The inspirations and origins for our stories.
Frances Pauli’s story “With Eyes Half Open” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 19 April 2019. “With Eyes Half Open” is the result of a writing prompt featuring circus-themed stories. I began with a young girl searching for magic, but as soon as Miranda walked through that gate, she was skeptical. The illusion of the lights and colors, the showiness and the theatrics did not impress her. I had to find something deeper, darker to …
Daniel Roy’s story “Forever and a Life” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 12 April 2019. One of the paradoxes of aging is that the less life we have left ahead of us, the more we obsess about extending this time. Death-defying acts of rebellion have almost always been led by the young, after all. It led to me wonder: how fearful of death could someone be if they could theoretically live forever? What would …
Sarah McGill’s story “A Yellow Landscape” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 5 April 2019. I wrote “A Yellow Landscape” after reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, which is a series of gorgeous essays on physical space in poetry. I was caught by his descriptions of a house as a very physical and yet deeply symbolic shell around the self. The protagonist of “A Yellow Landscape” moves around a house that is not her …
Evan Marcroft’s story “The Color of My Home is Red Like an Apple” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 29 March 2019. This story emerged from a lifelong grappling with the fundamental hurdle that I perceived in the concept of religion. I was never one to put faith in any process that could not be studied directly, and so I was somewhat puzzled by those in my life who held up the laws of their …
Rajiv Moté’s story “L’Appel du Vide” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 22 March 2019. “L’Appel du Vide,” French for “the call of the void,” is a phenomenon where a person standing at a precipice has the unreasonable, outrageous urge to step out into the abyss. Psychologists have studied this, and found that the urge isn’t suicidal, but an act of imagination that sparks the awareness of being alive. I wrote this story for a …
Vaya Pseftaki’s story “The Noise Inside” was published in Metaphorosis on Friday, 15 March 2019. The idea of a strange noise emanating from someone emerged as I was struggling with Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Around that time, I was also playing in a D&D campaign based on Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar books. This unholy combination produced the character of Sheyen, who, in the process of the story, mutated and bloomed. Kristeva’s theory of Abjection played …
