BASS 2026: Ayşe Papatya Bucak, “The Writer Writes from Prison” from Copper Nickel #40

Evelyn de Morgan: “The Soul’s Prison House” 1888 When the phrase “the writer writes from prison” popped into my head, I knew I would do something with it. The phrase has a certain velocity, which created the rhythm of the story’s opening, which for a while was all I had. I’m not much of a planner when it comes to short stories; this story’s turns basically came to me one at a time as I wrote…. As I came to the end, I was worried about writing a story that seemed to lack consequence despite the characters suffering, so I decided to examine the question of consequence within the story itself. Ayşe Papatya Bucak, Contributor Note, Best American Short Stories 2026 Series Editor Nicole Lamy called this story “hypnotic, surprisingly droll” in her Foreword to this volume. I’ll sign on to that. It borders on absurd, in the way reality sometimes borders on absurd. Unfortunately, it’s not available online, and I’m a bit stymied as to how to convey how powerfully it conveys the struggles of…