I’ve admired Mikka Jacobsen’s craft ever since I read her essay collection, MODERN FABLES, a couple of years ago, and was thrilled to see that everything I love about her voice returns in her latest book, the short story collection GOOD VICTORY, stories mostly set in Alberta, in which the mundane mingles with the extraordinary to incredible results. It was also such a pleasure to meet her online and get to talk about her fiction debut, and whether or not she believes in such things as ghosts, psychics, or life coaches.
In our BOOKSPO conversation, she tells me how Samantha Hunt’s novel THE SEAS gave her permission to get unabashedly weird in her fiction, and also to treat her characters’ yearnings for love with the seriousness with which such yearnings deserve. She talks about how her feminism shows up in her writing, both the stories and essays; the ways in which writing fiction is harder than memoir, and how releasing a second book feels different (and maybe better?) than releasing a first.
Debut stories about the absurdity of growing up and being human in the twenty-first century.
A woman finds her childhood friend working in a booth at a psychic fair in the West Edmonton Mall courtyard. A lonely neuropsychology student steals cocaine from his lab rat to impress a Tinder date. Teenage girls play a dangerous game and discover a portal to another reality. These penetrating stories explore the strangeness and absurdity of being human in the twenty-first century: high school dances and teen pregnancy, bearded ladies and neighbourhood flashers, life coaches and Dolly Parton karaoke. Both unsettling and illuminating, Good Victory shines light in dark places.
Mikka Jacobsen is the author of the essay collection Modern Fables (Freehand Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in Joyland, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Prairie Fire, Canadian Notes & Queries, The Missouri Review, and Lit Hub, among others. She won Alberta Views‘ 2022 Short Story Contest. She lives in Calgary, AB. Good Victory is her first collection of stories.
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