During the soil residency, I have been working on revising, maybe even rewilding, some flash fiction for a new collection: Sauna Culture.
From the story, “Genealogia”
My other self rarely asks questions about me. He exists on a parallel plane, superior in his mind, concerned with the strange lives of ancestors. We share a lineage to a now-dead family in Beyoğlu. Snapshots captured three smudged figures in front of a grand townhouse in Istanbul. Constantinople then, he corrects. For I am always wrong, not worth talking to, the occupant of a dull, tarnished mind. Our great-grandfather, he gushes, was Levantine. A Frenchman who married an Italian in the Church of St. Anthony of Padua. They joined a lively community in the cafés and theaters and bookstores. They listened to the Latin mother tongue at daily Mass and rebetiko and jazz and flamenco at night.
Christopher Linforth is the author of three story collections, The Distortions (Orison Books, 2022), winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize, Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020), and When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014). Recently, he has been awarded fellowships to the Ragdale Foundation, VCCA, BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Kone Foundation, Sitka Center, and Château de Lavigny.
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