My first encounter with Elizabeth Ellen’s work was her debut novel Person/a, about romantic obsession and the stories we tell ourselves (and, if we’re writers, tell others) when we’re in…
Imagine Us, The Swarm by Muriel Leung Nightboat Books, forthcoming May 2021 preorder: Bookshop / B&N / Amazon 120 pages – essay collection “How do you write a history…
* * * A Valentine in two days two chickens laid two eggs, forty Flying Fortresses seventy miles from Dresden, as upon one foggy winter night in 1972 a stewardess…
I wonder if there is an afterlife. Nancy believed in it, but she doesn’t seem to be cooperating. My friend Carrie tells me her dead partner Judy moved a chair…
Orchard Grove is a squat windowless building with a green shingled overhang beveled around wooden soffits. I used to walk there from Gerry Rushlow’s farm. Or was it Sally Rushlow’s…
Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz Grove Press, February 2021 Bookshop / B&N / Amazon 208 pages – short story collection “Milk Blood Heat,” the title story of…
The morning after the neighbors cut down the tree, my yard was quiet. The crows that for the last 15 years had woken me every morning like an alarm clock…
The radioactive sugar will feel cold as it goes in, the nurse tells me. She’s been trying to find a vein. It’s ok – no one can ever find a…
* * * They arrive a few minutes earlier than anticipated, deviating from the embossed schedule that sits crumpled within my hand. The sound of them slicing across the horizon…
Some Animal by Ely Shipley Nightboat Books, May 2018 Bookshop / B&N / Amazon 120 pages – hybrid Ely Shipley’s long-awaited second collection, Some Animal (2018), evades category and…
I don’t care about duck hunting but I like magazine subscriptions. I like organizing them on the bookshelf. Puddles, the kids magazine delivered once a month to my dad’s work…
Image Credit: Cathy Stancil Photography Northern California, 1971 Near the end of summer, without warning, the hippie ashram where my son Jamey and I lived lost its lease. We…
The author and her mother Outside my window in the August heat, the highway blurs by, liquid. As CDs rotate through the player, I’m suddenly alert at the first strains…
On the first day of the semester I and three of my classmates are lying on the cold grass by the beach, watching the sky. An airplane arcs above us,…