Featured Mentor: Kirstin Allio
We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Kirstin Allio! Kirstin Allio won the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 for her new story collection, Double-Check for Sleeping Children, coming out in 2024. Previous books are the novels Garner (Coffee House Press, LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction finalist), and Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa), and the story collection Clothed, Female Figure (winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Competition). Recent stories, essays, and poems are out or forthcoming in Action Spectacle, AGNI, Bennington Review, Changes Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Guesthouse, Harp & Altar, The Hopkins Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and elsewhere. Her honors and awards include the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, a PEN/O. Henry Prize, the American Short(er) Fiction Prize from American Short Fiction, and fellowships from Brown University’s Howard Foundation and MacDowell. She holds an MFA from Brown, and lives in Providence, RI.
Kirstin spoke to what she loves about reading works in progress, “I love the intensity and openness of process. The tension between construction and inspiration, the back-and-forth between close-reading, dwelling deep in the weeds of words and sentences, and then zooming out for an aerial view of a potential arc, or theme, is no less than exhilarating!”
And Kirstin’s favorite book recently? Read her review of Gerald Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction and tell me you don’t want to read it too!
“It's true that Americans—this American, at least, often has the sense of receiving Australian literature upside down. Opposite seasons seem surreal, English might be in translated from a mirror English, and this minor strangeness is the quality that’s initially captivating to me in Gerald Murnane’s Collected Short Fiction and the quality that compels an attention to reading that's at once like relinquishing and reinventing comprehension.
Murnane is a master of atmospheric, geographical consciousness, a sense of place that seems to refer to both earth and moral imagination. The story "Land Deal," for example, is an originary hallucination, a node of collective consciousness, and, mapped as a morality tale, the ur-story of colonialism in Australia. Deeper in, I read Murnane as a writer with a center of gravity like the center of the earth, which gives him leverage, range: despite the idiosyncratic, provincial constraints of so many of his characters, the stories are vast, universal. This quality of imagining outward and then pulling in tight is as natural and steady as breathing, so that my experience of reading is breathing with the stories rather than following them. Letting my mind go.”
Click here to sign up for a mentorship from Kirstin!
Click here to check out Kirstin’s short story collection about women on the edge, Clothed, Female Figure.