This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.

THE BOOK: This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love.

PUBLISHED IN: 2019.

THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Wortman.

THE EDITOR: Amanda Miska/Kristine Langley Mahler.

THE PUBLISHER: Split/Lip Press.

SUMMARY: This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. contains thirteen stories, full-length and flash, that explore love—sexual, platonic, filial, and beyond—in its gritty and beguiling forms. A small-town teenager pursues an eccentric pinball wizard after her grandfather’s move to her home shakes up her parents’ marriage; a chronic depressive turns to a TV animal psychic in hopes of mending her relationship with her dog-loving dad; a middle-aged recovering alcoholic goes back to college and becomes fixated on his stern professor. As characters in various stages of life try to navigate love, they court obsession, madness, and transcendence.

THE BACK STORY: I wrote the stories in this collection over a good decade and a half: they were largely composed in isolation, solely on their own terms, without a view toward putting them in a book. Around 2016, I finally had a body of cohesive work that I liked enough to organize into a book. I had also been writing more and more flash fiction (very short fiction) and I started to consider how those short pieces could be in dialogue with the longer ones. That’s when my story collection, as a full-fledged book, rather than a mere compilation of stories, came to life for me: I realized I didn’t have to go a purely conventional route, with all full-length short fiction—I could go my own way, which freed me up and made the work of structuring it also a kind of play.

WHY THIS TITLE?: The title is a thought the protagonist of the titular story has during sex. It encapsulates the book’s attitude toward love—jagged, fragmented, insistent—and signals we’re not in Hallmark or Harlequin territory.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? My book would probably appeal most to readers who like voice-driven, somewhat cerebral literary short fiction with a dash of humor. Depressives and worriers seem to like it—my people!

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Wortman manages to find the beauty in even the darkest subjects. Though her prose never loses the conversational tone of her first-person narrators, it cuts through her characters’ defenses in the same breath to crystallize the experience of loving and being loved, and of living with the darkly calibrated emotions of depression. The tenderness and care for each character’s self-destructive tendencies sings off the page, casting each story as an act of empathetic observation devoid of judgment.” —Allison Epstein, Necessary Fiction

“Wortman’s debut seems like anything but. Rather, it is a kind of clinic in short-fiction artistry, laden with truth, humor and keen observation, a 21st-century meditation on the perpetual entanglement of human love and suffering. ” —Clay Evans, Boulder Daily Camera

“Jennifer Wortman’s new collection of short stories . . . illustrates the complexities of love through sharp dialogue and character development. She pushes beyond the traditional conceptions of fairy-tale love and excavates an experiential version—one much more practical and realistic, in which her characters struggle to reconcile their beliefs of what love should be with how they experience it.” —Yousef Allouzi, Atticus Review

AUTHOR PROFILE: I grew up in Gambier, Ohio, home of Kenyon College and, reportedly, the Gates of Hell. My late father was a historian and my mom’s a retired librarian, so books were in my blood—and all over the house (still are). After attending Oberlin College, I moved to Colorado, where I’ve been ever since, roaming the Front Range from Boulder to grad school in Fort Collins to Denver’s Capitol Hill to my current home in Lafayette, where I live with my husband and two kids. I’ve worked in libraries, a restaurant, a hotel, a print shop, an academic publishing company, a rock shop, a university human resources department. Since having kids, I’ve mostly worked from home: currently, I teach online classes for Lighthouse Writing Workshop and do freelance proofreading and editing. I also serve as associate fiction editor for Colorado Review. My writing appears in a variety of journals, including TriQuarterly, Glimmer Train, Electric Literature, Copper Nickel, Brevity, among others, and I’m the infinitely grateful recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: Because my book deals, in part, with depression and anxiety, I’ll use this space to add that I’m a big believer in destigmatizing mental illness and the variety of modalities to treat it. If you’re struggling, there’s no shame in getting whatever help you can. I’ve done it and still do it.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: https://theoffingmag.com/fiction/which-truth-patricia/ .

LOCAL OUTLETS: BookBar, Tattered Cover (Denver).

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Split/Lip Press, Amazon.

PRICE: $16.00.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Email: qtarqtar@gmail.com; Twitter: @wrefinnej