Stephanie Pushaw I have a long-standing rule: my family does not read my work before it’s published. Not drafts, not half-formed ideas, absolutely not the version tantalizingly close to the finish line where I’m still bargaining with sentences, flipping words around like tongue-tied cherry-stems. Even after publication, I prefer to keep my work at a careful distance. It feels both embarrassing and raw to promote it. If someone asks what I’ve written, I’ll say the truth: i t’s

Padraig Parkinson Like many people I know, I’ve spent way too much of my adult years watching sport on tv whilst never participating in any sporting activity unless walking to the fridge for another beer qualifies. The good news is, the more you watch, the more you’ll witness triumphs of individuals or teams against huge odds. This is particularly good if you’re Irish. The Irish love an underdog, probably because we had 800 years of oppression from the British to endure. (If

Stephanie Pushaw I didn’t finish the book at a writer’s retreat. I didn’t finish it in a sun-drenched café or an isolated cabin or under the creative haze of mushrooms in the desert. Oh, I’d “worked” on it in all those places, in seven cities, on three continents. I told people I was “writing a novel” for ten years. Come dissertation time, I finished it in four weeks. I finished it in Portland, in the last gasps of winter, in that uncinematic type of rain specific to the Paci

Stephanie Pushaw I grew up at the edges of fire country. The kind of edges you don’t realize are edges until they’re illuminated, a...

Stephanie Pushaw Barrier Island The first three months I lived in Galveston, Texas, I couldn’t leave the house in the daytime. From June...

Stephanie Pushaw I grew up semi-wild, drawn to fringes. Microcosms in the soft humid forests of Missouri: a massive downed oak tree, its...

Elizabeth Boudreau There are a lot of days when my body looks strange in the mirror, as if someone made a suit out of something else’s...

Stephanie Pushaw I write this at the close of my third year of a PhD program in literature and creative writing in Houston, Texas, a city...

Ara Hagopian I’m on drugs and I am desperate to close this gap between us. The gap between reader and writer is too wide. It feels...

Stephanie Pushaw What’s civilized is certain: mapped and plotted, every inch of it pinned down by the neutral precision of coordinates....

Sandee Gertz One way to avoid a root canal is to be picked up by the wind outside a periodontist’s office on Route 19 South, Pittsburgh....

Vix Gutierrez I have just arrived at the party and I’m looking around for the quickest way to leave. The Lyft that brought me here has...

Kerry Feltner I envision myself in a golden orb before I leave my house in the morning. My arms close to my sides, I close my eyes and...

Thomas Keith Introduction One of the features of being young, or more broadly being inexperienced, is that you don’t know what you don’t...

Kerry Feltner An order came in before the workday ended on Good Friday: 40,000 board feet of pine, a solid choice, Dad said. Enough for...

Shane Cashman Excerpted from Joyless Kingdom: Poems, Prose, and Dispatches From the Plague “Know how much a head’s worth?” the old man...

Elizabeth Boudreau There are two critical facts you must know about me. Firstly, I exist in a constant state of longing for attention....

Jiani Gi Philosophy I I had ideas about definitions, but then I noticed that death vindicates the persecuted martyr and breath inducts...

Damon Moore A Remain voter in the referendum, I have spent all my adult life as a European citizen, and throughout that same adult life,...

Thomas Keith There are rare times in life where we long for reality to imitate art—to find stability in a structure we’ve experienced...