Eli Sparkman talks FLASH!

* Here is Eli in a half-trench coat Sheila Heti gave him :)

Hi Everyone,

Well, the world might be a s%$# show, but at least we still have our stories. Today, I’m featuring the work of the brilliant Eli Sparkman, one of the member-owners of Book Suey in Hamtramck, Michigan. We had so much fun discussing his stories. I hope you enjoy this deep dive as much as I did.

This is FLASH, so Eli was able to read three in their entirety before we discuss them; however, I still recommend reading and annotating them beforehand on your own.

Thanks to Elliot Bancel for editing this discussion!

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Read Eli’s stories here:

Crown Molding – X-R-A-Y

Chew – Action, Spectacle

400,000 Lawns – HAD

Daffodil – Bending Genres

No Dinosaur – ANMLY

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Bio:

Elijah Sparkman is a writer based in Detroit. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in ANMLY, Sleepingfish, Sundog Lit, and X-R-A-Y. He is the Program and Volunteer Coordinator for 826michigan, a youth creative writing organization. He is a member-owner of the co-op bookstore Book Suey in Hamtramck, MI.

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On August 1st, I’ll be speaking with Ananda Lima on the podcast about her story, “Antropófaga,” featured in The Kenyon Review Online.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books, 2024) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors, edited by Cynthia Pelayo (Primer Sueño/Atria Books). She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has an MA in Linguistics (UCLA) and an MFA in Creative Writing (Rutgers-Newark). Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago and New York. (photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

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Paid subscribers can join me for a subscriber-only discussion of the story on July 16th at 4 pm by registering here.

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In Other News:

I’ve revamped my poetry blog, My Personal Favorite, because I want to celebrate the work of fellow poets. A poetry community is harder to find in rural Ohio, where I spend a lot of time these days, so creating a virtual community has become a priority for me.

I also have a new poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, available from SFAPress, which can be found here. If you use the 40% discount code: HEART40, it’s a bargain!

The cover artist for What Trammels the Heart was Michigan artist Kimberly Santini. If you don’t know her work, you should check it out:

See you soon and Happy Summer!