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Zazie Anastasopoulos 2024 Youth Fellow Still Life cover

15 Nov “Still Life” by Zazie Anastasopoulos

Posted at 09:37h in JBWC Fellowships, Just Buffalo Writing Center, Young Writers, Youth Fellow Projects, Youth Fellowships by

Presenting “Still Life” a short story by the 2024 JBWC Youth Fellow, Zazie Anastasopoulos.

“Still Life” is one story in my collection Body Acts which considers women’s bodies and pain. The collection is informed by fictions from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the first feminist medical horror) to Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach tetralogy, and even the recent TV series Dead Ringers starring Rachel Weisz. One of my favorite lines in the series comes when the protagonist Elliott Mantle declares “There should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies.” Each story takes up uncanny interactions between women and those who oversee their bodies: doctors in particular, but also bosses and even the beauty industry. When I learned that Mary Shelley’s mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) died from an infection passed to her by her doctor during Mary Shelley’s birth, I started thinking about how women’s bodies have been historically neglected, even unintentionally. Writing these stories is the first step in my journey to consider how that neglect might be showcased in fiction as I hope to study creative writing and health advocacy in college and find ways to bring my two interests together. While all of the stories in my collection are uncanny or a-real in nature, “Still Life” is meant to be darkly humorous “body” horror story too. I hope you enjoy it! — Zazie Anastasopoulos

“Consuming and consumptive, ‘Still Life,’ calls to mind early works of Shirley Jackson, Lisa Tuttle, and Carmen Maria Machado, among other masters of the macabre. Through both mundane and dazzling detail, cut through with incisive observations of contemporary life, Anastasopoulos reminds us that sometimes our wildest fears are our most reasonable, and that everything we assume about the nature of reality may be illusion. I look forward to future work from Anastasopoulos, a searing talent.” — Jaclyn Watterson

Cover Art: Zazie Anastasopoulos
Design: Robin Jordan
Fellow Mentors: Jaclyn Watterson, Bella Poynton, Christina Vega-Westhoff & Robin Jordan
Fellowship Judge: Aitina Fareed-Cooke

Each summer, the Just Buffalo Writing Center Youth Fellowship offers a motivated young writer the opportunity to develop their craft and explore professional avenues within the literary arts. Learn more & apply.

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