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Every Which Way, the Wind
Fiction by Pat Foran My Dear Frontal Passage Friend, We’re having trouble hearing each other. Is it windy where you are? Is it raining, Gene Kelly raining, where you are? Is there a fire in the back of your head, burning from the back to the front, perpetually? Is it like falling falling falling without […]
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The Pie Was a Final Draft: On Baking a Bad Cake
by Michaella Thornton “Words are my magic, antiproverbial cake. I eat it, and I still have it.” — Ursula K. Le Guin For my daughter’s fifth birthday this spring, I didn’t special order her birthday cake but rather baked her cake from-scratch. I’ve fallen into an unplanned rhythm of baking her cakes on odd-numbered years […]
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Three Deer Yesterday While Driving
Fiction by Donald Ryan Headlights interrupted the young buck’s breakfast. With his head alert and body frozen, his close-cropped, sprouting points were as clear as a positive afterimage on the first blink. As the road veered, the beams, straight with the car’s speed of light, yielded the trance. He thawed. Another blink. He was gone, […]
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Country Craft: The Writer’s Knife
by Stuart Phillips The spring earth thawed and yielded eight slabs of New York Bluestone from my front yard, remnants of an 1820s walkway from when neighbors visited neighbors. Sixteen hundred pounds, looking for a new home. I decided to use them for steps in the little slope by our grapevines. Although well-traveled it is […]
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If a tree starts crying for help in the middle of a forest, but it’s at a frequency too high for human ears to hear, did it really cry?
Fiction by Kirsten Reneau Yes, because we can actually see the acid tears that the roots secrete up through the soil, slicing their way through the hard dirt, physical markers of the call for help. Yes, because it is very likely people who are making the tree cry – well, the people or maybe termites […]
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Beauty in the Bones
An excerpt from In the Lonely Backwater Fiction by Valerie Nieman The kitchen at the Plantation wasn’t anything like the rest of the house. No displays of artificial flowers or gold-painted Valentine cupids holding up lamps, no bright-colored couches or polished furniture. It was a working place, my grandmother’s office. We had moved back from […]
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Not Everything is Gone Forever
by Gabino Iglesias I love many things about writing, and one of them is that, once something is done, you can always go back and reread a line, a paragraph, a chapter. Life moves at breakneck speed and everything—life, love, happiness, depression, friendship, pleasure—is ephemeral, but once a book is in print, once it’s a […]
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Crows in the Barleyfield
Fiction by C.W. Blackwell Adelia hides in the tall barley and watches the old man pace at the edge of the field. He looks lost and unsteady on his feet, sunlight glinting from his thick drugstore eyeglasses. He shouts her name with his hands laced atop his head as if the pose could somehow carry […]
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WHY I AM NOT (and am)
by Jane Hammons Decades ago, when I was earning a teaching credential at UC Berkeley, I was assigned a class of graduating high school seniors who were not going to graduate unless they passed a writing proficiency exam. Students from many backgrounds and dispositions filled this classroom: the school bully; depressed students unable to complete […]