They called the children night commuters. You used to find this strange, writing fundraising copy at your desk in Sydney, trying to squeeze emotion from dry UN reports. For you, the term conjured up Dickensian images of children going…
By Jen Craven • Here’s a truth many writers (myself included) sometimes resist: if your characters aren’t suffering, your story probably is. In the world of suspense fiction, suffering isn’t just dramatic flair—it’s fuel. It’s what cranks the tension,…
A stowaway made the long trip to the United States with my mother, father, and me. Unbidden and unticketed, tucked into the pocket of a gray overcoat, chilled by early fall’s ocean breezes, pushed back by hope—grief nevertheless made…
Bedtime in first grade is finger jelly and sock lint. Vaseline rubbed on my bloody, split, vellum-dry knuckles; hands cocooned in white Nike gym socks, wrapped on my wrist with scrunchies. I am told to sleep. Wake up for…
By Emilee Prado • Toni Morrison’s novel Love grapples with the vast, mutable, apparitional human experience that we compress into that four-letter word taken as the title. For those who have fallen in and out of romantic love, for…
By Gerry Stanek • James Baldwin finds a unique way to interiority in “Sonny’s Blues,” which was first published in 1957. I say unique, because I’m not sure there’s another story like this; a character’s thoughts and perceptions are…
By Nancy Au • In the title essay of The Empathy Exams, a 2014 collection by Leslie Jamison, the author writes about her time as a medical actor playing Stephanie Phillips, a fictional patient who experiences seizures as a…
