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…
I first learned of J.M. Sidorova’s The Witch of Prague because we share a love for the famed Unicorn Tapestries, a set of unicorn tapestries woven more than 500 years ago, depicting a medieval unicorn hunt. In Sidorova’s novel,…
Christopher Bowen’s forthcoming flash fiction collection, The Things They Forgot to Tell Us When They Left from Cervena Barva Press, features twenty-five compellingly crafted and vastly different stories that all explore vividly realized settings across the American Midwest. Writing…
In Jaclyn Desforges’s aptly titled short story collection, Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026), we meet a wide cast of characters that include a ghost, a tarantula caretaker, a mother with five unexplained and well-behaved babies, and telepathic…
For as long as I’ve been around the indie lit world, Aaron Burch has been a steady source of positive energy and endless creativity. Over the past fifteen(ish) years, he’s been responsible for so much inventive writing—his own, of…
Genre-bending is a not a new concept, yet it seems to have recently made its way into the mainstream (at least, as far as TikTok goes) with works such as the memoir/fantasy/gothic/horror In the Dream House by Carmen Maria…
By Ryan Habermeyer • My mom used to say I hated getting my hair cut. I would cringe, squirm, fidget, even cry out of an irrational fear the barber might cut my ears off. I was allergic to idleness,…
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…
