Category: Editorials

Navigating MFA Decision Day During COVID: Three Considerations

Ivan Moore A year ago, I was still weighing my options. Quarantine had just started, but I already suspected it could extend into Fall 2020. Like everyone, I was stockpiling canned goods and trying...

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On-Call

Zachary Barnes When COVID-19 hit and the world shuddered to a standstill, a lot of folks like me found a new pocket of time on their hands. I hadn’t realized just how much time I spent...

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Sabrina Orah Mark’s Everexpanding Poemstories

Millie Tullis If you haven’t already fallen in love with the work of Sabrina Orah Mark, I scarcely know how to tell you where to start. Everywhere, I know, would hardly be a helpful answer....

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How to Start a Short Story: Pairing Your Title and First Line to Draw the Reader In

Kevin Binder One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about my creative writing program is that the experience has helped give words to many things I’ve been trying to do in my writing. A prime...

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Phoebe’s Body at 50: A Letter from the Editors

Phoebe’s first issue, published in 1972, opens with a poem by Mary Anna Dunn titled, “Firstborn, or the Table,” which stamps the page with the birth, on said table, of “a child’s bloody...

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Five books of poetry I loved in 2020

Millie Tullis My year opened with a writing retreat in the Appalachian mountains. One day, my friend Sarah and I got caught in a snow storm while trying to bring home groceries. It took us hours to...

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The Longest Night: What it Means to Write through Grief

Leah Sumrall In a good year, the winter solstice is as much about celebrating new life as it is honoring death. It is a season when light, so often a foregone conclusion, seems a little less certain,...

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Movement: An Exploration of Export in Dante and Wendell Berry

By Chris Stanzione When our poetry editor Millie asked me what I look for in great literature, I said that, like all great art, I look for “export,” for pieces of art that, after our interaction...

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Point of View: Peter Streckfus on “The Carpenter” and “Death in a Fig”

Chris Stanzione, phoebe’s Assistant Poetry Editor, asked Peter Streckfus to reflect on his past Phoebe publications, “The Carpenter” & “Death in a Fig”. He discusses the formal...

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What a Horror Author Taught Me About Artistry

By Timothy Johnson I recently read Josh Malerman’s Malorie, the sequel to his 2014 Bird Box, which Netflix turned into a successful film in 2018. I like a good horror tale, and over the last few...

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