“Don’t Tell Anybody What They Are” by Athena Nassar appeared in Issue 36 and can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
In the process of writing this piece, I attempted to achieve an abrupt shift from humor to horror and then horror to humor, as well as both simultaneously in certain scenes. A lot of this story does deal with how the narrator perceives her family, often not knowing whether to think of them as objects or people, and this fluctuation between product and personhood can be both comical and horrifying.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
I’d say the most difficult part of writing this piece was deciphering what information to include and what information to leave out. Since this is only a short story, there is only so much ground that I can cover. As I returned to this piece again and again, I kept asking myself questions like: What are the limits of this world? How does this world work? Who would approve of these manufactured families and who would not?
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. I’d like to think that both Klara and the Sun and “Don’t Tell Anybody What They Are” exist in the same world. Similar to the AI who narrates Klara and the Sun, the narrator in my own story longs for a love that is reciprocated and is ultimately betrayed.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Margaret Atwood because, in my opinion, she’s the best speculative fiction writer of all time.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I have a poetry collection forthcoming this spring, so I am currently working on polishing that manuscript, but for my next project, I plan to write more stories in conversation with this one to comprise a collection. These stories will most likely have an overarching theme of missed human connections and connections that feel almost human, but not quite.
Our thanks to Athena for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “Don’t Tell Anybody What They Are” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-dont-tell-anybody-what-they-are.
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Athena Nassar is an Egyptian-American poet, essayist, and short story writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her debut poetry collection Little Houses is forthcoming from Sundress Publications. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Southern Humanities Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Salt Hill, Lake Effect, New Orleans Review, Zone 3, The Los Angeles Review, PANK, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the head poetry editor for The Emerson Review at Emerson College.