Dana Brewer Harris is a Washington, DC-based fiction writer and voiceover artist.
My Background
I write character-driven literary fiction because I want to bring people’s inner lives to the page. I think a lot about the mystery of personality and why people do what we do. Why do we become entangled in storms of our own making? Read my latest piece, "Fogbow" published in July 2024 in Flash Fiction Magazine.
Pushcart Prize Nominee for "Fogbow", Flash Fiction Magazine
2024
Best Small Fictions Award Nominee for "Sweep", Atticus Review
2022
Best Small Fictions Award Nominee for "Sweet Knife", CRAFT Literary
2024
Setting
Shot by DBH. Salt Flats, Utah
“Hattie was no longer frightened—no longer fighting feebly for what was left of her life. She
pushed the rocker closer to the porch rail and eased down into it to take in the view. She thought the glacial valley was the loveliest. It was covered with dense forest and green meadows, and mapped with cool streams. In autumn, the color would fall away from the wildflowers, and somehow make the sky more blue. It had been some sixty years since it struck her this way. Until today, she would have told you that the rivers had all dried up and the trees were full of rot, but this morning, Hattie was sorting out a delicate hope stirring in the bones of her spine. A gust blew a marigold across her foot. A small mound of them lay just beyond the porch, each fluffy head resting affectionately on another. I’ll sit here through autumn, she decided, then go inside and watch winter though my window.”
Plot
Shot by DBH. Ring of Brodgar, Orkney, Scotland
“I am afraid of the dark and can never remember being free of the fear, but everyday, I go
through the motions of bravery. Lock away the night lights and sleeping pills, plan a walk after sunset, fling wide the curtains to watch dusk come in. Disrupt the madness. Thirty minutes and only terrestrial objects will be visible. I sit facing the picture window, the one I fell through Halloween night when I was a girl. I close my eyes and imagine the coastline in Oak Bluffs, the smell of the sea and dragonflies and sea salt, where I live serenely in a gothic cottage of blue. A horn blares, my eyes open. I’m in civil twilight, the generous one that still gives me enough light to see, but there is a problem in my throat, a familiar dread in the grooves of my tongue. I put my hands to my throat until I can swallow, then splay my fingers across my chest until my heart beats into nautical twilight, the dark one when there is no distinction between sea and sky. I think I see the moon. I see the moon. We, the moon and I, wait together in the gloaming, until astronomical twilight comes and fear dies under faint stars.”
Shot by IHH. Brough of Birsay, Orkney, Scotland
“She was slower than a walk to get your own switch.”
- DBH