Virgins & Tricksters

Fiction. These quirky, exuberant stories range from the Caribbean to small-town Pennsylvania to a post-apocalyptic state forest. A noted psychologist and lifelong religious skeptic is scolded by tiny statues of the Virgin Mary. Remedios, a recent college graduate, explores the Afro-Puerto Rican spirituality of her grandparents and discovers a history book that is writing itself. Dissident geologist Pilar Quinones is shut out of a shelter during a bio-chemical attack and winds up in a forest presided over by a joyful Devil. In the story cycle "The Wives," we hear from the exiled ex-wife of a 20th-Century revolutionary-turned-dictator, the abandoned wife of an 18th-Century pirate, the restless wife of a 10th- Century priest, and the deposed, indignant wife of God himself. Veering between the realistic and the fabulist, these tales might best be described as whimsical-realist or magic-absurdist. A number of them have been published in literary journals such as Painted Bride Quarterly, Natural Bridge, Terrain, Specs, Segue, and Fringe. "The Associated Virgins" earned a Special Mention in the 2013 Pushcart Prize volume.