Melanie Rae Thon – författare

Unsettling and perceptive, these short stories challenge American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Wide- and wise-eyed, mysterious girls leave their realities behind for strange and slightly unreal places at the edges of the country. Alternatively they hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation. The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls stand at a boundary where both the girls' bodies and their tales are either their own or laid claim to by the culture and characters that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends.

Missing: seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia. The search for these two spans a single day, morning twilight to late evening, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night 'when the father was kind, and not afraid, and not angry.' Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family--bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather. The perceiving consciousness is oceanic and atmospheric, embracing all living beings, swirling around a person, a bird, a bear, trillium blooming in dark woods, snow, stones, pines singing--moving closer and closer, loving, finally merging, sensing and knowing as one, before lightly whirling out again to embrace and love another. This powerful current of shared memory and experience, this ceaseless prayer, is a celebration of life, all life, mystery and miracle within an immense animate landscape, a song of praise, the voice of the river. Melanie Rae Thon opens a new genre: call it Eco Avant-Garde, a confession of faith, and a love song to the world.

A love song in three movementsA love song in three movements, As If Fire Could Hide Us explores the expansiveness of consciousness and compassion through and beyond the human body.A twelve-year-old girl slips out a basement window, steals a bike, and sets off on a perilous adventure. Injured and slowly bleeding out, Orelia enters a vast, spectacularly animate environment where she senses the limits of self disintegrating, her being entangled with the forest.A prison guard and member of the strap down team witnesses a painfully prolonged execution and is delivered to a heart-cracking sense of identification with the ones he’s killed. Every grieving mother is his own. Any man might be himself, his closest friend, his brother.An organ donor’s body is restored and resurrected through the bodies of multitudes. Spiritually and physically, one human being becomes many. Everything in the cosmos is intertwined and interchangeable. Embracing this awareness may bring fear or euphoria—desolation, peace, despair, rapture.