My father suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease. “Suffered” isn’t quite accurate, though. Dad fell gently into the embrace of Alzheimer’s. During the years between the diagnosis and his death, only once did I see him frustrated by his inability to…
When we got to Kituwah it was dark. The mound-building ceremony was long over, the cars driven in and out of the field were gone, the little road empty and twisting through the mountains. Mom got out of the…
Poioumenon for my son “Can I ask you a personal question?” I asked. “About kids?” It was early 2017. I was in the passenger seat and my friend, G., was driving. She’d been my lit professor back when I…
In five years, on Space Mountain, we’ll blast asteroids to clear a path through the Milky Way, buckle up and hold our breath as we journey into the void of darkness. When we disembark through adverts of outer space…
By Peter Selgin • The older I get, the less interested I am as both reader and writer in things are that—or that feel—“made up.” Put in positive terms, the more attracted I am to stories and novels that…
They staggered, stunned, into the fall, she and Teddy making giant vats of pasta and vegetarian burrito dinners to feed twenty-five, inviting home everyone they knew to eat, to drink, to stay over, please, we have a futon and…
Everyone expected me to take my mother’s eyes. I had a right to take what I wanted, and her eyes were legendary. She’d taken them from her mother, and her mother had taken them from her mother. They were…
By Amber Wheeler Bacon • In the third draft of my novel, I’m still messing with structure. It feels like I’ll always be messing with structure. To experiment, I’ve tried copying the frameworks of different novels I love: Purity…
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
By Candace Walsh • In Jess Walter’s “Famous Actor” and Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” the authors use intertextuality as a structural element: a rhythmic, outside-of-time interruption of the chronological main story. Simultaneously, each of the female narrators…
