Janika Oza
Janika Oza is a writer based in Toronto. She was the winner of the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in Fiction and has received fellowships from VONA,
Tin House,
The Best Small Fictions
Cincinnati Review,
SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her KR Short Fiction Contest-winning story “Fish Stories” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of the
What was your original impetus for writing “Fish Stories”?
I think often about hauntings: how we can be haunted by a memory, a place, an action we did or didn’t take. I think these hauntings can manifest in very physical ways, like how we sleep or dream or digest. I wanted to take it one step further and consider what it might mean if that haunting walked through the front door. For the mother in the story, this is absolutely real, and I was interested in how the daughter would respond to something she doesn’t perceive, but maybe wishes she could.