Roxane Gay’s short story North Country, a 2012 Best American Short Stories selection, focuses on Kate a young African- American academic grappling with the loss of her stillborn child. The North Country’s wintry backdrop at once represents the natural setting and her state of mind; it is an apt metaphor for disconnection, isolation, and the loneliness of grief. Gay effectively employs other craft elements such as scene and summary, theme, character, and plot to evoke emotion and insight in the reader. Finally, Gay’s dry humor and raw honesty make this story poignant and unforgettable.
Roxane Gay is an American essayist, fiction writer, editor and cultural critic known for her witty and empathetic style. Her writing is concerned with the themes of feminism, race, gender identity, body image and sexual violence. She is the author of best-selling collections Ayiti (2011) and Bad Feminist (2014), a 2014 novel An Untamed State, the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017) for which she was a National Book Critics Circle Finalist in Autobiography.
Hosted by: Della Leavitt
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BIO: Moira Sullivan has been participating in writing groups since 1993. She hosted a community open mic at the former Café Express in Evanston and continues to write poetry and short stories. She served as an associate editor for “RHINO: the poetry forum,” and participating in the Highlights Program. In graduate school, she collected political poetry in Brazil and became a professional translator and marketer at a global humanitarian association. Her short story The Pawnbroker’s Deal appeared in the collection titled Further Persons Imperfect (2007). Her story Caught in the Net appeared in Turning Points, the 75th Anniversary OCWW Anthology (2021) and her story Man of the House appeared in OCWW’s Meaningful Conflicts: The Art of Friction anthology (2023). An OCWW member since 2018, she currently serves on the promotion committee and on the board as Secretary. These days you might find her working on a sci-fi novel at a local Evanston cafe as a member of the 2024-25 cohort in the “Novel in a Year Program” sponsored by Story Studio.
