Nonfiction by Oliver Radclyffe, reviewed by Beth Johnston FRIGHTEN THE HORSES: A MEMOIR (Roxane Gay Books) Frighten the Horses, Oliver Radclyffe’s poised and witty memoir of gender transition, opens in a Manhattan barbershop, as he gets a shave and basks…
Fiction by Julian Zabalbeascoa, reviewed by Collin Kim WHAT WE TRIED TO BURY GROWS HERE (Two Dollar Radio) In the opening pages of Julian Zabalbeascoa’s debut novel What We Tried to Bury Grows Here, young Isidro Elejalde leaves his Basque…
Lori Miller Kase THE BEAUTY OF EMPTY SPACE In Japanese flower arrangement—ikebana—the space between flowers and branches is as important as the stems and blossoms themselves. The Japanese term for this negative space is yohaku no bi, which translates to…
Fiction by Greg Hewett, reviewed by Madeline Mundkowsky NO NAMES (Coffee House Press) I was initially drawn to Greg Hewett’s novel No Names because I am, first and foremost, a music lover. Though my childhood soundtrack included John Denver, Dolly…
Poetry by Daniella Toosie-Watson, reviewed by Elena Bowman DEITY ISSUES: DANIELLA TOOSIE-WATSON AND WHAT WE DO WITH GOD (Haymarket Books) My Dead Dad knows how to take a joke. Knock, knock. I first saw this poem by Daniella Toosie-Watson in The…
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.…
Lauren Rile Smith Be Your Own Secretary (With A Little Help) Anyone who has worked for a very small business knows the score: there are more roles than human beings on your team. You get asked, “What does your marketing…
Fiction by Francizca Gänsler translated by Imogen Taylor, reviewed by Jadyn Genest ETERNAL SUMMER (Other Press) “Although I could see the fire through the window, the situation in the forest eluded me.” I aptly read Francizca Gänsler’s atmospheric debut novel…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS DIGGS, Cultural Detective Episode 3: Reputations Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in…
Poetry by Sam Kerbel AFTER-BIRTH There is much grief tied to us Not unlike a hospital cot Where a new father sleeps If he is lucky And finds himself realizing Not for the first time He authored something He knows…
Flash Nonfiction by Sherri Alms WHAT I KNOW ABOUT DEATH A body begins to decompose four minutes after a person leaves it. I was born on my father’s birthday. A week or so before his sixty-third birthday and my forty-second,…
Flash Nonfiction by Jen Bryant SHELTER My first January in Ohio, the river’s surface froze solid. Patches of dirty snow accumulated in parking lots. The sky, the snow, the asphalt: everything was a dull, unrelenting gray. After brewing my morning…
Fiction by Harris Quinn FAIRVIEW I’ve won more than I’ve lost, though I’ve kept no ledger. I’ve lost big, but I’ve won big too. I took 7,000 dollars from a New York man in Aiken after the Masters one year.…
Poetry by Daniel Coudriet HEARTBEATS I am a hospital that missed a war that grew outside. I’ve stolen appliances from empty homes. I’m sorry for all the songs I didn’t complete. It’s hard to have a relationship with a room.…
Fiction by Davis MacMillan OLD FRIENDS A long time ago, when we were little or maybe medium-sized boys, a man did yoga in the park near my house. This was strange: yoga was known but it was not really the…
Nonfiction by Cornelius Fortune ON SUPERMAN Of migratory journeys across a sea of stars Start with an origin story—everyone loves a good origin story. Well, this one is mine, more or less. * It begins with a door, a door…
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…
Flash Nonfiction by Elizabeth Wenger THE WASP NEST The wasps made their home on our home so that our homes were fused, a hybrid beast, and this wouldn’t do at all, wouldn’t do because there were kids running around (the…
Fiction by Jake StimmelRED-HEADED MIKE FINNEGAN “I did not take your boat, Mr. Roosevelt, because I wanted to steal something, no indeed; when I took that vessel I was laboring under the impression, ‘Die dog or eat the Hachette.’” —Letter…
Flash Nonfiction by Judy Harju Galliher WHEN I SEE MY SON IN YOUR TRUCK I remember our road trip to the reunion, how we crammed into the cab of your Tacoma truck, how the metal rod in your spine meant…
Poetry by Cal Freeman QUAKER SPEAK FOR DEAD The dreams are different when I sleep beside Lake Erie. I can’t remember them in much detail. Momentous, ethereal, and cruel, they bring my father back at 4am, his predawn writing hour;…
Flash by Travis Flatt THE SPARTANS SACK TROY, ALABAMA I. They hunker in the dark, spying from peepholes carved in the galley of the Horse as Police Chief Frank Meyers argues with firemen over how best to haul this giant,…
Fiction by Richard Holinger HENRY GOES TO THE SYMPHONY “Your turn for the symphony, Henry,” his mother said at dinner. “It’s Shostakovich and Symphonie Fantastique. Would you like to go?” No, he would not like to go. He stared at…
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…
Flash by Sahil Mehta THE COMMUNIST The crimson tattoo, a hammer and sickle, was located about an inch south and half an inch to the right of his belly button. His penis, when enlarged by interest or intrigue, would point…
Flash by Susan Israel GOATVILLE Ambrose Bunch’s backyard was a tangle of weeds that his wife Florence kept harping on him about, so he went out, ostensibly to buy a lawn mower, and came home with a goat. “Flo, meet…
Poetry by Michael Grinthal I WAS WASHING AT NIGHT OUT IN THE YARD Crying is excellent Practicing Look How the geese Honk and hiss and migrate West. Blasphemous Not false Not even false The sounds I make Are obstinate Kinds…
Poetry by Dara Goodale PERFECT CONDUCTOR when he was eight he stuck a fork into an electric outlet he fried the nerve endings in his right thumb his sense of touch swept away…
Flash Nonfiction by Anne Anthony BEFORE I HELD YOU Before I held you, your father held you cradled in his arms—mine couldn’t, strapped securely to the operating table; before he held you, you flipped, you slippery fish dropping thud-like into…
Fiction by Mary Sauer THE MONARCH Cutting around and behind the main drag in Excelsior Springs, we choose the road often used to bypass the lights and traffic with two sharp, blind curves one after the other. Dad takes each…
Flash by Meg Pokrass TURD-L There was the time my actress sister taught me how to take a bath like a TV star. Ran the bathwater hot so that it felt as if my skin would glow like a pink…
Interview by Arthur Kayzakian A CONVERSATION WITH GREGORY DJANIKIAN, AUTHOR OF NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE (Green Writers Press) Gregory Djanikian’s Nostalgia for the Future: New and Selected Poems (1984–2023) is a collection that presents both continuity and formal metamorphosis across…
Fiction by C.J. Spataro, reviewed by Hannah Kroonblawd MORE STRANGE THAN TRUE (Sagging Meniscus Press) A few years ago, I worked as an usher for the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, a repertory company that performs in an open-air theatre all summer…
Tanya Elizabeth Egeness Epp SchmidFour Simple Words When I began my writing career, I suffered from a common ailment among new authors called “premature submission.” My first draft felt so inspired, so sexy, that I couldn’t resist the urge to…
Tisha Marie Reichle-AguileraNo Such Thing as Writer’s Block There’s no such thing as writer’s block. It’s a hill I’m willing to die on. If you think of it as a BLOCK, it becomes insurmountable. If you think of it as…
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 Craft Essay by Elaine Neil Orr The Present Tense: Conversing with Characters, Then and Now In my new novel, Dancing Woman, the protagonist, an expat American woman named Isabel, unearths an ancient work of art in her garden in…
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,…
A Writing Tip by Rebecca EntelGet it Wrong: Crafting Authentic Dialogue through Mistakes and Omissions When we speak, we rarely do so well. We restart sentences, use fragments, say useless words like um. Take a look at some linguistic transcripts…
A Craft Essay by Gerry WilsonSo You Think You Know Your Characters? Think Again. When I first dreamed up the heroine in That Pinson Girl, my literary historical novel released in 2024, Leona Pinson was a naïve little thing, too…
Interview by Andrea CaswellTIM WEED, AUTHOR OF THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT (Podium Publishing) In The Afterlife Project, award-winning author Tim Weed imagines multiple compelling futures: one set in 2068, as a team of scientists races to save humanity from extinction, and one…
Interview by Andrea Caswell TERRI LEWIS, AUTHOR OF BEHOLD THE BIRD IN FLIGHT: A NOVEL OF AN ABDUCTED QUEEN (She Writes Press) In Behold the Bird in Flight, Terri Lewis brings to life the unusual story of Isabelle d’Angoulême, a young…
Interview by Catherine Parnell AMIE SOUZA REILLY, AUTHOR OF HUMAN/ANIMAL (WLU Press) A bestiary in essays, Amie Souza Reilly’s Human/Animal chronicles the nightmare that ensues when Reilly and her family purchase their dream home and move in only to be harassed…
Matt ThomasWhat’s Found in Translation If you’re feeling poetically uninspired, try translating a poem from a language that you read imperfectly. The process of looking up words you don’t know and then determining the poetic intention from the direct translation…
Melissa MoschittoMaking a Dark Corner for Exploration While working on a historical fiction short story, I found myself stuck. It had been about two years since I had written the first draft of the story and I was struggling to…
Poetry by Barbara Daniels RED WING If death is marriage, I’ll marry the oil stain under my car. I’ll marry a bright wing. Weeds bend their frayed heads down to dirt, the sky equivocal, the old pines. The door behind…
Fiction by Callie Ann Marsalisi FOUR, FIVE, SIX All of the eggs are broken. One, two, three. Four, five, six. Both rows of the carton she mistakenly left open on the counter. Smashed. She closes the carton and thinks. She’s…