Agency 3: novellas

(Paperback)

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Three novellas, Teresa Carmody's Today Must Be Sunday, Kim Chinquee'sI Thought of England, and Allison Pitinii Davis'sBusiness, unique in style and narrative, deal with longing, loneliness, fear, and the relationships their characters make, and break, on their way to something like peace, if not happiness. Entering and abandoning social contracts and expectations across the country in the pursuit of the somewhat ethereal notion of contentment, these stories highlight the struggles of women across American cultural eras, aremd only with their ability to think and to act. These three novellas describe the harrowing, soul-rattling actions and choices made by women in the pursuit of defining their lives.

Carmody'sToday Must Be Sunday follows a young woman-white, queer, working class-from her childhood home in Michigan to seven other states, where she lives for shorter (six weeks) or longer (thirteen years) periods of time. The narrator's movement is the book's unfolding, and asa feminist, she brings a critical phenomenological approach to her observations. She knows that she is reading the world through her particular embodied experience, even as her body arrives into a place amidst a series of preconceptions and historical events.

Chinquee'sI Thought of England, a novella-in-flashes, follows a woman's journey in a new location (for her career) after being a single mom for eighteen years. A recent empty-nester, she falls into a community of competitive runners. Growing up on a family dairy farm, getting married then divorced early while in the military, living around the world, she carries her past with her through her running, the men she runs with, and the complications that come with them on her way to defining herself as either lonesome . . . or free.

In Business, celebrated poet Allison Davis's prose debut,Alexa's family owns an industrial laundry service. Wracked by guilt for rebelling against the family coda, Alexa stays on at the laundry on weekends, while working a factory job during the week. One night, she sleeps with a handsome Jewish boy who is engaged to Lia Mazur, the daughter of another immigrant family that owns a hotel. Predetermined gender roles and familial obligations, accompanied by an impending sense of doom for the city, attempt to thwart these women. How they go about accepting, denying, or gaming these systems will define the individuals they are to become.

Author Bio

Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Their recent collection of autofictions, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is out with Autofocus Books. She is also the author of The Reconception of Marie (Spuyten Duyvil 2020), Maison Femme: a fiction (bon air 2015), and Requiem, recently released in a new edition by punctum books (2025). Their writing has appeared in LitHub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, Matters of Feminist Practice, WaterStone Review, Lifework: On the Autobiographical Impulse in Contemporary Art, Writing, and Theory, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Omaha and teaches in the Writer's Workshop and low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at University of Nebraska Omaha. Find Carmody online at teresacarmody.com.

Kim Chinquee grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, served in the Air Force as a medical technologist, and worked as a med tech in various civilian clinics and hospitals, most recently during Covid. Her Covid novel, Pipette, was published in 2022 with Ravenna Press, and she is the author of Oh Baby (Ravenna Press 2008), Pretty (White Wine Press 2010),Veer, Shot Girls, Wetsuit, andSnowdog(Ravenna Press 2021), as well as the novella Pistol, which appears in the anthology Triple No. 3. She's received three Pushcart Prizes, is senior editor of New World Writing Quarterly, associate editor of Midwest Review, chief editor of ELJ (Elm Leaves Journal), and co-director of SUNY-Buffalo State University's writing major. She's published widely, in journals and anthologies including NOON, Conjunctions, StoryQuarterly, Fiction, Notre Dame Review, The Nation, Buffalo Noir, Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms, The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women, The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers, The & Now Award: The Best Innovative Writing, New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction, and others. She is a competitive triathlete, a USA Triathlon Certified Official, and she lives with her three dogs in Tonawanda, New York.

Allison Pitinii Davis, PhD, is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press 2017), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and the Ohioana Book Award, and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press 2013) winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her creative writing and scholarship have appeared in Best American Poetry, POETS.org, The Oxford American, The New Republic, Studies in American Jewish Literature, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University's Wallace Stegner program, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She lives in the Rust Belt, where she runs an editing service and teaches workshops.