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…
Kate E Lore SALVAGING A DEAD STORY Sometimes a story can start off so strong, but still fizzle out somewhere between the middle and the end. Maybe you’ve got a beautiful visceral spark, this pulsing idea from which you set…
M. LinA PERSONAL ARCHAEOLOGY OF SOUND AS TOLD IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award 1989: 乾你娘 – ‘gan4 ni3 niang2’ – ‘gan’ in the 4th tone meaning fuck. As in ‘you motherfucker’ If…
Oona PatrickTOSTA MISTA/MIXED TOAST On my first trip to Portugal, I ate tosta mista, or mixed toast, nearly every day because it was the only sandwich I knew how to pronounce. The mista distinguishes your order from cheese toast or…
Alex RostTHE BLUE PEN I’m writing this with a blue pen. Traditionally, and consistently, I’ve always been a black pen kind of guy. I think most of us are. You can say that about a lot of things. You can…
Cameron MacKenzieCATSUIT Every time Ally’s mom’s boyfriend fed his ball python, he played “Mouth for War,” by Pantera. My friend Tyler and I would squat beside the snake’s aquarium under the hot light and watch the little mouse as it…
Holaday MasonSUMMONED TO PERFORM AT ALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT 1. It’s so late I can hear my grandmother, Margery, slap an ace-high straight down on linoleum, light a Doral, become smoke. We are so wet again, our pool hair…
A.L. GordonPRECIOUS THINGS Winner of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award “Precious Things” by A.L. Gordon was one of those submissions that wowed me by how unafraid and emotionally raw it is in its subject, while still being beautifully crafted…
Marj HahneFRAGMENTS FOR AN IDENTICAL TWIN Cleave. Ends with leave. Let’s begin there. Because there includes here. Whenever you leave, I sense my own absence. Right before the last time you left, you screamed, “You got what you wanted! I’m…
Third Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024 Like all good personal essays, this one brings the humility and wisdom of experience to bear on a look at a past self, with sympathy for that self. The boy of the title…
Michael CzyzniejewskiHER HEART WAS A CHIPMUNK She said her heart was a chipmunk, said it on our first date. I figured she was being poetic, saying something like My heart is a chipmunk to mean she herself was like a…
Second Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024 This short gem manages to tell us almost nothing, and yet everything, about the girls of the title, capturing the complex dance between person and environment. The descriptions of what these girls pass…
First Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024 We are made to feel for the central character in this sad, moving work through the way place is evoked—both the place she is in and the one to which she aches to…
Luanne CastleANOTHER WEEK LEFT OF GRAND ROUNDS WITH DR. WEBBER My eyes lock onto Dr. Webber’s seed pearl spectacle cord as she launches clinical phrases from the patient report. After our first day trailing her, I bought a similar cord,…
Clifford Thompson ON THE OTHER HAND… Origins of My Comics As a young boy growing up in Washington, DC, in the early 1970s, I fell in love with the comic strip Peanuts, which left two indelible marks on me: a…
David L. UpdikeREUNION My kindergarten class’s fiftieth reunion is underway. It’s being hosted by two of our classmates, Mike Finnegan and Linda Haupt, who ended up dating in high school and getting married shortly after graduation. They’re now grandparents and…
Magda Andrews-HokeWAG On my twenty-fifth birthday I saw a greyhoundin a little red jacket being walked by a womanin a Scandinavian sweater. I said aloud,“Is this what it’s like to grow older?” I canmake no head, no tail of it:…
David WatersFIVE HEARTS Physician Notes Patient Name: Barbara Fields Chief Complaint: chronic yearning History of Present Illness: This pleasant 38-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished woman—looking younger than her stated age—comes to the Emergency Department complaining of unrequited desire. She is oriented as…
Micah GrotegutONO CHICKEN Scrolling through the news, I clicked on a video headlined “Historic Lahaina Burnt Down in Wildfire.” I listened to the reporter describe the ashy remains of once-standing homes and shells of vehicles strewn on apocalyptic roads, the…
Ho-Ming So DenduangrudeeFAIRYTALE Once upon a time, one of my children assured me that “America” was not just the name of a country but the name of the world. My children are young and have no memory of Thailand, where…
Cassie BurkhardtTHREE FLASH ON MOTHERHOOD MUD KITCHEN Dirt is the bane of my existence, but my kids love it—can’t resist it, never met a mud puddle they didn’t immediately want to wade in barefoot. All I see is laundry. We…
Hart Vetter SLAPPED “Just let it rise,” said Aaron. He’d had it. My son and I had schlepped over two dozen filled buckets out the basement up the steps to the front door and dumped them down the driveway, mercifully…
Erika KrouseI FEEL LIKE I COULD STAND HERE WITH YOU ALL NIGHT AND IT WOULD BE THE WORST NIGHT OF MY LIFE I work at Ye Olde Curio Shoppe downtown. We consign from the community—people bring in old family items…
Amanda GainesTRICH You ask him to wrest his fingers into the base of your hair from behind you. To pull. To undo you, the cartilage of your throat cutting against your taut skin, neck arced like a bridge over stygian…
Lori Miller KaseGUARDING THE NEST The robin eyes us from her nest. All it takes is a ruffling of the papers beside me to send her flying into the nearby redbud trees, angry wings flapping. I sit on the back…
Coralie LoonTHE WINK Lia woke to the sound of a rooster cawing. Again. The first time, she convinced herself she had imagined it. The sound didn’t belong here, not in the city, not in the suburbs, not even in the…
Sarah CarsonMY DAUGHTER’S SCHOOL IS CLOSED AFTER ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING IN AMERICA So I drive us to the zoo in the closest faraway place, and as she skips down the path to the primate house, the entire savannah is her…
Freesia McKeeTender Experiments We Could Conduct Together or Alone after Tyler Friend 1. We could go to Kwik Trip at 9:00 pm and pretend to shop while flirting over chicken tenders and red Gatorade. 2. We could go to Hilltop…
Charles Scott ULYSSES Ned Duncan arrived at the Cincinnati airport and took a taxi to the church in Madisonville where Darrell’s funeral was being held. In New York, in the years before Darrell got sick, they had lived together in…
Jane FeinsodTWO POEMS Apology And what of the child killed in a bathroom. And what of the others. Sorting the bookshelf and bleaching the tub. I worry I’m tumored. I mean that. In socks watching dog walkers. And what of…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH PATRICK STRICKLAND In this Craft Chat, writer Patrick Strickland reveals how questions about loss and (dis)location guided him through years’ worth of drafts and revision, leading to the published version of his riveting story, “Screaming…
Merridawn DucklerNEVER READ CLEAVER’S WRITING TIPS I taught fiction at a writing institute. During our class on publishing a student mentioned flash fiction. You should, I said, explore every possibility. I always urged them to explore every possibility, I’d be…
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…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH ELAINE CHEKICH In “Accidental Roommates” (Issue 46), writer Elaine Chekich creates a protagonist whose traumatic losses lead the reader on a perilous journey through the streets of Hollywood. Chekich spoke to senior fiction editor Andrea…
Alex BarrHITCHING A RIDE Sometimes the struggle to write a poem gets messy. You long to pour the churning gruel into some satisfying container. It isn’t always messy, but when it is, there’s a solution. Like an urchin sneaking a…
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,…
Andrea CaswellTIPS FOR RELUCTANT REVISORS Ever dread having to revise a short story that’s not working? How about that essay without a main point? Me too. Revision is the reality check at the other end of a romp across the…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH MAXIEJANE FRAZIER In her story “We Laugh” (Issue 46), MaxieJane Frazier conveys a lifetime’s worth of emotion and transformation in fewer than 300 words. In this Craft Chat with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell, Frazier…
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,…
SV BertrandFinding the Right Narrative Distance When I teach my memoir class, my main goal is to help my students find the narrative tools and devices they need to see themselves as a character on the page. Even in memoir,…
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…
Beth KephartYou in Random Order: A Jesse Ball Exercise Here’s an exclusive writing prompt from Beth Kephart, who recently conducted a masterclass for Cleaver called “The Art of the Telling Detail”. We are sharing this prompt from her workshop—if you…
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…
J. Bradley MinnickWELL BEGUN IS HALF DONE Okay, so this writing tip is not going to be very popular—particularly in a culture that yells “go-go-go-do-do-do” and imagines that people can attend to more than one thing at a time (which,…
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…