Elwin Cotman is the author of four collections of speculative short stories—The Jack Daniels Sessions EP, Hard Times Blues, Dance on Saturday, and Weird Black Girls—and the poetry collection The Wizard’s Homecoming. His debut novel, The Age of Ignorance, will be published by Scribner. Cotman’s work has appeared in Grist, Electric Lit, Buzzfeed, The Southwestern Review, and The Offing, among others. He holds a BA from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Mills College. He lives in Oakland, California.
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Weird Black Girls: StoriesFrom"Weird Black Girls"
Your phone alarm went off at eight. “I only got in a fight one time,” you told me after I told you my dream. “I was playing in the sandbox with my friend and he got mad at me for beating him in a game, so he punched me in the face. My mom took one look at me and said, ‘Never let anyone hit you.’ So she made me go back there and fight him.”
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“I felt bad! We were both crying the whole time. I think I won. I bit him a few times.”
“Sounds excessive.”
“Nuh-uh! When you grow up in poor communities, you have to do violent things to survive. Because if people think they can mess with you, they’ll keep messing with you, and your life will be ten times harder than if you just do unpleasant things. Like bite a boy on the playground. Yeah!” you affirmed with a prim little nod.
Weird Black Girls : Stories- Print Books
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Weird Black Girls: StoriesFrom"Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke's Intro To Acting Class"
For Leroy I put on pantyhose, a leather miniskirt, and black ankle boots with charms on the zippers, and, though Jennifer Beals doesn’t wear them in the scene I’ve rewound endlessly for reference—the one where she kicks it in her loft with the supposed-to-be-a-nice-guy-but-actually-kind-of-creepy-and-girl-now-that-I-think-about-it-ain’t-he-twice-her-age love interest—black leg warmers are a must.
For Leroy I wear a baggy aquamarine sweater with wide sleeves, one shoulder down. On my face go cleanser, moisturizers, concealer, foundation, bronzing powder, blush, eye shadow, mascara, ChapStick, and Revlon 5 to evoke Alex from Flashdance, a steel-town girl, a nymph terrified the dance school will reject her, slutty enough to feel you up under the table at a fancy restaurant, tough enough to punch a strip club sleaze, any ethnicity, mass market appeal, curly wig to my shoulders, hair-so-big-because-my-brain-holds-so-many-dreams '80s It Girl with a heart as pure as the cocaine grown by Reagan’s contras. I kiss the mirror. Mwah!
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Weird Black Girls: StoriesFrom"Things I Never Learned in Caitlin Clarke's Intro to Acting Class"
“Black woman—”
“When is you gon’ try the casserole? It’ll take your mind off it. Cleanse your thoughts.”
“Black woman—”
“I slaved over that casserole.”
“They should write a book about your suffering. Twenty Minutes a Slave. Black woman, I love you, but I’ma slap you.”
“Try.”
Accepting her challenge, I can barely twitch my forearms with her elbows on me. I try again and yell, full force, “Yo! Let me move my fucking arms.”
“I learned this in self-defense class. I’m Jason Bourne in this bitch.”
“Get off me!”
She does. Instantly I’m on my feet, and we circle with our dukes up, play slaps our love language.
“Oh my gosh,” I hear Leroy chuckle. “Y’all are like my kids.”
How embarrassing that I’m embarrassed. Even as I resent his condescending words, his indulgent wholesomeness leads me to take his hand and hurry him to the bathroom, slam the door, push his back to the wall, and, before I kiss him, grab hold of him, one hand to his gasping throat, the other the carafe of his cheek.
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“An exceptional work of magical realism . . . spectacular, full of energy and intelligence. [Weird Black Girls] features notes of Jesmyn Ward's musicality, shares Percival Everett's wit and flair for metaphor and calls to mind Gayl Jones' fierce sense for the fantastic.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Splendidly strange . . . the stories are gleefully genre-busting . . . yet their invention is always grounded in the tangible struggles the characters face . . . an epiphany about our shared American reality that is all the more startling for its brutal familiarity. . . . [A] must-read." —Kirkus, starred review [on Weird Black Girls]
“Homeboy can write. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. And not afraid to nerd out either. With Weird Black Girls, Cotman stellarly bursts open the thread of Black space in fiction. A landmark collection!” —Sidik Fofana, author of Stories From the Tenants Downstairs
Elwin Cotman creates exuberant fictional landscapes lit by philosophical lightning, illuminating sites of bawdy humor and of horror. His stories launch into a fabulist stratosphere, but their parabolic trajectory plunges them back into an unsparing reality. Thus they make the everyday strange and bring the strange within reach. A Cotman character is instantly recognizable for their wry, earthy lyricism; his work is alive with questions, tense with longing and possibility.