I love origami. In everything else, I am a chaotic hot mess, bubbling with ideas but no follow-through (please do not look at my TBR pile). Yet, when I slide out a piece of Japanese paper and apply my thumbnail to some clean crease-folds, I gain a sense of calm and control over my life. There is a sweet challenge in bending the paper to my will to create something lovely. And the bonus of adding sweet messages to the art…Well, I enjoy reading about that too. There are plenty of books and videos online with instructions for absolutely stunning origami. You can use any paper you like and make any creative additions that come to you. But if you are looking for stories with origami at the heart — origami in books — you will be blown away by the creativity in my choice for 11 of the Best Stories: Origami in Books. If you love this book as much as we do, check out our Reading Pathways: David Levithan here. This story has a beautiful blend of basic origami concepts with sci-fi creativity. My favourite is the weaponry jerengjen, as it unfolds from flat shapes into artillery with dragon-shaped shadows. It also folds into wolf-shaped robots or kestrel-shaped bombers. You can read it yourself on the Clarkesworld website here. Ghostweight by Yoon Ha Lee Troy Onyango also features in The Short Story is Dead, Long Live the Short Story! Vol.4, a short story anthology of 11 stories by African writers. The collection of writers were from the longlist in the 2018 Black Letter Media annual short story competition, including Nebila Abdulmelik, Carey Baraka, Tariro Ndoro and Themesha Khan. Origami by Troy Onyango Origami is a lot like your favourite book, folding and unfolding with the story as characters reveal themselves across the paper. It is such a beautiful artform, I expected to see it used more often in creative writing. If I have missed any here, please let us know in the social media chats!
