Elizabeth Gargano: How Parables Teach Us Who We Are
Octavia Butler’s novel begins in what then seemed a distant future, our current year of 2024. Lauren Olamina, the novel’s protagonist, leads a ragged band of followers through an America that is coming apart at the seams.
Richard Hoffman: Uncle and the Donkey Cart
One day Uncle came upon a donkey and cart, driverless, stopped in the road.
Michael Simms: Writing Prompts #9 and #10 | Find Your Inner Dragon
In this session, we’ll experiment with employing familiar tropes in new ways.
Michael Simms: The Song
The young man and the older woman met at an artist’s colony. They were both in the habit of walking on the wooded paths in the afternoon, so they began … Continue reading
David Kirby: Golden Gate by Clarence Major (Review)
A new world is rising, and for the most part these stories read like field reports about earthlings to an alien race.
Video: The Agent
A C-list talent agent walks through the world all but invisible… until he enters a pay-to-play audition room.
Michael Simms: Orpheus in Hollywood
Michael Chabon hasn’t so much straddled genres as rejuvenated whatever he touches, making literary fiction more engaging and accessible and popular genres less cliched and formulaic.
Michael Simms: The Witch’s Tower (excerpt)
~ the first two pages of a bound manuscript composed by the philosopher Linnaeus of Iskar in the reign of Ottolo the Befuddled; the rest of the manuscript being illegible having been damaged by water
Joan E. Bauer: It Takes a Lifetime
They’d both mastered the ‘poetics of place,’
small-town Mississippi and post-war California.
Welty believed & surely Macdonald agreed:
‘No art ever came from not risking your neck.’
Video: “The Tub” by Amy Hempel (with text)
My heart—I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God.
Emmelie Prophète: Pipo
Pipo often talked about fallen friends, their final, frozen, empty vision, almost as if he were feeling his own demise. He was close to and a cousin of Fanfan the Savage, but he was not an active gang member, and should never have died.
Charlie Amáyá Scott: Beyond the Binary | Retelling the Diné Creation Story
I have spent years learning and unlearning what it means to be Diné and to be Queer and to be Trans in this world—this world that denied me First Woman’s gift. Now I am reclaiming this gift.
Barbara Hamby: Elvis and Tolstoy Save the World
I am standing in line waiting for the bus to take me
across the street to Graceland when Tolstoy shows up
with his white beard and peasant’s garb
Video: Night Visit (Mature)
Ruthie spends an unusual night with a guy from her village. After discovering the troubling circumstances that led to their unexpected romantic encounter, she must seek the truth and find her own way to confront him. (Subtitled)
Vox Populi 