Review for 'Transcribed'
Winner of The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, Fall 2022Paul Guernsey, Editor
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
With her astonishing short story, “Transcribed,” Heidi Marjamäki not only won the Fall 2022 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award, for stories incorporating a supernatural theme or element, but in doing so she bested more than 300 competitors from around the world—not a few of whom have been publishing stories and novels for years or even decades, have received prestigious awards, and/or have taught in, or in a couple of cases directed, university writing programs. Against such tough competition, what made the difference for Ms. Marjamäki, a young writer near the beginning of her promising career? What made us choose “Transcribed” above all those other professional and highly polished pieces? It’s this:
Like all the finest writers, even when crafting a “mere” supernatural story—a genre we generally look to for entertainment rather than enlightenment—Marjamäki can’t help but weave her work with multiple threads of meaning. Certainly “Transcribed” provides the requisite shiver of a well-constructed ghost tale—and in fact, by the time the reader reaches the shocking ending, they will likely—as I did—shudder. But for those who care to look, there’s a lot more to the story than that. On one level…well, maybe those unsettling, insistent, disembodied voices do come from “real” supernatural entities. Boo. On another, however…maybe they’re symptoms of real, clinical madness creeping into the protagonist’s—Katie’s—seemingly disciplined mind as she sits alone in a dusty basement, listening to and transcribing some decades-old and extremely disturbing audiotapes. But if so, to what rational source can we attribute this growing irrationality—this madness? Here’s where it becomes fascinating, because there are so many interlocking potential sources—and they are all frustrations that many, or even most, of us have faced at one time or another, or continue to face even now: Loneliness. Isolation. Crushing career disappointment. The falseness and indifference, bordering on coldness, of co-workers and other people, along with the depersonalization, disrespect, and exploitation of an entire system—employment, I’m talking about—that we’re forced to depend on for our very existence. (And while every industry is capable of meting out an abundance of abuses, in this story Marjamäki focuses on the neglect and the excruciating humiliations—poverty, overwork, and lack of opportunity among them—that the academic industry ladles onto its army of low-status and easily disposable professional workers.) In other words, given the right circumstances—the right (or rather, wrong) twists and turns of ordinary fortune and fate—any one of us could, and perhaps would, begin to hear some dark and very negative voices. And that’s what’s truly scary about “Transcribed.”
Read 'Transcribed' here.