I’m so glad you’ve stopped by The Burning Hearth. I hope wherever you are the flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and your days are light and breezy.
This spring has been a whirlwind for me. I had my CNF “Fourth and Ash” published in the wonderful Emerge Literary Journal followed by an interview with the thoughtful and generous Diane Gottlieb for her WomanPause blog. Click here to read both and, if you so choose, you can listen to my reading of “Fourth and Ash.”
This CNF is the beginning of an incredible journey I’m embarking on with my friend Kris Roberts. When I was 14 and she was 10, she was abducted walking home from my house. That was the last time I saw her. This past August she found me through my brother’s obituary and everything I knew about time reoriented itself.
Diane and I also discuss my hybrid novelette, Born of Water, which will be published in June 2024 as part of ELJ Edition’s Afternoon Shorts Series.
Melissa Ostrom, the author of Beloved Wild and Unleaving writes of Born of Water:
Allegorical but personal, vision-laden then soberly real, Born of Water is like nothing I’ve ever read before. It bridges familial trauma and ecological devastation, marries mysticism with materiality, and mines dreams and disasters. A lesser talent might have made a muddle of such disparate threads, but Constance Malloy is a deft weaver, and she nets us utterly. The paradox of this mercurial hybrid is the pure distillation its complexities effect, a winnowing to essence, to the most integral, elemental us. “We stared in disbelief at the splendor of it all,” Malloy writes. “This was, as my grandfather would say, powerful medicine.” I love the beautiful philosophy these words suggest. Born of Water reminds us the world is saturated with mystery—or “splendor” or “powerful medicine.” We have only to see it.
Al Kratz, the author of Off the Resting Sea and The Tony Bone Stories offers this:
Born of Water is a deep exploration of opposites: nature as both salvation and ruin, humanity’s tiny and outsized footprint, and family as a structure both to be protected and protected from. In a smooth allegory that bleeds into realism through the invention of character, where Mari demands the writer’s ear, Malloy also deeply draws the reader into the world.
Coming in June is The Burning Hearth’s first “Voices of the Summer Solstice” with the theme “What Blooms” taken from the title of a flash I had published in New Flash Fiction Review. Click here to read. This issue is a choir of powerful women’s voices sharing their interpretations on the theme. I am so excited to bring their flash and poetry to you. Look for “Voices of the Summer Solstice” to post on June 15, 2024.
Until then, click here for some random fun with the Swedish Chef. Why? Because it’s funny.
❤️❤️❤️
Constance
Constance Malloy 