Welcome back to the Short Fiction Spotlight, a space for conversation about recent and not-so-recent short stories. Last time around we discussed a book in the PM Press Outspoken Authors Series, Report from Planet Midnight Plus… by Nalo Hopkinson, and this week, I’d like to consider another small collection: With Her Body by Nicola Griffith. This book was the second installment in Aqueduct Press’s Conversation Pieces series—a series now consisting of more than thirty volumes—and it contains three previously published short stories by Griffith, as well as a short essay by L. Timmel Duchamp.
The three stories that make up this short volume were all published initially in the early 90s: “Touching Fire,” “Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese,” and “Yaguara.” L. Timmel Duchamp’s afterword, “A Word for Human is Woman,” addresses one of the threads she sees running through these three stories: the re-centering of woman as a term containing “full humanness,” and a reconsideration of the human/nature/culture relationship.
[A discussion.]