Two sisters. Two imaginations. A collection of stories that refuses to behave itself.
From the wickedly funny to the unsettling, tender and surreal, Scoria brings together two sisters’ very different imaginations in a collection of short prose that plays with story, form and the strange fragments from which lives are made.
About the book
Kathy Derrick and Jac Jenkins grew up on a dairy farm under a cinder cone mountain near Maungatapere in Aotearoa New Zealand. Years later, when they decided to put their writing together in a collection, Scoria seemed an obvious name. Scoria is volcanic rock, full of small bubbles and glassy fragments. The stories in this collection are a little like that too.
There are stories about love, death, family, bodies, murder, memory and things that are harder to pin down. There are angels and caped crusaders, an apple orchard, a tsunami and a woman who sees herself more clearly through her lover’s hands than she does in a mirror. Some pieces are funny. Some are dark. Some are strange. Quite a few refuse to be only one thing.
The stories are short, but that doesn’t mean they behave themselves. Kathy and Jac play with form, point of view, reality and the reader’s expectations, sometimes giving you the whole story and sometimes leaving you to decide exactly what happened.
Praise for Scoria
The two clever sisters who lived deep inside the Northern forest just loved to construct brief, extremely pithy fables concerning separation and regeneration. Their joint imaginations run amok in this conjuring trick of a collection – at times wicked bitch brutal, at other times fairy modmother magical. But always superbly crafted nuggets of hypnogogia. He pukapuka iti rawa.
Vaughan Rapatahana
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About the authors
Kathy and Jac grew up on a dairy farm near Maungatapere, Aotearoa New Zealand. They both now live in the Far North, where Jac’s chickens pretend they are poets, and Kathy’s cat’s attempts at writing are promptly deleted. Both graduated with Masters degrees in creative writing within twelve months of each other and their work has appeared in various periodicals, anthologies, blogs and websites. This is their first collection.
