“Fire Season,” a short story by Colette Langlois, appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I wrote this piece during a period when I was breaking up with my home town. While I certainly did not experience the same events as the I-character, her psychological story arc probably reflects something of what I was going through at the time.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
Deciding which parts to keep. The first draft of “Fire Season” was almost twice as long, and had several flashback scenes with Mandy, the 6-year-old I-character and a lioness. It pained me to cut those scenes. They had their own storyline, and a dreamlike quality, the way childhood memories sometimes do, that just made them too confusing alongside the Clark storyline. Maybe some version of them will find a place in another piece. Also because the fictional setting was based on a location I know very well, earlier drafts had more place details and backstory that I later realized the piece didn’t need.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
The Moon of Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice (2018). I read this ripping good story not long after it was published, but thought of it often in the early days of the pandemic. It was chilling and astonishing to witness how much of what it imagined of human nature in a situation of existential threat played out in real life.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
A short story set 10,000 years in the future on one of Jupiter’s moons, and a novel set 10,000 years in the past in the European Alps.
Our thanks to Colette for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Colette’s story, “Fire Season”, here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-fire-season.
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Colette Langlois holds a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Colette’s short story “The Emigrants” won the 2016 Writers Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stuart Journey Prize, and was a finalist in the 2016 Lascaux Short Fiction Prize contest. Other work has previously appeared in Prism International, Junto Magazine and The Lamp.