Ashley Honeysett
Ashley Honeysett has lived throughout the United States as well as in Ireland and Japan and is now raising a child with her husband outside of Chicago, where she works as a fundraiser for environmental nonprofits. She studied creative writing at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and published poetry and prose in journals there and at Michigan State University.
In Fictions, Ashley Honeysett intersperses the self-doubt of short story submission with the trials of motherhood—or possibly the other way around. Like Lucia Berlin, there's a shadow of cruelty, if not outright violence, lurking in scenes of domestic routine. Formally, the intercut sections of memoir and meditation embody a great insight in Berlin’s work: balancing a creative career with conscientious parenting means that one must always steal time and write whatever scraps emerge, often written down on literal scraps of paper (be it an envelope or the back of a grocery receipt). Honeysett’s narrator conveys the emotional heft of a hard-won life in progress.