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…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS, DIGGS, Cultural Detective, Episode 2: The Break 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…
Fiction by Shaun Pieter Clamp A ROCKET’S TALE The scaffolding falls. I’m a shiny rocket nose downslope into crater. Imperfect bliss kindles in the mouth of the stone. I make my way down there on wheels. The bright moment will…
Fiction by Jeffrey FeingoldFIVE EASY PIECES Bobbie Bernstein rolled on her side to give Rayne a goodnight peck. She’d lost the baby a few days earlier, was still sore, and the rolling was a chore. White eyelet curtains fluttered as…
Flash Nonfiction by Diane Zinna FALL DICTIONARY Rainbow Coffee Mug: Noun. A broken cup found in the still-running sink. My mother must have been washing it. It lay in four white pieces in the silver-gray basin, and she lay on…
Fiction by Thomas William Brewer THE BALLPARK The ballpark rumbles under the steps of the spectators, zealots eagerly streaming into a cathedral of dirt and grass. A boy squeezes his father’s hand as they weave through the congregants and walk…
Nonfiction by Michelle Bitting STILL LIFE WITH FAMILY AND THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (with screen quotes from his bifurcated self) My analysis of this soul, the human psyche, leads me to believe that man is…
Flash by Christine H. Chen WINDOWS TO THE SOUL While your parents went out to pitch Ma’s dress design ideas to strangers, you were locked inside the apartment, the tick-tock of the wall clock your only companion. In the box next to…
Fiction by Alysha Black THE RUNNING WOMAN Nia saw the way everyone looked at her as she wheeled her kids around the grocery store at ten pm, and she hated it. Five months had passed since Peter’s death, and still,…
Poetry by Nora Gupta ELEGY WITH SALTWATER PEARLS I track my body through snow brimming with sweat, tears, the eternal glow of tobacco and ash, an unfinished stub melting its way into the ground. Inside, succumbed to hospice, you wrap…
Flash Nonfiction by Crockett DoobTHREE MICROS EVERYTHING WITH NOTHING There’s a bagel place I like a block away from work. I go in there and order “an everything with nothing,” which the cashier thinks is funny, and I guess I…
Flash Nonfiction by Charlotte GullickWEDDING DRESS Right now, the daughter and father are alone, the girlfriend—his—sits outside. She pulls on a joint, distancing herself from this, his dying. The girlfriend tries to make room for his children, for the connection…
Nonfiction by Lane Osborne BODY MEMORY When my family and I visited my uncle at his home weeks after he’d lost his leg, knee-down to diabetes, I tried not to stare. Not at what remained of his left leg, or…
Fiction by Liana Johnson EXPOSURE “Haven’t you ever been spurned by a lover?” Ms. Smith said in her outside voice. Our sixth-grade English class was acting out The Crucible in the school library. Ms. Smith directed the question to Jake,…
Fiction by Elise Wallen-Friedman NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH The Zoo Mrs. Rothenbloom stares at the sheet music propped up on her piano. She taps her foot, her light-brown sock padding into the shag rug carpet. AC pumps through the house, so the…
Nonfiction by Michael CoppermanYAKU Grandma Betty never arrived from Hawaii empty-handed. Bringing herself was enough: though she was four-foot-ten at best, she carried herself gracefully, with an air of self-assurance and ease. She wore designer clothes from Japan with flowy…
Nonfiction by Jay Hodges AS YOU WIND DOWN Planets whirl, asteroids careen, the sun and the moon come and go. Tectonic plates shift, volcanoes spew, icebergs calve, droughts creep, humidity swaddles. Hail pings automobiles, and lightning blitzes planes. Ghost ships…
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…
Poetry by Naisha Randhar YOU & I My best friend and I grieve the world on the way to school. We walk through chalk pictures, afraid of having kids. Dragonflies in a lit golden cage. Like islands, we are silhouettes.…
Flash by Frances Blankenship THE REFRIGERATOR That morning when Lydia woke up, she saw that she’d become a refrigerator. It must have happened fairly quickly since she was certain she had woken around two a.m. to give the baby a…
Flash by Gregory Meece THE SKETCHBOOK Blacktop parted infinite walls of cornstalks as I drove through another town. It was as if Moses had stretched his hand across a verdant sea. A fallen leaf on a current, I was pulled…
Poetry by Russell ZintelANIMALS THAT HAVE NEVER SET FOOT IN A SMILING KITCHEN Felt like a stray In deer form. Felt like a Eurasian red squirrel, As a pet without ownership. Ate like a lion, which is to say gloriously…
Nonfiction by Meg LeDuc THE TESTAMENT OF MY BODY Chapter 1 I’m reading Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century Christian mystic, on this October morning. 2 Julian writes, “Whenever a human mother nurtures her child with all that is beautiful and…
Carole MertzLet the Horse Run—Encouragement for New Writers When Carol Smallwood and Christine Redman-Waldeyer broadcast a call for submissions to their planned collection that eventually became Writing after Retirement, I was a writing novice. I’d completed a 16-month course on…
Nonfiction by Dava Sobel, reviewed by Beth JohnstonThe Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press) In The Elements of Marie Curie, Pulitzer-prize winner Dava Sobel promises not only…
Interview by Brian Burmeister ACTOR/WRITER/DIRECTOR GREG SESTERO, STAR OF THE ROOM AND AUTHOR OF THE DISASTER ARTIST Greg Sestero has worn many hats in his creative career. As an actor, he’s been in numerous films and TV shows, most famously…
Fiction by Julia Elliott, reviewed by Hana S. Elysia HELLIONS (Tin House) Grotesque, ethereal, and at times utterly bizarre, Julia Elliott’s magical story collection Hellions is a call to the carnal. Connected by feelings of entrapment, each protagonist encounters the…
Lita KurthA Schedule to Fit Your Personality Following the advice of many writers, I set myself a goal of writing a certain number of hours a day. Butt in chair no matter what! At least an hour a day was…
Laura StanfillOn Harnessing the Urge for Artifice Sitting in my living room, I wonder what the gold vintage sectional says about our family. It’s small, like the four of us, a just-right fit for our bodies, the nubby fabric loosened…
Nancy TownsleyOn Writing When a Book Birthday is Coming Up Simultaneously managing multiple writing projects can be tricky. My debut novel was released in April, and I’m working on a second one. I was humming along on the latter when…
Fiction by Nora Lange, reviewed by Maya Grunschlag US FOOLS (Two Dollar Radio) A pink cover decorated with a photograph of lounging blondes may delude some readers into expecting a candy-floss tale of girlhood. Us Fools is a far denser…
Fiction by Corinna Vallianatos, reviewed by Lennie Roeber-TsiongasORIGIN STORIES (Graywolf Press) On a rainy February evening in Los Angeles, I made my way to Skylight Books. Like many LA residents, I don’t own an umbrella, so I scurried under overhangs…
Lisa K. BuchananA BUZZWORD-FREE ZONE Even I—as a patient—am weary of first-person cancer narratives. This again. How then to share my personal experience meaningfully without imposing on the reader’s (and my own) language fatigue? When writing “Thank you, Coco Chanel”…
A Craft Essay by Tom McAllister In Praise of the Memoir of the Mundane The most common concern shared by many would-be memoirists is, “My life is too boring to write about.” Setting aside that often these claims are flat-out…
Poetry by Zefyr Lisowski, reviewed by Adrie RoseGIRL WORK (Noemi Press) When I first saw the title Girl Work, it brought to mind ideas of emotional labor, domestic work so often not seen as actual work, and also, the exhortation…
Julie Esther FisherTurn to Language Feeling stuck, or just need some extra inspiration? Take it from language itself. When you’re in need of a spark, pull out your thesaurus, a fresh piece of paper, and embark on making lists of…
Callie Ann MarsalisiWRITE DOWN WHAT PEOPLE SAY Write down what people say–in a non-creepy way, of course! I’m a linguist in addition to being a writer, which means I did a lot of transcription in college. First of all, transcription…
A Craft Essay by Elizabeth Galoozis There’s No Cheating in Poetry My poems must be composed only of my own original words. This central and stubborn rule hovered, unspoken, over my shoulder for years. Its roots were manifold, from the…
A Craft Essay by Joshua Wetjen Strangeness and the Art of Revision: How I Invigorated my Fiction by Welcoming the Strange The Toulouse-Lautrec masterpiece “At the Moulin Rouge” was recently part of an exhibition at Minneapolis Institute of Art, a ten-minute…
Fiction by Melanie Cheng, reviewed by Adele Zhao THE BURROW (Tin House) As the COVID pandemic recedes further and further in my memory, I sometimes forget that what happened in those years was not really normal. I find it hard…
Krista PuttlerFOUR EMOTIONAL CORNERS I often start a piece of writing with an immediate emotional response to something I have read, something I have overheard, or most recently (as in my piece Origin Story in Cleaver Magazine issue 48), in trying…
A Craft Essay by Bev Boisseau StohlWriting About Another (Who’s a Public Figure!) Without Malicious Intent Working and traveling with my boss was easy—easy, that is, compared to writing about him. Noam Chomsky, a man I call simply Noam, is…
Danuta HincEXPLORE THE UNKNOWN As a writer, you are a creator, shaping landscapes, cities, and people from the ether. Remember, the worlds you build are not just settings—they are living, breathing spaces where time and space dissolve. Once a story…
Miranda KeskesTake Your Teenage Son’s Advice Okay, so maybe you don’t have a teenage son to listen to. That’s okay. A daughter will do, or a significant other, a close friend, a neighbor, even your hairdresser: basically, anyone outside your…
Interview by Andrea Caswell THE FINDING OUT: Megan Marshall on her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (HarperCollins) In her memoir After Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall trains a biographer’s lens on her…
A Writing Tip by Billy DeanPOEMS FOR PEOPLE If poetry were a tree, its roots would be deep in the ground of human history, and its branches would be the way it evolved to reflect the practices of professional and…
Deborah Bacharach11 Ways of Writing About a Blackbird. . .or Anything Maybe you love description. You can spend an entire poem detailing the smell of a new shoe, the squeak it makes across a kitchen floor. Maybe you excel at…
Flash by Gretta Trafficante MORAINE We first formally meet playing hooky from the gay kickball league. Our refuge is the back nook of the only thrift shop in town to house an almost-adequate selection of 2XL vintage. I’m mulling over…