Ladies-in-Waiting

Chella Courington was born and raised in Southern Appalachia in a storytelling family who taught her how to value the word. Fortunate to be able to pursue an education, she received a Ph.D. in American and British Literature and an M.F.A. in Poetry. Creative publications include one novella, fourteen chapbooks of poetry and fiction, and innumerable poems and stories in journals and anthologies. With teaching as her livelihood, she moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Santa Barbara, California, twenty years ago, giving her the space and distance to understand her past. Not since Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt has a collection of fiction explored women’s desires with such wit, empathy, and delicious prose. Ladies-in-Waiting offers up sixteen tales of women in love, women in pain, and women floating in between in a world filled with magical objects, transformations, fixations, and desertions. Women haunted by thrift store finds and old dresses. A woman graced with a horn of plenty offering up increasingly worrisome gifts. A young wife and husband who build a wrestling ring in their backyard only to enter the ring together as opponents. Come and find for what these ladies have been waiting. A world of wonders awaits you.