We’re delighted to welcome Kristina Ten on the blog with an essay about some of the origins—personal, familial, cultural, and political—of her debut short story collection. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine will be published by Stillhouse Press on October 7, 2025. Please pre-order the book and ask your local and academic libraries to purchase it. Authors and publishers depend on advance orders! And please don’t forget to rate and review.

— Punctured Lines

History Without Guilt

Part of putting a book out into the world is asking people to read it, and part of asking people to read it is letting go of whatever carefully assembled artist statement lives in your head—how you would describe what your work is circling around, grasping at—and embracing that every reader is going to define their experience with your book for themselves.

That’s what I’m currently doing with my debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine. And the definition early readers keep landing on is the word “nostalgic.”

Knowing these readers, I can tell they mean it as a compliment, or at least a helpful neutral statement. All the stories in the book revolve around games and the childlore of the aughts: the divinatory power of cootie catchers, the electrifying lawlessness of the early internet, bonfire legends whispered with a flashlight held under the chin. About half the stories feature young protagonists. Many are set in schoolyards, summer camps, and locker rooms. Others are set in the kind of far-off realms that would feel right at home in a child’s imagination—even as the book itself is unquestionably adult, preoccupied with the horrors of, one, being controlled; and, two, the constant vigilance some of us (girls and women, immigrants, queer people) learn to exercise against it.