By Gabrielle Girard, Editorial Assistant

This week, to mark the many efforts to connect as well as to unplug during this winter holiday season, we at the GR bring you a themed dive into the stories of Issue 113.

 

While The Greensboro Review does not publish themed issues and remains dedicated to “the best fiction and poetry—regardless of theme, subject, or style,” as a reader, I am always looking for patterns and connections. Maybe it’s the way textures and pressures of our current moment show up in art, or maybe it’s just my own imagination, but I can’t read a literary magazine without looking for connective threads. In the Spring 2023 Issue 113, three stories especially stood out to me because of the unique way they each incorporate technology, highlighting characters’ emotional states and heightening characterization.

In Phoebe Peter Oathout’s “Unity Ritual,” Ema navigates sexuality and romance through technology, making content for pay-per-view platforms, and “burn[ing] through Wyoming Tinder” before she downloads Hinge and meets Sid. Although they spend time together in person, their “love developed over email.” Sid’s confident online persona and Ema’s Instagram account are places where they show new dimensions of themselves. Technology both encapsulates their relationship and illuminates the pressures of transphobia within the story, allowing self-revelation and expression, and moving adjacent to but never becoming synonymous with safety and connection.

Ian Power-Luetscher’s short story “Driftless” opens with the line, “One day I end up trapped inside of a TV show.” The narrator lays out his relationship and career conflicts through the lens of a sitcom. He says, “Cut to later,” and we jump months. We toggle back and forth between the present and painful memories in the past. In addition to being a vibrant, funny, and engaging mechanism for handling time and structure in a story, technology is integral to understanding the narrator’s mental state, reliability, and characterization.

In J.S. Nunn’s “The Committee of Household Electronics,” Daniel is a work-from-home employee reluctant to return to the office. His computer, refrigerator, alarm clock, and anything else with a text-to-speech function are malfunctioning and meddling in his life. It starts with his computer acting up in work video calls and escalates from there. The electronics’ voices, whether real or imagined, replace human connection and seem to actively try to isolate the narrator. Whether it’s a cause, a solution, or a manifestation of a deeper pain, this story’s use of technology interfaces with the narrator’s interiority and characterization, tapping into themes of modern isolation and loneliness while still preserving an element of humor.