continue making comics regularly for as long as I can, and it’s something of a dream of mine to write a graphic novel, that would be amazing. Although, I think I need a hell of a lot more practice and experience as of now. I would also like to at some point make a series of strip comics or webcomics, possibly something to do with my dinosaurs, we’ll see. In terms of how else I could apply comics, I plan on going to university for animation (at least that’s the plan right now), which obviously is very similar in many ways. Making comics will definitely be useful for getting into animation, but I hope that I can gain something from making animations that will benefit my comics as well.

SP: Yes, as things proceed, you will have a clearer picture. 🙂 Thank you so much Michelle for these wonderful answers! I loved interviewing you 😀 And please keep sharing your work with us.

MW: Thank you! I also really enjoyed this, your questions were really great and I loved answering them, thanks for doing this.

147612717979760-1MICHELLE WOSINSKI is an alumnus of the University of Virginia Young Writers Workshop. She was a member of the program’s first class of Graphic Fiction and Nonfiction, which was also the first workshop of its kind in the country. Though german screamo music from the streets of Luxembourg can be heard at all hours through her bathroom window, which is as distracting as it sounds, she continues to work on her comics and art.

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SHWETA PATHARE is an anime enthusiast who loves everything about her cats, family and friends. She believes that she will turn her imagination to reality with the power of her impeccable illustrations skills and her inquisitiveness.

Blaine’s Fire

A short story
BY JOHN S. OSLER III

The first day of summer after ninth grade, Blaine Cohen burnt all of his journals.

It’s a fairly common practice, burning notebooks at the end of the school year. At least, it is at my school, where everyone has a ranch house out in the middle of Texan nowhere where there’s no one to notice a massive column of smoke coming from blazing math homework and english papers as you vent your pent up anger and anti-intellectualism that’s as much a part of Farrand blood as iron.

Blaine, though, he’s not from one of the old families with a ranch house. He’s not from Farrand, not a Texan, not even a southerner. He hails from Meadville, Pennsylvania, and his only home is a townhouse on the border between the good part of Farrand and the bad part, built into the side of an old riverbed where the train tracks run.

Blaine didn’t light up his schoolwork either, he burnt his personal writing. Every page filled to the margin. Fantasy novels were the most common in his oeuvre, but he had poetry too, and slice-of-life short stories and highly inaccurate nonfiction and page long who-done-it mysteries with no solutions and choose-your-own-adventure stories that always ended in your death and flash fiction and dervish essays and dozens of other kinds of writing I’d never even heard of.

I wasn’t there to see the setup, but I can imagine it, piles tattered of notebooks rising like mountains on his dehydrated brown lawn. Maybe he sprayed some lighter fluid or insect repellent on it before dropping one of his stepfather’s collectable cigarette lighters.

What I did see was Blaine five minutes after the act. He rung my doorbell, and when I came out to see him his face was bright red, his hands on his knees, panting hard, like an excited dog. Blaine was fit, but the Texan summer heat was crushing.

“Hi Blaine,” I said.

“Hi,” he said, his word just another exhausted breath.

“Um, do you want to come in?” I asked.

“Actually,” he said, standing up straight and beginning to speak normally, “I was thinking you could come over to my house.”

“Okay.”

“Question: do you have a fire extinguisher?”

“Yeah,” I grabbed it from the closet next to the front door. Blaine could be so weird, so I’d given up trying to understand him years ago. I assumed we’d use the fire extinguisher to propel ourselves in some abandoned shopping cart he found in the woods or to use it for a game of spin the fire extinguisher with his cousins from Waco or something even less orthodox.

We started making our way to his house. After maybe a block of walking he looked up, surveyed the rising plume of smoke, and said, “You know, we should probably run.”

I realized we were going to use the fire extinguisher for its intended and sprinted to his house.

By the time we got there, the notebook pile was ash, the flames had begun rising on his little brother’s rotten wooden playhouse, and tendrils were spreading to the car port.

I unloaded every bit of foam from the fire extinguisher and only made a small wet patch in the growing blaze. So I grabbed my cell phone and made a quick, panicked call to the fire department.

“What is this?” I asked when I was done.

“I burnt all my notebooks,” he said.

I wasn’t sure what was more shocking, the growing inferno melting his brother’s yellow plastic swings or the idea that he would burn his dragon’s horde of notebooks. He’d punched me in the gut and stopped talking to me for a month when I’d spilled water on one by accident. To burn them? All of them? That wasn’t like Blaine as all.

On second thought, it was totally like Blaine. Consistently inconsistent.

“I wanted a clean start,” he continued. “No matter what I did, it always felt like I was repeating myself. I wanted to be reborn as a writer, rising from the ashes of my slaughtered past like a glorious phoenix.”

On a rational level, it was nonsense. On a literary level, it was a cliched metaphor. Either way I was unsatisfied.

The fire was starting to climb up the wooden siding of his house. If the fire department didn’t come soon, there wouldn’t be much of a house left.

“You know, we could have burnt them at my ranch house. I’m going there this weekend, you could come along and-”

Blaine shoved his palm into my sternum and for a moment I couldn’t breath. I stumbled backwards, tripped myself up, and collapsed to the pavement. As I looked up from my low angle on the ground, vision blurry from the pain, I saw Blaine surrounded by flames below and smoke above. His face was red again, this time from fury. He looked positively satanic.

The landlord evicted Blaine’s family, of course. It was the only rational thing to do, when your tenants burn down the carport, swing set, living room, and most of the master bedroom. When the poor guy came to break the news, Blaine’s stepdad punched a few of his teeth out.

To escape his stepdad’s wrath, he stayed with my family all summer and two months of the school year. It was fun, at first, like having a sleepover that didn’t end the next morning. But before long it became more like having an irritable brother with random mood swings who didn’t get along with my actual brothers.

I was almost happy to see him move back to Meadville with his ex-stepmom, because I was finally rid of that shifty mix of envy and pity I always get with him. He’s lived through a lot, and if he keeps going the way he’s been going he’ll suffer a lot more than I will in my lifetime.

But, if life experience is what feeds a writer, then he’ll be the best damn novelist of the century, provided he lives to adulthood and ever has something besides ashes to send to the publishers.

147326423367437JOHN S. OSLER III is a freshman at Grinnell College in Iowa majoring in English and Psychology. He has written over two hundred satirical articles for his underground newspaper The Southern View, and a few for his high school’s legitimate newspaper,Zephyrus, on the side. He has published short stories in Sprout Magazine, The Phosphene Journal, and Random Sample Review.

As Evening Closes In

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As Evening Closes In by Miranda Sun
Photography Ι 2592 X 1936 Ι 2015

MIRANDA SUN is sixteen years old and lives in Illinois. She loves to read, write, draw, take cool photographs, and drink lychee bubble tea (although not all at once). She has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and has been published in Creative Kids magazine, where she serves as a Senior Contributor, as well as other places, such as Glass Kite Anthology and Blue Marble Review.

Children of Kashmir

Artist Statement: “I developed interest in photography about  four years ago. I was experimenting with my mother’s DSLR and slowly, photography became my passion. My work, over the years, has seen significant improvement. Even though most of my work consists of street photography, I have never set boundaries for myself and have always been keen on experimenting.

As is known, human emotions are constantly changing and need an outlet. Photography has become a platform for my emotions and a channel through which I express myself. 

My interest in street photography developed because of this very idea, for I love to capture human emotions in their rawest form. Because of that, I have been inspired by photographers like Steve McCurry, Raghu Rai, Ketaki Sheth and Dayanita Singh.

I plan to continue working towards my passion, that has provided me comfort in the darkest times. I also hope to use this very form of art to bring about a change in the world, one picture at a time.”

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Children of Kashmir by Manya Sinha
Photography Ι 2336 x 3504 Ι 2014

MANYA SINHA is a seventeen year old Radiohead and Queen fan living in Chandigarh, India. She hopes to bring about a difference in the world through her art, one picture at a time.