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AITA: Am I the Asshole For Not Walking Away From Omelas
Creative Nonfiction by Paul Crenshaw I, (51 M), was born and raised in Omelas, and have lived here all my life. It is a beautiful town, bright-towered by the sea. The Festival of Summer arrives and the bells ring and under the great avenues of trees the stately processions begin. There is music, dancing. Arts…
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I Wrestle, I Rant But Writing Has Agency And Completes What I Can’t
By Camille U. Adams Writing isn’t salvation. It doesn’t console. Writing isn’t alleviation. It doesn’t cajole trauma into being meaning. It isn’t healing. Writing isn’t freeing. Putting words on the page doesn’t seal the escaped-from yesterday. Not from pain that lingers, flares, and that chronically plagues. Penning words doesn’t rescue from trauma’s effects. Macbook on…
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Where All the Heat Is
Fiction by Hannah Hollifield You start your period twenty minutes before Vacation Bible School. Your momma comes into the bathroom, hands you a tampon, and shows you how to stick the blue applicator in and send the cotton up. Then she hurries and y’all have to leave because the women’s study group is cooking the…
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Love in the Blood-Stained Blue Dot
A Review of Bobby Mathews, Magic City Blues By Wiley Reiver Alabama author Bobby Mathews has followed up his well-regarded 2022 release Living the Gimmick with the newly released Magic City Blues, a novel that, for all his first book’s strengths, reveals how dramatically Mathews is growing as a crime author. Blues depends on Mathews’…
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Those Little Rising Lights
By Cathy Ulrich Every morning, it’s still dark when I wake. Even in the longest days of summer, I wake before the sun. In the dark, I can see the lights from town. The airport sits atop the horizon, all red and white blinking lights. Without my glasses, they are blur and shimmer, not quite…
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TEXT ME BACK
Creative Nonfiction by Sara Gerot He left during the beginning of the COVID lockdown. I didn’t beg him to come back, which was the usual game wherein I would plead, apologize, and cajole. Though, to be honest, I did for the first couple days, but gave up, which was new. Back when I played the…
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Where My Words Come From
By Damon McKinney Growing up on a reservation in central Oklahoma wasn’t inspiring, at least at the time. Having Sunday dinners at my grandparents simple two-bedroom home wasn’t either, nor were the late nights at the family honkytonk, or running the streets of my hometown. Yet, those core memories are the anchors of my work.…
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I Know a Man
CNF by Kevin Brennan I know a man who will do things for you. Things you don’t want to do. I know a man who will get down and dirty. He’ll gird up for it, he’ll suit himself in hazmat skin. He’ll strap on goggles. He’ll tape his pant legs to his rubber boots. He’ll…
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The Road Never Ends
A Review of Craig Rodgers’ Drift By Eric Williams When reading Craig Rodgers’s forthcoming novel, Drift (Death of Print, 2023), I kept wanting to flip back to the inside cover and consult a map of the late capitalist America he writes about so sharply. Like the imaginary worlds documented at the front of paperback fantasy…
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Solving for X: Word Problems for Novelists
By Tiffany Quay Tyson In elementary school, I sometimes[1] read novels behind my math book. The teacher would write multiplication tables on the chalkboard or drone on about common denominators while I was fully immersed in some story by Lois Duncan or Louise Fitzhugh or Judy Blume. What was the point of memorizing multiplication tables…