Move Over by Lydia Weaver
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
It was the typo in a blurb on the jacket that made me buy the book, the book I’d avoided for years. It sat on a table in the Strand, a bit tattered, a bit stained, with that typo…
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,…
There were forty-nine white roses in the arrangement nearest to me. I counted them twice. Someone at the florist wasn’t paying attention. The front-row chairs were upholstered in dark red velvet, which was thinning at the edges. I rolled…
i. denial I can’t admit I’ve fucked up. Not to myself, and certainly not to anyone else. It simply doesn’t track. I’m the responsible one in the family. The reliable one. The sober one. Rock steady, perpetually calm…
i. Many things about the new wife I had married worried me. Presently, I feared that marriage had turned her timid. She sat at the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap. Her glasses were…
Where is your father? He’s dead, Mommy. She sobs over the piece of frosted layer cake the memory care center has given her as a welcome celebration. She forks bites of chocolate and thick white buttercream into her…
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…