{"id":575,"date":"2015-07-31T15:55:58","date_gmt":"2015-07-31T15:55:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/?p=575"},"modified":"2015-07-31T15:55:58","modified_gmt":"2015-07-31T15:55:58","slug":"the-backyard-transplant-gaining-inspiration-from-goreyesque-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/the-backyard-transplant-gaining-inspiration-from-goreyesque-places\/","title":{"rendered":"The Backyard Transplant: Gaining Inspiration from Goreyesque Places"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, my story, “The Backyard Transplant,” made its debut in the summer issue<\/a> of\u00a0Goreyesque, an Edward Gorey-inspired literary journal.\u00a0Featuring the exploits of a little girl named Francesca, a makeshift surgeon\u00a0who’s armed with safety scissors and a mallet, this is one of my lighter tales, a combination of the humorous and the macabre, not so unlike the oeuvre of Edward Gorey himself.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Ever since I first discovered Goreyesque last year, it became\u00a0one of my\u00a0major writing\u00a0goals to place a story with the\u00a0journal. After all, I’ve been a devotee of Edward Gorey\u00a0from the time\u00a0I was\u00a0in kindergarten, his morbid illustrations always a delight to my book-loving self. As an adult, my Ogdred Weary obsession only grew and eventually took me all the way to New England where I toured his famous Elephant House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts<\/a>. Seriously, that’s how Gorey crazy I am.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a><\/p>\n

All this fandom started thanks to my father,\u00a0which is quite appropriate since\u00a0I wrote\u00a0“The Backyard Transplant” for him. Last winter, he himself was a transplant recipient. While\u00a0the rest of\u00a0my family sat in a Cleveland Clinic waiting\u00a0room,\u00a0I decided\u00a0to try\u00a0my best not to think about\u00a0my father\u00a0being cut open\u00a0on a table for\u00a0the twelve-hour procedure, so\u00a0I instead opted to invent a gruesome yarn that I could read to him once he woke up.\u00a0Consequently,\u00a0as a highly trained lifesaving surgeon scooped out my father’s old lungs and put in two new ones, I penned “The Backyard Transplant.” Perhaps my task was not quite so monumental, but hey, we do what we can.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, “The Backyard Transplant”\u00a0became the first story I read to\u00a0my dear ol’ dad\u00a0after he woke up in the hospital room. My most vivid memory of that afternoon three-days post surgery was seeing him laugh for the first time. Indeed, I saw, not heard him laugh because he still had the obligatory post-transplant feeding tube, so he couldn’t actually speak or make any sound at all. But that didn’t stop him from laughing, knee slapping and all.<\/p>\n

So for the remainder of my writing career, “The Backyard Transplant” will hold a special place in my heart. And having it appear\u00a0in an Edward Gorey-inspired\u00a0journal? Well, that’s just icing on a very\u00a0morbid cake.<\/p>\n

Happy reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, my story, “The Backyard Transplant,” made its debut in the summer issue of\u00a0Goreyesque, an Edward Gorey-inspired literary journal.\u00a0Featuring the exploits of a little girl named Francesca, a makeshift surgeon\u00a0who’s armed with safety scissors and a mallet, this is one of my lighter tales, a combination of the humorous and the macabre, not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[24],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","tag-edward-gorey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":616,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions\/616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gwendolynkiste.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}