MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

Mentorship Recipient
"Conversations at the End of the World"

Recipient Reflection: 
Jena Vallina

On "Conversations at the End of the World" by Jena Vallina

by Matt Weinkam

How do you write about the end of the world? Not the fiery apocalypse of the movies but the real-life ecological disaster playing out every day in slow motion, larger than any of us can comprehend. How do you engage with that meaningfully in fiction?
 
In “Conversations at the End of the World,” Jena Vallina places us in the not-so-distant future (or perhaps just a more clearly depicted present) where the consequences of our collective action/inaction are a more visible reality of everyday life—there are mutated fish in a polluted Lake Michigan, more severe seasons in smoggy Chicago, and climate refugees are visible in the streets. Reading this story in our submission queue, I was drawn not only to the engagement with ecological disaster but also to the relationship between the narrator and her grandmother. These two elements—the personal story and the global story—together strengthen and complicate each other. The result is a story that challenges us to see our present more clearly, to reckon with the inevitability of a post-human planet, and to take what action we can while we can. No small feat for a piece of short fiction.
 
In revising the story as part of our editorial mentorship, Jena and I focused on clarifying the world, the timeline, and the figurative language. Trimming paragraphs and whole sections at the beginning and end of the story streamlined the narrative and focused it more clearly on the central relationship. Adding time markers and using tense to distinguish between past and present created a stronger through line made it easier for the reader to orient themselves in a non-linear story. We also extended the metaphor of emptiness throughout the story to reveal how it unifies the personal and the global while suggesting something more—that emptiness can be filling, that a world without humans can still be teeming with life.
 
At every turn during the process, Jena displayed her willingness to revise and improve the story, her foresight about the climate crises and the future of humanity, and her inventive use of language and voice to breathe life into characters and elicit an emotional reaction from the reader. She also wins the award for fastest turnaround time, responding with rewrites and edits sometimes within hours of my email. That work ethic reveals her dedication to the craft and foreshadows what will no doubt be a long, successful writing career. It was a real pleasure working with such a talented writer.
 
Whatever role literature plays in creating a better future, I have no doubt Jena Vallina will be part of it.

Matt Weinkam
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Matt Weinkam is the associate director of Literary Cleveland, prose editor for Gordon Square Review, and a founding editor of Threadcount Magazine. His work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Sonora Review, New South, Quarter After Eight, Split Lip, DIAGRAM, and Electric Literature. He holds an MA in creative writing from Miami University, an MFA in fiction from Northern Michigan University, and he has taught creative writing as far away as Sun Yat-sen University in Zhuhai, China.  ​​