This week we are proud to introduce a talented new voice in fiction, Allison Dziuba, and her debut short story, “Liminality: A Life Study.”

[suggesting an alternate reading]

What might it feel like to have your life written by someone else?

Liminality: the state of being at the threshold, of existing on multiple planes simultaneously. For me, liminality is a literary character’s dilemma. She exists in the world of narrative, a world constructed solely by language; she also exists in the world of imagination, in the space between writer and reader where inferences and personal associations are made. She puts pieces together with the expectation of forming a complete picture, but instead finds that what she has is a collection of remnants.

One aim of my story is to sketch out that liminal state, to explore Barthesian edges of character (of life?).

Narrative seams sometimes occur through iteration. For instance, I am interested in how routine may come to define the substance of one’s days and how one may nevertheless feel dissociated from that repetition. I am interested in how mishearings and misrememberings may become woven into one’s reality.

Language itself provides a site of fracture, too. Poet Ed Roberson conveys this linguistic-experiential multiplicity brilliantly. Lines like

and we sat down in a field of eyelets (hope woke open,

and copied the direction of patterns                 a sowing)*

stir several different yet concurrent readings. I am fascinated by how language can display choral sensibilities, wherein a single string of word-notes can be sung by various meaning-voices.

So what is a character to do with the plentiful possibilities and frustrations of liminality? She may peel back layers of experience and of language and not reveal anything. She may discover that the whole is actually illusory; there is only the edge.

*from “A swaying path” in To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan University Press, 2010)