"Take pride in everything you do" and all that but, well, I feel I should warn potential readers that is that this piece is pretty . . . well, an odd duck.
I suppose maybe the most helpful way to introduce "Weekend Remembrance of Dr. Kai Chaikin" is to share the rejection that it provoked from Bellevue Literary Review, which happens to be my favorite rejection of all time (do all writers have those?):
"I like the idea of the pseudo-scientific paper as a genre and the social implications--that the correlation between bladder size and memory, or bladder size and a predisposition to belief in God, parallels such issues as gender identity today, and also raises the question of whether or not there should be a gap between expectation and reality, or objectivity and subjectivity. But in narrative terms it needs to engage the reader more with regard to character and plot."
I love-love this rejection for two reasons:
First, it makes the story sound pretty insane, to the point where I almost want to reverse-engineer a second story with "Write a story that might provoke this rejection" as the prompt.
Second, I was just told by a literary journal edited and maintained by DOCTORS that my writing was too dense, which is kind of like them making fun of how illegible your signature is.
Anyway, you can read the piece in the Flatbush Review here.