Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Isabel Cooper | Can Curses Really Work? Even in reverse?
Author Guest / April 6, 2012

I blame the Van Wickle Gates. See, my college has these giant iron gates that are only open for matriculation and commencement, per wacky ceremonial tradition, and also per wacky tradition, there’s some kind of urban (is it really urban on a college campus? Whatever) legend that, should you pass through them at any other time, lo, you will be CURSED and condemned to STAY AT COLLEGE FOREVER, or not graduate, or something. Said curse couldn’t really apply to me, because the time I walked through them the wrong way was after I’d been graduated, for which I blame my friends Jamey and Mike: we were coming back from the ceremony, discussing who’d won various bets regarding the valedictorian speeches ($5 each on “community,” “diversity,” a gratuitous mention of 9/11, and “Jesus Christ, my personal savior”, and I still think I could’ve swept the pool if we’d bothered to write this stuff down) and…we went the wrong way. As you do. Since I already graduated, clearly, the curse instead decreed that I’d never get away from academia in general, and…I really haven’t. Definitely not in my writing: my first book, NO PROPER LADY, is one of the few things I’ve…