Storied Women

<p>Modeled after work by Roland Barthes, Maggie Nelson, and Marguerite Duras, among others, <i>Storied Women </i>pushes against the limits of auto-fiction, combining critical and theoretical writing with fictional narrative. The story follows Willow in the wake of a break-up as she processes her grief by reading books written on a to-read list her ex-girlfriend left behind. These books, coincidentally, include works like <i>A Lover’s Discourse</i> by Roland Barthes, <i>The Lover</i> by Marguerite Duras, and <i>Written on the Body</i> by Jeanette Winterson, inviting her to begin troubling the subject-object dialectic as it relates to romantic relationships and representations of love in literature. At the heart of the novella is a desire and failure to write new philosophies of love—new <i>poetry—</i>free from unnecessary gendered binaries and their patriarchal cultural contexts. </p>