Ella Hormel
Collected Flash Fiction
Ella Hormel’s debut book is a collection of flash fiction exploring the lives of girls and women in San Francisco. In these stories, the city’s objects become vehicles through which characters relate to one another and understand themselves. A coyote torments a city block; a woman visits her ex-girlfriend’s spiritual healer in a backyard hot tub; a teenage girl survives a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. Told with both humor and nostalgia, Earthquake Weather is a reflection on loss, loneliness, and loyalty—to people and to a city.
These short stories consider the concrete—lemons, pigeons, hearing aids—to get at something larger and looser and more abstract: the passage of time, the density and devotion of human feeling, a family’s dissolution, a mother’s distance. I admire these stories’ directness of language, compressed form, and dramatization of subtle and lasting discoveries…They live simply and profoundly on the page.
Corinna Vallianatos
At the heart of Hormel’s collection, readers will find a deep investigation of the human connection that powers domestic life. In a striking reflection of reality, Earthquake Weather’s characters meditate on the mundane, examine their own interiority without judgment, and often take the unexpected route—especially where community, love, and family life are at stake. The women in these stories are anything but simple—with sharp wit and fearless honesty, Hormel uncovers for us the vast and intricate emotional landscapes that both differentiate and unite the characters across their pages.
Earthquake Weather takes stock of the human strengths and fragilities at play both in daily life and over time, asks as many questions as it answers, and above all, delivers an honest portrayal of the human psyche—all punctuated by the city that binds these characters together.
Ella Hormel lives in Berkeley, CA where she works as an editor and prison educator. She’s a graduate of California College of the Arts and received her MFA in creative writing from UMass Amherst. Her work can be found in SmokeLong Quarterly, Foglifter, The New York Time’s Tiny Love Stories, and elsewhere.
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