Short stories by Nicola Griffith
Nicola Griffith is a native of Yorkshire, England, where she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. Her immigration case was a fight and ended up making new law: the State Department declared it to be “in the National Interest” for her to live and work in this country. This didn’t thrill the more conservative power-brokers, and she ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, where her case was used as an example of the country’s declining moral standards. In 1993 a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis slowed her down a bit, and she concentrated on writing. Her novels are Ammonite (1993), Slow River(1995), The Blue Place(1998), Stay (2002), Always (2007), Hild (2013), and So Lucky (2018). She is the co-editor of the BENDING THE LANDSCAPE series of original short fiction. Her multi-media memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party: Liner Notes to a Writer’s Early Life, is a limited collector’s edition. Her essays, opinion pieces, reviews, and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. She’s won the Washington State Book Award (twice), the Otherwise (Tiptree), Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, the Lambda Literary Award (six times), and others. In 2015 Nicola founded the Literary Prize Data working group whose purpose initially was to assemble data on literary prizes in order to get a picture of how gender bias operates within the trade publishing ecosystem. (The $50,000 Half the World Global Literati Prize was established as a direct result.) The group’s interests have now grown to encompass other aspects of publishing and bias, though it is currently on hiatus. In 2016 she began #CripLit, an online community for writers with disabilities for which, with Alice Wong, she co-hosts a regular Twitter chat. Nicola, now a dual US/UK citizen, holds a PhD by Published Work from Anglia Ruskin University, is married to writer Kelley Eskridge, and lives in Seattle. Most of the time she is happily lost in the seventh century (writing the second novel about Hild, Menewood), emerging occasionally to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything.
Listing 2 stories.
On a cold Seattle night, deep in the heart of winter, a woman walks into a bar and finds the beautiful and animal-like woman she has been waiting for. She chases the woman into the night and finds the stranger is not what she seems—but neither is the protagonist.
A 30-year-old lesbian businesswoman goes to a strip club with the other businessmen in hopes of winning a contract, but is surprised by her connection to one of the dancers—despite her hopes of playing it cool. As she ruminates over the connection, an old friend shows up and tells her information that upends everything she thinks she knows about her life.