"For a luck tomorrow buy a flower today" is the message from Felma, a flower seller in Deborah Jiang-Stein's latest collection of stories titled Lucky Tomorrow.
For over ten years, Jiang-Stein had been writing poetry and flash fiction with no particular goal of creating a book. But after a meeting with her publisher, connective themes led to the fluid and globetrotting collection of fictional tales. Through short stories and slice of life moments, Lucky Tomorrow finds common tones between experiences and events that are sometimes a world apart, with locations varying from Minneapolis to Seattle to Tokyo.
Jiang-Stein has written about being a child of an incarcerated woman in her previous book Prison Baby, but even in the fictional Lucky Tomorrow, the character of Felma seems to echo the voice of her mother. "Once I got through my whole take on that and feelings and trauma and recovery through it, I started to think about the experience through her eyes," says the author. "I actually put new eyes on what that experience was like."
Lucky Tomorrow can be found at local booksellers and online at the University of Minnesota Press website.
Minnesota Reads is produced at The North 103.3 with funding provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
