Sandi Leibowitz’s story “The Cypress and the Rose” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 20 April 2018.
I envisioned this as a feminist re-telling of a certain familiar fairy tale, but I didn’t want that to be apparent early on. The hero’s name that came to me was Cyprus, who was a boy. Then I changed it to Cypress, and the tree and plant imagery came to me. That sounded like a girl’s name, so I swerved the story into a different direction again–and liked it much better that way.
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