Megafauna: Stories and Screenplay (Paperback or Softback)

The bold and incisive characters of Flora K. Schildknecht s brilliant debut collection, Megafauna, confront existential dilemmas at a bed-rock level. From a child who longs to know if there is a moral order to the universe as she wrestles with her Darwinian instinct to smite a weaker classmate, to a ninety-year old man about to be removed from his prairie home as he recalls a violent and cruel boyhood, to a barely fifteen-year-old African refugee who has already learned the laws of survival through self-reliance, these pieces vivify their subjects but also spotlight corners of the reader s own psyche with a terrifying brightness.

The characters of these stories embrace the struggle to live fully and authentically in a variety of locations, taking the reader through a wild series of interior and exterior worlds. The dangerous mountains and lakes of the expansive northwestern wilderness are the backdrop for a frightening story of disappearance and desire for a troubled boy and his reality-challenged stepmother. A hyper-domestic, suburban setting frames the lives of a group of first-time mothers as they both merge their identities in group-think and attempt to outdo one another at holistic parenting. A wife-and-mother in a woman-woman marriage stumbles through divorce and into an unexpected satisfaction beyond her wildest dreams.

Each story asks, where is the real danger? Does it lie in the struggle within, or in the rigidity of society, or even in the very land that surrounds us? The collection begins and ends with stories of young females encountering and hoping to triumph over the worlds they have inherited. These narratives will break your heart in utterly different ways, and you will come away vowing to be a more perceptive and compassionate person, at home and abroad.

Flora K. Schildknecht has published fiction in The Louisville Review, 2nd & Church, The Chaffin Journal, and Sisyphus. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart prize. She earned an MFA from Spalding University, where she studied fiction and screenwriting. Her love of travel has taken her to Japan, Tanzania, Argentina, Mexico, Great Britain, and to Scandinavia and much of Europe. She lives with her husband and young son in Louisville, Kentucky, and teaches at Bellarmine University.