by Mark Alvarez

My old San Francisco neighborhood has two hearts: Portsmouth Square and Washington Square. While the former is something whose name is unrecognized even by many San Franciscans, part of the vagueness they thrust upon Chinatown–despite being the spot where the state of California was founded–the latter is one of the most well-loved public spaces in the City, a tree-lined green slope decompressing North Beach density, perfect for absorbing the between-fog sun.
… More Requiem for a Kool-Aid Wino: Why is Richard Brautigan, the Original George Saunders, Still Ignored?

NonfictionNOW featured a slew of diverse writers and panels this year. During the panel “Decolonizing Nonfiction,” four Southeast Asian authors brought a perspective to nonfiction that I had not yet seen as a young, Latina woman growing up in the Southwestern United States. They began the panel by introducing which parts of Southeast Asia they had come from so that the audience could understand the circumstances that had informed their writing. I found it interesting as writers Daryll Delgado, Lawrence LacambraYpil, Wilfredo Pascual, and Ruihe Zhang sat before an audience of predominantly white writers and explained their journey into the world of nonfiction–an “American invention,” as Zhang calls is. … More Decolonizing Nonfiction: What it Means to Write in an ‘American Invention’

A hermit crab essay is one that imitates a non-literary text—recipe, obituary, rejection letter—using the found form in novel ways, but retaining the semantic resonance of the original. … More The Hermit Crab Essay: Brenda Miller Unshells her Own

Thin Air’s Trevor Warren sat down with Alice Hatcher, whose novel The Wonder That Was Ours, won the 2017 Dzanc Prize for Fiction. … More Roaches Are Ideal Narrators: An Interview with Alice Hatcher

By Margarita Cruz Jake Skeets (Diné) is from the Navajo Nation. He received an MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His work has appeared in Word Riot, Connotation Press, The Blueshift Journal, and elsewhere, and he recently founded Cloudthroat, an online publication of Indigenous art and poetics. He is the winner of the 2018 … More Lands Shift and So Should Poems: An Interview with Jake Skeets

By Michael Buckius In his award-winning debut poetry collection Go Because I Love You, Jared Harél dives into themes of nostalgia, childhood, parenting and the trauma of the past. His writing is sometimes matter-of-fact and sometimes surreal, giving insights into what it means to be father and husband, the legacies of past and present, and how … More Nostalgia for the Present: An Interview with Jared Harél