Electric Literature

I’ve always been captivated by artists’ sketchbooks. They’re wonderful places for experimentation: random drawings, collages, taped notes, found objects, and whatever else helps make sense of an idea before it’s fully formed. Memory has always felt much the same way to me: a collection of fragments, fleeting images, and moments that seem random, but rarely are.

This is the third essay in a series. Read “Blue Spark,” Part One here and “Blue Spark,” Part Two here.

It was a mild winter when the vacant lot across the street from Bea and Foster finally sold and the new neighbor, a nondescript man about their age, thirty-eightish, began showing up mornings in a black puffer to poke little orange construction flags into the soft earth.

Bea watched with disdain as Foster stood at the front window, palpating a worn ...

Valeria Luiselli is no stranger to incorporating tangible records of the world in her writing. In The Story of My Teeth, she exchanged audio recordings with a group of Grupo Jumex workers at a juice factory in Mexico. In

Guan Ah-fung hanged himself from a jackfruit tree one sundown as wildfire whirled through fields of lalang grass, spewing a dirty haze that choked the jungle and enveloped half of Kampong Krokop, the Village of the Boars. Rays of the setting sun, st...