A Craft Essay by John Sergio BETTERED BY A BOT: A Hopeful Submission, an Immediate Response, and an Existential Crisis Almost immediately after my short story was rejected by one publisher, it was selected and shortlisted by a different one.…
A Prose Craft Essay by Jillian Schedneck WHAT WE CHASE AND WHAT STAYS: On Running After Stories, and Standing Still When I moved to Abu Dhabi and then to Dubai in my mid-twenties, I thought I needed to seek out…
A Prose Craft Essay by Phil Wetjen HAIKU PRACTICE FOR PROSE WRITERS A few months back, I decided to create a haiku journal. I’m a prose writer, so I did it not so much because I wanted to write great…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Jacob Butlett THE THREE CLASSICAL CATEGORIES OF POETRY AS VENN DIAGRAM The Narrative, the Dramatic, and the Lyric are broad classical categories of poems. For some, they may seem “too technical” to understand, let alone apply…
A Craft Essay by Emma RowanNO “I” IN CNF ? A Less Reflective Approach to Creative Nonfiction Could I be the only CNF writer, the only memoirist, who doesn’t like to talk about myself? Or even worse, my feelings? Let…
A Craft Essay by Erin MurphyALL THE THINGS: WRITING CATALOG POEMS Whatchamacallit used to be my favorite candy bar: the perfect combination of peanut butter crisp coated in a thin layer of chocolate. Then Hershey ruined it in 1987 by…
A Craft Essay by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo HOW TO WRITE A LOVE POEM FIRSTS My first poem was about shooting stars. I was eight and inspired by a notebook with an illustration of a star flying across the pink-lined pages. I…
A Craft Essay by Heidi SeabornWriting to the End: Artistic Choices in Apocalyptic Times Two a.m. on November 6, 2024. My love is propped with pillows, his phone aglow with news. Have I slept at all? Even sleep feels uncertain.…
Nonfiction by Danuta Hinc RUNNING When you leave the place that named you, the world opens and closes at once. Your identity fades into the background of a perpetually expanding frame, balancing between awe and surrender, turning your life into…
Nonfiction by Michelle BittingSCHRÖDINGER’S SISTER You could say I am a thought experiment. Sometimes described as a paradox of quantum superposition or divide in perception. To be considered both dead and alive. Simultaneously. No one I’m close to, privy to…
A Craft Essay by Michele BattisteOther Wisdoms: The Divinatory Potential of Poetry Every word is haunted by its past and potential variations. —Kenji C. Liu Sometimes when I’m learning about divination, I think I’m learning about poetry. I’m learning how…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Matthew W. BakerPoetry and the Kink: The Inherent Queerness of the Poetic Line Poetry and the Kink: The Inherent Queerness of the Poetic Line It is 2015, and I am walking back to my apartment…
Interview by Karla Cordero PILGRIMAGE, HEALING & SELF-DISCOVERY: A CONVERSATION WITH REBE HUNTMAN, AUTHOR OF MY MOTHER IN HAVANA: A MEMOIR OF MAGIC & MIRACLE (Monkfish Book Publishing) In My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle author…
Interview by Jen Michalski A CONVERSATION WITH CURTIS SMITH, AUTHOR OF DEAF HEAVEN (Running Wild Press) In his seventh novel, Deaf Heaven (Running Wild Press, 2025), Curtis Smith returns to Central Pennsylvania to explore the loss of redemption within a…
Fiction by Tezer Özlü, translated by Maureen Freely, reviewed by Tigerlily Warner JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF LIFE (Transit Books) How glad I am that I brought no books with me on this journey. For a quarter of a century,…
Flash Fiction by Mikki Aronoff JUST LIKE THAT The night we were hit by the biggest snowstorm in decades—such a surprise that late autumn evening—our middle brother died. No one was prepared for his demise. That shouldn’t have been the…
Interview by Beth Kephart A CONVERSATION WITH CLEAVER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KAREN RILE Beth: I hear myself through the years asking you questions. About violins and Mozart’s sister. About trapeze art, birds, organs. Rhubarb. The New Yorker. “Hansel & Gretel” (the play…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Eileen ToomeyIt Started with a List: CRAFTING A HELIX POEM In August 2020, early in the pandemic, I was lucky to attend a remote workshop with poet Lidia Yuknavitch who shared with us a narrative…
Poems by Sharon White, reviewed by Sara Verstynen THE BODY IS BURDEN AND DELIGHT, (Cornerstone Press) Sharon White’s The Body Is Burden and Delight was the perfect selection for The 2023 Portage Poetry Series, awarded annually by Cornerstone Press. The…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Abbie Kiefer THE GENEROUS ACT OF PUBLISHING DRAFTS: Letting Poems Exist as Iterations Most of the poems in my debut book, Certain Shelter, appeared first in journals—and in almost every case, the book version of…
Interview by Andrea CaswellA Conversation with Sven Birkerts, author of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press) “Nothing defines a writer so much as what they pay attention to.” In his newest book, The Miró Worm and…
Elizabeth Bird HOW I’M RECALIBRATING FOR THE THIRD AGE A Craft Essay on Creative Nonfiction Writing While “Third Age” certainly sounds more enticing than “God’s Waiting Room,” no matter what you call it, retirement brings creeping intimations of mortality. Time…
A roundtable discussion by Autumn Konopka & Emma Parzybok A DISCUSSION WITH SHANNON ROBINSON AND DARRIN DOYLE Authors Shannon Robinson and Darrin Doyle sat down with Autumn Konopka and Emma Parzybok, Cleaver’s Book Reviews Editors, to discuss their new books,…
Carole Duff WRITING A MEMOIR PARTLY ABOUT A PERSON I NEVER MET I found the journals while cleaning closets during spring break. Six 9-by-6-inch books written by my new husband’s daughter, who had taken her life at age twenty-four. A…
Elizabeth Stone SOMETIMES A REVISION REALLY IS A RE-VISION When a former student died of AIDS and left me his diaries, I couldn’t unearth the real story I needed to tell—until I began wondering why my long-dead grandmother made a…
Stories by Pamela Gwyn Kripke, reviewed by Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner AND THEN YOU APPLY ICE, (Open Books) One of the most basic aspects of humanity is pondering the future—questioning who we are and what we will become. In the mid-1950s,…
Laura Leigh Morris WRITING TIMELY FICTION Picture it: Twenty-five university professors in dresses and sports coats crouched in a dark classroom, waiting for a gunman to walk through the door. More nervous than we should have been, given this was…
Stories by Lena Valencia, reviewed by Jennifer Nessel MYSTERY LIGHTS, (Tin House) As the sun set across our campsite in Rocky Gap, Maryland, I turned to my friends, who had taken great pains to convince me to join them, and…
A novel by Alisa Alering, reviewed by Alana Craib SMOTHERMOSS (Tin House) The Appalachian Mountains may be the oldest mountain ranges in the world. Dating all the way back to Pangea, they have grown and ached and evolved and mutated…
Henrietta Goodman METAPHOR AS SEDUCTION It sounds ridiculous—the first person to seduce me was T. S. Eliot. I was fifteen, in 11th grade English. Most of the poetry we read that year required a process of “translation” from antiquated to…
A novel by Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, reviewed by Benjamin Selesnick YOU CANNOT FORBID THE FLOWER (Tolsun Books) Elizabeth Lukács Chesla’s hybrid auto-fiction novel, You Cannot Forbid the Flower, includes three different voices, each looking through the same historical period: in…
Poems by Nathan Lipps, reviewed by Dakotah Jennifer BUILT AROUND THE FIRE (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) “Mourning doves linger beneath the basket of seeds waiting, discussing applications of empathy or economics, what poverty means” Miles to go before…
Alex Barr ZORAN Even in the distance you looked foreign. Hair frizzed up above a frown, clown’s blob of a nose. Going very slowly, considering the relationship of the bicycle to each building you passed. Yes, a frown—you were always…
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher CREATION MYTHS 1 – Coyote grasps at straws within adobe. careful as threading. an eye of a needle. seeking a key. within river clay. opening a door. finding a face. where to belong. where to rest. beating.…
Elaine Chekich ACCIDENTAL ROOMMATES Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I hardly knew Quibble when I started sleeping on his couch. We’d served under Lt. Pablo in Afghanistan, but mostly we were on different details and didn’t…
Victoria Korth BEDSIDE When I say darkness, I mean everything I don’t understand, my mother’s breath in mine before I was born. In the dark, her breath pauses and mine goes on, pacing in its neutral candor. Can it be…
Meg Yardley ARE THEY OR AREN’T THEY? Leah was standing in the feminine products aisle. At least, she had always thought of it as the feminine products aisle until just now, when she realized it was also the condoms aisle.…
Robert Garner McBrearty GETTING OUT Everyone is getting out. They’re getting out. My dentist is getting out. The letters are familiar: After over thirty years of service, loving every moment of it, so very grateful to all of you… But…
Patrick Strickland SCREAMING EAST ON I-10 I just want to get home, but home’s never quite where I left it. After work tonight, I glide along the streets of Simi Valley, nearly nodding off a time or two, in search…
Autumn H. Thomas BODY DOUBLE A productivity strategy often used by people with ………….inattentiveness adj. ………….………….pollen sticking to stigma ………….………….brushed by genetic chance ………….………….the limb of the bumblebee ………….………….lackadaisically’d rigour mortis Coming home to the mansion of my mind Unable…
Kate E. Lore FLAME Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award The flame tastes rock but they don’t like it. Spit and sputter, they leave behind a black trail burn, an imitation of shadow, crude like a child’s…
J.D. Isip WHAT USED TO BE MCCARRAN AIRPORT, LAS VEGAS The Spring Mountains out in the distance, if you’re lucky you’ll catch a sunset, the diminished edifices of glistening cassinos refracting a little of the glory in their windows where,…
Mark Liebenow FRAGILE, FRACTURE, FEAR Every evening, I make spaghetti and try out different seasonings in the sauce, including hot spices from the southwest, which you would have hated, or I pull out leftover chicken and eat it cold in…
Ash Trebisacci VOICEMA[LE] TO MYSELF Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award There’s this podcast that I love. The host’s voice is unmistakably, gorgeously trans. It purrs, crackles, ekes out phrases like a song I know by heart…
SV Bertrand TELL ME IF IT HURTS It happens again. But this time I am not busy dying, so I get to see what happens after. Dad is getting the car refueled, and I am sitting in the back seat while…
Brooke Harries TWO POEMS Transformer Miss him, …………or drinking coffee in bed, reading with a lamp at the bedside. Read an interview with Lou Reed. The one …………where he stops answering by saying Nothing I feel like talking about. Make…
Kindall Fredrickswhere has amelia gone where has she been amelia quiet as an attic ……………………….where is she? where is she? we crawl into her and chew ………………………………………………..make a clergy ………….of our teeth we search god hung over us fat and…
Elisabetta La Cava MEMORIZING ROMAN ROADS In the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Venezuela, behind a four-foot fence, stood a white metal pole. She didn’t hang a flag on it. I was eight years old and didn’t care…
Marlene Tholl BABY DOLL Shanty Point Labor Day. Surging swells, pale over dark, an outlook off into forever. My husband Augustus was surfcasting for striper with an eel on the hook. He pointed out the now mostly submerged rocks that…
Rick Andrews TRASH I’ve got bags full of trash she touched: a pamphlet from a state fair pumpkin carving booth. The pithy tops to Snapple bottles and Jones sodas. Maps, maps of museums, of Delaware, of Boston, maps of Paris,…