Every year, I wrote stories for the competition, as my mother had. And yearly, the magazine published vampires fluent in metaphors. Zombies measuring syllables in flesh.
I wrote about mothers and sons. Abandonment. They weren’t autobiographical, even though my sisters raised me, and Mother drifted like the tide. I was simply drawn to darkness.
I arranged and rearranged mothers, moving them from bars to classrooms. They boozed, got high, took road trips to random spots.
After the fiftieth rejection, I burned the stories, leaving a space wonderful and vast. So I sat down to write a story about writing a story.
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Mir-Yashar is a graduate of Boise State University, with a BA in political science. He currently attends Colorado State’s MFA program, in fiction. His short stories have been published or are forthcoming in various literary journals including Monkeybicycle and Crack The Spine. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and enjoys beer, The Big Lebowski, and exploring the beautiful wonders of Fort Collins.
Lead image: “Story Dynamics” (via Flickr user Apollo Scribe)