Fast Car, by Kaia Stead

Prose, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Fast Car is a nonfiction chapbook that explores first love in all its intensity, electricity, and fragility. What do we do when someone becomes a part of us? How do we build a life with someone, and what do we do if we fail? How can we make amends when apologies will never be enough? Author Kaia Stead piecemeals together a relationship that is tender, brutal, and full of small flashes of beauty and large moments of becoming.

The past permeates the present in this nonlinear narrative, and Fast Car forces readers to encounter the way life keeps going regardless of circumstances, that the past is not static, and how conflicting emotions—love and rage, desperation and resignation, commitment and regret—can exist simultaneously, especially in the curious and tender space of young love.

Kaia Stead is a writer and educator living in Northern California. She appreciates nature and honesty in her life and work and seeks to create the kinds of stories she wishes she read because, although stories do not make life any easier, they can help it make sense. When she isn’t sitting with words, she prefers to sit in wild places with her dogs.