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…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH HANNAH SMART Hannah: I developed the concept for this story first. I knew I wanted to write a piece that questioned the nature of truth, and I knew that in order to do that, I’d…
A Writing Tip by Shoshauna ShyThe Almost-But-Not-Quite Poem Three weeks of wrangling words into position—and still when you cap your pen or click Save, there’s a crumpled shirt tag chafing at your neck. Something isn’t right. Why does your poem…
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…
Andrea CaswellA Craft Chat With Monique D. Clark Andrea: Congratulations on “The Love,” (Issue 44) which feels like a perfect short story. It’s got it all: deep love, disenchantment, humor, food, family secrets, and a profound moment of truth, encapsulated…
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…
Andrea CaswellA CRAFT CHAT WITH SUE MELL In her flash CNF piece “Transported” (Issue 44), Sue Mell takes readers on a joy ride through a coming-of-age friendship. Mell shares insights about writing the story with senior fiction editor Andrea Caswell.…
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…
Hannah SmartTHE DETRIMENT OF DOUBT “Hello, I’d like to report a fire at the Gerry’s Pizza off West Ninth Street.” “Okay, and your name, sir?” “Gerry Parker.” “Could you describe the situation?” “I am seated in the restaurant parking lot…
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…
Todd RobinsonEverywhere the World is Green and Dying 1 And shelterbelts of feeling, barn swallows flashing …
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…
J. Bradley MinnickA MAN’S REACH SHOULD EXCEED HIS GRASP My mother arranged for us to walk to school together. I didn’t want to go to school; and, I especially didn’t want to walk anywhere with Kate Wheeler. Kate Wheeler was…
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.…
Richie ZaborowskeSTAY ON THE LINE A tornado of nurses blew in. The whole maternity care team. Cracking commands. Swirling around. Wheeling your wife away. And when you stood to follow, they told you, no. To wait, and not worry. So…
Michelle BittingManger, Emptied I saw the shepherds slogging through red dust,Their sandals kicked up a ruddy cataclysmWith palm trees sighing through green stars above. This was in Los Angeles where the active sitefeatured a bereft crèche, no babe front and…
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…
Joshua AmbreFREEDOM TRAIL In front of the visitor center, our tour guide adjusts his breeches. They’re slightly too tight to be family-friendly, but I’m relieved to have something to look at besides old buildings for the next hour. I watch…
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…
Marie ManillaRETROSPECTIVE Lena skids around the backseat as the cabbie rudely shifts lanes. Her gnarled knuckles couldn’t negotiate the seatbelt. The tunnel engulfs her, the hum and grrr. The weight of all that earth compressing her brain. But they emerge…
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…
Gideon Huan-LangTRANSNESS AS PERPETUAL PAPERBOY Imagine: Victorian hand-me-downs, black suspenders, tweed-lined cap. And he is holleringabout the end of the world. Extra! Extra! Read all about it. Call him doomsday cult, the way he had broken his voice already—the Titanic,…
A Writing Prompt by Layla MurphyHate Christmas, You’re Allowed Bah humbug—this again! Christmas is right around the corner, and whether you celebrate it or not, you’ve surely got some holiday sensory-overload by now. I thought we should turn things topsy-turvy…
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 Jen MathyBooster Clubs Don’t Just Sit in The Stands A successful writer today has a whole new set of responsibilities. Yes, your primary role is that of artist and writer. First, create. Then, with the understanding…
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…
A Novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Coralie LoonTHE MEMORY OF ANIMALS (Tin House Books) We’re all familiar with the sense of exhaustion and collective grief that seeped into our bones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the pandemic is…
A Short Story Collection by Amber Caron, reviewed by Char DreyerCALL UP THE WATERS (Milkweed Editions) “You’re gonna wanna find the biggest branch you can and make a lot of noise as you run.” This was the only terse instruction…
A Writing Tip by Layla MurphyWRITE LIKE YOU’RE DYING I never knew what a death doula was until I listened to an episode of NPR’s Life Kit the other day focused on relationship repair. It seemed odd at first that…
A Writing Tip by Michelle Bitting FINDING GOLD IN LOST TREASURE “There is something to be said for a boundary, there is something to be said for unbinding.” ~ Diane Seuss I remind myself and my students to write with…
A Writing Prompt from Anne AnthonyBEGUILING