She Wondered if the Gun Was Loaded: An Introduction to Sara Hopkins’ Work by Andrea Applebee


 
 
The writing of Sara Hopkins centers on relationships between women as complex, decision-making characters fully engaged with the challenges of their time. She explores landscapes of identity and dialects of violence while tracking these characters’ navigation through their environments.

With an exacting balance of humor, urgency, and observation, these stories bring us to recognize and interrogate ourselves as we cross through spaces and encounter crises that we know well–be they rural or urban, regional or virtual. We are often located somatically with the narrators of these stories in a richly grounded sensory experience. But a delicate critical distance is maintained with subtle or uncanny flashes of a more general perspective–one of contemplation and witness.

In the stories included here, we are drawn into two vital questions. In “Dead Water”, the parasitic threat of white supremacy and systemic racial violence are raised. “Strange Currencies” fantastically dramatizes the power and precarity of women in a sexually abusive, relationally reckless, and environmentally unstable time.

These are stories that take on some of the most difficult and dangerous questions we live within.

Sara Hopkins is a former photojournalist, who lives in Georgia. She writes fiction and is currently working on a short story collection
 

Read “Strange Currencies” by Sara Hopkins >>

 

Read “Dead Water” by Sara Hopkins >>