author spotlight: ashley huyge
There is no easy cure for depression. It feels like an experiment, trying to balance eating right, and exercising, and getting 8 hours of sleep, and sunshine, and journaling, and medicine. It’s frustrating and scary exploring what works, or doesn’t work. I wondered how far someone would go, what would they risk to try and […]
author spotlight: zanny stohl
I think the most challenging thing about writing an unreliable narrator—and writing in general, really—can be when you’re too worried about being misinterpreted. […] Trust is the crux of it—you have to trust yourself as an artist to effectively share your vision, and you have to trust your reader’s intelligence. That takes practice.
author spotlight: rj aurand
Life is in its own way a series of little deaths, and shedding these skins/releasing older versions of ourselves is what makes it possible for us to change and grow. I’m not the same person I was fifteen years ago, or even five years ago—and that’s the way things should be.
author spotlight: rachel henderson
Even when there’s zero physical danger, having something unwanted follow you around—gradually consuming your time/energy/strength to such a degree that you relent and accept it—can be real life-wrecker. Maybe there’s a very good reason for accepting it. Maybe you’ve got no other choice but to accept it. Maybe you’re just exhausted. But the end result […]
author spotlight: sasha ravitch
The Book of Revelation has colonized my symbolic language without a clear or definable provenance. But can you write about queerness, about monstrous desire, about obsession, without calling the Devil or the Woman of the Apocalypse?
author spotlight: chloe ho
Subject matter naturally informs structure, definitely. Free verse comes the most natural for me, and I feel that it particularly suits “still life of womb” precisely because it’s so loose, so unstructured. You re not particularly coherent when you’re curled up immobile and trying to not literally cry out in pain, after all.
author spotlight: hannah madden
In my story, I gave the garbage disposal a voice because it can often feel like we’re being taken from more than we are willing to give up. At first it feels harmless, but as we are whittled down more and more, we realize that something has to change.
the dead man
The Dead Man rachel henderson There is a man at my office who I know, for a fact, to be dead. He showed up four months ago, right after our latest schmooze-n-booze holiday party (the one where Penny Jones spilled red wine into Cynthia Hutchinson’s designer purse, vomited, and burst into tears) and he’s been […]
glass girl
Glass Girl ashley huyge I never wanted children of my own. I struggled so much to take care of myself that I couldn’t be responsible for another person. I used to wake up in the morning, shivering in anticipatory grief; an unholy breeze whistling through my ribs, filling my body with emptiness. I didn’t have […]
still life of womb
still life of womb chloe ho ghost-girl crumple of the petalled body its crush, its bloat, its crying swell, the supine spine snapped to its stark stretched husk that cavity that cavalier horror of the body, its theology belonging to a carved craven beast salivating, strewn into a pucker of blooming animal agony still panting […]