- Olivia Brooks
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
About the Work: Danica Li
In our “About the Work” series, Olga Mexina asks recent contributors for insight into their writing or for current sources of inspiration. Read Danica Li's work in SER Vol. 43.1.
“Queen of Hearts, Queen of Swords”
This story was based on my experience from many years ago working as a young lawyer representing a group of female dancers in a wage theft class action against a strip club. Among the dozens of cases I’ve handled before and since over my law career, this case made an unusually deep impression on me. It was the women who I spoke to who I remember best. I learned what it was like for them to work at the clubs, how they slept during the days and stayed up working into the nights, how they dealt with the house moms and with pushy or infatuated clients. Through the case, I came to understand the costs of doing this work — the dangers and threats, the economic and social precarity. It was striking to me how dangerous and stigmatized this job was, and also how physical it was—and how in spaces like this the female body became the site where powerful forces clashed, forces like capital, law enforcement, male need and loneliness, and carnal desire. I wanted to convey all this in the story.
I remember during the editing process, the fiction editor Neal Hammond asked me why there was so much imagery of knives, swords, and edges in the piece. I responded that it was because I imagined that a woman had to be able to defend herself with the ability to deal pain, to succeed or even just to survive in an environment like this one.
DANICA LI is a lawyer and writer whose work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Missouri Review, California Law Review, and Best American Short Stories 2023. Her fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She obtained her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also awarded the Eisner Prize in Prose, the university’s highest writing award, as an undergraduate. The first writing prize she ever won was for a short story about unicorns in the fourth grade.