Anna Kovatcheva was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, and holds an MFA in fiction writing from New York University. The White Swallow was selected by Aimee Bender as the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition, and was published in 2015. Anna’s stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review. She lives in New York City, where she works as a graphic designer. In her off hours, Anna writes about Slavic folklore and teenage girls conspiring to murder.
I originally delivered this essay as a craft talk for undergraduate student writers attending the 2016 James Madison University Creative Writing Conference; it has been lightly edited. As I told those assembled, no thirty-minute talk on this subject could possibly be comprehensive. There are many ways to write weird work that matters—this piece doesn’t even begin to touch on […]