A chronological archive of essays and creative nonfiction published in Cleaver’s quarterly literary issues from 2013 to present …

A CRAFT CHAT WITH HANNAH SMART by Andrea Caswell
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH HANNAH SMART Estimated reading time: 5 minutes Andrea: “The Detriment of Doubt” (Issue 44) is such a clever and creative piece. How did the idea for a 911-type call that’s not exactly a 911 call originate?  Hannah: I developed the concept for this story first. I knew I wanted to write a piece that questioned the nature of truth, and I knew that in order to do that, I’d need a scenario with lots of built-in assumptions about truthfulness. My fiancé and I were throwing around ideas, and one of his suggestions was a 911 ...
A CONVERSATION WITH DANUTA HINC, Author of WHEN WE WERE TWINS by Andrea Caswell
A Conversation with Danuta Hinc, author of When We Were TwinsPlamen Press, 232 PagesInterview by Andrea Caswell Danuta Hinc’s novel, When We Were Twins (Plamen Press, 2023), follows a group of characters caught in cycles of violence and war. The book imagines the evolution of an intelligent young man into a radicalized terrorist, challenging us to see into his heart and humanity. In this interview with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell, Hinc discusses the importance of creating connections across cultures, and explains how writing historical fiction forced her to question her own assumptions about human history and the consequences of ...
A CRAFT CHAT WITH MONIQUE D. CLARK by Andrea Caswell
Andrea CaswellA Craft Chat With Monique D. Clark Estimated reading time: 6 minutes Andrea: Congratulations on “The Love,” (Issue 44) which feels like a perfect short story. It’s got it all: deep love, disenchantment, humor, food, family secrets, and a profound moment of truth, encapsulated within 1500 words. What’s your “recipe” for creating a powerful short story? Monique: Thank you so much! It was an honor to have “The Love” published in Cleaver Magazine. This is a great question, and in theory feels like an easy one to answer. However, it truly isn’t. My best answer is: Know at least ...
I TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS, a craft essay by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart will teach an all-new interactive Zoom masterclass for Cleaver on Sunday, February 24 2-4 PM: WRITING ADVANCED BY CATEGORIES: TURNING OUR OBSESSIONS INTO STORIES. Join us live or purchase the recording. More info here. Beth Kephart I TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS The writer as maker is the poet who weaves, the essayist who stitches, the quilter of fabrics and words. They are Virginia Woolf baking bread and Elizabeth Bishop watercoloring. They are Zelda Fitzgerald cutting paper dolls, Stanley Kunitz among the seaside garden bees, Lorraine Hansberry and the allure of her sketches, and Flannery O’Connor gone exuberant ...
2024 Creative Nonfiction Contest
ANNOUNCING Cleaver's 2024 Short Creative Nonfiction Contest We invite short works of nonfiction that show us where the truth can both unite and divide. Far from singular or simple, the world around us glistens with contradictions. Show us where you hold yours. Submissions open January 15, 2024 and close April 20, 2024 Judge: Clifford Thompson $500 First Prize $250 Second Prize $100 Third Prize SUBMIT Submission Guidelines Theme: Duality Submission length: up to 1000 words Submission fee: $20 Do not submit previously published work. Please remove your name and any other identifying information from your manuscript, including the file name ...
COLLIDING WORLDS by Krys Malcolm Belc
Krys Malcolm Belc COLLIDING WORLDS Johnny Brenda's Where Frankford Avenue meets Girard Avenue—heart of demolition, of crumble and shiny plastic—you can see Philadelphia’s most surprising sunset, melting purple bleeding into orange-red, punctuated by Fishtown’s rowhomes and churches. Forget that this is a site of colliding worlds: battles over demolition and rebuilding, crumbling buildings, plastic construction, streets blocked by concrete trucks and delivery vans, articles in national magazines about how we’re just arriving, here on Frankford Avenue, the oldest road in Pennsylvania. We came thousands of sunsets ago to see a singer neither knew perform upstairs at the place on the ...
SQUEEZE by Beth Kephart
Beth Kephart SQUEEZE It’s your size. You fit within the squeeze, take the narrow on like it belongs to you, like Camac is your personal arcade of gendered sketch clubs and daytime twinkle and the red balloon of a hibiscus bush too wide for the walk. A poodle’s piss. Nobody out ahead of noon, ahead of you, and where Camac breaks, it breaks south and you break, too, down Manning, past Sartain, toward the narrow hush of Quince, where the only way to be civil as a stranger is to amble the proper center of the street and keep your ...
RECIPE FOR VIABLE ZYGOTES by Beth Broome
Beth Broome RECIPE FOR VIABLE ZYGOTES Start out with a blood test. Inject ten units of leuprolide acetate. Repeat process for approximately seven to thirteen days. Return to office for blood test. Decrease leuprolide acetate to five units. Avoid alcohol. Meditate. Inject seventy-five IU of gonadotropins (to stimulate follicular development). Repeat process for ten days. Drink Gatorade. Quit aerobics. Inject five thousand units of human chorionic gonadotropin (refrigerate if it has been pre-mixed). Go to bed early. Fornicate. Return to office for blood test. Abstain from intercourse. Dress nicely. Smile at work. Crack sixteen eggs. Set aside in small dish ...
TRANSPORTED by Sue Mell
Sue Mell TRANSPORTED In my teens, in the early 70s, I often took a Saturday morning train from Grand Central to visit a camp friend at her parents’ enormous house, which you could see from the Hartsdale station. Her father was a concert cellist who demanded diligence, and I would sit beside her on the piano bench as she practiced, thumb and pinky toggling the octaves of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag.” Neither of her parents ever seemed to be around, and we freely smoked hash and drank apricot brandy with one of her older brothers, on whom I had ...
FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY by Alyssa Songsiridej
Alyssa Songsiridej FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY 4814 Trinity St My tenancy in this house—a longstanding punk house in permanent dereliction—took place from 2011-2013, but this is just a sliver in the house’s long history, a drop in all of the total personal experience held by its walls. The story of the house existed as myth and oral rumor, passing through a series of different names: The House of Less Cock, the Unholy Trinity, and then, when I lived there, only Trinity. Human life ebbing and flowing and leaving waves of random detritus: a bronze Buddha, a stripper pole, the ...
THIS ONE SMALL THING WILL FIX YOUR SEX LIFE by Jennifer Jussel
Jennifer Jussel THIS ONE SMALL THING WILL FIX YOUR SEX LIFE After a few months of back and forth, we finally ordered the vibrator. My husband seemed elated by the decision. In a matter of hours after ordering it, his face smoothed from hard and square to the cherubic oval I first fell in love with four years ago. Even before it arrived, we started touching more, and kissing. I woke up the next day and rolled over to find his face inches from mine and neither of us pulled away. Even before it arrived, we had sex for the ...
TO THE MAN WHO LISTENS FOR ECHOES by Robbin Farr
Robbin Farr TO THE MAN WHO LISTENS FOR ECHOES We were lake-bound on an unfamiliar road. But stranger yet, you were unknown to me. I to you. It was summer. It was happenstance. It was a moment so clouded in headiness, bright lake breezes, and wine, it may not, after all, have much truth to it. We didn’t meet, exactly. We fell into a mutual avoidance; each of us averted our glances at the last second, lest we were discovered staring, and regained a riveted interest in the poet addressing the workshop on the subject of West Coast landscapes and ...
A CONVERSATION WITH BETH KEPHART, AUTHOR OF MY LIFE IN PAPER: ADVENTURES IN EPHEMERA BY MICHELLE FOST
A Conversation with Beth Kephart author of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera Temple University Press, 336 pages Interview by Michelle Fost I had the chance to have a conversation with Beth Kephart, whose new book, My Life in Paper, has recently been published. Our conversation took place over email, one back and forth a day for about a week. Widely creative as well as accomplished, Beth became absorbed in making handmade books and paper during the pandemic, a practice that is central to My Life in Paper. Take a workshop with Beth Kephart online, Sunday February 25, 2-4 ...
A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES SULLIVAN, AUTHOR OF HARBORING by Justin Eells
Justin Eells A Conversation with James Sullivan, author of HARBORING James Sullivan and I attended the same MFA program and later shared an office as adjuncts at that same school, Minnesota State University, Mankato. Over those years, we shared work with each other and shared conversations at Wine Cafe, our beloved local dive, about writing, reading, teaching, whiskey nuances, and life. When the publication of his novelette Harboring was announced by ELJ Editions, I was excited, not only because of my friend’s success but because this meant I would get to read another story by a writer whose work I ...
SELF-TAUT by Chelsey Clammer
Chelsey Clammer SELF-TAUT I spend fifteen minutes of my life negotiating with an egg. Again. How its hard-boiledness acts like a six-course meal. I have to sit down. Not at the table—too dizzy for that—but on the hardwood floor—quick—back against cabinet. Chew, masticate until it’s mush. Then, the careful, slow mini gulps as I convince myself not to gag. Salty dry yolk, the toughness of white. A slow process just to help work out the knot that’s not in the pit of my stomach, but its entirety. I blame stress that has started to reincite my relationship with restriction. But ...
JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC by Christian Chase Garner
Christian Chase Garner JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC  Step #1: Make the curry roux Heat a pan to medium-low heat on your stovetop, or your induction burner, if you live in a twelve-by-forty-foot rectangular building that used to be your mother-in-law’s photography studio, the one that your family wired and plumbed, where your bed lies only feet from your kitchen. It is difficult to have peaceful rest when your wife works from the same spot she tries to dream in and when you don’t have a wall separating you from the dark walnut butcher block where you slice through portobello ...
MAIN LINE by Alex Behm
Alex Behm MAIN LINE His voice is scratchy with sleep and a virus. I ask how he’s feeling. What’s wrong, my father interrupts through the phone. I’m just thinking, I say. Again. My father is in another state, trying to sleep, whereas I am in a dorm room with high ceilings and all of the lightbulbs blaring, even the desk lamp. I like to let the light in; my family lives in a river valley where I have never seen the sun set beyond those mountains that press us inward, nearer to the heart of what land is left. My ...
OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT by Susan Barr-Toman
Susan Barr-Toman OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT My senior year of college, I was set to graduate a semester early. Instead, I took a full-time position at the university and enrolled part-time, hoping it would make things easier. I’d been working my way through college, sometimes cutting classes to meet tuition payments. Always closely eyeing that grindstone with its precarious balance. Spinning. I felt older than my classmates, more grown-up, and it was not a lot of fun. On one of my first days, before the other students had returned to campus, my boss, an older woman named Rosalie, invited me ...
NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS by Jessica Klimesh
Jessica Klimesh NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS Nobody tells you how quickly the face of a dead person loses color, how quickly gray washes over you, how quickly the person who was your mother becomes a body to be cremated, transitioned into ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nobody tells you to expect bleak silence and snow, a coldness you won’t register, or how even the air will forget to breathe and that you will need to be reminded as well. Nobody tells you how quickly you’ll take care of the necessary notifications and respond to the trifling Christmas ...
MERMAIDIA by Brooke White
Brooke White MERMAIDIA In Greece, there were stories about Poseidon; in the Roman Empire, there was Neptune. Before that, there was Ea, Babylonian god of the sea. Even earlier was Atargatis, the Syrian goddess of fertility who was half-human, half-fish. There was the belief in ancient times that every land animal had its match in the sea. Like so many protagonists in young adult novels, I often felt I was in the wrong place, the wrong time. When I was a child, I was sure I was magic, that I’d get my letter to a supernatural boarding school in the ...
Kathryn Kulpa author photo
Jessica KlimeshAn Interview with Kathryn Kulpa, author of COOKING TIPS FOR THE DEMON-HAUNTED I recently had the delightful opportunity to interview Kathryn Kulpa about her latest chapbook Cooking Tips for the Demon-Haunted, winner of the 2022 New Rivers Press Chapbook Contest. Kathryn is an editor and workshop instructor at Cleaver, and I’ve had the good fortune to be a student in a couple of her workshops. So I was especially excited to chat with her and learn more about her process, her ideas, and how she so successfully took 14 captivating yet discrete stories and made them fit so effortlessly ...
AN INTERVIEW WITH RUTH MADIEVSKY, AUTHOR OF ALL-NIGHT PHARMACY by Simona Zaretsky
AN INTERVIEW WITH RUTH MADIEVSKY, AUTHOR OF ALL-NIGHT PHARMACY by Simona Zaretsky Ruth Madievsky’s novel, All-Night Pharmacy from (Penguin Random House, 2023) is a gorgeous and dark exploration of sisterhood, sexuality, and traumas inherited and experienced. The unnamed narrator struggles with addiction to drugs and to her sister, all while trying to come out from under intergenerational trauma (Shoah grief, as the narrator terms it) with the help of her self-appointed spiritual guide, Sasha. Madievsky has previously published a poetry collection, Emergency Brake, and her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are featured in many publications. Her writing has been awarded numerous ...
AN UNNAMED ESSAY by Samantha Padgett
Samantha PadgettAN UNNAMED ESSAY IN WHICH THE WORLD ENDS, BUT I’M TOLD EVERYTHING IS OKAY My mother is panicking. I know this despite her insistence that she isn’t afraid. After days of listening to the newscaster detail the refrigerator trucks being filled with overflow bodies, my mother buys twenty pounds of potatoes from a local farmer. She doesn’t tell us until it’s done. ◊ I spend hours sitting with my great-grandmother. The air in her room is thick and gummy. She keeps her space heater on high even after Easter passes. She’s ninety-six and lonely. But I’m right here, I ...
CONTRAINDICATED by Carolyn Alessio
Carolyn AlessioCONTRAINDICATED My mother once found opiates in the bottom of a used necklace box. She’d heard a clicking sound while lifting out the gold-plated necklace she had just purchased at a dying mall near her home. A half-dozen pills sat hidden under the box’s pressed cotton, like a priceless masterpiece that had been painted over with a trite landscape. “Someone’s going to be looking for those,” my mother told me over the phone. “I’m glad I used a gift certificate so they couldn’t trace me.” The idea of my elderly mother in her condo being a target for drug ...
WHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT by Rebecca Grossman-Kahn
Rebecca Grossman-KahnWHEN YOU CALL HIS MOTHER FROM THE PSYCH UNIT When you call his mother, give yourself time. A half hour, at least. Give up on the idea of beating rush hour traffic home. Swipe your badge and enter through the doors of the inpatient psychiatry unit, the one with the conference room you know will be empty at 4:00 p.m.  Settle into the sparse room with its echoes and afternoon sun at a low September angle. See the light descending toward the parking structure, casting sharp lines through the metal blinds and a glare on your computer screen. Before ...
THE RIDE by Sarah Myers
Sarah MyersTHE RIDE You’re buying tampons, brushing your hair, cleaning the crud off the kitchen table, and the sight of your own stupid fingers reminds you that the bottom has dropped out of everything. Then you’re talking to a colleague or a friend or a weird and lovely student, and you smile with every inch of your teeth because you’re there with them (you are, you really are), but you’re also not there, hearing, as you do, the constant low hum of am I real? and isn’t it strange we’re all just skin bags for cosmic particles? and how can ...
AN EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT AS IT PERTAINS TO THE DIVORCE AND SUBSEQUENT ROMANCE BETWEEN CHARACTERS XX AND XY by Jon Chopan
Jon ChopanAN EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT AS IT PERTAINS TO THE DIVORCE AND SUBSEQUENT ROMANCE BETWEEN CHARACTERS XX AND XY Rabid ..........Which is the only way to describe XY’s love, even now, when XX is gone, when she is off and out in the world like a storm front, 1–150. Raccoon, 51. Race, 52. Racket ..........The way XY and XX pretend that they are not in love, 54–55. ..........Or, the ways they are: ....................Late at night, with XX’s new lover gone ....................Talking for hours, arguing, crying, laughing about why XY is no good for XX or how XX is still ...
DUNES DAY by Andrew Michael Johnson
Andrew Michael JohnsonDUNES DAY In the summer of 2020 we fled the confinements of our house in Kansas City and drove to Colorado. After the first three months of pandemic lockdown, my wife, three young children, and I needed to breathe some fresh air, see constellations, hike, and escape the growing sense that we might be trapped together forever. After ninety days of seeing the same three small faces every day—faces I love but faces frequently contorting to open their word holes and say things like, “I need another cheese stick,” or, “Google Classroom can kiss my butt,” or, “Moana ...
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DALEY, AUTHOR OF FAR CRY by Michael McCarthy
AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM DALEY, AUTHOR OF FAR CRY (Ethel Zine, 2022) by Michael McCarthy Tom Daley is Boston’s bard. His dedication to the craft should be obvious to anybody who's spent an hour with him, for in that hour, he will have likely recited any number of poems from memory, as he does in this interview. Employed as a machinist for more than twenty years, he left this work to pursue poetry full-time, making him one of perhaps a half-dozen people I know who make their living exclusively as practitioners and instructors of poetry. You’d be forgiven for mistaking ...
AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR PHOEBE REEVES ON TWO NEW PUBLICATIONS
An Interview with Author Phoebe Reeves on Two New Publications by Hannah Felt Garner I Think of My Poems as Being Products of Sound— Phoebe Reeves Phoebe Reeves is a poet and an English professor at the University of Cincinnati having a very productive year: she published her third chapbook last fall and débuts her first full-length book in May. The Flame of Her Will (Milk and Cake Press, November 2022) is a chapbook of erasure poems that mines a 15th c. guide to witch-hunting called the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of Witches.” Through an alchemical process, Reeves turns misogynist ...
FLIGHT PATHS by Jacqueline Ellis
Jacqueline EllisFLIGHT PATHS December 2021: I give my dad a project: tell me what you remember about making wine with your friend Franco, back when we lived in Peterborough. The task distracts him while he waits for biopsy results. Suspected mesothelioma. It is two weeks after he called to tell me that a routine chest X-ray had uncovered nodules in his lungs, and we have spoken every day since then: 4:00 p.m. in the United States, 9:00 p.m. in England. Each time, before I hang up, I say: “I’ll call tomorrow. Just to check in.” Each time, my dad hands ...
THE SECRET ANNEX by Rita Mendes-Flohr
Rita Mendes-FlohrTHE SECRET ANNEX In all those years we have lived in this the old house in town so close to the sea, I have never been able to get near the beautiful turquoise water behind the row of houses on the Pietermaai. It is too dangerous to walk through the narrow alleys between those houses to the sea that is sparkling at the other end. You don’t know who is hanging around there, my Mami says. In the backyard of the Wilhelmina School, we are even closer to the sea. If you listen hard, you can hear the rustling ...
church by Erin Pesut
Erin Pesutchurch There came a time about three years after we moved to Vermont when I decided I wanted to go to church again. Really what I wanted was to go to church at Christmas. Really what I wanted was to go to church for the four weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas. Really what I wanted was to see how church changed for Advent. Really what I wanted was to hear familiar hymns. To make the sign of the cross and feel holy water on my face. Really what I wanted was for church to be a portal ...
WITNESS TO THE ARIA by Meg LeDuc
Meg LeDucWITNESS TO THE ARIA A sculpture soars in the sky of Meijer Gardens, red as a hummingbird heart, rising over the pinprick of a groundskeeper below. Of the painted scarlet steel of his public art, Alexander Liberman once said, “All my sculptures are screams.” Yet Aria shouts joy, curves a-dance, music in metal. Meanwhile, in downtown Grand Rapids, a woman sings The Clark Sisters on the corner of Monroe and Pearl, singing the sunshine down: “You came my way / You made my day” and “I’m a witness.” Here on that city intersection, a gospel woman caresses her aria ...
MAGIC WINDOW by Anne Panning
Anne PanningMAGIC WINDOW (CHASING HOME) What did you think when you cupped your hands against the glass and peered inside? Did you think the old wavy Victorian glass was a portal to the past? Did you see your mother in the kitchen, frying liver draped with onions? Was she listening to John Denver on her little boom box? Did she have a dish towel slung over her shoulder? Embroidered with kittens or vegetables? Was it soft with wear? Was the yellow-painted radiator leaking warmth? Was her heart a basket of needles? A tiny jar of yarn? If you sat at ...
MEDITATING IN HELL by Megan E. O’Laughlin
Megan E. O’LaughlinMEDITATING IN HELL Age 24. The Gambia, West Africa. I do not pray five times a day like the people in the village. When I duck into my little house, the girls ask where are you going? I tell them to pray; I don't know the Mandinka word for meditation. Most evenings, the gaggle of girls come over for gossip and help with their homework. They ask about my prayers, so I sit criss-cross-applesauce, close my eyes, and watch the space between my breaths. "That's not praying. She doesn't know!" the girls giggle. But their laughter washes away, ...
TO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY by Shabrayle Setliff
Shabrayle SetliffTO MY ONCE AND FUTURE BODY Grandmother’s body was vast, heavy, and unknowable. Her belly was like an ocean in a cave. She never understood the glorious figginess of it. The tacky, seeded roundness held together with lovely bruised purple skin. Instead, she seemed concerned with its dimpled retaliations. Its heft that felt like the constant plunge of gravity, not the groundedness I knew when I fell into the soft acreage of her arms. Despite her efforts, the field of her kept producing fractals of brown skin, smooth folds, and pillowy lipids. Her body’s growth came under constant surveillance ...
ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS, a craft essay by Ian Clay Sewall
ON AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: YOURS, MINE, AND OURS by Ian Clay Sewall 1. Writing stories and essays about the people I remember and the people I know requires stretching out moments, staring through a square piece of stained glass that’s purple and blue and orange, soldered a long time ago against strips of silvery-looking zinc. The stained glass is a few feet from my stained desk, and looking at it helps me remember that what I am writing, the colors I use, the tools of creative nonfiction, are many. And they’re both new and old. At times, when I’ve wanted to explore ...
A CONVERSATION WITH NANCY LUDMERER, AUTHOR OF COLLATERAL DAMAGE: 48 STORIES by Kathryn Kulpa
FLASH-WRITERS: TRUST YOUR READER: a conversation with Nancy Ludmerer, author of Collateral Damage: 48 Stories (Snake Nation Press, 2022) by Kathryn Kulpa I had the pleasure of interviewing Nancy Ludmerer, a student in one of my Cleaver flash fiction workshops, about her full-length flash collection Collateral Damage: 48 Stories, published by Snake Nation Press. Nancy’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, has been widely published in journals, and she moves effortlessly from brief, lyrical microfiction to longer, more complex stories that push the boundaries of flash fiction. A master of compression, she can unfold a lifetime in a paragraph, as she ...
A CONVERSATION WITH CHRISTOPHER M. HOOD, AUTHOR OF THE REVIVALISTS by Hannah Felt Garner
I Tell My Students All The Time, "Your Job Is to Make Art. Your Job Is Not to Explain Shit," a conversation with Christopher M. Hood, author of The Revivalists (Harper 2022) by Hannah Felt Garner I met Christopher M. Hood in the English teacher’s lounge at the Dalton School in New York City, where he’s been a teacher since 2008 and where I periodically substitute. Starting out as a high school English teacher, Christopher went on to found Dalton’s Creative Writing Program, which he now runs full-time. My first impulse for this interview was envy-tinged curiosity: how does he ...
A Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love by Michael McCarthy
Wisest is she who knows she knows nothing: a Conversation with Alison Lubar, author of Philosophers Know Nothing About Love Thirty West Publishing House, 2022 by Michael McCarthy Read Alison's poem "Grand Slam" in Issue 39 of Cleaver. I first met Alison Lubar at Fergie’s Pub in Center City Philadelphia. Kind of. The Moonstone Art Center runs poetry open mics every Wednesday there. One night I took to the stage to read a poem I had written in an online workshop. When I stepped down, Alison came up to say they recognized my poem. Only then did I recognize them ...
I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN by Gemini Wahhaj
I LIKE TO THINK THAT ALL OF MY CHARACTERS HAVE A GOOD SENSE OF HUMOR: A Conversation with Chaitali Sen, author of A NEW RACE OF MEN FROM HEAVEN Sarabande Books, January 2023 by Gemini Wahhaj Chaitali Sen’s short-story collection A New Race of Men from Heaven (Sarabande Books, January 2023) won the 2021 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her novel A Pathless Sky was published by Europa Editions in 2015 and her short stories have appeared in Ecotone, Shenandoah, American Short Fiction Online, New Ohio Review, and Colorado Review. The daughter of Indian parents, Sen grew up in ...
LINE COOK: A LOVE STORY by Madeleine Barowsky
Madeleine BarowskyLINE COOK: A LOVE STORY For this task, your tools must be hot. They must be cold. They must be bone-dry or slick with hot water. Cold water. For this task, the item should be room temp. It should be completely frozen. It should be partially thawed, and I learned that lesson the hard way, goat cheese shattering with a ferocious bang of the knife. Be sure the plate does not have any hint of heat. Be sure it is still warm. The buns should be sweaty and puffy. If the cheese is sweaty, it has sat too long ...
THE PRIZE FIGHTER by Lyn Chamberlin
Lyn ChamberlinTHE PRIZE FIGHTER She would go to Paris. When this was all over, this is how she would start again. But today she would go back to caring for him, undo the hook and eye they’d put on the outside of his bedroom door so she wouldn’t find him in the middle of the night peeing into the kitchen sink or looking for the knives she’d stashed in her car. When she unlatched the hook in the morning—she wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold, it was already loose—she would find him dazed, poised like a prize fighter ...
IN-LAWS by Laura Tanenbaum
Laura TanenbaumIN-LAWS “In five years, I’m going to fall in love with a fish,” the four-year-old declares, over hard-boiled eggs, on a ninety-degree day, to no one in particular. “They will be rainbow-colored with gray and black stripes. I will teach them to walk on their fin so they can come to our house. And I will teach them how to breathe. I will say, 'It’s easy, fish. Just breathe like you did in water; only, it’s air.' " His brother tells him he might need to compromise. Maybe six months on land, six months in the water, like the ...
DARK MATTER by Meredith McCarroll
Meredith McCarrollDARK MATTER “You know how dark matter is like the absence of space, but it, like, takes up space?” “OK.” “Well, what if dark matter could be contained and it’s like an anti-gravity solution. In a gas form. It takes up the space that is the absence of space.” “Dark matter?” “Yeah. Which is different than dark energy.” “I don’t know what dark energy is.” “Oh. Have you heard of the Big Bang, Mama?” He is fourteen. I am in the bathtub. He is wearing the new sweatshirt he saved to buy that is still so soft on the ...
WHALE CRATERS by K. T. Moore
K. T. MooreWHALE CRATERS “Had one come down overnight.” Eden was waiting for him in the car park. Tayne felt himself sweating by the time he reached her, and as the wind kicked up, a shiver started between his shoulder blades. Eden had her hands tucked into her jumper sleeves; Tayne peered at what remained of the lookout and he wished he'd thought to bring a pair of mittens. “One landed in Port Chalmers a few months back,” he said, staggering as he joined Eden at the cliff edge. Along with the rotted kelp, all of Matakaea smelled like an ...
YOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS by Ron Tobey
Ron TobeyYOU SLEEP UPSTAIRS The annual flood of green from West Virginia’s vast Appalachian forest drubs me senseless. I feel lightheaded. I check my Fitbit. Why does my blood oxygen level drop? My mortality, I wonder. At midnight, the rain slips off the ridge peak, settles, as a hen fluffs, spreads her nether feathers, wiggles a little dance, nests upon our hollow."I lie in bed from two-thirty to four-thirty in the morning, listening to her contented cackling drip off the eaves of our log cabin. You sleep upstairs in the guest bedroom. The foam mattress is better for your hip ...
LUCIAN MATTISON, AUTHOR OF THE POETRY COLLECTION CURARE, SPEAKS WITH WILL HUBERDEAU 
Will Huberdeau speaks with Lucian Mattison about his new collection of poetry Curare from C&R Press. Will: Starting with the title, what does “curare” mean to you? I had to Google it and got a variety of definitions and explanations. How did you develop the concept for this collection? Lucian: I’m not normally a big obscure reference kind of guy. Usually, I like to lean more into “Let’s all get along and understand each other.” But in this case, I made an exception for a couple of reasons. On a more surface level, I read the book Shaman’s Apprentice about ...
EMET EZELL, AUTHOR OF BETWEEN EVERY BIRD, OUR BONES SPEAKS WITH CLEAVER POETRY EDITOR CLAIRE OLESON
Poetry Editor Claire Oleson speaks with emet ezell on their debut poetry chapbook, Between Every Bird, Our Bones, out now with Newfound. Claire: This book gives us bite-sized poems in paragraph-like vignettes. What drew you to this form, this body, for your language? emet: In BETWEEN EVERY BIRD, OUR BONES, the text and the body are unapologetically queer— which is to say, they never fully solidify into a single shape. No table of contents, no capitalization, and no titles. Instead, these poems fly through the sky with infinite beginnings and infinite iterations. I found this poetic form by listening deeply ...
IN WHICH LIFE?: A Conversation with Chauna Craig, author WINGS AND OTHER THINGS, speaking with Emily Huso
IN WHICH LIFE?: A Conversation with Chauna Craig, author WINGS AND OTHER THINGS, Press 53, speaking with Emily Huso Chauna Craig’s second story collection, Wings and Other Things, speculates about the possibilities that exist beyond fear, self-doubt, and patriarchal control. Most of the collection’s sixteen stories are set against Midwestern expanses and center female protagonists who dare to imagine the roads not taken and to re-imagine themselves. In these narratives, Craig explores moments of silent but irreversible rupture: an unwelcome revelation about a significant other, words that can’t be unspoken, a dream dashed. Like the exposed anatomical heart depicted on ...
HOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story by Beth Kephart
Beth KephartHOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned. How are you? Well… How are you? Just a— How are you? No, really. You first. I am so notoriously arrantly perfectly foul at performing this simple civic duty that I become invisible to myself whenever I am asked. Uh, I stutter, and in the absence of my response, the talk salts up without me, which is to say that I can walk four hills, two cul de sacs, five point two miles, and ...
34 FEET by Phil Keeling
Phil Keeling34 FEET The gun was small and snub-nosed. It looked heavy, though, attached to the lanky arm of my mugger. Imagine it. Me! With my very own personal mugger. Because in that moment, he was mine and I was his, alone as we were at the moment. Swear to God, the gun looked heavier than the kid wielding it. Its barrel was cool against my head in the muggy Savannah night, so that wasn't so bad. Did he keep the gun in the fridge? This was the same year my cat died. The first year I had ever lived ...
AN EASIER STORY by Emily Parzybok
Emily ParzybokAN EASIER STORY Around the time I had an abortion, the bathroom drain gave up entirely. For months, the drain had been slow-moving. I’d find myself in an inch of water at the end of a shower, shaking my feet as I placed them one at a time on the bathmat. Finally, it stopped draining altogether. A ninety-second rinse left a pool in the tub that took hours to clear. In the TV show Russian Doll, a character says, “Nothing in this life is easy. Except peeing in the shower.” And I kept remembering that line as I held ...
WAR GAMES by Peter DeMarco
Peter DeMarcoWAR GAMES In the car trip to a Pennsylvania V.A. hospital when I was twelve, my mother told us that our great Uncle Roy was a veteran of World War I and couldn’t communicate anymore. The ride was three hours of empty landscape outside the window. AM radio. A song about a roller skate key. Jumble puzzle books and Spider-Man and Archie comics. At the hospital, Uncle Roy was seated in a wheelchair in the visitors’ area, with a fireplace and couches. When he saw us he howled, like an animal. We stood there, frozen, until our mother motioned ...
WAR AND PEACE 2.0 by Emily Steinberg - Title
WAR AND PEACE 2.0 A Nonfiction Visual Narrative by Emily Steinberg ...
RIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS by Deb Fenwick
Deb FenwickRIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS The dandelions in the front yard have the audacity to pop up screeching yellow, blanketing the lawn. I’m crouching, trowel in hand, yanking and destroying. The soil won’t easily yield. But neither will I. I’m determined to unearth every last one. Each spring, I try to get the upper hand—dig them up before the yellow flower stage—eradicate them before they turn to seed and drift through the breeze, propagate, and start the whole cycle over. I plunge the narrow blade of the trowel around the perimeter of a large clump of toothy leaves, working ...
SIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL by Luisa Luo
Luisa LuoSIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL One, I am a byproduct of post-colonialism, fortunately and unfortunately. Post-colonialism is my explanation for everything I have been put through from racism to sexism to homophobia to the Red Scare you name it. There is a root to all problems and I’m thrilled to reveal that the root is right here. To understand post-colonialism, we ought to understand that the world wasn’t so divided back then. My land was connected to the land bridge across the Bering Strait, like the other colonized people, and the colonizers. We weren’t so different back ...
MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN:  A Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei, author of THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI, speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell
MAKING EACH STORY ITS OWN a Craft Conversation with Tony Taddei author of  THE SONS OF THE SANTORELLI speaking with fiction editor Andrea Caswell Tony Taddei’s debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli, is a fast read: the prose is smart and snappy, the characters are funny and flawed, and we can’t look away from the situations Taddei has put them in, situations he believes “best evoke their mortality and individual points of view.” I recently had the opportunity to speak with the author about his book and the craft of short fiction. The discussion included reflections on writing ...
A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF: On Writing from the Heart, a Craft Essay by Vivian Conan
A LESSON FROM MY THIRD-GRADE SELF On Writing from the Heart, A Craft Essay by Vivian Conan I was fifty-two when I chanced upon the bright marigold flyer taped to a streetlight in my Manhattan neighborhood. The Writer’s Voice at the West Side YMCA, it said. One of the courses listed:  The Personal Essay. I had never heard that term, but it sounded like just what I’d been looking for. From the time I learned to print, I’d wanted to be a writer, even though on a parallel track, I believed all the books that were ever going to be ...
A Conversation with Ann de Forest Editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING by Amy Beth Sisson
A Conversation with Ann de Forest, editor of the Anthology WAYS OF WALKING, New Door Press, 258 pages, Interview by Amy Beth Sisson I met writer Ann de Forest many years ago, but during the pandemic we formed a new connection around poetry. We became critique partners and attended Claire Oleson’s Poetic Anatomies class. Ann is an accomplished writer in multiple genres who often focuses on the resonance of place. When she mentioned she was editing an anthology of essays about walking, I knew it was something that I, as a walker, reader, and writer, wanted to get my hands ...
BROOD X by Gwen Mullins
Gwen MullinsBROOD X Brood X is the largest brood of 17-year cicadas. This brood is found in three separate areas centering around Pennsylvania and northern Virginia, Indiana, and eastern Tennessee. The largest emergence of Brood X appears as adults only once every 17 years. —National Park Service Back then, everyone still called me Gwendy, so it was in the body-in-progress of thirteen-year-old Gwendy that I first encountered the cicadas of Brood X. The emerging insects, like my boy cousins, were four years my senior. I was intrigued but disgusted by the intricate carapaces the cicadas left behind, and a delicious ...
DESPINA by Jennifer Hayden
Jennifer HaydenDESPINA: a visual narrative Jennifer Hayden is a graphic novelist based in New Jersey. She is the author and artist of The Story of My Tits, a graphic memoir about her life and her experience with breast cancer, which was nominated for an Eisner Award and has been translated into Italian and Spanish, soon to be out in French. It was named one of the best graphic novels of 2015 by The New York Times, Library Journal, GQ, Comic Book Resources, Paste, Mental Floss, Forbes, and NPR. Hayden’s first collection Underwire was excerpted in The Best American Comics 2013 ...
TIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD by Richard Casimir
Richard CasimirTIMOUN, or, LITTLE WORLD There is an image etched in my childhood memory from Haiti, which I find hard to erase. I admit I never try to block it out because it looks like a natural backdrop in my field of vision. It is indeed a troubling view but one from which I cannot escape. Therefore, I grow accustomed to it, absorbing it, despite myself, into my world of thoughts, dreams, and aspirations. My vision of the image has altered over time, dimming some details, such as the age of the little boy it features, sitting on a school ...
A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS
A CONVERSATION WITH NAMRATA PODDAR, AUTHOR OF BORDER LESS 7.13 Books, 157 pages Interview by Grace Singh Smith Full disclosure: I met Namrata Poddar—writer, editor, UCLA professor of writing and literature—in a room filled with Vermont sunlight, at Bennington Writing Seminars. But what I should actually say here is that I met Joohi Mittal, a widow whose fortunes have fallen (“Poor Joohi, Mount Sinai duplex to Malava cubicle!” Mount Sinai. Need we know more?). Joohi appeared in Namrata’s story, “Silk Stole”, which we were “workshopping.” I don’t remember any of our comments, helpful or not; what I remember is a ...
An Interview with Kathleen Courtenay Stone, author of the collective biography, THEY CALLED US GIRLS
A Conversation with Kathleen Courtenay Stone, author of the collective biography, THEY CALLED US GIRLS: STORIES OF FEMALE AMBITION FROM SUFFRAGE TO MAD MEN, Cynren Press, 222 pages, Interview by Jean Hey I met Kathleen Stone during a residency at Bennington College while we were working toward our MFA degrees. We were both from Boston, and Kathleen invited me to attend BookLab, a vibrant literary salon that she runs. But our friendship really took off in coffee shops. Once a month we met — and would still, if it weren’t for Covid — to discuss our projects, share writing advice ...
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: on Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World, a craft essay by Geoff Watkinson
COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS:  On Lewis Hyde’s Advice for Creativity, and How I Became an Artist in the Modern World A Craft Essay by Geoff Watkinson During the fall of my senior year of college, I took my first creative writing class and began to think that I might want to be a writer. I was a history major, read hungrily, and chose electives like Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Film, Modern Speculative Fiction. I remember thinking that writers (and artists in general) were born. There was a mystical quality to Albert Camus, whose books I’d started reading at age sixteen and ...
CLEANING HOUSE by Andrea Lynn Koohi
Andrea Lynn KoohiCLEANING HOUSE “Right there,” I say, pointing to the spider on the wall before leaving the kitchen. I’d rather not kill things, so I make my husband do it. My only complaint is that he doesn’t kill faster. He has this habit of pausing an inch over the target, then moving in slowly with a gentle scoop and a delicate squeeze. I never understood why he prolongs the trauma. He says I shouldn’t criticize unless I want to do it myself. But today I leave the room for the moment of death. I sit on the sofa and ...
REFLECTIONS by Virginia Petrucci
Virginia PetrucciREFLECTIONS April 2012 I do one bump right before I pee and then another after I’ve washed my hands. I suck the lingering white crumbs off the tip of my apartment key like a rapacious baby. I was anticipating this for the entire bus ride across town. I look at myself in the mirror, and the horror and humor hit me at once: Ma’am, this is a Noah’s Bagels. It is eleven in the morning, and my expensive therapist awaits down the street. He knows about my brain, but the rest is out of his clinical reach. I leave ...
PUSHING AWAY THE SCUM by Benedicte Grima
Benedicte GrimaPUSHING AWAY THE SCUM I have no recollection of being bathed before the age of five. Doubtless, long forgotten nannies took charge of that. But growing up in an old farmhouse with a French mother and an unreliable well water supply, I knew nothing of showers until I went away to school at age eleven. In the meantime, my younger sister and I bathed together in the upstairs tub on our own, squealing, fighting, and splashing. It was a Saturday ritual, before we dressed for Sunday mass. Our mother washed our hair separately in the kitchen sink, as we ...
ADULT SWIMS by Christine Muller
Christine MullerADULT SWIMS Someone must have peed in the pool. From the vigor of the lifeguards’ arms waving us out, I figured that someone must have peed a lot. I tried to keep my head above water as I made my way to the end of the lane, thinking about all of the sweat, saliva, and mucus that’s already a part of the liquid-based exercise experience. At any given time, someone is spitting into the gutter, and at all times, lap swimmers exert themselves enough to be soaking wet on dry land. Swimming is funny that way; it can look ...
SHELTER by Bree Smith
Bree SmithSHELTER First, the wound has to clot. In the hemostasis phase, blood vessels constrict to stop blood flow. Platelets fuse together to form a seal. Coagulation binds the wound on a molecular level. If a wound doesn’t clot, it bleeds out. After thirteen years as the director of a women’s shelter, I know: the ones who don’t clot are the no-chance girls. These are the girls with loose teeth and rib bones poking through their tank tops. These are the ones who don’t make it past their stepfathers. The ones who are always found a few minutes too late ...
MAKING A CAKE by Grace Kennedy
Grace KennedyMAKING A CAKE Today is my father’s birthday and I am making a chocolate Guinness cake. I am making this cake by hand because I do not have a stand mixer and do not want to spend two-hundred and seventy-nine dollars on a twenty-pound gadget I will only use once a year. I am making a cake even though I do not really like cake and do not have a stand mixer because my dad is turning seventy which I know is not so old but feels very old when I watch his hands shake as he pours his ...
THE TRUTH by Cassie Burkhardt
Cassie BurkhardtTHE TRUTH When I was in eighth grade, I had a terrible eating disorder and was hospitalized for most of it. When that didn’t work, I was admitted to a treatment center in Utah called The Center for Change, three thousand miles from home and everything I’d ever known. Eventually, I got out, but I still looked like a scarecrow with braces. My parents, bless them, decided to give me a fresh start, sent me to a private school, an artsy, alternative one where I could hopefully be myself, whoever that was. Ms. Johnson was my English teacher, and ...
SPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND by Cassie Burkhardt
Cassie BurkhardtSPONTANEOUS BUNGEE JUMP IN SWITZERLAND Twenty-six years old. Pink cutoffs. Barefoot. Day trip to Lugano with friends when we see a sign with an arrow: James Bond Golden Eye Cliff Jump. No one else wants to do it, but I do, so we hop in the VW Golf, make our way up to the tiptop. My husband can’t even look out the window. Rocks, some jagged, others smooth as elephant backs, peek from glacial water, turquoise but stop-your-heart cold. Twenty minutes later, I’m poised, arms to a T, toes on the very edge, ready to dive headfirst off a ...
MASQUERADE by Dhaea Kang
Dhaea KangMASQUERADE We’ve just arrived at prom and already I want to leave. Should we take a photo? Chris asks. I clock the long line, my classmates barely recognizable without their signature Hollister t-shirts and hoodies, skin-tight low rise jeans. We just took a bunch of photos in my backyard, me in my coral floor-length gown from the thrift store, he in a borrowed tux and bowtie. Around my wrist the corsage his mom made. Nah. I don’t feel like waiting in line. I find my friends seated at a round banquet table, introduce them to my date. An acquaintance, ...
WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver
WANTED: TWO WRITERS MUSE ON THE ART OF SAYING NO by Beth Kephart and Stephanie Weaver They want you. They want you for free. Because you are wise, they say. Because you know things. Because they want their people to know your person, to learn from you, with pleasure. They will, of course, be keeping all the cash, but you should focus on the pleasure. Just an hour of your time, they say. Then (a few days later): Two? You say yes because you are conditioned for yes, because isn’t this what you, playing the writer, do—yield what you know ...
FIVE AND A HALF QUESTIONS FOR MICHELLE ROSS ON HER NEW COLLECTION SHAPESHIFTING—Interview by Kathryn Kulpa
Five and a Half Questions for Michelle Ross on SHAPESHIFTING from Stillhouse Press Interview by Kathryn Kulpa Michelle Ross has published short fiction in Cleaver (“Lessons,” Issue 13; “My Husband is Always Losing Things,” Issue 23; “Night Vision,” with Kim Magowan, Issue 34). She spoke to us recently about her new short story collection Shapeshifting. Kathryn Kulpa: This is such a strong collection! One thing I really like about Shapeshifting is the diversity of points of view, style, and even genre. There are short, flash-like pieces, longer stories, realistic and often funny pieces like “After Pangaea,” with the parents sleeping ...
PACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL by E. A. Farro
E. A. FarroPACKING FOR AN OVERNIGHT AT THE STATE CAPITOL Minnesota State Capitol May 2018 the last weekend of the legislative session No one likes conflict, but with the smack of a fist I am a million particles of brilliant light.  However, tonight, I'm taking the punches. The letter is a direct threat, a blunt whack to the nose. I haven't been home for dinner in days, and I can't remember what it feels like to help my boys into their pajamas. I'm tired and mad and for a moment frozen in place. It's Friday, well past the mid-May sunset ...
MEN O PAUSE by Emily Steinberg
Emily SteinbergMen O Pause For over a thousand years, menopause has been treated as an illness, something to be feared and fixed. Emily Steinberg’s Men O Pause visualizes the grim history of the treatment and attitudes towards menopausal women throughout history, from the Salem Witch Trials to 19th-century institutionalization for hysteria, to menopause medicalization in the early 20th century. The story ends with her own positive experience of empowerment and self-actualization. In 2021, not only do we no longer need to be ‘fixed,' but we are quite happy to be living outside the realm of women’s historical natural function. —Caroline ...
THE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE by Tricia Park
Tricia ParkTHE DISTANCE FROM HERE TO THERE The other evening, on my way home from a violin recital in Gangnam, I missed a step and fell in the Seoul subway station. I caught myself on my hand, twisting my wrist. I fell hard on my foot, sprained my ankle, and skinned my knee. And because I was walking downstairs instead of up, there was a moment of full-fledged, disorienting fear; a moment when the earth underneath me vanished. In the aftermath, the only sound was the echo of footsteps slowing down on the platform. People stopped to stare but no ...
A CONVERSATION WITH AMY KOPPELMAN, AUTHOR OF A MOUTHFUL OF AIR by Michael McCarthy
A Conversation with Amy Koppelman Author of A MOUTHFUL OF AIR Two Dollar Radio Interview by Michael McCarthy I spoke with Amy Koppelman as she was finishing making her first book, A Mouthful of Air, into a feature film. Though she wrote the novel eighteen years ago, it still seemed fresh in Koppelman’s mind. As I spoke with her over Zoom, she searched for the right words to describe her first novel. In this work, Koppelman engaged the experience of postpartum depression when conversation about the topic was rare. The book was first published in 2003 by MacAdam/Cage (a small ...
SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE a craft essay by Laraine Herring
SPECULATIVE MEMOIR: MAKING THE INVISIBLE VISIBLE A Craft Essay by Laraine Herring I was eight years old when the tree spoke to me. My dad had just gotten out of the hospital after a near-fatal heart attack, and I would ride my bike down to my elementary school to escape the new person who’d replaced the father who told jokes and let me walk across his back. I always brought a book. I’d lean up against the massive oak’s trunk, nestling in among the raised roots, and let the tree hold me. When she spoke, I thought it was the ...
EVER GIVEN by Sara Davis
Sara DavisEVER GIVEN Because the spring tide comes in on its own time, because the earth goes on turning and the moon goes on circling around us and the ocean eddies unevenly but inevitably between them, because the seawater rises even in the desert latitudes of the world where scorching winds blow dust in the eyes of sailors, the tide came in on the seventh day after the Ever Given lodged slantwise in the throat of the Red Sea like a crust of dry bread. It was because the seawater welled in the deep trench men cut between continents, because ...
AN UNFULFILLED DREAM by Anika Pavel
Anika PavelAN UNFULFILLED DREAM Through the COVID-19 lockdown in spring 2020, people were buying everything in sight. During a visit to my local supermarket, the empty shelves were familiar. In my youth, in communist Czechoslovakia, empty shelves were a norm, not the result of a pandemic. A memory flooded in. I had to put my hand over my still unmasked mouth to hide the smile as I joined a line of people waiting for a new supply of toilet paper. I came back to the apartment empty-handed and told my husband how we dealt with toilet paper shortages back then. Under ...
cleave. by Courtney Elizabeth Young
Courtney Elizabeth Youngcleave. Here are the ways I have heard it happens: in bed, waking to wheezing, breathing in loose clumps lining your pillow. Out with friends, falling into your Cobb salad, your Pinot. In the pool, raking waters in a panic, clawing to clean up the unhinged mess you have become. Wiping sweat away from your brow after removing your garden hat, now filled with clumps. In the conference room, before a presentation, onto your notecards. With windows down, enjoying a summer breeze until you see it in the rearview mirror, whipping and whirling away and out of your ...
HOW A GIRL GROWS UP by Lindsay Rutherford
Lindsay RutherfordHOW A GIRL GROWS UP I don’t remember who suggests skinny dipping (me?), but none of us have our suits on anymore. At least I don’t. I am twelve, and we are at a friend’s remote lake property for a swim team picnic. It’s after 9 PM—many families have left already—and dark, so there’s not much to see, just the occasional fleeting glimmer of something pale beneath the lake’s surface. Flesh, ghost, or fish, it’s hard to tell. It smells like the end of summer—tang of smoke from burnt bluegrass fields, the day’s heat evaporating from boulders and docks, ...
DOUBLE FOLDED by Tricia Park
Tricia ParkDOUBLE FOLDED                                                          Every Korean girl I know freaks out about going back to Korea. Some are yuhaksaeng, the Korean born who study, work, and live abroad. Some are like me, American born and returning to Korea for the first or third or one hundredth time. We represent a range of the diaspora, living in various states of exile. “I’m so ugly,” we sigh, pulling at our faces as we peer at ...
THE RECKONING by Emily Steinberg
Emily SteinbergTHE RECKONING The Reckoning is a 22-page full-color visual narrative, that illustrates our planet’s stark environmental crisis on a visceral gut level in words and images. It explores how our sustained misuse of natural resources is intertwined and connected, on micro and macro levels, impacting everything from climate change to how the Covid 19 Virus was transmitted from animals to humans. It imagines how we can do better. The Reckoning, supported by a grant from The Studio for Sustainability and Social Action, Penn State University, was created in response to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption ...
A PIERCE OF ANGELS by KC Pedersen
KC PedersenA PIERCE OF ANGELS Light airs! Light airs! A pierce of angels! Theodore Roethke …it is not the skill of the hand / That writes poetry, but water, trees, / And the sky which is clear to us even though it’s dark. Czeslaw Milosz I was torn between the desire to show how well I was dealing with things and the imperative to show that I was not O.K., that this man’s actions had derailed my life in a thousand ways. Rebecca Makkai Each time, Greta recreates her grief from scratch. There is no mercy for time served. She ...
SPONGE BATH by Tracy Rothschild Lynch
Tracy Rothschild LynchSPONGE BATH The no-nonsense, middle-aged Filipino nurse tells me, pushing up her smudged glasses, that I need to clean up a bit down there. She waves her tiny hands dramatically around her own groin area and then shuffles over to me, all action. Am I embarrassed? Maybe. For some reason I feel like I’ve let her down. On day three in the hospital, day three with no breasts, day three of forcing a smile each time a visitor says knock knock out loud like it is funny, I guess it is time to get back to life. I ...
FUND WHAT YOU FEAR by Marnie Goodfriend
Marnie GoodfriendFUND WHAT YOU FEAR I lie in bed, my eyes fixated on the fruit trees outside my bare windows. I do not have insomnia. I am bone tired. Recently, my pain is nocturnal. My body waits until my head makes contact with the pillow before fireworks burst in my pelvic cavity. I bend my knees like an upside-down V and press my feet into the mattress. V is for vulture. violence. victim. vampire. vagina. The other day, my friend Melissa told me about the fund-what-you-fear philosophy. Her words bloat several text bubbles. They remind me of our distended stomachs: ...
FALL OF MAN, a visual narrative by Jennifer Hayden
Jennifer HaydenFALL OF MAN a visual narrative Scroll down for an interview with Jennifer Hayden by Cleaver Visual Narrative Editor Emily Steinberg Hayden is the author of The Story of My Tits, the Eisner-nominated graphic memoir about her experience with breast cancer. She wrote the webstrips Rushes: A Comix Diary, and S’Crapbook. Her first book, Underwire, was featured in The Best American Comics 2013, and she has appeared in anthologies. She is working on a graphic anti-cookbook called Where There’s Smoke There’s Dinner, and a travel novella called Le Chat Noir, about her dicey relationship with France. She has lectured ...
I’M NOT SORRY by Ali Kojak
Ali KojakI’M NOT SORRY They say I should write you a letter. As a goodbye, they smile sadly, for closure. They say closure like it’s a literal thing I can touch, can put in my Amazon cart and click, it’s here. Aha! Now you’re closed. But how do you close a life? Maybe it’s like sending guests home after a party. Thank you for living, I say quietly, as you stand in the doorway not looking ready to leave. I gently push the door in your direction, biting my lip to stop from changing my mind. It’s late, and my ...
TRADE CRAFT by Jason Jobin
Jason JobinTRADE CRAFT On the walk home from the bakery, spelt loaf in hand, I look back—because this is the part of town where you look back—and see a guy. He’s late thirties, soft looking, salt and pepper hair, very familiar. Familiar from where? He doesn’t make eye contact, but if he was a serial killer, would he? A real serial killer would feign disinterest and appear much like a normal stranger, maybe even exactly like a normal stranger. I run the rest of the way home. Safe in my room with all the doors locked, I roll a joint ...
FISH FEEL NO PAIN by Michelle Renee Hoppe
Michelle Renee HoppeFISH FEEL NO PAIN My little brother held a trout, a rainbow burning bright enough to eclipse reflections. The fish did not reflect, but the stream did, and he took a mighty brown watery rock to spill the brains of the flesh, white and red onto the grey wooden dock, a spilling of color all over the dock, and when I screamed he said, Fish feel no pain. I told him he could not know fish's mind, not at ten or twenty or a thousand years could he know the inner worlds of slippery things, but that day ...
Looking up
Sarah BergerLOOKING UP One thing I did when I was twenty was fall in love with a Roman Catholic boy and get all confused. I was a half-Jew-half-gentile quasi-Lutheran atheist, led as in a trance to the burly God of Ceiling Paintings like a little girl in a gossamer nightgown. The boy was a convert himself, and his zeal was real. He tried to baptize me (baptise; he was British) using the water pitcher in his college dorm room. He cited doctrine. I said no; I hadn’t gone completely off the deep end of the holy water pool. But I ...
WE'VE WAITED FOR VACCINES by Rebecca Entel
Rebecca EntelWE'VE WAITED FOR VACCINES Of when my father had polio, I’ve heard disjointed details but no narrative. Scalding baths, quarantine, how many adults held him down for the spinal tap, the iron lung, paralysis that one day disappeared. In the world outside, my grandmother lengthened his Hebrew name with Chaim, Life, and my grandfather delivered bread through the night. Under the covers, his sister plucked the braces from her teeth with scissors. Each time visiting hours ended, my grandparents stood outside the hospital staring up at a window. Polio came to him in 1954. The vaccine came to him ...
MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL,  A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
MAKING THE READER FEEL SOMETHING. PLEASE. SHOW AND TELL. A Craft Essay by Shuly Xóchitl Cawood “Show, don’t tell.” An old piece of writing advice, generally good advice, but sometimes hard to know how to do it well. Also, confusing, because telling is often part of the showing, especially when writing personal essay and memoir. The advice stems from how writers can best help readers understand what they are trying to convey—everything from emotions and mental state to the tone of a situation, the nature of a person or relationship, the look and feel of a setting. And much more. What if ...
MICHELLE ROSS INTERVIEWS DAN CRAWLEY, AUTHOR OF STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, A NOVELLA IN FLASH
Michelle Ross Interviews Dan Crawley, Author of STRAIGHT DOWN THE ROAD, a novella in flash Dan Crawley’s novella-in-flash, Straight Down the Road, was highly commended by judge Michael Loveday in the 2019 Bath Novella in Flash Award and published by Ad Hoc Fiction. His debut short story collection, The Wind, It Swirls, is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press this year. Michelle Ross: Straight Down the Road is set during a family road trip. There’s a kind of out-of-time feeling to the trip. Are they on the road for a couple of months? Is it years? For the reader, it feels ...

 

My-Boyfriend's-Estranged-Grandfather