By Will Cordeiro I study the atlas. Our GPS has lost its signal. Glare along the dash. My partner at the wheel. A rush of green. We swerve the mountain roads, a valley sweeps below us. The summer morning, a palpable expanse, comes bracing in our bones. We must have taken a wrong turn at Springerville, near the border with…
By Andrea A. Firth Realtors describe my town as semi-rural, a suburb, ten miles from the San Francisco Bay, sort of country but not quite. The highway exit leads four miles down a winding, two-lane road to the center of the town and an aging shopping center. Once a vast ranch owned by a man named Joaquin and his cousin…
By Katie Dickson Peter’s mother, tanned and laughing in her lime green swimsuit, twisted on the spigot outside the back door. Margo Stiles was unyielding in her cheer, or so it seemed to Peter, and he tried to be happy too. His mother let the water flow from the hose until it ran cool and Peter took a long drink;…
By Zach Murphy The tulips grew apart from each other that spring. The ground cracked and crumbled in ways that I’d never seen before. I watched the foxes and the coyotes battle all summer on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, where the blood would leave permanent stains on the concrete. The reckless packs would flash their teeth, mark their territories, and steal…
By Jackie DesForges Somehow my conversation with Melissa Febos has drifted from cuddle parties to crime fiction. Febos is one of my feminist icons, and crime fiction hasn’t had the most progressive track record as far as fiction genres are concerned, so I’m surprised we’ve ended up here—and besides, we are supposed to be talking about Girlhood, her new collection…
Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram, Almost Famous, and As Alone As I Want To Be. She’s a former clinical psychologist, performer and film historian. Her essays, book reviews and short stories have appeared in more than 150 publications. Her play, “Life Without” was nominated for Outstanding…
Wynne Hungerford’s work has appeared in Epoch, Blackbird, Subtropics, The Brooklyn Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, American Literary Review, The Normal School, The Boiler, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among other places. She received her MFA from the University of Florida.
When my children were young, we went around the dinner table and shared serendipities—something surprising and joyful that had happened to each of us during the day. My children are grown now, and I live alone, and we are in the midst of the worst phase of a global pandemic.
Being avid readers, we have always looked for book recommendations or reviews. As readers from minority communities, it became clear during high school we were not hearing about authors or reading about characters who represented what we saw in the mirror.
“what would I write if no one could see
I would write that I blame my mother
and then I would write that I was justified”