Coming October 2026

The girls and women in The Periodic Family, Claudia Monpere’s debut collection, endure grief, abuse, dystopian bureaucracies. Yet they survive. They sing, forging family wherever they can.

Claudia Monpere’s debut story collection, The Periodic Family, is full of ghosts: Literal ghosts who repair roofs, ghost children who protest gun violence and turn everything they touch into vines, but also metaphorical ghosts, stuck in the wake of bad decisions, missed opportunities, warning signs disregarded… “You want to howl when people say what a gift it is,” thinks one woman about her life, but Monpere shows us, with her cartwheeling coffins, joyful ghosts, Barbies dressed to the nines, defiant survivors, that it is a gift.

 –Kim Magowan, Author of The Last Day

In The Periodic Family, Claudia Monpere examines the roles we play and the burdens we carry in so many interesting ways and from so many intriguing angles. What is it to be a mother? What is it to be a wife? Or a daughter? Or a woman? Or a girl? Through this sparkling collection of tiny stories, she directs her reader on a vivid journey which takes in different places, time periods, and scenarios, and reflects on the scientific and environmental as well as the cultural and the genetic. We’re placed in the claustrophobia of a marital home. We’re thrown into the dystopian nightmare of a speculative baby clinic. We experience disappointment, fear, confusion, addiction, anxiety, shame. There’s so much here that leaves its mark on a reader’s soul. But what sets this collection apart is its ability to find light in the dark, and how these stories ultimately take us to a point of hope, answering the question “what is a family?” with a proclamation: “family is what we make it.” It isn’t the neat uniformity of the periodic table suggested in the collection’s title, but something much more sprawling and organic.

Matt Kendrick, editor-in-chief of the Welkin Press