Duru Gungor

Author

Short Fiction

I'm one of those writers who, once a piece is completed, becomes fully alienated to it. On happy occasions, it happens because the finished thing seals itself against time and operates serenely within its limits like a perpetual machine, while even the next day I myself am no longer the one who wrote it. (In the more frequent unhappy instances, I still have no choice but to walk away from the malodorous thing that came out of me.) Perhaps it's this separation that helps me turn back and recognize around the finished piece odd glimmers and flashes, at times an entire halo, of additional life--strange coincidences, sources of inspiration, stories within stories.

Access story here

That Jasmine Scent

This one is a thought experiment; based on a few autobiographical elements, it helped me explore something that didn't but could've happened, and how I would've reacted.

The Water-Sprite

The inspiration for this oddity is manifold: the title is a tribute to "The Wood-Sprite" by Nabokov, an unassuming little story by his standards. Yet it speaks of feral innocence and its irrevocable loss with such pristine words, so redolent of a child's summertime solitude, that I rarely get to the end of it without tearing up.

The Crowmaven and the King

I took the idea of weaponizing crows from a medieval manuscript attributed to a certain Marcus Graecus: Liber Ignium ad Comburendos Hostes (or The Book of Fires for the Burning of Enemies).

Bio

Duru Gungor finds it awkward to be referring to herself in the third person. That's where I come in.

Welcome to my official playground, a place where a hyper-tense, paradoxically slothful, and occasionally crafty nocturnal beast reveals her true colors.

Disguised as a professor by day, I crawl out at nightfall and slowly, painfully, ecstatically toil at the small, quaint work that I put on display here. Why? I might respond to that with a dance, and that's something you should know about me. Also, see how fearless I am in using adverbs. This is a good start.

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Contact

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