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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

‘Grandma Why are we brown?’   The grandmother puts down the rifle she’s been cleaning Another rifle and a box of ammunition are sitting on the kitchen table in front of her   ‘What?’   ‘Why are we brown?’   ‘We’re not brown, we’re morochas Where did you hear that?’   ‘We were in gym class and Tati shouted, “Ewww!!! She has brown nipples!”’   The kettle comes to a boil and the grandmother stands up to turn off the stovetop She wraps a dishcloth around the iron handle before picking up the kettle Then she puts two bags of coffee in one mug and a teabag in the other and pours in the hot water before bringing both mugs to the table The sugar and spoons are already laid out on the cloth She unwraps the bread, which has been bundled up in cloth to keep warm It came out of the clay oven less than an hour ago   ‘How did she see your nipples?’ she asks, sitting down   ‘We were finishing gym class and had to get changed back into dry clothes So I was sweaty and took off my t-shirt and she saw my boobies Why are we brown?’   ‘We’re not brown’ The grandmother sips from her mug, which she holds in two hands Her gold wedding ring is shoved right up to the top of her finger, where it meets the palm ‘Brown is the wrong word, it’s a filthy color We’re morochas, which is different’ She sips from her mug but the coffee is burning hot and scalds her throat The grandmother grimaces in pain and tears come into her eyes Her granddaughter laughs ‘We’re not brown, we’re morochas, OK?’   ‘But that’s not an answer’ The girl puts two heaped spoonfuls of sugar into her tea, adds milk, cuts two slices of bread and dips them in too The bread swells with milky tea and she starts to scoop it up with the spoon like soup   ‘We’re morochas because the paint ran out while we were being made’   ‘What paint?’   ‘At the place where people are made they didn’t have enough paint to make us really dark We were going to be black, but they

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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Interview

Issue No. 15

Interview with Zadie Smith

Jennifer Hodgson

Interview

Issue No. 15

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success....

fiction

October 2012

Girl on a Bridge

Wayne Holloway

fiction

October 2012

Pirajoux… The middle of a hot endless summer, driving on the A39 through an as always empty central France,...

Art

September 2014

On the Ground

Teju Cole

Art

September 2014

I visited Palestine in early June 2014, just before the latest wave of calamity befell its people. For eight...

 

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