All According To Norm

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- Bottom Drawer Prize Winner

Norman Lansberry has always loved conspiracy theories. He goes to conventions, discusses them online, and makes presentations about them at school.  When an online patron decides to finance his quest to prove that Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's biological son, Norm takes his mom Quinn and his best friends Nelly and Donnie on a trip to Cuba, where they look for Castro’s DNA in the hopes of matching it with Trudeau’s- which surely must be easier to come across once they get back home.

As the practical difficulties of the search become more and more clear to everyone, however, so do the practical difficulties of being Norm. 

With a healthy mixture of historical detail and present absurdism, All According to Norm treads the line between “that’s a stretch” and “this might as well happen”- a line which we all know is a circle.

Beatriz Seelaender is a Brazilian writer from São Paulo. She began writing in English at eighteen, submitting short stories to literary magazines. One of those stories, "A Kidney Caught in Quicksand" (Grub Street, 2017), earned recognition from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. Besides that, she's had poetry and creative nonfiction appear in magazines such as Guesthouse and Pangyrus. 

Her novella "The Austenites" won the Sandy Run Novella Award in 2019, and the present work, "All According to Norm", was the winner of the 2020 Bottom Drawer Prize. 

Seelaender has a shih tzu, Uli, who is her utmost muse, and a bachelor's degree in English and Portuguese.