Blog
Michael Dinkel
October 19, 2020Michael Dinkel studied art and creative writing at St. John’s University in Collegeville Minnesota and at the University of Alaska in Anchorage where he lives.
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Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade
October 19, 2020Brenda Miller teaches in the MFA program at Western Washington University, and Julie Marie Wade teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.
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Susan Jackson Rodgers
October 19, 2020Susan Jackson Rodgers is the author of a novel, This Must Be the Place, and two story collections, The Trouble With You Is and Ex-Boyfriend on Aisle 6.
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Micah Perks
October 19, 2020Micah Perks is the author of a short story collection, a memoir and two novels.
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Molly Rideout
October 19, 2020Molly Rideout is a Midwestern writer whose work has appeared in Fourth Genre, Mississippi Review, Tampa Review, and Bluestem.
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Megan Harlan
October 19, 2020Megan Harlan is the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the 2019 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and published by the University of Georgia Press in Fall 2020.
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The Hart
| October 19, 2020 He steps out of the grass like a god. Thick necked to hold up east-to-west spanning antlers which in turn hold up the entire sky, three clouds and a Northern Harrier. I am caught off guard by his emergence, how he comes from nothing into everything.
Grandmom's House
| October 12, 2020 Our house was like a radio playing six stations at once: brothers arguing, piano keys banging, lawn mowing, blender blending, phone ringing, dog barking. Stepping inside Grandmom's house was like that moment at the YMCA swimming pool when you duck your head under water and all the noise gets muffled and feels far away.
Before the First Frost
| October 5, 2020 The yellowed aspen leaves shimmer like so many pennies against the setting sun, almost frantic in their last-dance enthusiasm for the night's forecasted hard frost. Your neighbor's forgotten garden has little to offer: one ghostly chalk-colored squash that just a few weeks ago was a cheerful orange trumpet blossom.
The Cadence of an Individual Heartbeat
| October 2, 2020 “I’ve always been a hungry reader,” Rebecca McClanahan writes in her newest collection In the Key of New York. Me too. And I often read as I eat: I gobble. But, as with certain transcendent meals, there are books that, from the first page, ask that I slow down and savor: hold the book carefully, turn the pages mindfully. McClanahan’s memoir-in-essays is just such a book. As I read, I found myself asking what qualities define writing that both enlivens and stills the reader.
Keywords: book review
Waste Not
| September 28, 2020 My parents are old and inert, their bones want only to be still. There's not much we can do for entertainment, except sit here, and then for a change of scenery, sit there.
Flicker
| September 21, 2020 I watch her snap the skateboard's tail to the street just like her boyfriend does, mount it, one foot at a time, steady herself and roll to the corner. Her right foot steps off, kicks twice, three times, she accelerates, wheels click on the sidewalk's seams.
Mom's Nighty
| September 14, 2020 I started wearing Mom's nighty after she died. “You don’t remember?” Grandma asks. “You used to spray her perfume on ribbons.” Pink fills my skull. Satin dipped in distilled forget-me-nots. Little boy fingers tying bracelets around small wrists.
Black Hair Matters
| September 7, 2020 My toddler grandchild sits still on the carpet between my knees, her back cushioned against the sofa. I consider detangling her springy hair coils. Should I fix her hair similar to the way my mother did mine? Most school mornings, she would twist my bristly hair into a short, thick braid.
Bathing (Again) at 9600 Feet
| September 2, 2020 Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, watcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar.
Keywords: book review
The Greatest Unease
| August 31, 2020 Flying over deep water in the inscrutable dark. We are doomed. I hear the pilot slur his words. My neck is stiff. I feel a headache coming on. My legs begin to cramp. The anxiety pills make me nauseous. The line for the loo snakes down the aisle. The plane begins to jerk.
He Gave Her the Honey-Sweet Berry of the Pomegranate to Eat
| August 24, 2020 In the produce aisle, I consider genetically modified pomegranates: ruby globes that overflow my palms cupped together. But the one I choose to bring home I pluck with my thumb and forefinger. Pitted and tawny, my pomegranate looks like what it is: a seed pod . . .
Your Dad's Not Here
| August 17, 2020 “You don’t have to go in, Mom,” my son said through the phone. I was standing on the porch, holding the phone, and knocking on his dad’s door.
Fog
| August 10, 2020 Low-slung fog canvasses our narrow valley. The film of haze blurs the trees, rubbing out their distinct edges. As if the forest is fine print and I am trying to read it without my glasses. This morning I awoke thinking of my old brown mare . . .
Relighting the Candle
| August 3, 2020 In Sonja Livingston’s The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion, the author is drawn to explore her youth in the Catholic Church. She longs to return to the intertwined experience of childhood and faith when the two were inseparable.
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Footfall
| August 3, 2020 The black, four-inch stilettos with pointed toes were a gift, so I tried to be polite as I thought of a kind way to say: Hell no. Then I looked at his happy, hopeful face and knew I would learn to wear them.
Convergence
| July 27, 2020 Rain falling on the cabin roof isn't music or balm or metaphor. For two days and two nights, it's nothing but water saturating the stairs I descend in the dark to go to the outhouse while my husband sleeps.
False Spring
| July 20, 2020 Fourteen cedar waxwings cluster in the apple tree. The bright February sun sharpens their dark masks and perky crests as they bounce from branch to branch devouring the rotted fruit beakful by beakful until the apples hang in tatters.
Two Forms
| July 13, 2020 Henry Moore's bronze sculpture Large Two Forms sits like a pair of discarded vertebrae on the pavement outside the art gallery, where small children clamber and slide through its round openings on their bellies and backsides. Teenagers, too, are drawn to these primal shapes.
How to Save Yourself in Nine Steps
| July 9, 2020 I was so immersed in Judith Sara Gelt’s memoir Reckless Steps Toward Sanity about her life growing up in a Denver neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s that I kept entering a time warp. It’s not fair to Gelt’s story that my own memories of living during the same era kept flashing through. Gelt sent my senses hurdling back in time with the mention of TV shows or magazines, filling my head with jingles and laugh tracks and the sound of Stevie Wonder’s voice.
Keywords: book review
Stream
| July 6, 2020 I want to believe that the first song I heard came from my mother. She sang "Moon River" while putting me to bed. I'm crossing you in style someday. What was that river of the moon?
Airview
| June 29, 2020 My father decided he wanted an airview, a photograph of our summer home taken from a tiny plane on a clear, bright day. In these pictures, the skies are always blue and the houses have been carefully groomed like children for class pictures . . .
Fear of Poetry
| June 22, 2020 My beloved friend dying of cancer said she’d been afraid of poetry for too long. I suggested a poetry party. A university lecturer, Susan was inspirational whether she was talking Jane Austen or freshman composition.
