By Evan Calbi • I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an…
I first met Marty Ross-Dolen in spring of 2020 at an online introductory event for Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) MFA in Writing program. We’d each been accepted into VCFA’s Creative Nonfiction program, with goals of working on…
Essay by Sonja Srinivasan • Russian writers never shy away from penetrating insight into all facets of the human psyche: we read Russian novels precisely because they “go there.” There is also a strong dramatic element to much of…
By Ayşe Papatya Bucak • I imagine many of us have heard the common textbook wisdom that story is dictated by a character’s desire, plot is generated by what characters do in the face of their desire, and endings occur…
Common descriptors from readers of working-class literature tend to devolve into one of two fields. The first, with words like “gruff,” “gritty,” and “crass,” tend to simply describe the economically depressed settings and the hardscrabble lives of the characters…
Tim Weed’s third novel, The Afterlife Project, follows Dr. Q and her team of scientists as they travel through a world devastated by climate change and illness, looking for any sign of a woman still able to reproduce, after…
The internal logic of a speculative fiction story has a strange mathematics of its own. The rules of its world deviate from the rules we follow, but are usually consistent with our expectations about how rules operate. More than…
By Alexa Will • 1867–nonfiction, noun. Prose writing other than fiction, such as history, biography, and reference works, esp. that which is concerned with the narrative depiction of factual events; the genre comprising this. —From Oxford English Dictionary This…
In Smokebirds, Daniel Breyer narrates a story which uniquely blends fiction with autobiography. We meet the Peterson family, the lucky few Northern Californians that, in the year 2028, are rich enough to flee the annual fire season for their…
Laura Stanfill is the founder of Forest Avenue Press, a small press based in Portland, Oregon. With her leadership, the press has acquired and published books recognized by major awards like the Nautilus Book Award, New American Voices, and…
