Watermark Books and Cafe

Luke Geddes will be here to celebrate his first book, a short-story collection titled "I Am a Magical Teenage Princess," which will be published by Chômu Press in July. Publisher's Weekly says of the book: "In a lesser writer’s hands the work would come off as puerile, but Geddes’s sure prose, empathy, pop cultural knowledge, and stoner wit make for a rewarding and unusual collection."

"I Am a Magical Teenage Princess" is a thematically linked collection of short stories celebrating and re-examining 1960s and contemporary culture, magnifying such popular icons as Betty and Veronica and Wonder Woman through a literary lens of wit and pathos. In ‘Surfer Girl’, the title character drifts through time, tormented by the bizarre clichés of drive-in B-movies. ‘Another Girl, Another Planet’ depicts a reluctant teenage astronaut idling away her post-apocalyptic adolescence huffing gasoline and fooling around with her five brutish shipmates, all named Tommy. ‘Habit Patterns’ shows us the beleaguered subject of an educational hygiene film who longs to break free from the cruel social strictures of her celluloid world.

In these and other stories, Luke Geddes experiments with poise and verve whilst retaining an unfakeable human touch often lacking in works more self-consciously centred on human interest. A book for the magical teenage princess in all of us, this debut short story collection welcomes a unique and surprisingly wise voice to the world of letters.

Geddes received an MFA in fiction writing from Wichita State in 2011 and is currently a PhD student of fiction at the University of Cincinnati. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, Washington Square, The Collagist, and other journals. He has presented papers at the ACLA, PCA/ACA, and University of Oregon’s "Understanding Superheroes" conferences. I Am a Magical Teenage Princess is his debut collection.