Winner of the 2024 Chapbook Open
JR Fenn
JR Fenn’s Tiny Vessels contain expansive truths. Selected by Rita Bullwinkel as the winner of The Masters Review’s 2024 Chapbook Open, the seventeen small fictions in Tiny Vessels hurtle backward and forward in time and space, all contemplating what it means to be human, to be alive and exist in our history, in our future. “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.”
You can order Tiny Vessels through Red Mare Press, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
About the Author
JR FENN writes about the living web of the human and more-than-human world as it changes over time. Her work has appeared in many places, including Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Split Lip, PANK, 100 Word Story, the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. Other recognitions include the Gulf Coast Prize for Nonfiction, the 59th Annual New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction, and Stone Canoe‘s Robert Colley Prize for Fiction. Her work has been supported by the Key West Literary Seminar, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop, Writing by Writers, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Hewnoaks, among other places. She teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family.
Praise for Coats
“To read these seventeen gem-like dispatches from a dreamlike world 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.”
—George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December
“JR Fenn’s vessels are Fabergé eggs, mermaid’s purses, and light-filled hulls. Each offers a window into a world both strange and familiar. Together they become an airship that moves from the heartbreakingly intimate to the startling and expansive. Fenn’s stories are precise and wise, restrained and delightful, tiny but never small. An absolutely exquisite debut.”
—Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread
“‘The vessels may be tiny, but the worlds contained in this collection are immense. These small stories ache and breathe and sing and dream, contemplating everything from the inside of the tiniest seed to the farthest reaches of the universe. With taut, poetic prose, Fenn’s work captures the complexity and wonder of existing.”
—Tara Campbell, author of City of Dancing Gargoyles and Midnight at the Organporium
“These stories are lush in both their everydayness and their strangeness. Even those rooted in the ordinary world read like dispatches from somewhere else, because JR Fenn has a way of cracking open what you didn’t know could open. Tiny Vessels is a surprising and captivating collection—a dreamy delight from a writer I’ll eagerly follow into any world she unearths.”
—Michelle N. Ross, author of They Kept Running
“For those of us who worship at the altar of literature Tiny Vessels is a new star in the firmament, every sentence a benediction, startling in its narrative precision, its lyrical grace, the primacy of its storytelling. From the earliest sentences of Tiny Vessels it’s clear we are in the hands of an anointed master, a visionary stylist, a practitioner of ancient word magics and timeless mythologies, wielding the word as prayer and testimony, a passionate interrogation of the human condition, each faceted compaction of narrative essentialism touching the reader with awe and wonderment. Every once in a while, a work, a writer, comes along to remind us, literature is grace, God is good.”
—Arthur Flowers, author of Another Good Loving Blues and De Mojo Blues