Dwellers

First, we thank the many hundreds of fine writers who submitted to our 2026 Fiction Contest.  

And we send deep gratitude to Jessica Treadway, our final judge.  Jessica has published four novels and four story collections, including I Felt my Life with Both my Hands, to be published in April 2026.  We thank her for choosing the winner of the $1000 Fiction Prize, and the runner-up from among our five finalists.

These stories exemplify the wide range of our outreach from British Columbia to London to Africa, from LA to the Pacific Northwest to New England.  They also show diversity of styles, ranging from realistic to more experimental.  And their subject matter is diverse as they tell of love and loss, ambition and rebellion, violence and healing, veering from the existential to the absurd to the rapturous.

FICTION WINNER:  JEFFREY MICHAEL KANE

“Say it Right” explores the power dynamics among parents and children, brothers and sisters, in the wake of a death, asking who gets to tell—or rewrite—the story. “By the time I found the start of a sentence, he was already telling another, and everyone was already nodding, and the moment for truth—whatever minor truth I thought I was defending—had dressed itself quietly and left the room,” the narrator recalls of his brother.

RUNNER-UP:  PIPER FRANCKUM

In contrast, “The Lottery” delves into the consequences of winning it all, depicting the quiet desperation of day-to-day life without a direction. “The expectation of nothing is essential to the character of a lottery winner,” the narrator muses. “Lottery winners are careless, detached, and typically unlucky in life right up to the point they scratch that winning ticket.”

FINALISTS:

“How to Beat Your Face on a Budget Before and After He Leaves you for the Twink at the Club” by ELISA GARCIA. What a romp of a searing, moving story is this tale of a cross dresser preparing for her big moment on the stage, humor meets lyricism meets compassion. “Give the moisture a minute to set, humming to Cardi B, fancying yourself a bodega baddie, before smearing Pixi brand primer on the sleep creases lining your face. Marvel at the porcelain smoothness of the skin beneath the faded pockmarks where your tears tend to pool before spilling.”

“The Yellow Kitchen,” by JESSICA DALY experiments with plot and structure, yet with a realistic base. In lyrical language this story depicts the grief of a woman left by her lover, only to communicate with the Ex-lovers’ dead grandmother. “Then and now, I fall asleep feeling like the Earth had reversed its rotation and changed everything eternally. Grocery stores now riddled with shelves of food foaming with mold, streetlights flashing cornflower blue.”

“Empties” by TARA DUGAN measures a life in beer bottles, painting a portrait of a flawed father as seen by his son, meditating on memory and grief. “As the bottles made themselves at home on Clifton, they made the house a fragile one,” the son reflects. “Every room rattled if you walked through it too decisively; every nerve was fragile, going from solid to fractured after a single mistake, no grace or give in between.”

EDITORS’ PICKS:  We also thank the fine authors of our Editors’ Picks, stories of such high quality that the Solstice Editors felt moved to publish them. 

“Crashing Out” by TUNDE OYEBODE reveals the anger beneath a highly educated African’s alienation while living and loving in London.

“At 70” by IAN M. RANDALL tells the tale of a widower desperately, yet ironically, seeking ways to relieve his loneliness.

“Bonesters on Holiday” by TAMARA SELLMAN whisks us from a New Age shop into an enchanting realm, bringing us face to face with an unexpected kind of otherness, stripping away what’s unnecessary—sometimes literally—for connection.

“Butterfly Eyes” by DAR THOMAS is an intimate meditation on memory, grief, and daughterhood, a portrait of a virtuous mother, of what life can really be like under the rule of a saint.

Deep thanks to the literary insights of our READERS of many years, David Sahl and Heather Labay, and to our new readers Ona Anasike and Mia Karvonides.  Their avid, professional involvement was key.

Publishing and promoting the array of diverse talent in this contest is one of the joys of being an editor, even during difficult times.

Lee Hope, Founder, Fiction Editor

Monica Jimenez, Assistant Fiction Editor

A Broken Russia Inside Me: A Memoir
By Anatoly Molotkov
Trail to Table Press, an imprint of Wandering Aengus Press, 2026
Eastsound, WA, 194 Pgs.

Anatoly Molotkov’s memoir is an extraordinary achievement. Born in 1968, he comes of age against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991—arguably the defining cataclysmic events of the 2^nd half of the 20^th century.

The memoir opens in May 1990, near the U.S. consulate in Leningrad. Anatoly, twenty-two, is with his friend Sergey. They are science majors at Leningrad State. They are checking for immigration postings. They want out. Most countries are closed, but the U.S. remains open. “If the entire world were wide open, we would choose America anyway. We don’t know much about the United States, but we love it for its relentless opposition to our rotten regime and for its literature and art.

He gathers his family together in the kitchen to share his decision to emigrate to the U.S. He paints an intimate, vivid scene:

“I invite everyone to join me in our small kitchen, painted green up to the middle. The top half of each wall and the ceiling are white. The shy gas stove, old-fashioned even by Soviet standards, perches in the corner. A tiny refrigerator, a cupboard, a counter, a small table by the window where we sit, a green poplar outside, an expiring century whooshing past us.”

The kitchen is transformed into a private compartment on a train that is not moving! It’s the scenery personified as Time speeding past them, leaving them in the past. Family and reader are destabilized. Anatoly stands outside of Time, in a working relationship with the Fates, playing out the threads of his life to his destination in the U.S., and his destiny as a writer.

“I’ve decided to move to America. Sergey and I will go together.”

“What?” Mom’s face hardens.

“I need to get out of here.”

 “I’m going to be a writer. I’ll do anything else to make it work. I’ll figure it out.”

As the plane to the U.S. lifts off the runway, he observes, “The drab Russian land trails back, a tape of my life fast-forwarded.” He has broken the spell of stasis from his (soon-to-be-former) country, his whole being thrown into overdrive, catching up to the future that had almost whooshed by him.

Molotkov employs a nonlinear narrative compressed in short chapters and vignettes that flash back and forth and forward in time, highlighting the events in his life that have shaped him into who he is in the present and who he hopes to become. The first three chapters are a template for this: He is 22 years old in Chapter 1 when he decides to emigrate; in Chapter 2 he is 16 years old, a budding philosopher, asking “Who do we decide who we are?” and experiencing a strong epiphany to be a writer. At the end of Chapter 3 he is 49 years old, back to the future— “As I type this in 2017, I find online photos…,” a meta memoir move breaking the narrative and speaking directly to us about the unreliability of his memory, doing research for the writing of the very book we are reading!

He settles in Albany with friends who have preceded him. He rents a small studio, but the work he finds doesn’t pay the rent. When his lover Luba arrives, just divorced, with six-month-old baby Sonya, his promise to himself to do whatever it takes to be a writer is put to the test:

“On one of our most penniless evenings, Luba and I pack Sonya in her stroller and set out hunting the sleeping Albany downtown for bottles and cans to recycle. It’s a chilly night. …As we prowl Albany’s streets with the homeless and the hopeless for our 5¢ prizes, the dark downtown buildings stare down in disgust. We are not put off. We’d rather collect cans in the United States than engage in intellectual pursuits in the Soviet Union. There is no future for us there.”

Soon they are fighting over money and who cares for Sonya because they can’t afford a babysitter. Luba begins an affair and moves out, though they still feel a deep connection. She decides to move to the West Coast. “We meet twice on Luba’s last day in town and share tense words and desperate sex. Our relationship doesn’t seem finished.”

This opens a creative space in Anatoly, and he fills it by viewing films and reading novels, studying their craft and searching for his own narrative voice. He is moved by the flashback ending of Philip Kaufman’s film The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the conclusion of Atom Egoyan’s Exotica:

“This deconstruction of time is loaded with opportunities. Breaks in narrative chronology break me into pieces, bring me to tears, and make me rethink my work. Time is a gift, an enemy, a friend. A gap in time is a collision of emotional tectonic plates.”

As a writer, I revel in the joy of his discoveries — one can almost hear his synapses snapping! And it leads him to the one and only conclusion:

“I’ve been writing in Russian and translating into English. This is time consuming. It becomes clear: sticking with Russian is absurd. What good will it do to be bound by the language of the dead Soviet empire? I’ve already given it up by moving away. My future as a Russian writer ends here.”

He begins a grueling routine unpacking English grammar: “I sweat as I struggle for synonyms, a thesaurus on my desk.” He starts a novel in English, commits to a single-spaced page a day, whether it’s at the end of a ten-hour shift at the deli, and it’s an effort to keep his eyes from closing until “a sufficient bundle of words lands on the page.”

At the deli, he forms a lasting friendship with Scott, who has done theater and writes, and shares a passion for film. They collaborate on short stories and a novel. When Scott graduates from SUNY, they decide to move to San Francisco in January 1991 “for its multicultural and multisexual vibe, art, and beautiful views. It beckons us from Kerouac’s pages.” Here he goes through a radical transformation: his inner “flower child” springs forth:

“San Francisco exposes me to a broader range of lifestyles. To a person from the gray USSR, this place is both an imperative and an offering. I love the freedom. I might as well use it. Hair dyes enter my life. …Rainbow hair is the only reasonable choice.

“After a few months, …my full-color commitment begins. I hire a seamstress to sew two pairs of pants from four different sections of multicolored fabric. With rainbow pants and shirts to supplement my rainbow hair, I finally feel far enough from a uniform. Can I relax yet?

“Wait a minute.

“Fingernails.

“I stock up on nail polish.”

But when he meets Laurie, who will become the love of his life, she gives him an ultimatum; she is tired of being the center of attention when they go out. “The pants are the worst part. If you could wear a normal pair of pants or jeans, I think I could deal with the shirt and the hair.” He agrees. They will become lifetime partners, and his personal commitment clarifies: “I must continue to shape myself into the best instrument of art I can be. I also intend to live a moral life.” Beauty & Truth made whole in the living witness of the artist.

If the East Coast bestowed freedom, the West Coast offered wings. And he soars, gaining perspective on his life. He travels to Russia and revisits friends and memories. His biological father died when he was four under mysterious circumstances: by accident, suicide, or murder by the KGB. He asks family members, and everyone has a different perspective. It is not resolved, but through the many tellings, he gains a more complete understanding of his father.

The frenetic chapters of his youth in Russia and New York give way to contemplative, elegiac portraits. His mother: “She was sincere and brilliant, full of energy and cheer, a warm, impressive individual. …Her name was Valentina.” His stepfather:  “[We] played chess, had debates and minor fights, read and discussed poetry. The daily habit, and then nothing. I caused so much distance by emigrating. His name was Ivan.” And Luba, his first love, former partner, and longtime friend: “Is this a happy ending or simply a different one? We helped each other peel off our more selfish selves and gave each other permission to hope for a better future.”

He also confronts the atrocities of Stalin when the mass graves are discovered in Toksovo in 2002, not far from where he used to ski. “We must still be trying to get the Soviet poisons out of our systems,” he reflects in the closing pages of A Broken Russia Inside Me. Writing the memoir was the cure.

2025 marks fifty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Half a century later, Lebanon still suffers its consequences. In recent years, conditions have deteriorated quickly, especially after a total economic meltdown, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Beirut Port Explosion on August 4, 2020, and yet other wars in 2024 and 2026.

Through it all, I found hope and inspiration in the young generation of women. I chose to focus on their majestic presence, creativity, strength, dignity, and resilience. I saw my younger self in them. I was twenty when I left Lebanon in 1984 during the civil war, to go study in the United States, in what had been the largest wave of emigration—until recently. Many find themselves at that same juncture as they face the painful decision in determining whether to stay or leave: one road leading to separation from family, home, and life as they know it, the other staying despite the fraught conditions in the country, holding on to hope for better days.

On the crumbling wall of an abandoned building, I saw graffiti scrawled in Arabic: لوين روح (Where do I go?). I was with Perla, a young woman who suddenly threw herself against that wall. In that fleeting moment, that question became the title of this body of work.

While this project started in 2020 after the Beirut Port Explosions, it kept evolving as I connected with more women and as the situation on the ground kept deteriorating. Together, we collaborated to visually tell personal stories – theirs, but also our collective story—against the meaningful and symbolic backdrops of the unique fabric of the country: textured walls of Beirut, the Mediterranean, raw mountains, traditional and abandoned buildings, and the many layers of destruction accumulated over the years. Every picture has a narrative. Women, land, and architecture are all intertwined. The process is collaborative and the photo session always evolves organically as the women become active participants in the image-making process, presiding over the environment, and making it their own. The need to hold on to creativity and self-expression feels urgent.

While my photographs may not provide solutions or closure, I hope they nevertheless invite the viewer to pause and find the beauty, hope, shared humanity, and grace that still exist despite everything. They are my love letters to the women of Lebanon.

Where Do I Go? was published as a book in March 2026 with an exhibition at the Eskenazi Museum. The first edition sold out, and the second edition will be available this fall.