“The Baptism of Sister Kim”

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Jeanine Bee is the current fiction editor of Wayfare and she was terrific to work with. This story was already worked into a publishable shape and if it had gone to press as I sent it to her, that would have been just fine.

But the thing about working with editors (Jeanna Stay also chimed in) is this: no piece of writing is ever perfect. It can always improve. And so in the first pass we refined a few things. We fiddled with commas and paragraph breaks. And then because we were working on it, we discovered that we could slice off the opening. While there’s a lovely bit of poetry about temperature that disappeared, the story is stronger. And that’s the sort of discovery that can only come through multiple eyes working together over multiple moments.

Here’s the story: