Contributor Interview: Dorit d'Scarlett

Dorit d'Scarlett's story "Green Jumper" appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of Broad Ripple Review.

What is your favorite punctuation and a literary hot take you have?

Brackets — though I rarely use them, I want to use them more. I love the way they create a secret chamber inside a sentence, a kind of afterthought or whisper that runs parallel to the main thought.

Hot take: novels don’t need neat resolutions. Ambiguity is closer to how life is actually lived. A present moment, written with honesty, can contain an entire history.

What led you to write Green Jumper?

It came from the way absence reshapes a space. I was thinking about how houses can feel disloyal in grief, how objects resist being ordinary after someone is gone. The piece is a way of sitting with that strangeness until it softens.

What topics do you think are most notable in writing right now?

There’s a lot of noise around artificial intelligence and authorship, and rightly so. But what interests me most are the ignored and quieter currents: homelessness, migration, the ache of late awakenings, and how the smallest domestic rituals can still hold beauty and defiance in a house of tension.

I saw that you’ve written poetry as well. How does your poetry process differ from your fiction process? Do you have a preference for one genre or the other?

Poetry usually arrives as fragments — a line, an image, a rhythm I can’t shake. Fiction is slower, more like building a house sentence by sentence, though I still want the walls to echo with dreams. I don’t prefer one over the other; they converse. A story might begin as a poem, or a poem might reveal itself as a fragment of a longer narrative.

What unique experiences/obstacles have you faced as a CALD writer? Do they influence what you write about?

Writing across cultures and languages means there’s always a border in the room. It can feel like exile, but it’s also fertile ground. I’m interested in the slippages — how memory changes in another tongue, how place shapes the stories you’re allowed to tell, and how belonging is always a negotiation.

Now that Green Jumper has found a home, what’s next on the writing docket?

I’m immersed in a novel that wrestles with art, identity, and the theft of voice in the age of AI. But I keep circling back to flash and poetry — they offer a kind of immediacy the novel doesn’t. They’re small rooms I can step into while the larger architecture takes shape.

Do you have any advice for upcoming writers looking to get their work published?

Rejection is part of the apprenticeship. But don’t send the same piece piece elsewhere- reread it and tweak it - it will almost always be better for casting a fresh (and mildly bitter) eye over it. The most important thing is to keep writing toward your own voice, because that’s the one thing no one else can give you.

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About the Author

Dorit d’Scarlett is a Danish/Australian poet and writer ‘of a certain age’ living in Malaysia whose short stories and award-winning poetry have featured in Rattle, Meniscus, Antler Velvet, and many other international literary journals. Her long-form fiction has been long-listed for multiple writing awards. Awarded ‘Artist in Residence’ in Provence, France, she can consequently be found sipping iced Ricard to counteract the tropical heat as she ponders humanity and prose.

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About the Interviewer

Ollie Sikes (they/them) is an evolving queer writer, editor, and creator based in Dallas, TX. They completed a double BA in Creative Writing and Theatre at Butler University. Besides volunteering with Broad Ripple Review, they also serve as Content Creator for the little things literary magazine. Their poetry has been published with Synchronized Chaos. You can follow them on Instagram @ollie.sikes.