REVIEW
Erica Soon Olsen's Girlmine
Girlmine by Erica Soon Olsen is a gorgeously wrought, fabulist exploration of capitalistic expansion and gendered life in the American West.
This tight-knit collection of six flash fictions spans the European settler-colonial era through the present day to the near future. The titular story takes its premise from the real-life names of mines in southwestern Colorado: Yankee Girl. Orphan Girl. Linda. In Olsen’s hands, these names become jarringly literal. Colorado’s hills are alive. Their rich veins, the lifeblood of women, not ore. We watch as these unwilling women are mined, shipped off, pimped out, married. And although their sisters in the hills send avalanches to warn men away, their efforts are not enough to stop the miners. Such is the violence American expansion unleashes on the natural world and her daughters. The next story “Iron Man” envisions the logical conclusion of this expansion: an Arizona that has no public land anymore. Only gated neighborhoods and Target parking lots that shine as brightly as stars.
The heart of Girlmine, though, dwells in myth. Beautifully so. Olsen twice considers the Greek story of Daphne. (In the first Daphne story, a woman turns into the detritus surrounding an RV to escape her Apollo; in the second, an Aspen.) This echoed theme allows Olsen to explore less romanticized aspects of Western life—the vulnerability of women in rural landscapes and the ugly realities of logging. In these stories, Olsen’s writing is immediate, raw, direct. (“Apparently aspen means something like bitch.”) This style contrasts with her more lyrical, languid prose in her Scandinavian-inspired stories, “The Emigrants” and “Assimilation, Sunset Park.” These stories cloak the reader in folklore and beg us to sit and consider the desires of rock trolls who roll their mineral bodies across oceans and struggle across continents to reunite with their humans. For, as this collection reminds us, greed may have trampled the earth, but the earth’s spirits remain—however dormant, however pebble-small, however bathed in the garish light of a Target—waiting to return.
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Book Details
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Girlmine can be purchased here.
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Published by Bull City Press. Girlmine is part of the Inch series (issue #40). Bull City Press describes the Inch series as "a quarterly journal focused on the miracles of compression." Each issue is a mini-chapbook (poetry, fiction, CNF) by a single author.
The volume is delightfully pocket-sized at 4”x 5.25” and is 23 pages including acknowledgements.
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BIO
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Erica Soon Olsen was born in Hollywood, California. She is the author of Recapture & Other Stories (Torrey House Press), a collection of short fiction about the once and future West. A graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, she is the recipient of a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellowship and residencies at Ucross, Jentel, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. She lives in northeastern Utah.
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