“An Execution” by Garrett Ashley appeared in Issue 33 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this story.
I jump back and forth from writing genre fiction to writing depictions of people struggling to live in the real world, and this is one attempt to do something in-between. Now that I’m out of school and I’m teaching, I’m trying to worry less about genre and labels, which feels pretty good. As a side note, I love postmodern writing that exaggerates mundanities in the real world, and I’d love to do more of this kind of stuff in the future.
What was the most difficult part in writing this story?
I’ve had trouble getting away from stories comprised of modular segments. My ideal short story right now is a 4,000-5,000-word narrative consisting of several flash pieces, all of which can be read individually and out of order, but which amount to a larger whole. That’s how this one started, but I couldn’t get around the traditional narrative: I wanted to start small, show instances in a vacuum, play with ideas and emotions, have some fun dialogue, and get to a final section that was formally/tonally dissonant in some way. I think it turned into something resembling a more traditional narrative, probably the result of a first-person narrator.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Ramona Ausubel’s A Guide to Being Born has been one my favorite short story collections since it came out. There’s a lot of wonderful, magical imagery here that gets lost in its depictions of real life. The last story in the collection sticks out to me the most: hands/arms grow from people’s bodies when they love someone. It’s hard to explain how this moves the story along, but trust me.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Despite telling myself not to worry about labels so much, I’ve been interested lately in the horror genre: how it works, why we feel discomfort, the problems with human communication, etc. A while ago I read a book called Horror and Architecture by Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing, which was interesting and insightful. I’d love to pick their brains about their understanding of horror and the sublime. Anyone who could talk to me about horror in general and how to correctly feel while reading, especially since I’m so desensitized to everything now, would be a great person to drink with.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’m turning a recent Asimov’s story into a novel. As far as I know, there aren’t a lot of sci-fi stories that take place in the pine-belt South, and I’m curious about some of the problems we have here that affect us ecologically. I’ve finished a draft and am working through revisions. I also have two story collections out on submission: one genre-esque, one not: a novel-in-stories, probably less publishable, but I’m trying anyway because I’ve enjoyed every minute of working on it.
Our thanks to Garrett for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this story. Read “An Execution” here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-an-execution.
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Garrett Ashley’s work has appeared in The Normal School, Asimov’s Science Fiction, DIAGRAM, PANK, and Sonora Review, among other places. Garrett is an Assistant Professor of English at Tuskegee University.