The author will read at A Room of One’s Own on Nov. 21.
In Homesick, author Nino Cipri crafts speculative fiction with eerie themes in peculiar formats.
“Which Super Little Dead Girl™ Are You?” starts with, “On a Friday night, where could a potential murderer or evil spirit most likely find you?”
“I had this idea for a really long time that I wanted to write about a superhero group of dead little girls. I had their origin stories, but I could never come up with a plot line,” says Cipri, who will read from the 2019 collection at A Room of One’s Own on Nov. 21, 6 p.m. “Also, I loved those personality quizzes when I was a teenager reading Seventeen magazine.”
Homesick garnered Cipri the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize and a complimentary blurb from author Carmen Maria Machado, whose similar genre-shifting style has created a buzz in the fiction world. Cipri, who is pursuing a masters’s of fine arts degree at the University of Kansas, is familiar with A Room of One’s Own from attending WisCon, the annual feminist science fiction conference.
Homesick’s third story, “Dead Air,” begins with one young woman interviewing another post hookup. The two become romantically involved as they descend into creepy, murky circumstances in the Pacific Northwest. The book’s opening piece, “A Silly Little Love Story,” features genderfluid and neurodiverse main characters and a ghost.
Cipri’s style is to experiment with forms, and the stories often involve queer characters. “I really love the technical challenge of writing in odd formats and trying to carry a narrative out in the form of a personality quiz or an audio recording,” Cipri says. “I grew up reading authors like Ursula K. LeGuin who really explored queerness in her stories.”
The novella that rounds out the collection, “Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff,” is fan fiction of a science documentary about prehistoric humanoid otters and the feuding academic friends who uncover their remains and artifacts.
Many of Cipri’s tales have been spawned by “me being bored, doing repetitive work and my brain trying to find ways to occupy itself,” says Cipri. The author found time to dream up plotlines while working as a bike mechanic for Chicago’s version of B-Cycle.
Cipri, a trans/nonbinary writer who uses nongendered pronouns, describes their upcoming February release, Finna, as, “What if you found out that wormholes in Ikea led to Ikeas on other worlds and you had to go explore that with your coworker who is now your ex?”
