About the Author

Kristin Tenor finds inspiration in life’s quiet details and believes in their power to illuminate the extraordinary. Her stories and prose poems have appeared in Best Microfiction 2024, Wigleaf, Bending Genres, 100 Word Story, Unbroken Journal, and elsewhere. Her work has also been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She is a contributing editor at Story. Read more at www.kristintenor.com

Reviews

"With prose that's both elemental and dreamlike, Kristin Tenor creates quietly powerful distillations of love and life and grief. In these pages, you'll encounter lost children and drowned boys, blackbirds and daylilies, carnival rides and distant train whistles, crazy quilts and dandelion wine. Tenor guides us through the liminal spaces and the haunted landscapes of human experience with remarkable compassion and sensitivity. Unforgettable and gorgeously written, This is How They Mourn is an immersive and deeply moving collection by one of the best writers currently working in the very short form."

—Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018.

"With deft precision and artistry, Kristin Tenor digs deep into the emotional landscape of our shared humanity. This Is How They Mourn is a beautiful exploration of yearning, loss, and navigating what remains. Raw, honest, vulnerable—the stories and prose poems included in this collection hold you in their embrace long after reading them. A profound, masterful debut from a writer we're sure to hear from for years to come."

—Grant Faulkner, author of The Art of Brevity and All the Comfort Sin Can Provide

"There is a live sensibility in Tenor's fiction, filled with refreshing honesty and humility. Her characters rise from fully inhabited lives, experiencing ecstatic joy and desires, and immense pain. Vibrant both in sonic pleasure and imagery, her lyrical writing jumps from each page, as the lone self comes to terms with the world."

—Robert Vaughan, author of ASKEW

"Kristin Tenor’s award-winning debut collection is infused with her creative DNA. Her words fly on harbinger wings—swallows, paper cranes, blackbirds, baby sparrows. Tenor’s sensory details guide her prose with the poetry of peas and bees, knees that knead, Queen Victoria and Virginia Slim. The titular story is a worldbuilding funeral of family, kielbasa, an accordion, wheat pennies, and whiskey. While Tenor’s characters may get stuck in mud and clawfoot bathtubs, there’s also laughter, roller coasters, and lemon bars, written in glimpses of shadow and technicolor. This collection speaks of how to mourn, but it’s also about how to live."

—Amy Barnes, author of Mother Figures and Child Craft

"Winner of The 8th Wavelengths Chapbook Contest, Kristin Tenor’s This Is How They Mourn is a collection of stories that individually display a beautiful range of narratives, while as a whole, it reads like an extended goodbye letter without wanting to say goodbye. Tenor juxtaposes the heavy and the dark with innocence, creating this conflict of emotions—nostalgic, at times, resembling the feeling of walking through the rooms of a house you used to live in years ago and finding hints of familiarities in a home no longer belonging to you—becoming a stranger in your own kitchen. Tenor writes with precision, showing the vast array of worlds that can be created in a small space—leading us to a universe of words and making us want to raise our hands and say hi."

—Shome Dasgupta, author of Tentacles Numbing and Atchafalaya Darling

"This Is How They Mourn is an extraordinary collection, and each of the short pieces within is subtle, elegant, and exquisitely crafted, offering us brief and haunting glimpses into lives in moments of crisis and transition. Tenor has a remarkable gift for illuminating the unspoken conversations that pass between people and for imbuing those moments with tremendous wisdom and insight. This is among the best debuts of flash fiction I’ve ever read.”

—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared