Sherri Turner Annie will wake in the morning later than usual. She will have a hangover that she doesn’t remember getting. She will head to the shower and stand under the pummelling jets for an extra five minutes even though she is already late for work. Annie will not know that she will […]
Shipra Agarwal Writer’s Note: It’s been seventy-five years since the British Raj ended, but its remnants live on in sections of Indian society in the form of white-worshiping and self-loathing. They get passed from one generation to the next, much like the family’s gold. The Color Brown began as a list of “how to lighten […]
Christine Collinson Writer’s Note: I was listening to a podcast on birds through history when I first came across ‘Climmers’ (or Climbers). This led me to some early twentieth-century film footage of Climmers working at Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. Although silent, the film was so atmospheric that my character’s story emerged soon after. A routine […]
Susmita Bhattacharya Writer’s Note: In 2016, I started a Facebook Group with a few of my friends who, like me, had just finished their treatment for breast cancer. We decided to write a poem a week, using the prompts from Jo Bell’s book, 52: Write a Poem a Week. This was a very special group […]
Emily Devane Writer’s Note: This piece started with a voice, and a feeling: I am looking for the key to the drawer with nothing in it. I heard that voice in my head and I knew that the person saying those words is unravelling. When I wrote this, I had in mind The Yellow Wallpaper […]
Lori Sambol Brody Writer’s Note: I set out to write a flash novella about a high school theater kid (Julia) navigating her older sister’s wedding, with a dose of Jewish folklore mixed in. Think of Sixteen Candles crossed with The Dybbuk. As I wrote, however, I found myself relying on the tropes of Jewish generational […]
Bri Gonzalez Writer’s Note: My collection-in-progress, currently titled A Wellness Check, inspects how pop culture, like DC’s Batman, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and horror movies from the 50s to present day, exploit mental illness as shock value. It’s a call-out – the poems critique media for profiting off of perpetuated stigmas. My collection-in-progress is also […]
Sage Ravenwood Writer’s Note: On writing these poems, ‘Once We Were Kids’ is based on an actual childhood memory. I wanted to capture the innocence of that time period yet show how the outside world creeps in no matter how safe and loved a child is, /the boy who commented on me liking chocolate ice […]
Rosie Garland and Meg Pokrass Writers’ Note: Since 2020, we – that’s Meg Pokrass and Rosie Garland – have been collaborating on flash fictions and hybrid prose. We describe it as ‘inviting another writer to the dance’ because that’s what it feels like: a dance, a duet… where the sum really is greater than its parts. It’s […]
Adrian Dallas Frandle Writer’s Note: The title of the piece “On Amoxicillin” invokes the dual sense of “on” as both a polemic (“On Beauty…”; “On Grief and Grieving…” etc) and the state of treatment, of “being on” a course of amoxicillin. The poem falls toward the end of my collection in progress, Acoustic Ecologies and […]