The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Kathryn Yelinek’s story “Hearts and Roses” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 25 November 2016. “Hearts and Roses” came about by merging two different ideas, as so many of my stories do. First, I’ve always enjoyed stories about individuals who have been turned human from something else, e.g., The Shape-Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn. I’d been wanting to write a story like that for some time but couldn’t find a hook for this idea. Then …
Allison Epstein’s story “Pandemonium” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 18 November 2016. For a mild-mannered, not-religious Midwesterner, I have a slightly offbeat fascination with demons. I often find my brain circling back to them when I sit down to write, like water circling the drain of a vaguely hellish shower. The reluctant Miltonic demon has always fascinated me: the world-weary nine-to-fiver, beaten down by the daily grind of damnation, yet still pathetically hopeful things …
Eugene Morgulis’s story “My Last Summer at Camp Unterlaken” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 11 November 2016. The setting of the story is based on Camp Interlaken in Northern Wisconsin, which I attended every summer as a boy. The lake was freezing, so the counselors would joke that there were motion activated heating coils beneath the surface, and we had to jump in so they could warm up the water. The story takes that …
Caleb Warner’s story “The Cartographer” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 4 November 2016. This story really first came into being as a prose poem that I wrote for an introductory poetry class I took years ago. The primary image I began with was that of a little girl looking up at a telephone pole. I had no other context in my head other than just that image. A lot of my ideas start this …
Karl Dandenell’s story “Comes the Tinker” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 28 October 2016. My stories usually start from the ending (what I want to see happen) or a setting (where can my characters play?). “Comes the Tinker” was one of those tales that fell into my brain as both images (the Tinker and his cart with mechanical horses) and sounds. I was in the middle of tracing my wife’s ancestors from England to …
Hamilton Perez’s story “Strix Antiqua” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 16 September 2016. I’ve always been fascinated by old myths and folktales, and I like to keep compendiums of magical creatures close at hand when I’m writing. In one such compendium I discovered the strix, a bird from Roman mythology often associated with witches, owls, and the consumption of human flesh. Seemed like good material to work with. The first thing that came to …
