Owl in Darkness

In this long short story (or novella), a writer arrives at an old manor for a six-week residency, only to discover that while there, she can’t seem to write a word. The longer she stays, the more she loses her grasp on who she is and what she needs to say, until gradually, the background becomes the foreground, as the minutiae of the place she finds herself in start to loom large. In the echo chamber of her own head, the natural world and the strangers around her begin to speak to her in odd ways.

Zoë Rosenfeld is a writer and editor. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Bullhorn and Transfer, her poetry was included in the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. I: The Babarians of San Francisco—Poets from Hell, her reviews have appeared in Esquire, Biography, Us, and Paper magazines, and an essay of hers was included in the anthology Dirty Words: A Literary Encyclopedia of Sex, published by Bloomsbury. She is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship in fiction.