REVIEW
JR Fenn's Tiny Vessels
JR Fenn’s Tiny Vessels is an award-winning collection of seventeen stunning flash fictions that awe with their complexity and wow with their precision and prose.
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The title of the collection attunes the reader to no end of small spaces: a toy farm, a spaceship, a house, a pool, a mouth. The tiny stories themselves serve as both container and ship, each a portal to memory, lost worlds, other selves, reminding us that “[a] space will always be filled with something, even if it’s not what you expect.” Fenn’s storytelling ranges from concrete narratives to defamiliarized ones to the delightfully strange. “The Cherry Tree,” for example, offers the story of a recent immigrant who is harassed after insisting their contractor complete a landscaping project as promised, while “Fumigation Day” disarmingly bears witness to the oddity that is the modern house. How we fill structures with items we rarely use or no longer need. How we wrap these buildings in plastic, from time to time, and inject poisonous gases so that nothing from the natural world can make a home alongside us. Meanwhile, “Central Schools Resolution No. 2153” chronicles a “Midwest ripe for the taking,” a suburban town nearly undone by a sudden onset of clowns.
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Fenn's skill in story compression is simply jaw-dropping. Hedgehog stuffies evidence our disconnect from nature. A waterless pool, the ultimate fate of our habitat. In a beautifully rendered capstone moment, the 100-word gem “Matchbox” offers a meditation on both its titular object and the collection as a whole, the narrator pondering why craving tiny spaces feels so fundamental. An excellent question. Why do we love tiny spaces so? Perhaps their slight size makes them feel knowable, approachable, an antidote to cosmic chaos. Maybe we’re drawn by a hardwired desire for safety or psychic comfort. Fenn’s thoughtful prose kindles such questions—our minds, yet another tiny vessel—and invites us to sit with the myriad mysteries that dwell within.
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Book Details
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Tiny Vessels can be purchased here.
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Published by Red Mare Press. Selected by Rita Bullwinkel as the winner of The Masters Review’s 2024 Chapbook Open. The volume is 5.5”x 8.5” and comprises 33 pages of prose.
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BIO
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JR Fenn writes about the living web of the human and more-than-human world as it changes over time. Her work has appeared in many places, including Boston Review, DIAGRAM, Split Lip, PANK, 100 Word Story, the Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Syracuse University, where she was awarded the Joyce Carol Oates Prize in Fiction. Other recognitions include the Gulf Coast Prize for Nonfiction, the 59th Annual New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction, and Stone Canoe‘s Robert Colley Prize for Fiction. Her work has been supported by the Key West Literary Seminar, the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop, Writing by Writers, The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and Hewnoaks, among other places. She teaches Fiction and Environmental Writing at State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry and lives in Western New York with her family. Find her at www.jrfenn.com.
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SOCIAL MEDIA
Bluesky: @jr.fenn
Instagram: @jr.fenn
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