Teaching Notes for Kelly Marie Wants to Talk to You
Use in the classroom to discuss: the campus as setting; the city as setting; uncanny environments; uncanny apparitions; transition points; interpersonal orbits; voice; vivid worlds viewed through a very strange lens; Brooklyn; dump sites; beer bottles; longings; hookups and hangups; characters who are unrealistic/surreal yet believable/knowable; furtive performances of the personal; broadcast performances of the personal; humor; dream-logic; doppelgangers; doorways; hauntings; stolen experiences; heart eyes.
Pairs well with Unset; Flat Stanley Reports Back to his Third Grader; and Carnival Bound (or, please unwrap me)
Kelly Marie Wants to Talk to You by Michael Giddings
64 pages.
Perfect bound.
Winner of the Cupboard Pamphlet’s 2022 Annual Contest, Michael Giddings’ Kelly Marie Wants to Talk to You asks us to consider what shapes our love can take—and what slips into existence in the aftermath. In these chain link tales, best friends mark up the maps of our disappointed hearts, strange lovers spit strawberries into our mouths, and subterranean cats stretch out in their sleep, making missed opportunities of our midnight conquests. Who will have your back when you are at your worst? Who can you call out of the garbage heap to help you? Stoop a bit. Come in under the fence. Kelly Marie is here. She wants to talk to you.
Michael Giddings is a writer, cartoonist, and musician from Brooklyn. He works as a preschool teacher and is an associate fiction editor for Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. His work can be found in HASH Journal, Reservoir Road Review, Scribble Lit, The Minnesota Review, and Pidgeonholes. Michael is currently revising a novella, The Homeschoolers, in which Kelly Marie will return.