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…
Alex BarrDUST ISN’T DEATH Those abandoned stories and poems gathering dust in a drawer—they may look like fossils but what if they’re embryos? I’d like to share my experience which I hope will be useful and encouraging. It’s about kissing…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH T.S. BENDER T.S. Bender’s short story “Miguel’s Sancho” (Issue 45) is a skilled exploration of belonging and isolation, love and loss, and the darker sides of the human heart. In this Craft Chat, senior fiction…
Kathryn Silver-HajoINTERVIEW YOUR CHARACTERS Sometimes when I want to get to know a character better or they just aren’t ringing true on the page, I request an interview. Like, really. Depending on who your character is, you might have a…
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…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH SOFI GUVEN Sofi Guven’s short story “Proximity” (Issue 45) is an exploration of people’s boundaries, both emotional and physical, in a world in which we are all connected. In this chat with fiction editor Andrea…
Andrea CaswellVULNERABILITY, AUDACITY, AND FREEDOM: A CRAFT CHAT WITH MARIANA SABINO In Mariana Sabino’s short story “The Undercurrent” (Issue 38), locals at a bar in a beach town are fascinated by, and unwelcoming to, a widow who arrives in their…
Talya JankovitsTHE DENOUEMENT: HOW DOES IT END FOR REJECTED WRITERS? I have been having a hard time with endings lately. Poems, short stories, dare I admit, essays. I’ve been considering this a lot, what this could mean, all these unfinished…
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…
A Writing Tip by Federico EscobarDIM THE SCREEN TO TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN There is a well-intentioned person who gets in the way of my ideas bursting onto the page. This person is eager to please, wants to make sure…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH KIM MAGOWAN In her story “The Back Nine” (Issue 45), Kim Magowan shows us a character with a growing list of personal losses, trying to come to terms with the lost connections that still haunt…
A Writing Tip by Clifford ThompsonDUALITY IN THE PERSONAL ESSAY Duality is the soul of the personal essay. I sometimes tell students that while the province of speeches and op-ed articles is certainty, the domain of the personal essay is…
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…
A Writing Tip by Snowden WrightTRIAL AND ERROR At an Oxford, Mississippi, courthouse last summer, I sat in on the trial for the most recent person to try to assassinate my father, a circuit court judge. Things went poorly for…
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…
Nicole BrogdonTHE POD I never felt enough eyes on me, never enough love. Never enough arms, wrapping round my body. Nor hands, chopping vegetables for soup. Not enough healthy backs, moving my furniture. More hands, putting on clean sheets—floral sheets,…
Kim MagowanTHE BACK NINE The email is from Marianne’s boarding school classmate Harrison McBee, then captain of the lacrosse team, now an investment banker living with his husband in Manhattan; the subject heading is “Sad News.” Reluctantly, Marianne opens it.…
T.S. BenderMIGUEL’S SANCHO It was some point early in August, a Thursday or Friday, some point at the end of the week that Miguel didn’t show up to work. And that morning, as the sun streamed into the garage of…
Katie TonellatoBABY, SWEETHEART, HONEY Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award When I was young, they called me baby, sweetpea, honey, cherry pie, chubs. So often they called me these things, that when they called me my name,…
Julian ShendelmanSUSPENSION POINTS “I suppose you could DM,” Marine said, staring into her clipboard. “Direct message?” “Dungeon monitor. You essentially walk around making sure people aren’t openly bleeding on the carpet. It’s a violation of our lease. Here.” She handed…
Claudia MonpereSALT PAINT Tina and her sister, Meredith, are painting cats on the six-foot cardboard coffin. Tuxedo cats, tortoiseshells, tabbies, Maine Coons. Meredith is the real artist. Tina should have left her to it, sick of her sister offering advice…
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…
Sofia Drummond-MooreEXHUME The bog body lies on the light table like an oil spill made flesh. Curled on his side, knees drawn up, Avril can see the outlines of his once-bones under skin like leather. She can also see the…
Michael GrinthalTHEY ARE CALLING YOU AND THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE SAYING Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award In the unsolvable sun Of a yellowing year All of the newest tunes Of tiredness are rolling About in…
Jess YuanAQUACULTURE QUARTET [1] to explain eyestalk ablation imagine floating mid face fallopian tube connecting to the ocular nerve ………….in your shrimp body ………….eroded by a losing economy overextending, deteriorating because blindness makes more babies in her ………….she grows fertile…
Susan GosleeLIGERTOWN: HERALDIC ATTITUDE Ligertown —Idaho, 1995 Heraldic attitude —Photograph of lion 9 Goldenrod lines the creek like torches lighting the road to a garrison. Narrow banks shortbread-mold the lion’s spine and chest, but his red-gold mane floats out as…
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…
Sophie NunbergA CONSTELLATION OF ERRORS Honorable Mention of the 2024 Cleaver Emerging Artist Award I study the events of my birth like astrologers do stars in the sky. I’m already late when, two days before I finally do break my…
Rebecca EntelHOW TO DRINK ENOUGH WATER IN WARTIME You have finally logged out from your social media because it was making you physically ill. With less scrolling, you’re not getting more done. You feel bad news from journalists or emails…
Ariana KellyAT ELEVATION In mid-June after my sophomore year at Yale, I took a Greyhound bus from New Haven, Connecticut to Boise, Idaho for $59.00. The ride took three-and-a-half days, during which two people were kicked off in Ohio for…
Peter GrandboisSOMETIMES WE SPEAK TO OURSELVES in dead things other times we fit too many bodies into the meadow where the elk whistle and stamp it’s strange this book of burning leaves where snow sometimes settles inside like prayer other…
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…
Darcy LohmillerA SUDDEN GUST OF WIND We step out of the truck into a bright October sun and a howling wind. In the field we have chosen to hunt, thick stalks of grass flatten and shudder against the gusts. Our…
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…
Sofi GuvenPROXIMITY When I get home, I start to make bread. I open my window curtains wide and prepare the ingredients. Buckwheat flour, salt, sugar, and yeast stored in jars, scooped out with a ring of measuring cups. The windowsill…
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.…
Luke KoestersHOSPICE INTAKE I close my eyes and jump / off a stone pointed cliff. / I’m back to falling / into the gulch below La Quebrada. / I was high diving / only four months ago. / I open…
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…
A Writing Tip by Jess SilfaCREATING READER INVESTMENT IN YOUR CHARACTERS As I write (or rewrite) a piece of fiction, I ask myself a few questions: Why does the story start when it does? What does my chosen point of…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH RICHIE ZABOROWSKE Andrea Caswell: “Stay on the Line” begins in media res, in a hospital during a medical emergency. What made you decide to start there? With short stories, it can be hard to know…
A Writing Tip by Layla MurphyIN A WRITING RUT? TRY FREE ASSOCIATING The idea that psychoanalysis and the art of writing have significant common ground is not revolutionary. What is explored, what can be learned, what challenges must be faced—in…
A Writing Tip by Chuck AugelloBeat the Clock Estimated reading time: 3 minutes During my years as a working writer I’ve had opportunities to participate in public readings and open mic nights, including a “slam” in which I placed second…
A Writing Tip by Moriah HamptonWhen Willpower Isn’t Enough Recently, I set aside a story I’d been working on for over a year. I did so reluctantly after revising the opening section to build to certain plot points I selected…