“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” — The Lorax A couple years ago, I was speaking with a writer friend about fiction’s ability to change peoples’ minds. We were both taking an environmental fiction class, and she voiced her frustrations with this premise. She said … More Exploring Cli-Fi: Can Fiction Change Your Mind? by Tianna Jordening
When do a bunch of stories become a collection? When I finished my MFA program at Oregon State, I figured my next step was to publish a book. Lucky for me, I’d written a lot those two years—conservatively, twenty short stories and probably twice as much flash. I’d been through the thesis process of polishing … More A Conversation with a Past Contributor: Mike Chin
Before he fell asleep in my arms by the campfire again he saw something in the flames. First a cat, then a monster, then a burning tree, the same he climbed earlier in the afternoon, high enough to look out at Pike’s Peak and see the snow still holding strong in late June, his dad … More Fatherhood Therapy by KG Newman
Pink + White Everyday control. We being pink + white we just nod slow, move north nod again, eyes close. It’s hurricane season everyday. It could all cannonball the same way. It could all shoot up, kneel into something like a birth, no kiss no glory. No telling. No immortality. White Ferrari On eyes, in … More Two poems by Amanda Leahy
Brew for Brynn and Nikiko Noun: A mixture of several things – Cambridge Dictionary Verb: To cook, steep, or simmer To concoct To conspire (of tea or coffee): To become stronger in taste in the container in which it is made – Cambridge Dictionary All those years that I was chasing after them, wiping their … More Three pieces by Samina Najmi
candlelight vigil in the gunmetal streets sharp rain sinking into pittsburgh’s deep roots two blocks from your parents’ the synagogue where your mom taught preschool community congregation drowned & drowning the crowd’s gathering silence small fires between bodies we canceled the halloween party to gather at lilly’s for proximity how close to eternity we become … More Tree of Life by James Croal Jackson
Writer So, when you sat there at four in the morning, having quietly slipped out of the bedroom. When you sat there and wrote—thoughts like threads of a cobweb, a minute procession of ants, black hieroglyphs sharp like blades, miniaturized barbed wire, iron against snow. When you sat and your head was a cube, your … More Two flash pieces by Toti O’Brien
BLUE Worse than beauty dying is our letting go of it, sadly, wearily, resigned to its not being enough but tortured by someone else’s enjoying it as if in begrudgery we fashioned for ourselves a world without music or wished for rain to cover the mountains. In age, the sting of hail is a welcome, … More Two poems by Ted Mc Carthy
Debris There is a story bobbing along the blue painted boards hitting the rocks time and time again like a man full of regret, banging his head against the wall. Circling the scattered evidence in their motorboats, they keep asking what happened? But a thousand nails have already started to rust at the bottom of … More Three poems by Johanna Evenson
More than forty years here, each time passing these places, I recall: Farragut Park, I’m performing street theatre here for National Secretaries Day, a feminist play highlighting bias, equal rights and equal pay. My father saw the end of my scene, years later we saw Occupy camped out here. Sheridan Circle, around embassies we hold … More to Washington DC by Ruth Ticktin
