“The Transformative Effect of Sparkly Red Shoes” by Lisa Julin Sharon appeared in Issue 17 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
The aspect of this story that most gripped me was Jill’s sense of superiority over her husband, crediting herself with heightened imagination, creativity and passion, while all the time being oblivious to the complexity of her husband’s true nature. I guess I took pleasure in bringing her down a peg, then raising her up again as she explores her discovery.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story?
The ending in which Jill, at least temporarily, suspends her own shock and confusion to remember the husband she has loved and who offers entrée into his secret self.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
A friend gave me the book “History of the Rain,” by Niall Williams, published in 2014, and I loved it. It is about a quirky Irish girl seeking to discover more about her dead father. I’ve given it to friends and family as gifts.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
I’m going to cheat a little and select an author who died recently at too young an age, Delores Phillips. Her sole novel, “The Darkest Girl,” is about a thirteen-year-old black girl in 1958, in Georgia. The book deals with serious family issues in the context of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Ms. Phillips was not much older than me, lived in Cleveland, and, while working in nursing, went back to school at a later age to get an English degree. Similarly, I worked as a lawyer and went back to school in my forties for my English degree. Quite coincidentally, I have been working on a novel involving a white thirteen-year-old girl in Ohio in 1958 during the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I am hard at work on a novel that I keep thinking is done then end up going back and revising.
Our thanks to Lisa for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Lisa’s story, “The Transformative Effect of Sparkly Red Shoes,” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-the-transformative-effect-of-sparkly-red-shoes.
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Lisa Julin Sharon’s stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Cleaver Magazine, Gemini Magazine and The Painted Bride Quarterly, among others. Lisa holds a law degree and a Master’s in English. Her novella, Glen Willow Gardens, is due to be published in 2018 by GusGus Press.