“That Long Body of Hers” by Julie Esther Fisher appeared in Issue 46 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
Free writing is the only way I’ve ever been able to outrun the inner critic. Free writing with 104 fever is that process on steroids. At twenty years old, freshly home from the ten-day retreat for my low residency bachelor’s degree program, I crawled out of bed to fulfill the first in a daunting array of writing tasks set by my mentor. I’d hoped that a fever might earn me the right to stay in bed and postpone my workload, but my tough, and ultimately wise mentor required me to get on with the job. I’m forever grateful to her. That Long Body of Hers was to become my first published story, accepted by Alaska Quarterly Review, thrilling an idealistic young artist who didn’t quite realize what she was getting herself into.
My fascination with, and urge to tell stories, manifests in this fever piece in which not even the protagonist can suppress this most ancient of human arts, gathering around the campfire to spin a good yarn.
There was not much to do when my mentor returned the story to me with her feedback. She wanted one succinct paragraph answering the question: how long have these two women been taking baths together?
Recommend a book for us.
These same campfire instincts are exquisitely fulfilled by “Revenge,” Yoko Ogawa’s dark and twisty collection of linked stories. In sometimes skeletal, sometimes poetic prose, the author penetrates the ravages of loss and grief with an almost gothic sensibility. Each story is a piece of blade-like precision. Together, they cut the reader apart. By the end of the collection, the reader becomes just another member of the slowly exsanguinating, for whom there are no saving stitches.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be?
I’d love to sit down with Yoko Ogawa, but I would be scared! To plumb the consciousness of an author who takes me to places of trauma with such unsettling ease makes me wonder what everyday life is like for her. Her horror is often conveyed in just such settings, the innocuousness of the daily. I’d wonder what might happen next, and though I imagine wanting to flee before it does, I know I wouldn’t be able to tear myself away.
What are you working on now?
I have many irons in the proverbial campfire. I’m always looking to write new stories, revise old ones, or repurpose material searching for its best crucible or form. A novella is three-quarters of the way to the finish line, and my forthcoming poetry chapbook requires of me an eagle’s editorial eye. I always return to poetry, my touchstone, my north star.
Our thanks to Julie for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “That Long Body of Hers” here.
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Julie Esther Fisher’s stories and poetry appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Waxwing, Radar Poetry, The Citron Review, Prime Number Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, On the Seawall, Sky Island Journal, Litmosphere, Leon Literary Review, Passager’s 2025 Contest Issue, and elsewhere. Winner of several awards, including Grand Prize Recipient of the Stories That Need to be Told Anthology, Sheila-Na-Gig’s Editor’s Choice Award (Poetry), and Sunspot Lit’s Rigel Award, she has been shortlisted in numerous other contests, and received multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart nominations. Her poetry chapbook, On the Lip of Night, is available from Finishing Line Press, and her novel in stories, A Pearl Is Just an Accident, out this October, is available on advance order from Silent Clamor Press. Raised in London, she holds degrees in fiction writing and counseling psychology. Today, along with her classical musician husband and their two faithful rescue dogs, she is graced to live amidst several hundred acres of wild conserved land in Massachusetts, where she indulges her passion for nature and designs gardens.