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Mr. William
Fiction by Ali Pensky Mr. William is coming over tonight. I’m making spaghetti, spicy meatballs, and garlic bread. I have a bottle of red wine, but I always mess up opening the bottle. I’m sure Mr. William won’t mind. Mr. William says the hardwood floors are one of the most expensive things in the gallery.…
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The Pie Was a Final Draft: Holding Up the Mirror
By Michaella Thornton At the end of May, I traveled to Hermann, Missouri to hang out with three of my closest girlfriends, women I’ve known since I was a teenager. Somehow I’ve kept these friends for almost 30 years. One of us lives near Portland, Maine. The rest of us reside in or near Kansas…
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Purebred Hustle
Fiction by Evan Morgan Williams They arrested Benito Luna in the principal’s office Friday afternoon. Arrested him for the murder of Jontiel Robinson the week before, the corner of Yamhill and 199th, the apartments beneath the tall firs. To be clear, there would be no flowers left on the sidewalk for Jontiel Robinson—such a punk,…
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Fiction is Trouble
By Jim Roberts The late Chuck Kinder1—creative writing teacher to Michael Chabon and close friend to Raymond Carver—once told me that “fiction is trouble.” This was sometime around 1990 when I was just starting to write seriously, having fantasized about it for over twenty years, imagining myself vaulting the wall of my gray corporate cubicle…
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The Psychic’s Apprentice
Fiction by Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey The boy needs a job. It’s unfortunate, really. Really, what he’d like to do is sit on a park bench and watch the leaves change from green to ghost. But this foolishness is out of the question, so the boy gets on his computer and loads Craigslist recent job postings. The…
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Country Craft: Parking Your Writing
By Stuart Phillips My friend, Susan Muaddi Darraj, is a proselytizing member of the five a.m. writers’ club. Frankly, not a club I’ve ever had any interest in joining. Instead, I have contented myself by building my “writing life” on the fringes of my “real” life. And there’s the rub. I tell myself I will…
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Anti-Depression
CREATIVE NONFICTION BY ASHLEY ESPINOZA I don’t want to write about my depression. I don’t want to make sense of it. Follow it around a path, a spiral. I don’t want to find the source of it. I want to wallow. To sink deep into it. I want to let it engulf me. To take…
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Suing for Peace
By Russell W. Johnson When I’m not busy trying to be a writer, I make my living as a lawyer. I know, I know. How original? Another John Grisham wannabe. I admit it has become kind of a cliche given the number of attorneys turned author. Scott Turow, Richard North Patterson, Meg Gardiner, Theodora Goss,…
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Artful Academics: What Are The Odds?
By BrandY Renee McCann I have a math lesson. Wait—bear with me, please! In an introductory statistics class in graduate school (also taught in 4th grade math in the state of Virginia), one of the first principles we learned is that two unrelated things can be correlated, or seem to have a relationship with one…