Chapbooks

Everything’s Changing, Thirty West Publishing (January 13, 2023)

About

Everything is changing in towns across the United States. What we think we know is wrong. Animals have gone wild. Myths and fairytales are upended. Women’s bodies are growing weapon appendages. Nothing is certain anymore. The stories we tell ourselves are shifting. EVERYTHING’S CHANGING is a chapbook full of stories. Everyday magic, transformations, chaos, and coming to terms with the world as it is and how we want it to be. Stories within have been published in journals such as Best Microfiction, CRAFT, Cheap Pop, Fractured Lit, and more.

From “More Beautiful Than the Moon”

“I touched its rough, pock-marked exterior, I remembered that the moon was only bright white because it reflected the sun. Without that, it was just a big rock. The only thing that made it special was what he’d taken from it. Here, on the dark side of the moon, my grandmother’s moonstone still glowed.”

Praise

“In Everything’s Changing, Chelsea Stickle plants a foot in the world we recognize and pushes off into the most delightful and unexpected directions. Anything is possible in these pages: Characters might find themselves encased in marble or immortalized in marionettes. As readers, we inhabit the experiences of Medusa, of ghosts, of the lover of a man who literally lassos the moon. Each story offers a singular, illuminating glimpse into a fractured world whose most startling element is its similarity to our own.”

—Siân Griffiths, author of The Heart Keeps Faulty Time

“In this collection of stories, Chelsea Stickle creates worlds of beautiful oddities. And never for a moment does she let the reader disbelieve in the magic she has created. With a deft hand, she guides us into these unknown places that still feel, somehow, like home.”

—Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You

“The flash fiction stories in Chelsea Stickle’s new chapbook, Everything’s Changing, are wonderfully weird, anchored in the real but always lifting a saucy foot into the illogical, a literary Twilight Zone where everything looks normal…right up until the moment it doesn’t.”

-Nancy Stohlman, author of After the Rapture and The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories

“The tales in this chapbook take on a post-Roe world, a world recovering from a pandemic, and a world in which the horrors of daily living dare the magical realist to conjure events more astonishing than the headlines. This Stickle does. She dances with the dead. She rewrites Pygmalion and sympathizes with Medusa. She lops off the fingers and hands of sexual harassers, attacks luxury cars with peacocks and, at one point, stops time. This collection roils and heaves like an angry, rising sea of surging prose and coast-ravaging metaphors.”

—Jennifer Companik, editor at TriQuartely and author of Check Engine and Other Stories