Today is release day for Tiny Vessels by JR Fenn, chosen by Rita Bullwinkel as the winner of the 2024 Chapbook Open! “To read these seventeen gem-like dispatches from a dreamlike world,” writes George Saunders, “is to receive a lovely condensed version of what life on earth is like, and to be blessed with a feeling full of fondness and of longing for a kinder, more natural world.” Read Rita Bullwinkel’s introduction to this prize-winning chapbook below, and pick up your copy through Red Mare Press today!
These seventeen stories circle the potent, high-centrate questions of life. What parts of our childhood selves live in our adult bodies? If humans left Earth, would they lose their humanity? What is the nature of emotional inheritance? How are the stories we tell road maps for how we might walk through life? Is narrative a vessel? If so, what’s inside? Can what’s inside a life be both immense and small at the same time?
The delights in these pages are manifold and maximalist. In some stories we’re in a post-earth, space-station-inhabiting human civilization where the memory of dogs is so distant that it might be a fiction. In other stories we’re inside the primordial soup where humans have yet to exist. These stories swerve wildly from the familiar world, to the invented, to the uncanny, while always inhabiting the texture of a true emotional reality.
Cherry trees blossom. Mothers die and leave heirlooms for their daughters. Match boxes from childhood are treasured. Interstates change. Apple Danishes are eaten. Stories are told and then forgotten.
The rhythm of this collection feels like whitewater rafting. The swerves are radical, and unexpected. These stories splash, shock, and subvert expectations. JR Fenn is a master of collage and compression. She captures very large narratives within the span of just a few scenes. Her linguistic brushstrokes are broad, yet specific, intuitive, and beguiling, and communicative. Some stories read like fables, while others read like a diary. Tiny Vessels is a tremendous achievement. It’s a book that now lives inside me.
—Rita Bullwinkel, Guest Judge