Rare Encounters with Sea Beasts and Other Divine Phenomena

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Rare Encounters with Sea Beasts and Other Divine Phenomena is about memory and giant squid. It’s about losing a childhood friend and being disappointed by God before your eighth birthday. It’s about praying, but instead of actually praying you go off hunting a giant squid like it were some sort of God-surrogate. It’s about loneliness and yearning and searching—sometimes for giant squid. It’s about the inability to properly understand friendships and love far too deep into a life. It’s made up of 12 pieces of flash and microfiction that tell 12 interconnected stories that span a single lifetime.

“I’d read every novel by the author who wrote the book about the killer squid. But I read the one about the squid the most.

I’d read that book so many times over so many years and only one giant squid had been seen alive and in person.

Even still, they were real.

They were out there. “

38pp.

Cover design and art by James Edward Clark

Rare Encounters with Sea Beasts and Other Divine Phenomena is about memory and giant squid. It’s about losing a childhood friend and being disappointed by God before your eighth birthday. It’s about praying, but instead of actually praying you go off hunting a giant squid like it were some sort of God-surrogate. It’s about loneliness and yearning and searching—sometimes for giant squid. It’s about the inability to properly understand friendships and love far too deep into a life. It’s made up of 12 pieces of flash and microfiction that tell 12 interconnected stories that span a single lifetime.

“I’d read every novel by the author who wrote the book about the killer squid. But I read the one about the squid the most.

I’d read that book so many times over so many years and only one giant squid had been seen alive and in person.

Even still, they were real.

They were out there. “

38pp.

Cover design and art by James Edward Clark

About the Author

Nick Gregorio lives, writes, and teaches just outside of Philadelphia. He earned his MFA from Arcadia University in May 2015 and has authored three books of fiction. His work has appeared in Crack the Spine, Hypertrophic Literary, 805 Literary and Arts Journal, and many more.

Reviews

“Rare Encounters (…) is Gregorio’s most profound work to date. His fiction is, without doubt, full of insight, beauty, and wisdom.”

—Nathaniel Kennon Perkins, author of Wallop

Gregorio’s Rare Encounters with Sea Beasts and Other Divine Phenomena is a time machine. It takes the reader through the years with exactness and precision as we vibrate from piece to piece: knowing that the interwoven flashes will change us by the time we reach our destination. The whole collection is an exploratory oceanographer tagging beasts and beauties that have just made their presence known, growing and stretching the initial mystery of the characters as they become real-life beings, making actual what was thought to be indescribable. These flashes are tension-filled treasures creating magic of the mysteries of the everyday, elevating moments of lucidity to sacredness. Gregorio writes with an earnest clarity and such deep emotion that I had to remind myself to not devour this too quickly, to spend time savoring every sentence in case I read it too fast: “fast enough to hurt a little.”

—Jane-Rebecca Cannarella, author of Better Bones and Thirst & Frost

“Nick has a knack for detail—the kind that makes you curious, that makes you feel connected, that makes you understand why literature exists.”

—Claire Hopple, author of Tell Me How You Really Feel

Gregorio is a loud, spirited voice in today’s literary scene. Rare Encounters (…) harnesses that raw energy and channels it into a nostalgic hunger for tenderness.

—Mallory Smart, author of The Only Living Girl in Chicago