Each year we are privileged to be able to nominate work for anthologies and awards including Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers (Best Debut Short Stories), and…
By Katy Scarlett • In 1979, Rosalind Krauss published her now-famous essay “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” which explored how new forms of three-dimensional art-making borrowed from sculpture, monument, architecture, interior and landscape design. She writes, “as the 1960s began…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
Elvia Wilk’s nonfiction debut, Death by Landscape (out July 19, 2022, via Soft Skull Press), investigates how we might displace human-centered narratives. Through literary immersion, research into spectral encounters and virtual reality, reflections on her own physicality, and first-person…
In The Witch Hare, a witch’s familiar—a curious young hare—goes on a globe-hopping journey to help her sad companion learn to live life to the fullest again. As the hare ventures out to seek adventure, she shows the witch…
In Hollows, Tommy Dean’s first full-length flash fiction collection, the narrative lens captures everyday humans at a pivotal moment, where one decision will change everything. Three boys enter the woods carrying a gun. A divorced teacher borrows money from…
The nature center has five baby sea turtles, each in their own 20-gallon saltwater tank. When I see them for the first time, I have to fight the impulse to plunge my hand into the water and scoop one…
Content Warnings—death by suicide, gun violence One morning a science teacher at the high school found the window of his lab smashed and a dead possum on the floor. In my memory, the teacher is all gray: gray pants…
We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…
January Two old men used to live next to each other. One is dead and the other is dying. The one that is dead planted a garden. The one that is dying is my father. My father sits in…
My parents had just decided to move back to Indiana when my father had his first stroke. The eight months that followed were about doctors’ visits, medication, two more strokes, cancer, and, inevitably, end-of-life decisions.
Finally, a funeral.
My mother bore it all with a stoic sadness and let me make most of the decisions. I accepted that responsibility and never felt the stress of it all until later. Moreover I did not mourn my father until weeks after he’d died and I began to write “Eight Months” and other stories.
Writing is and has always been a means of clarification for me. In the silence of my own thoughts and words, it is as if I am hypnotized and filing papers into an order that is logical and tidy. Then I can move on.
I do it as if I am someone else, an observer who while empathic is watching a movie about someone else.
I wrote “Eight Months” in one sitting and like everything I write, whether it is poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, I rewrite constantly. Leaving it for a while and then returning until I am only changing a word here and there.
I write for myself and although I’ve been fortunate enough to have been published many times, publication is never a goal. I attend no writer’s groups, have no writing degree, and beyond Facebook (which I joined unwillingly, at my daughter’s insistence that I needed a “social presence”), have no website.
I am always humbled and frankly a little surprised when someone finds value in my work. And I always hope that reading it helps someone get through their day as much as writing it helped me get through mine.
GILBERT ARZOLA is the second son of a former migrant worker, living in Valparaiso, Indiana, with his wife, Linda. His family arrived in spring of 1954 in North Judson, Indiana, when he was three, to work in the fields, deciding to settle there. Gilbert was named Poet of the Year by Passager Press in 2019. His first book of poetry, Prayers of Little Consequence, was published in 2020. Rattle published a chapbook, The Death of a Migrant Worker, in September of 2021 after selecting it from two thousand submissions for their annual prize. His story “Losers Walk,” originally published by Chaleur Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2018. A poem called “Richard Smith” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year. Gilbert’s work has appeared in Whetstone Magazine, Palabra, Crosswinds Poetry, The Tipton Poetry Journal, Passager, SLAB, and The Elysian Review, among others. Find him on Facebook @ArzolaGilbert.
