How should a French bulldog be? This question preoccupies The Oldest Bitch Alive, the absurd, oddly wise debut novel by Morgan Day. Bizarrely funny and philosophical, the novel’s unlikely protagonists take on grandiose questions of form, materiality, and what…
I owe Katie (the poet and essayist Catherine Pierce) five dollars. I have owed her five dollars since the autumn of 2000, when I inadvertently stiffed her the money after having a very inexpensive breakfast together. We were both…
When I first met A. Kendra Greene at Florida Atlantic University’s Off the Page literary series, her energetic presence made it almost impossible to picture her sitting quietly at a desk writing. During our follow-up video call, she confirmed…
By Darryl J. Benjamin • Many contemporary short stories begin with what I’ve been calling “the mountaintop move”: an omniscient, panoramic first paragraph that orients us in time, space, and tone, followed by a second paragraph that drops us…
Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney founded Rose Metal Press in 2006 “to support innovative hybrid writing and provide a publishing home for transgressive, unusual, and hard-to-categorize literary projects.” In addition to exciting hybrid work, the press has published an…
Memoir asks writers to transform the messy materials of lived experience into structured stories that illuminate larger questions of identity, loss, resilience, and meaning. In this conversation, Renee Gilmore (Wayfinding(opens in new tab), Trio House Press, 2025) and Kelly…
When Elaine U. Cho’s debut novel, Ocean’s Godori(opens in new tab), came out in 2024, I had the privilege of being in conversation with her for the Washington, DC stop of her book tour, as well as for its…
Essay by Shara Kronmal • I first met Diane Josefowicz through Necessary Fiction where she serves as book reviews editor when she edited a review of mine. Diane is one of those editors you love to work with, one…
By M. Beth Zimmer • “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Henry James, The Art of Fiction During the first month of my first semester as an MFA student,…
A few years ago, when I was developing a graduate course on flash writing, I knew that I wanted to include Beth Ann Fennelly’s Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (2017) because it showed how brevity helps language to draw…
