Category: Features

Behind Rapture: An Interview with Mary Jo Amani

Millie Tullis Mary Jo Amani’s ecstatic poem “Rapture” remained with me long after my initial reading. I was so grateful to be able to share this powerful poem with our readers in issue 49.2....

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Reading The Lonely City without a Magic Bullet

By Melissa Wade I stare at the rain pouring down from the clogged gutters outside my window, realizing I have yet to talk to another human today. I asked my dog if he wanted to go for a walk, but it...

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How Do You Know When a Story is Done? How Veteran Writers Assess Their Work

By Kevin Binder The question “Am I done with this story?” is one that almost all writers will ask themselves at some point during their careers. In a previous blog post, we asked established...

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The World Behind the World: An Interview with Novelist Justin Cronin

By Melissa Wade Justin Cronin, writer of The Passage, no longer writes short fiction. He said the form is incompatible with his temperament. His successful trilogy, by way of proof, clocks in at over...

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Harvest

From Issue 36.1 Danielle Evans Eggs. They wanted eggs, and their requests came trickling in daily in ten-point type, through the want ads of the campus paper. Five, ten, fifteen thousand you could...

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The Light of the Remotest Stars

From Issue 21.1 Justin Cronin The morning he was scheduled to appear in bankruptcy court, Frank O’Neil ate three eggs for breakfast, read the Times and Globe, drank two cups of coffee, helped his...

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How Long Does It Take to Write a Short Story? 7 Established Writers Weigh In

By Kevin Binder Writing fiction shares a strange quirk with playing chess. Unlike most endeavors, which people usually get faster at as they improve, writing and chess both seem to take longer as...

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A Review of “Blizzard” by Henri Cole

I’ve come to the conclusion I have a strange idea as to what the purpose of  “eco-poetics” is. While I originally saw it as any other poem, except that its aesthetics involve nature...

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Reading Cold Pastoral in Dystopian Times: An Interview with Poet Rebecca Dunham

In an era plagued by a global pandemic and a slew of environmental crises, Rebecca Dunham’s poetry collection Cold Pastoral (2017) poignantly captures the need to reflect on our responsibility to...

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Funerals

Robert Bausch “…Anything makes me laugh, I misbehaved once at a funeral.” –Charles Lamb He could hear the people in the church praying. So many voices carried a long way and he could...

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