J. Bradley Minnick MS. ROBBERS Ms. Robbers taught seventh-grade Spanish at Mann Middle School and was the reason for Bernie Markee’s infamy. Ms. Robbers was white, tall, unmarried, called herself a “Progressivist,” and believed she spoke Castilian Spanish perfectly, pronouncing…
Meg LeDuc APPETITE Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I have an insatiable appetite for self-loathing. I hate my body’s neediness, the way it presses its wants upon me, always petitioning for more, more, more. I hate…
Anna Tomasulo SMALL WORDS We sit at the bar. Our glasses sit at the bar. He and I sat first and they followed. Something about the night makes me want to talk. So, talk I do, about other hes and…
MaxieJane Frazier WE LAUGH After Sarah Freligh When we’re twenty, we laugh and laugh. For the men surrounding us as if we’re gold at the end of a rainbow. For the slurred compliments and bestial breath. From the corner booth:…
Mike Itaya BAD LOVE JR. It was unseasonable noon in August, and I already missed the tangy summer where everything grew like weeds and everyone who was anyone got twitchy pants. Up at Ezekiel Remedial School, I was a no-show…
Finley K Foster CAPTAIN JONAH I miss the set up and the punchline, but all around the table people are laughing. I can’t force a laugh, not a believable one, so I throw on a face, one that says “gotta…
An Interview by Benjamin Woodard, edited by Emma Parzybok AN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN VAN NEST, AUTHOR OF WHERE TO NEST Kristen Van Nest’s debut memoir, Where to Nest: A Global Search for Love, Cheap Wine and a Place to Belong…
Ona Gritz WHAT CONSULTING A PSYCHIC DID FOR MY MEMOIR—AND FOR ME About a decade ago, compelled to write a memoir about the sister I lost to violence thirty years earlier, I began the painful process of investigating my own…
Check out Beth’s upcoming live masterclass, The Writing is in the Details, Sunday July 28, 2-4 PM ET. Can’t make it? A recording will be sent to all registrants. Beth Kephart DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS The artisans of the telling detail…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileTHE PAST IS PERFECT You wrote a paragraph. You were writing a novel all summer. You had written the first hundred pages on a bus. You had been writing the same old story for years.…
A Novel by E.J. Koh, reviewed by Julia Hou THE LIBERATORS (Tin House Books) E. J. Koh’s latest novel, The Liberators, begins with language, then war, recounting the early memories of Yohan, a newly widowed father in the midst of…
Stories by Shannon Sanders, reviewed by Kayla McCall COMPANY (Graywolf Press) My family’s matriarch has a ritual when company comes to visit. She chases carefully-swept corners with lemon-scented cleaners. The vacuum hums over the rug, then the hardwood, then the…
Alina Pleskova and Kimberly Ann Southwick, edited by Hannah Felt GarnerALINA PLESKOVA AND KIMBERLY ANN SOUTHWICK WANT YOU TO DIY IT THIS POETRY MONTH Alina: Kimberly Ann Southwick and I have traveled in the same extended poetry circles for about…
A Conversation with Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Sydney Tammarine DUALITY IN NONFICTION Estimated reading time: 1 minute What does duality in creative nonfiction mean to you? Do you have any favorite essays or memoirs that explore duality? When I think…
David Galef NO SURPRISE FOR THE WRITER? WHAT A RELIEF FOR ME. Robert Frost’s famous line of writing advice, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” comes not from a poem but from his essay “The…
Richard Parisio FAIRY SHRIMP In my first year of teaching ………………………I led my seventh graders to the woods ………..to study vernal pools. Study? No—to stare ………………………………….astonished at what we found: plump transparent one inch freshwater shrimp ………………………………………………sidestroked across a black…
Kathryn Silver-Hajo THREE MICROFICTIONS The Divide I hadn’t spoken with Grandma since she went into assisted living. I missed visiting her lemon-and-love-infused apartment at holidays, our weekly calls. Now we chatted about my MFA program, the Haitian nurse who snuck…
Sven Birkerts ALL THAT WAS NOT THERE… When I was in the eighth grade at Berkshire Junior High in Birmingham, Michigan, I had a Spanish class with Mrs. Whittaker. I woke up today thinking about that class, though more than…
Rachel Toliver ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R7, ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R8, ON WHAT USED TO In those days, what I call my girlhood, there was always a man and he was always at the end…
Sofia Sears QUESTION 1: HOW WILL YOU BECOME YOUR MOTHER? Your body is a secret you forgot how to keep. A lesson in scorn & sediment. Loose fingernails, fathers, passageways. A seabed sucked dry, passing animals baited and bled. The…
Federico Escobar ANGELA He got to the bus stop trailed by wet footsteps that merged with the night. His Converse shoes squished as he walked, and his drenched denim jacket clung to a watery button-down with its belly buttons missing.…
Bradley Sides ROOTED IN THE PLACE YOU KNOW You live in a place that doesn’t have a bookstore. You live in a place that doesn’t even have a chain dollar store. The latter is still ten, fifteen years away. The…
Interview by Andrea CaswellA Conversation with Danuta Hinc, author of When We Were Twins (Plamen Press) 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…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileWRITE IN SAFETY Recently I wrote about The Most Dangerous Writing App, an efficient but hair-raising way to generate fresh ideas for your writing. If you haven’t tried it, give it a spin. You might…
Beth KephartI TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS 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.…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileFIRST TO THIRD Here’s the truth: Your first instinct is your best. Write the draft the way it comes to you. Maybe your story comes out naturally in first person. And you nail it, fluently:…
ANNOUNCING Cleaver’s 2024 Short Creative Nonfiction Contest Creative nonfiction is a genre of exploration into ourselves, our society, and our world. We invite short works that explore life in its dualities: memory and imagination, self and society, perfection in flaws,…
Where did this prompt come from? I’ve used it in my Penn classes for more than twenty years. I’ve personalized and fancied it, but I don’t think the original idea was mine. This week I paged through my personal library…
Matthew Guenette THREE FLASH PIECES Pet Peeve A jackhammer hammers somewhere in the school and your armpits sweat through your shirt. You don’t know what you’re doing, and the class knows that you know they know, but you can’t tell…
Matt Thomas ANNIVERSARY POEM II Remember the tracked snow it was last to melt and so was like a suture in the flattened grass, Robins feeding impression to impression hashes as if marking time passed from The Incident that dried…
L M Feldman YOU WILL HAVE ARRIVED: A Semi-Natural History 1. The Valley Green Inn A WEDDING You arrive alone to celebrate someone’s love and hope and future (your faith in such things long gone, a dry river). You’ve donned…
Kelli Short Borges TWO MICROS Manning Up It was Jack’s birthday and there we were—me, Jack, and Thom, the Three Musketeers, wrestling in the pool while Dad grilled a T-bone, Jack’s favorite, he said (we knew it was really Dad’s,…
Erin Mizrahi I MISSED ANOTHER DEADLINE BUT IT’S OKAY IT’S REALLY OKAY & it’s for the best my CV is just a list of sensations & my author bio is a photograph of a fainting couch & it’s ok &…
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…
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…
Monique Danielle THE LOVE Robin and I arrive at the restaurant at the same time. Today is her thirty-second birthday and she’s chosen The Love, one of her late father’s favorites and the last restaurant we’d eaten at together. She…
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.…
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…
Yolanda Wisher germantown avenue speaks & coulter school to school the dark writes itself a poem of youngblood façades playin in the face of founding fatherhoods cobblestones chucklin low—got ghost jokes stagin colonial comedies & catcall sitcoms yoga & ubuntu…
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…
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…
Jeff Friedman FOUR MICROFICTIONS Card Trick Even though it was warm in the house, Callie covered herself to the neck with the afghan and lay down on the couch. Her red and green wool socks pushed out into the open.…
David Waters SONG OF THE REDWOODS June Francis fills a bag with perishables from the fridge: milk for his lattes, oat milk for Lucy’s, salad ingredients, a chicken, leftovers, and random stuff, like the twenty-three-ounce bottle of Frank’s Red Hot…
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…
Ginger Ayla DRINK, ANYWAY, THE LIGHT There are creatures adapted to living so low in the ocean they can only survive in extreme pressure, any attempt to lift them causes disintegration, they lack the necessary compression to hold together scale…
Patricia Flaherty Pagan TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY Before she throws my father’s Christmas stocking into the fireplace, Siobhan brings it out to the porch to show it to us. “I dreamt his cruise ship exploded. Dad drowned,” she says.…
Meg Pokrass MOM AND THE OTTERS There was the time Dad scooted home with a bunch of supermarket flowers, handed Mom what he had to offer, flashed us his new beard, and we chanted Beard! Beard! Beard! like we were…
Interview by Michelle FostA Conversation with Beth Kephart, author of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) I had the chance to have a conversation with Beth Kephart, whose new book, My Life in Paper, has recently…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileWRITE DANGEROUSLY The best way to improve your writing is to cultivate a consistent practice. There are many ways to approach your practice, and you might change up your techniques frequently in order to keep…
Nonfiction by Harry N. MacLean, reviewed by Anna LlewellynSTARKWEATHER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE KILLING SPREE THAT CHANGED AMERICA (Counterpoint Press) The stranger asks no greater glory till life is through than to spend one last minute in wilderness. —Charles…