Nora N. Khan

This is a lame post about my first published story, The Quarry. I wrote this story a while back while in my first workshop class with Marilynne Robinson, nearly six (Jesus Christ) years ago as a student at Iowa.

Because we all know how popular literary journals are, I got permission from Hunger Mountain, the VCFA journal of the arts, to preview a bit of it here below.

I would be grateful to hear your thoughts. Though my writing and my interests have evolved drastically in the time in between, it does remain emblematic, for me, of a specific time in my life, when I felt short stories were about cobbling together scenes that made emotional sense.

I also learned that I need to give up my dogged resistance to having some semblance of a plot, very quickly. It actually is a great joy to have a plot.

A note on the featured image of a bike in a tree: this is a famous landmark on Vashon Island. There are numerous stories about how it got there. Some lore runs: a boy left his bike in a tree and then went off to World War I, and the tree grew around his bike. It could also be a hoax.

You can read a bit about this popular landmark at Atlas Obscura.