My short story “Yet a Youth” came out on Monday in Issue 80 of Youth Imagination. You can read it here! This story actually originally appeared in almost identical form in the Spring 2010 issue of Small Craft Warnings, Swarthmore College’s oldest literary magazine (of which I was also an editor). So this story is at least ten years old! I’m still fond of it, though.

“Yet a Youth” is one of the rare stories I’ve written that has no elements of fantasy. Maybe I could even say it’s not speculative fiction, except that I hesitate to categorize it as historical fiction because it isn’t set in a real time and place. Maybe this setting could have existed or did exist somewhere in the United States of the 19th century, but I didn’t actually research it. So it might be alternative history. It’s also a little bit unusual for me because the protagonist and POV character is a boy. Most of my main characters are girls.

The inspiration for this story came from a verse in the book of Judges. There was a time about a decade ago when I decided to read the King James Bible straight through from Genesis onward, and I stumbled upon some verses that particularly struck me. I guess this was one of them. I didn’t want to name my main character Jether, though.

Fun fact: I entered “Yet a Youth” in Swarthmore’s William Plumer Potter short story competition, which was judged that year by Wesley Stace/John Wesley Harding (who recorded a rendition of the shape note tune “Columbus”). While I did not win or even place, the judge gave public comments on all the entries, and he described “Yet a Youth” as Gothic.