A woman with a winged daughter yearns to escape the domestic sphere. A debilitatingly shy woman meets a siren at a party who reveals the secret of the multiverse. Five teenage girls magically keep their small, dying town alive. Over the course of generations, a single lamp is passed from person to person to person. And, in the next moment, a carefully preserved fossil shatters quick as—snap your fingers now—that. Audrey T. Carroll’s latest short story collection, What Blooms in the Dark, is a meditative exploration of queer identity, the magic of nature, and those underlying systems—such as capitalism and the patriarchy—that structure the world and the lives of the individuals who are contained within. Filled with stories that are endlessly imaginative, at times speculative, and contemporary yet fully aware of the historical conversations they enter into, Carroll’s latest collection invites readers to consider the light and the dark that coexist in the most intimate, but also universal, corners of life.
Court Ludwick: There’s so much to be said about this collection, so perhaps we begin by talking about some of our favorite moments, our favorite threads? Broadly speaking, I’m particularly drawn to Carroll’s depictions of fracture—the fracturing of the women in these stories, but also the fracture of the land.
The first story in this collection, “A Little Vine That Grew Outside Her Rock,” also begins to enact a kind of decentering that continues throughout. Moving away from anthropocentric ways of being, many of the stories here often nod toward the importance of listening to nonhuman “voices,” which is in direct opposition to those oppressive sociocultural forces that necessitate a particular human-centered perspective in the first place. In this way, the collection depicts the fracturing and harm that arises out of a heteronormative patriarchal social order, and ultimately grapples with the desire to break away from these confinements. How might we escape certain structures and containers that are thrust upon us?
Romy Ewing: Yes, there’s a sense of dread interwoven; though, Carroll is able to capture this dread without having it weigh down the pieces. It culminates in more of a “memento mori” kind of overtone that makes the dark and the light of the pieces that much more powerful—there is very palpable contrast. The ground cracks and the landscapes wilt, but then someone’s daughter is climbing a tree, and then a bird lands on the windowsill. It feels balanced but not overcalculated. It’s extremely real, that blend of caution and optimism.
CL: I totally see this happening in “In This Universe, and That.” Even though the ending of this story is fractured itself—an experimental move I really enjoy by the way—there is an optimism present, too. Honestly, this story reminds me of my favorite Black Mirror episode, “Hang the DJ.” In both, there are more “disruptive” elements; in Carroll’s story, there is temporal disruption and structural “fracture.” But there is also a very specific kind of optimism contrasting this “fracture,” but that doesn’t feel dissonant or in opposition at all.
RE: I loved “Hang the DJ” when it came out! I’m actually so thrilled you brought this up. I think optimism as a contrast to the structure, like you said, is usually the kind of optimism that moves me most, at least narratively. I adore the way these stories shake us, and I love the non-linear feel of the way the stories are structured.
CL: Totally. In the Black Mirror episode, the central characters lean into this fracture so much that they climb out of the constructed world, and then the viewers get to see that world quite literally crumble away. In Carroll’s story, a similar kind of thing happens where the fracture seems to lead the characters to a more satisfying mode of existing. Carroll crafts this so adeptly, and it makes me think the story is possibly nodding toward how it might be useful to lean into certain “disruptions”? Perhaps in order to break free from sociocultural structures/constructions that confine?
Another social “construction” I see this collection confronting/disrupting is compulsive heteronormativity. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Carroll’s representations of queerness.
RE: The way Audrey writes on queer love is so authentic and completely robust. Liberation is at the center of so many of these pieces, and often through the vehicle of queer liberation in particular. Again, magical realism is a matter of choosing and also of blending, and I love the realism that Audrey chooses to include. I love that there’s a character who includes her astrological sign in the process of coming out, who talks about Freddie Mercury, who speaks about the labor of coming out.
CL: I think one of the collection’s many strengths is this balance Carroll strikes. Here, magic is infused into the mundane, and the result is rather effective. Carroll’s queer characters exist in these magical worlds, but their narratives still feel wholly authentic and true to real life.
There is also the magic that blooms out of nature—the magic that is nature—and the magic that’s found when these characters are able to find their way back to nature, rather than remaining confined in constructed worlds. These various kinds of liberation are all tangled up with one another.
RE: Not to mention the worldbuilding that allows for all of this! The facets of logic twist and overlap, and the worldbuilding happens so seamlessly and quickly that you get completely lost in the mythos alone. Carroll returns to the same themes—of motherhood, of exhaustion, of grief—but it always feels like a new take. The magic of the mundane and the magic of nature are a great way of putting it—and I adore that intersection.
CL: It’s a great intersection! I appreciate how Carroll considers the act of liberation from so many different angles, how the collection zeroes in on the many ways that sociocultural structures exert pressure—and then, ultimately, how one might be able to push back against these. Carroll’s characters confront external forces—familial expectations, social pressures, and the effects of climate change, to name a few—but also internal pressures where conflict arises in the self.
RE: On that note, there are stories where queer characters are written into a heteronormative world, but there are also stories where queer characters exist in a world where there is no dominant sexuality, where the oppressive forces in the world simply do not include this—and in these instances, the characters can just be. In my own writing, I’ve always gone back and forth on which setting to choose, finding so much merit and just so much to explore in either direction, and I’m enthused to see Carroll might be in that same boat.
CL: This makes me think about another question that kept coming up for me: where does power reside? “The Keepers of Miller’s Grove”—a story about five teenage girls with magical powers who keep their town afloat—is one that comes to mind when I think about this question of power. In our world, teenage girls are so often targets for ridicule and sexism, labeled and judged for their interests, and relegated to roles (in a lot of popular media) that are limiting and don’t speak to the power that young women truly do have. But Carroll pushes back against these common stereotypes, and the story centers these young women who, behind the scenes and unbeknownst to the other residents, are responsible for the town’s survival amidst environmental challenges.
RE: Yes! “The Keepers of Miller’s Grove” also stood out to me immediately, and I loved it for that same reason—the complete deconstruction of the tropes we force teenage girls into narratively. It’s this epic of a tale—these girls, and the ways they’re connected to each other, and the lore of the land. This one really sucked me in.
And so then, to follow it up with something like “Escape,” which is so punchy and classic, is fascinating to me. And yet, nothing feels out of place. Carroll creates the space for that kind of variety, all while maintaining cohesion, all the way through.
CL: How do you see Carroll enacting this? For me, I think the collection takes on this satisfying kind of recursiveness. Carroll gives the reader just enough in the moment, in a particular story, to pull them through—and then returns to these very compelling threads later on.
RE: Even contained within the very first story, “A Little Vine That Grew Outside Her Prison Rock,” I think we see this happen. Audrey has her own kind of magical realism that crescendos into what you see on the page. Early on, there is the fantastical, but then the whole aperture of the story just widens and widens, and there is the familiarity of older folktales present, but at the same time, the story also becomes a biting portrait of this very specific kind of working-class ennui, and it’s not overdone. It’s fresh.
There’s a description of listlessness in both the landscape and Thea’s body that I can’t get out of my head:
Looking out at the thinning grass and the cracking road beyond it, Thea couldn’t help the feeling that life should be more by now. She tried instead to focus on the thistle that had blossomed weeks ago, now transformed into white tufts like fledgling feathers. It very nearly amused her, this idea of a field of baby birds all nestled on top of stems. Thea wondered if she could share her breath with them and make a wish the way that children did with dandelions […]
After that, immediately I’m there, transported. That kind of numbness has always been a challenge for me to write, personally, and get it across properly—so it’s impressive to experience as a reader.
CL: The collection contains so many images with staying power, that resonate, that remain with the reader. There are winged women who alight into the sky. There are other winged creatures. There are objects and people on the precipice of breaking. There is containment. There is fracture. There is a small seed that begets life. There is a bursting out.
“On Eggshells”—a story about a mother who is trying her best to keep everything together—contains prose that is both lovely and heartbreaking, constrained yet evocative of the character’s desire to escape: “[…] in her periphery, something invaded her waking world: a thin white shell, cracking in ten places along a single curved line, the thin white membrane dangling in the gaps.”
Another favorite of mine, “Brittle Stars,” considers the things that we as humans place value on, the things we deem worthy of preserving, as well as the things we do not:
In a brief breath of a moment, it looks as though what she holds in her hands are actually fossilized stars. June turns to read its name on the corresponding label: Blastoid. The sign estimates it at 350 million years old. June cannot even fathom all that had happened in that time. This exact kind of ancientness, this element of mystery and the unknowable, fills June with a childlike awe. She turns to her daughter. It is not enough time. Her daughter’s arm is already raised above her head. June does not understand the image before her; her mind is still in the past. Her daughter swings. The fossil smashes against linoleum. It had survived millions of years, this impression of life, and with one movement, with one lack of movement, it is gone.
I’m so taken by the moments of absurdity, too.
RE: “On Eggshells” also comes to mind for me—the moment where there’s this winged being helping the protagonist make mimosas; they’re eating biscuits and gravy. And that’s played pretty straight, Carroll pokes fun at that juxtaposition briefly, but it’s for that reason, because it’s touched on only so briefly and then the story carries on in a very matter-of-fact way, that there’s this humor and absurdism that slips through among these very serious themes.
But these characters also have these powers, a hive mind, they speak to the dead. And then they go to PTA meetings, they’re hungover, they’re listening to Bratmobile, their marriages are failing. They’re extremely contemporary in their dialogue at times, they’ll use millennial/gen z slang.
And I’m making it sound like all my favorite pieces are toward the beginning, but I just think, even as someone who has read Carroll’s work before reading What Blooms in the Dark, falling into this work at the very start feels like that magic that happens the first time you read or watch something that really captivates you. You completely shut everything else out as you sit there and try to determine, okay, what is this world—you know? I found myself trying to pin down what magic is to the people in these worlds, what’s the history?—but also, you know, what is the same as the world we live in? And do these characters react the same way we do to, say, things like climate change? To the conflicts in their interpersonal relationships? I must say, I feel so lucky to have been able to sink into this collection completely, and also to go back right now and revisit the pieces that drew me in.
CL: We might turn now to the body. What is the role of the body in this collection? How are Carroll’s stories in conversation with disability literature and poetics?
RE: When you look at it through a lens that considers what this book might be to disabled readers, it opens a multitude of doors: characters constantly preparing for the worst, always operating under the idea of needing a plan, tolerating pain of all kinds and hiding it from the world, feeling strange when they do hide it, but also when they don’t, and just being hyper-aware of the perception of themselves through others.
The body plays an enormous part in this collection, and you do get that recurring imagery, like you said, of winged creatures, of birds, of escaping and bursting out of yourself. It’s not fantastical in the sense of leaving parts behind; it’s about bodies that struggle and strain themselves when they do leave behind the parts of the world that do not accept them, and about bodies transcending the constructed reality the world has given them. There is a radical rejection of routine, of capitalism and individualism. Carroll’s characters do not run from the world; they seek to clutch it with There is body horror and dysphoria but also body euphoria as well.
CL: Definitely. I think Carroll is adept at showing this through the body, through the physicality of the characters, through the strain they experience, through the pain they tolerate, but also through the radical rejection, like you say, of these underlying structures that do not necessarily have to structure our worlds.
RE: And yes, it’s absolutely touching on conversations happening in the realm of disability lit—and of disabled communities in general. These characters are often engaging in that trope of putting others above themselves, of acting as saviors of sorts. For a lot of them, they’re just “pushing through” for a little while longer, for some indeterminate amount of time. For these characters, pushing the body, the mind, their everything, is everyday life. They’re exhausted.
But these characters and stories are also such beautiful representations of these experiences. The collection doesn’t evade the realities of chronic illness or disability by blending and diluting them, but it does utilize specificity in a way, again, that doesn’t take you away from it—pounding migraines, panic attacks that the reader can feel in their own chest through the page. Carroll’s descriptions of dull pain, by the way, are some of the strongest I’ve read.
CL: The last story, the story this collection takes its name from, “What Blooms in the Dark,” encapsulates so much of what we’ve been talking about.
RE: Yes, I think this final piece is what really ties the collection together. I get as lost in the description of Julian dragging his old truck to the gas station as I do in the otherworldly elements. The worldbuilding, again, is balanced beautifully in this way. I keep talking about getting lost, being swept away, but it’s true—I’ve felt like a kid again, reading about these worlds and staying up late anticipating what’s going to happen, and that kind of curiosity has been satisfied every time. But never in the way I expect. The collection starts with the uncontrollable necrosis of a landscape and closes with the uncontrollable spread of life. In the first story, Thea has to hide from her family to mask the way the wildness calls to her; but here at the end, Julian is unabashed. Julian’s enthusiasm is contagious. There are elements of virality in both stories, of these systems of life and death, literally and figuratively spreading—and reminiscent of the mycelium network, ebbing and flowing, but never truly gone. There exists this idea of the seed and the return to it after a lifetime of growth and death. There is life that hasn’t been seen in years, there’s imagery that mirrors the way civilizations go up and collapse while natural life remains. The seed sits and waits, impervious to the world in the way it’s later—or earlier, to touch again on the narrative and symbolic non-linearity that appears again and again—forms aren’t. The flower blooms, as the story persists: “most progress is quiet and without witness.”
CL: It’s one of my favorite moments:
The lights are out. The parking lot is empty. There are no holy men, no one to take measurements or capture the moment for posterity, and the landowner is long gone. The red petals open to the silence, the white bells in its center seeming to glow. There are no witnesses, neither starlight nor doe. And then, after a short time, the petals begin to wilt and the curled leaves begin to shrivel; it is both expected and sudden. By morning, the flower’s fundamental pieces have returned to the dusty soil.
And the search for signs continues.
Read more book reviews published in this issue of Wordgathering.
Back to Top of Page | Back to Interviews | Back to Volume 18, Issue 2 – Winter 2024-2025
About Court Ludwick
Court Ludwick (she/they) is the author of These Strange Bodies (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Microfiction, and can be found in EPOCH, Washington Square Review, Denver Quarterly, Oxford Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Court holds an MA from Texas Tech University and is a current PhD student at USD. She lives in Minneapolis with her lucky black cat, where she is currently at work on her second book. Read more at www.courtlud.com.
About Romy Rhoads Ewing
Romy Rhoads Ewing (she/they) is a writer and photographer from Sacramento, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in HAD, JAKE, BRAWL, fifth wheel press, Bullshit Lit, Querencia Press, Nowhere Girl Collective, Anti-Heroin Chic, Major 7th Magazine, MEMEZINE, Y2K Quarterly, and more. Her debut chapbook, please stay, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2024. They received their Bachelor of Arts in Child Development from Sacramento State University and also hold an Associate of Science in Anthropology. She is currently studying Japanese and can be found at romyrhoadsewing.xyz.