Tiny Doors by Lydia Copeland Gwyn
It’s been twenty years now, and you’re still somewhere in the air of that September. Still a rope of smoke frozen mid-curl over the mountains.
Upon impact, the galactic mass of an asteroid makes small work of nature’s bounty. Species of flora and fauna eons old give way to a vaporous mist in seconds, victims of friction. Rapid excavation etches a surface scar, radiating a further life-flattening blast of wind from its center. Megatons of force ravage entire ecologies, mere consequences of catastrophe.
Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s Tiny Doors surveys aftermath on a smaller scale, offering glimpses of a family as its members find themselves navigating impossible situations and experiencing unexpected violence. Against a backdrop of Appalachian tranquility, characters wrestle with the after-effects of suicide, the trauma of birth, and the dark spaces of parenting and childhood. Idyllic times give way to calamitous moments of domestic devastation, leaving survivors with “histories that rise and sink and shift in bed with you at night, . . . a mood in the air, a slow evaporation lifting like a veil.”
80 pages, handmade and numbered • 2018
It’s been twenty years now, and you’re still somewhere in the air of that September. Still a rope of smoke frozen mid-curl over the mountains.
Upon impact, the galactic mass of an asteroid makes small work of nature’s bounty. Species of flora and fauna eons old give way to a vaporous mist in seconds, victims of friction. Rapid excavation etches a surface scar, radiating a further life-flattening blast of wind from its center. Megatons of force ravage entire ecologies, mere consequences of catastrophe.
Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s Tiny Doors surveys aftermath on a smaller scale, offering glimpses of a family as its members find themselves navigating impossible situations and experiencing unexpected violence. Against a backdrop of Appalachian tranquility, characters wrestle with the after-effects of suicide, the trauma of birth, and the dark spaces of parenting and childhood. Idyllic times give way to calamitous moments of domestic devastation, leaving survivors with “histories that rise and sink and shift in bed with you at night, . . . a mood in the air, a slow evaporation lifting like a veil.”
80 pages, handmade and numbered • 2018
It’s been twenty years now, and you’re still somewhere in the air of that September. Still a rope of smoke frozen mid-curl over the mountains.
Upon impact, the galactic mass of an asteroid makes small work of nature’s bounty. Species of flora and fauna eons old give way to a vaporous mist in seconds, victims of friction. Rapid excavation etches a surface scar, radiating a further life-flattening blast of wind from its center. Megatons of force ravage entire ecologies, mere consequences of catastrophe.
Lydia Copeland Gwyn’s Tiny Doors surveys aftermath on a smaller scale, offering glimpses of a family as its members find themselves navigating impossible situations and experiencing unexpected violence. Against a backdrop of Appalachian tranquility, characters wrestle with the after-effects of suicide, the trauma of birth, and the dark spaces of parenting and childhood. Idyllic times give way to calamitous moments of domestic devastation, leaving survivors with “histories that rise and sink and shift in bed with you at night, . . . a mood in the air, a slow evaporation lifting like a veil.”
80 pages, handmade and numbered • 2018
Lydia Copeland Gwyn's stories and poems have appeared in New World Writing, Gone Lawn, the Jellyfish Review, Appalachian Heritage, Elm Leaves Journal, the Florida Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations, was a finalist for the Best Small Fictions, and has placed in the Wigleaf Top 50 three times. She was also a finalist for Glimmer Train's Flash Fiction Award, and her chapbook "In the Air a Shining Heart" placed second for the Florida Review's Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award. She lives in East Tennessee with her husband, son, and daughter.