Amy Guth is the author of Three Fallen Women, which she is perpetually touring to pimp out. Between travels, she has written for The Believer, Monkeybicycle, Bookslut, Hungry Chicago, Four Magazine, and The Complete Meal, among others. She has collaborated on a few shows within Second City's Training Center and is an assistant fiction editor at 42 Opus. The select few remember the days when she dabbled in improv, as well, including the night she was the "Kill Whitey" crayon.

 

 

 

 

I initially wrote this first section at a time I was reading a lot of physics work, and was also living in an apartment where just strange luck seemed to happen around the front door area. There really was a bullet in the closet wall, then a couple came to dinner at one point and had this knock-down drag-out fight in my foyer. Then, a friend had a freakout around the same spot during a rough time in her life. Anyway, when I realized it was all happening in the same area, I initially laughed it off as a coincidence, but then thought to try to explain it and write about it as if wasn't a coincidence at all and I suppose reading physics influenced that. So, the strings are sort of how those two things come together in Three Fallen Women, as if rooms have a memory bank of their own, almost.

 

 

 

In this section, the character Carmen, who is a heroin addict and has been dying for most of the book, finally is dying and I go through her death process, emotionally and mostly physically, and work off the idea that organ systems have lives and personalities. Maybe my admiration of Tom Robbins work is most apparent in sections like this one. Anyway, the rain in this section-- well, Im not entirely sure how O came to arrive at that explanation of rain carrying out fate like that, but I know I was initially thinking about those little terrarium containers and the water cycles within them and took it here.