Amber Sparks
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You can scroll the shelf using ← and → keys
It’s fitting that Anne Valente is one of the first writers featured at my Necessary Fiction Writer in Residence project, because I first fell in love with Anne’s writing when I read a piece of hers at Necessary Fiction last year. The story, “May This Strap Restrain You,” is a beautiful showcase for everything great about Anne’s writing. It’s full of lush descriptive language, haunting and sometimes harrowing settings, and the secret struggle of a person just trying to be, and act, and exist with other people in some meaningful way in the world. Every piece Anne writes is thoughtful and profound; she’s not a writer who tosses off throwaway pieces, ever.
All of these qualities that I so admire in Anne’s fiction grace her story for NF as well. This is a sad piece. (I’m already sensing that most of these pieces will be sad, perhaps because they describe a people no longer living, a place no longer standing? Whatever the reason, the sense of great loss is palpable in many of the pieces I’ve received so far.) But it is also a piece filled with hope born of sadness, with fear overturned by courage, with loss shouldered only through great love. It is, in short, a lovely and poignant story, and I highly recommend you read it right now.
