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Clare Beams

Clare Beams is the author of the novels The Garden and The Illness Lesson, both New York Times Editors’ Choices, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Randolph College.  

Fiction  – 
sketch drawing of a bear head f

Snowy-white, Rosy-Red, Will You?

My girls were my greatest joy—sometimes I wondered how I could be the love I felt, looking at them—but the kind of happiness they gave me wasn’t the long-walks, ruminative kind. It was a slowly accreting thing, terror threaded through every layer.

Fiction  – 

Granna

In the wake of the end of things with Adam, a good and generous man, Teresa felt the need to do something self-evidently good and generous. Adam had made her feel incapable of giving. She would show him giving. She called her older sister Deb and said, “Let’s take Granna up north.”