Rachel Karyo writes: This short story is written in snow, one or two words at a time, photographed, and then published on Instagram. Shelley Jackson has been writing “Snow” (now in its twelfth sentence) since 2014. The story is still in progress.
William H. Gass writes that when we read works by authors such as Kafka, Beckett, Barth, and Borges, it’s “as if we’d stepped into a two-pound puddle of mirror glass and come out as wet as Alice.” This is how it feels to read a Shelley Jackson short story.
Her prose is graceful, playful, inventive, and poetic. An example: “There are snows made of clock faces and circular slide rules, of maps to undiscovered countries, of the shattered breath clouds of those who have cried out for help unheard on a clear winter day.” I love the beautiful strangeness of “shattered breath clouds,” the paradox of the map, those unexpected, evocative, analogue objects, and the music of the sentence, its consonance and repetition.
Jackson is also an accomplished visual artist; the letters she creates are beautiful, seemingly stamped into the snow by a magical typewriter. In some photographs the words look faint and ghostly, in others as inked and permanent as tattoos (another medium for Jackson’s fiction, see “Skin”). Occasionally the colour of what lies beneath the snow (some bricks, a bench) shows through, making the letters appear red or aquamarine.
Jackson lives in Brooklyn and writes on her borough’s sidewalks and trees, chairs and cars. She writes in playgrounds, near swings and slides. On a trash can. Street sign. Mailbox. Boot. Covered with snow, the everyday objects she photographs frequently look strange, almost unrecognizable.
Sometimes the presentation of a word evokes or contradicts its meaning; for example, “apples” occupies the middle of a circle, “Alps” climbs a steep railing, “tattooed” looks anything but, and “tiny” looms gigantic.
Near several words you find tracks – bird, dog, human, raccoon, and since this story is published on social media you also find “likes” and comments. Readers cheer the appearance of their favourite punctuation marks or raise issues of literary theory (“What does this do to narrative, this interface that determines its own kind of linearity and progression?” asks alirachelpearl). Thismagicisle griped about the snowstorm last April, but said she was willing to endure the weather if it enabled the author to continue with her story. A flurry of “yays” when “Snow” resumed this November.
Read the story here: https://www.instagram.com/snowshelleyjackson/
(c) Rachel Karyo, 2018
Rachel Karyo’s short story “Brownie 2” was recently published in Noctua Review, and her story “The Well” is forthcoming in the Grit City Comics anthology Monster Mash-up.
Stories written: “Mandatory Meeting for Museum Guards Before The VIP + Members’ Exhibition Opening Reception” (read by Keleigh Wolf), “The Rachels” (read by Samantha Jane Gurewitz)