SARAN WRAP MAGIC: An Interview with Amy Cipolla Barnes
Where neighbors handed warm zucchini bread over fences, a 10-year-old drove me around a farm in a rusty truck, and I most likely met a serial killer.
HOBBIES by Robbie Herbst
She’d say that it’s not enough for a man to create a life; he must sustain it. Protect it. Sufficiency means safety. It means contingencies. It means insurance.
IF SHE WERE AN ANIMAL by Cameron Darc
He fondles a piece of charcoal and looks at me before touching the paper. The line makes a limp imitation of a spine. A nose appears.
ELAINE SUN, KRAMER MOON, GEORGE RISING: An Interview with Donald Quist
I'm still thinking through and discovering all Seinfeld has, and will, teach me about creative writing, particularly poetic movement, and/or MacGuffins as a narrative technique.
COMPANY MAN by Jeff Karr
The lord’s light is a fathomless null. Sometimes you’re afforded a glimpse and it’s a tunnel on the other side of which you crawl on the accordioned car’s ceiling.
SMOKE AND FISH by Uyen P. Dang
At first everyone blamed the smoke on the war, then the steel plant, and, finally, the water. But Ong Hai says it’s not water but grief at the bottom of the sea.
X-R-A-Y SPECS: BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS
Like Terminators or cockroaches, dive bars will always rise again. They’re one of the last bastions of organic and spontaneous social connection.
AT THE VERY CENTER OF YOU IS NOTHING by Alice M.
The masks were thin, pliable. They attached to her skin, seamless. They emoted for her, always appropriate, guaranteed to fetch the reaction she wanted.
HEARTLESS by Alex Sullivan
Those twins out of St. Paul are doing some live podcast tour about living without lungs but that’s easy, the no lungs thing.
THE WORLD IS AN UNCOMFORTABLE PLACE: An Interview with Tara Campbell
I just kept doing it until I had over three dozen paradoxes saved on my computer. Some of them allowed themselves to be shaped into publishable stories.