The inspirations and origins for our stories.

It came from Erik Goldsmith

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Erik Goldsmith’s story “Sharpington’s Coffers – Current Score 49.8” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 8 December 2017. I wanted to write something about an unknown author (like myself) and how frustrating the publishing world can be. I don’t know about other people, but sometimes I get this gnawing feeling. rejection after rejection, that I’m not creative enough to be published, objectively speaking; that it’s not the story’s fault, but my own lack of ingenuity …

It came from Mariah Montoya

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Mariah Montoya’s story “The Wife of Fabian Vitalik” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 24 November 2017. I first started writing “The Wife of Fabian Vitalik” after hearing a few real-life stories about husbands or wives who left their spouse after several years of marriage (these were situations where the split seemed entirely one-sided). I wanted to explore the concept of separation – what makes someone leave? What makes someone stay? Of course, Fabian’s wife …

It came from Joachim Heijndermans

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Joachim Heijndermans’s story “My Book Report on Starlight” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 17 November 2017. My family moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1998, when I was about 8 years old. I did not speak a word of English and was terrified of the prospect of attending a school where I couldn’t talk to anyone. By a pure stroke of luck, the school I attended had another student who also spoke …

It came from Gerald Warfield (again)

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Gerald Warfield’s story “The Number of the Tribe” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 10 November 2017. I love to speculate on the origin of things, how one concept is built on another, is built on another, all the way back to—when? Mathematics should be traceable to a time when someone realized that it was useful to have more numbers than one had fingers. But the specifics of those earliest events will remain forever shrouded …

It came from Patrick Doerksen

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Patrick Doerksen’s story “Notes Towards a New Fairytale” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 3 November 2017. “Notes towards a New Fairtale” was written at a hinge moment in my life. I was trying to decide whether or not to go “all in” with fiction or to let myself keep dabbling and making more career-oriented lifestyle choices. I was discouraged by a number of rejections and feeling quite lost; so I wrote a story about …

It came from Benjamin Cort

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Benjamin Cort’s story “Bluebird” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 27 October 2017. “Bluebird” started as a sci-fi riff on some of the early scenes of Grapes of Wrath. I imagined a cowboy of sorts with a hulking harvester monstrosity talking a family off their dusty farm so that a high tech city could make its way in. The “City” in Bluebird is inspired by another short story I wrote for an American Protest Literature …