How These Words Lean on You: An Interview with Ben Purkert
The kind of ending that Purkert is in love with, is that most important part of a successful poem: the audible click of a final line.
Structure in Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World
Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World is a deceptively slim novel. Alternately referenced as narco-noir, myth, epic, and border story, the novel manages to fluidly traverse genres and structural layers in a mere 107-pages.
White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrasino
If you are Black and American, then you too might have a story similar to mine. A story whose blood origin begins with more questions than documented truth.
Searching for Symmetry: Ramifications by Daniel Saldaña París
In a house on a street in Colonia Educación in Mexico City on a Tuesday around midday, a mother makes the decision to leave her husband and children and never return, an action that leaves a distinct mark on the family members’ lives, like the crease left on a folded piece of origami paper.
Second-Hand
It was through second-hand books that I learned how to read for myself.
A Relief and a Horror
We’re better equipped now than perhaps ever before to empathize with and examine how Jackson conveys the Blackwoods’ sense of isolation, both social and physical, from their community.
Trace: An Interview with Melanie Figg
Melanie Figg’s new full-length poetry collection Trace gives voice to family, feminism, and individual history through the lens of art.
Echoes of The Three Marias in the #MeToo Movement
By delving into historic literature, readers and writers can gain a deeper understanding of current day issues and subjects, important in providing invaluable background and context, along with a wider perspective to inform current opinion and work.
Some Days Are Better Than Ours: A Collection of Tragedies by Barbara Byar
Barbara Byar’s collection, Some Days Are Better Than Ours: A Collection of Tragedies, rages against normality, a feat that hits close to home in the COVID-19 era.
Best Small Fictions Roundtable: Part 4
Jennifer Fliss and Jennifer Todhunter discuss grief, parenting, resilience, and catharsis.
Best Small Fictions Roundtable: Part 3
Cathy Ulrich and Chaya Bhuvaneswar discuss finding a story's pulse, finding time to write, and engaging in community.
Best Small Fictions Roundtable: Part 2
Michele Finn Johnson and Tommy Dean discuss saving characters, hearing voices, and giving back to the literary community.
Best Small Fictions Roundtable: Part 1
Tara Isabel Zambrano and Christopher Allen discuss expanding The Moment in flash fiction, stirring the bubbling pot of character, and knowing when a draft is done.
Ways We Vanish: A Conversation with Todd Dillard
The map of human life isn’t a line, and I wanted to show that here. Life can look like a phone call coming from your chest, a door in the middle of the woods, a moon that, for a time, sings, and then is never heard again.
Crossing the Line: When and How to Write about Family
When family members are the subject of creative nonfiction, is their privacy unfairly infringed upon? Who has the right to tell a particular story? What is the point of sharing personal stories?
An Archipelago of Truths: The Island Dwellers by Jen Silverman
In intimate, first-person narration, The Island Dwellers reads like a series of private letters addressed to our hidden selves.