Mother-Writers Are Writers
By Ann Guy • Wading through a sea of blond hair and blue eyes every day felt normal in the tiny, rural Western Michigan town where I grew up. So did biking to the public library and loading up…
Tag: Identity
The Woman Who Looked Like Patti Smith by Catherine McNamara
It’s an ugly thing to follow a woman along the street but this is what I did. She was a copy of Patti Smith during the early Mapplethorpe years, before Horses and Mineshaft and all the BDSM, when they…
Archipelagic by Elisabeth Vasquez Hein
Is your mom a mail-order bride? I was once asked by a classmate in fourth grade while we sat at our desks making fake nails out of Elmer’s glue squeezed into the hollow of our plastic rulers. No, of…
Empty Nester by Jennifer Lewis
I hold the things I need in my arms. Since the pandemic, I don’t use a basket. Today, I’m cradling a bottle of Advil gel caps, blue mascara, and a ginger lemon kombucha. Customer service associate needed in the…
Analysis of a Fugue by Annabel Li
/fjuːɡ/ noun A piece of music popularized during the Baroque period in which a primary melody, or subject, is introduced by one voice, then systematically passed to and developed between others in a polyphonic, intertwined texture. 1. Subject…
Interview: Hanna Pylväinen
In celebration of the inaugural Novelette Print Prize, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponded via email with Guest Judge Hanna Pylväinen, author of The End of Drum-Time. In the resulting interview below, they discuss choosing point of view, honoring…
Where Am I From? by Amber Wong
“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” —Alasdair MacIntyre No one would talk. It was as…
Penny, Barbara, Ruth, Irene by Amy Grote
After three gin martinis, my mother-in-law spits out her teeth. “You’re a cannonball with a credit card,” she hisses. Her dentures glisten like pearls in her palm. Never, she likes to remind me, did she foresee her sweet son…
Imagining Mother, an American Exorcism by A. Sandosharaj
1. When my mother first came to the United States in the 1970s, she was disappointed by the treeless tenements my father brought her to. She had grown up on a bustling island beach in what was then called…
There Are Hundreds of Beautiful Asian Women Waiting to Meet You by Tessa Yang
Later, you’ll claim there were warnings. Unusual bird calls. That double rainbow you snapped for Instagram. A knowing gleam in the eyes of the hibachi waitress. To make sense of a thing is to make it your own, and…
