Do you love short fiction? You will love these three stories by wildly talented emerging author Lizzie Derksen.

These stories exist in a world that seems vacuum-sealed and entirely insular, a perfectly preserved diorama of everyday interactions, but don’t let yourself be fooled. They play freely with boundaries of any kind, made alive with the imagination of our young narrator and her acerbic kind of curiosity. With Lizzie’s invitation, we are here to bear witness to extraordinary scenes, slyly parading as ordinary.

Ess, as we come to know her, is navigating a world that was already shaped long before her, just like any kid. You will come to learn how her social landscape is hewn by religion, by youth and gender — at times she is parroting the language of her parents or her sister, and at others she is shrewdly taking stock of everyone and everything around her. Just like the stories she tells, she is imaginative, conflicting, and deeply human. This presents us with an opening, a sliver of light coming through the keyhole, to question what can be relied on, whether or not we place our trust in the words on the page. Ess possesses the self-awareness to place herself in a world as she chooses to see it, and she is generous enough to take us along with her and let us decide for ourselves.

About the author:

Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from the Canadian prairies. Her work encompasses poetry, prose poetry, short- and long-form fiction, experimental and dramatic short film, video poetry, pornography, and documentary. She is one of four authors of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books 2017), and her work has appeared in PRISM International, Room, Funicular Magazine, Poetry Is Dead, The Vault, and on CBC television. She will release a new chapbook of poetry, Aunt Rachel Says Twelve Poems, in November 2019. Lizzie lives in Edmonton, on Treaty Six land, and is currently at work on a couple of small films and her first novel. Follow her: lizziederksen.com

Illustrated by Tatjana Prenzel, Frankfurt, Germany: tatjanaprenzel.com