My heart is open. I can feel it. It’s never open. This can’t be a coincidence. This—
Her head is hung in anguish. She has opened the window. She is telling Satan to leave our house. She is upset with us.
I wanted them to think that I'd developed some sort of heat resistant super power. "This?" I said. "This is nothing," even as sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eyes.
I had no brothers or sisters, so I received a single white envelope. I took my time opening it. I watched as those around me opened theirs. One of my friends started crying. Breathing deeply, I read mine.
He was super into God. He was super into church. And he was super into me
This was the summer after seventh grade, and all my thoughts were sinful, according to the church. The year before I had confessed all my crimes and a man in hip waders held me under water until all the evil in me had fled the power of Christ’s approach, but now, in the early stages of my adolescence, I was obsessed with the opposite sex.
"I loved reading Exit, Carefully. It’s unusual, and in my opinion exciting, to publish a play without previously receiving a major production."
-Walker Caplan, Lithub
“Lutz’s work is a marvel of the possibilities of language. Each of her sentences is an intricately crafted thing, deeply complex yet crystalline in its clarity . . . her command of each and every word remains supreme.”
--Mira Braneck, The Paris Review Daily
Garielle Lutz is the author of The Complete Gary Lutz, among other books.
"[Her Lesser Work] is a collection of mordant and formally inventive stories circling themes of, let’s say, desire and escape within repressive structures."
-Walker Caplan, Literary Hub
"Her Lesser Work is full of power and it takes risks and it's alive and real and it fixes a very sharp eye on the shit humans do to each other and themselves."
-Lindsay Lerman, LitReactor
