Vibe: spooky, whimsical, cerebral
Rejections: 3
a time travel novella
about a young woman, July Friday,
student due to undertake her Study
Away Séance (modeled somewhat on my
junior year abroad). Of course she goes to
Victorian England, finds Thackeray.
Read more at Wild Roof Journal. I inhaled this issue on the day it came out! I think you should do the same. I absolutely loved the sound and rhythm of "Brief Footnote to Butterflies in May" by JC Alfier: "Swallowtails cling to blossoms/ of wolfsbane wildly purpled/ in their toxic namesake."
"Educational Séances" is one for the Vanity Fair fans. A long, but truly fabulous Victorian novel.
I wrote this piece for a hybrid memoir class, in which we were encouraged to tell our life stories with the help of other sources. I really wanted to write about the time I did a séance/ tried to contact the spirit of William Thackeray...
For the first draft, I tried to include alllll the research about the Victorians that I'd conducted for a (failed) novella. With my workshop deadline fast approaching, I kept getting stuck, so I went back to the novella draft—the opening plus a date/sex scene I wrote for a romance class—and thought, why not repurpose this? The result was looser, and more fun. For now, I'll keep all my weird-facts-about-the-Victorians bit for parties.
Prompt
Create a hybrid piece using your own poems/prose. Bonus points if you conduct a séance to speak to your favourite deceased writer.