Writer Spotlight: Elijah J. Mears
Welcome to the eighth installment of Writer Spotlight. This week’s focus is Elijah J. Mears. I’ve reviewed six of Mears’s short pieces, five of them on Inkfoundry’s “Get WYSR” feed. (In case you didn’t know, Inkfoundry is a wonderful and free resource that aggregates short fiction and poetry pieces!) This capstone review will look at the overall themes and topics of Mears’s body of work.
Recurring Themes:
Aliens
Gay representation
Fat representation
Self-esteem/Self-acceptance
Short, punchy lengths with vivid prose
Day One - Feb 19
“Everyone Hates It When The Alien Shows Up At The Club”
Everyone hates it when that obnoxious alien shows up. Well, maybe not everyone. Maybe one person likes it ;)
“Loving the Alien is the Easiest Thing in the World”
Learning to love an alien, learning to love oneself.
The Pairing:
Both these pieces were flash fiction and centered around aliens and gay representation! Also, there is a running thread about being excluded from society. Already, so many themes and parallels.
Individually:
“Everyone Hates It” has a unique technical usage where the parenthesis denote someone new speaking, like dialogue tags. The most interesting part though, is when there are multiple parenthesis in one sentence, which is used to indicate a crowded bar. REALLY cool semantic I’ve never seen before!
“Loving the Alien” in addition to loving the rainbow, adds in fat representation as well, and themes around low self-esteem, loneliness, and learning to love yourself through someone else’s eyes.
Day Two - Feb 20
Scars tell stories, and sometimes they bring us together.
In a post-apocalyptic world, the narrator just needs to get his sister to safety and food.
The Pairing:
Both these are quite short; one flash and one micro.
Individually: (Spoilers below)
“Scar Tissue” joins Mears’s first two stories with themes around being gay, excluded by others in society, and aliens! But in this one, the alien is not the love interest, but rather furthers the theme of acceptance that the two lovers find themselves creating in each other.
“We Keep Moving” has zombies! I love this reveal towards the end that makes you re-read the whole thing.
Day Three - Feb 21
5. “What the Crab Apple Tree Near Miranda Spaceport Saw”
Jun and Elliot argue under the crab apple tree, and it so badly wants to tell them something.
6. “The Memory of You is Contained in the Crab Rave”
Don’t worry, the crabs will remember you.
The Pairing:
Both of these are from non-human POVs!! Literally one of my favorite things ever!! A crab apple tree and a swarm of crabs. Also, interestingly, both of these have the word crab in them. Now I’m wondering how crab-apple trees got their name…
Individually:
“Crab Apple” This one joins “Scar Tissue,” “Loving the Alien,” and “Everyone Hates It” for gay representation! There’s also a melancholic tone, here, from the crab apple tree that so yearns to communicate with the humans. I really felt this one.
“Memory of You” is a micro fiction, so it joins “We Keep Moving” for length reasons, but also because it’s horror-based. There’s also a hive mind and memories passing from one being to the hive mind.
Personal Favorite: “What the Crab Apple Tree Near Miranda Spaceport Saw”
Summary!
If I were to summarize Mears’s style in one sentence, I would say he excels in lovely yet succinct prose that tends to hover around gay and fat representation, and often includes aliens, self-esteem, and how society excludes people as a focus.
Interview Questions
What are the themes you tend to return to the most in your work overall? Why do think that is?
Mears: I find that I return again and again to the idea of outcasts, nonconformity, and things or people that are caught in the margins. The Alien is a major motif in my work, as seen in the two “Alien” flash pieces I have published, very briefly in “Scar Tissue”, and majorly in the piece I have forthcoming in the Wrath Month anthology (which is actually a sequel to “Loving the Alien is the Easiest Thing in the World”). The Alien is a metaphor for anyone who doesn’t fit—I think in particular of my spouse, who is a green-haired transgender nonbinary person, but also myself to an extent, many friends I’ve had and people I’ve known in passing. I think, as a queer person, there’s something that rings true to me about the idea of characters who simply don’t fit into boxes and that’s not just fine, but even good, and even beautiful.
2. What is one of the characters in your short stories/flash pieces that you relate to the most, and why?
Mears: Transparently, the main character of “Loving the Alien is the Easiest Thing in the World” is basically just me. It’s really a story about how unbelievably lucky I feel that someone as strange and wonderful as my spouse is in love with someone like me, and was inspired by a moment a few years ago when we were talking about some of our opinions of our own attractiveness and at one point they said they felt like they’d tricked me into loving them and I was like, “Wait, hang on hang on hang on, no, I’m definitely the one who tricked you, I married way out of my league”.
3. What short fiction author do you look up to? Why?
Mears: Oh, so many, for so many different reasons. I could give you a different answer to this question every day for ages, but I marvel fairly consistently at Isabel J. Kim. I talk a lot about how my earliest influences as a writer were authors I read as a kid who made me go, “You can do that with words??? I must learn this sorcery for myself” and the notorious IJK always makes me feel like that even as an adult. Every time she drops a new banger, I learn about new things you can make words do and that always inspires me to experiment and continue trying to improve my own craft.
Anything else you’d like to say about your work?
Mears: If I can, I’d like to just plug my twice-monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for at https://elijahjmears.com/subscribe. Unless there’s something specific with how a market wants to announce a sale that prevents me from doing so, it’s basically always the first place I mention upcoming work, and is also a great way to keep up generally with what’s going on with my writing, my life, and get an email from a friend every couple weeks.