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The Fractured Mirror: Tell Me the Biggest One You Know
By Edward Karshner My day job is researching the intersection of time and folklore. I study how stories reveal an understanding of ourselves in time. Do we flounder in, what David Southwell calls, “the warped gravity” of nostalgia? Or do we founder under the crushing weight of fatalism? In folktales, I’m always looking for a…
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The Mayor of Leicester
Fiction by Julia Watson The mayor had gone missing. Nobody had seen him in over a week. In a town as far-reaching as Leicester, it was custom to spot one’s neighbor only at the Ingles. The land was large, well-soiled. Horses and goats and chickens mingled and mozied across fenced hillocks, while their keepers kept…
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Yesterday is Today
A Review of Leah Angstman’s Shoot the Horses First By Alex Carrigan In her new short story collection Shoot the Horses First, Leah Angstman compiles sixteen stories set across America’s past, primarily by exploring the lives of putatively unexceptional figures in the 19th century. Angstman’s tales transcend time and place to present stories to which…
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Healthy Habits: A Parable
By Valerie Peralta Once upon a time there was an ordinary woman who wanted two things. She longed for a body that mirrored the svelte images she saw clad in bikinis on Instagram. A flat stomach flanked by taut arms and legs. And she desired to pen poems and stories that captivated the hearts and…
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The Girl on the Unicycle
Autofiction by Jay Parr CN for racism and hate speech. Me and Jimmy was riding bikes first time I seen her. It was last weekend of summer break, school starting back up in a couple days hanging over our heads like a goddamn prison sentence, so we was living life, reckless, desperate, like we ain’t…
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Country Craft – Let’s talk: An Approach to Writing Conversations
By Stuart Phillips Late summer we transplanted thirty hosta from our front walkway, wheeling barrowsful to more welcoming spots in the shade. As my wife and I planned the new plantings, we went round and round with competing combinations before we realized that what she really wanted was a lavender hedge, and what I really…
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Mother/Mutt
Creative Nonfiction by Annie Marhefka Our mother rescued a mutt after we all grew up and left her. She had been abandoned, she said. The mutt had, too. I had escaped to college; my brothers found jobs that afforded their exit, and poof, like ants scattering, my mother joked with a tender smile. I guess…
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The Pie Was a Final Draft: Good Grief
By Michaella Thornton Lately, it’s been harder to gather my resolve and joy to bake or write much. I won’t lie; I’ve been struggling through a slow-moving season of pain and endurance, and that’s okay, too. My focus lately has been on: Of trying so hard to remember good enough is great, Rome wasn’t built…
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That Bottle Green Phone Call, 2006
Fiction by Elissa Field It’s expensive to get the phone activated for international roaming but, late after midnight – so late that I have to ask the hotel clerk to unlock the door with the distinct risk I might not be let in again before dawn – I’d got desperate with waiting for news and…
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Biracial in the Pine Barrens
A Review of Davon Loeb’s The In-Betweens By Maud Lavin The In-Betweens (WVUP, 2023) is Davon Loeb’s memoir of growing up as a biracial boy mainly with his Black mother, stepfather, and half siblings in the Pine Barrens, along with some summers in a small town in Alabama with his Black cousins, and infrequent visits…