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FICTION

The Essential Worker
Fiction by Jane Turner Goldsmith (Summer 2023)

An excerpt from a composite novel in progress, The Essential Worker takes place during the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic. These compelling short stories from down under are told in the voices of workers who kept Australians fed, well and alive in Autumn 2020: supermarket workers, bicycle food couriers and truck drivers, as well as overworked teachers and health care providers. By turns frightening, hilarious and tender, seven linked stories recall that eerie and uncertain time when no one really knew what was happening on our planet. Each essential worker is a survivor with a distinctive voice—among them truck driver Reddy and Lilla, a teacher:

From “Roadkill”
You hear about it all the time. Old bastards, like me—think they know it all. Don’t need to slow down for hazards. Or young blokes not long for the road, on uppers to pass the time. Speed and speed, that’s it. They get sucked down the plughole, down they go, whirling and swirling, but can anyone tell them? They gotta find it out for themselves. See a few front-end pileups, prime movers ramming into cars at cross-roads or sliding off into the lanes. A few of those before they get charged and chucked in the clinker and that’s the end of their bloody careers.
    Whereas me, fit and surviving. On the road twenty years. Fit and Reddy. READ MORE...

From “Shiny Shoes”
The boy’s eyes were slate grey, and at the very moment he’d thrown the first rock, she'd had a flash of something cruel and familiar. His eyes—with that opaque dead quality to them, empty pools, she’d seen eyes like that before. It was awful to think, but there you go, it would be hard to unthink it now. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

Australian readers, click here.

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Salvaged (April 2023)

What can be salvaged from lost or damaged relationships, troubled times or long lives well lived? The stories, essays and poems in our 13th anthology and 48th issue explore emotional residue ranging over time and space from pre-industrial Europe to 1930s Taiwan to an Afghani war zone.

NONFICTION: New in this issue, our first Editors' Choice, “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld, is a meditation on her mother's life, in which personal, cultural and political history are deftly interwoven. David Blackmore's powerful and insightful “Allegheny Brush Heap” also reflects on a parent, along with the truth about the forest his father loved.

Salvaged FICTION pieces are all very short stories—concise but deep reads, bitingly funny or achingly sad. For a peasant child whose mother is a wet-nurse for the privileged (Lila Kurth's “Peasant Child”) and for the former foster child in “Catch and Release” by Brenda Jacobsen, the emotional residue is loss. Remnants of the near and distant past resurface in Julia Dron's two stories set in Taiwan, “The Setting of the Sun” and “The Land Where Her Ancestors Live.” In Madeleine McDonald's “The Letter,” a woman sees her deceased ex-husband through new eyes, and in William Cass’ “Redemption,” a man confronts his own youthful regrets. In other stories, the salvage may be life itself (David MacWilliam's “Take the Shot”) or an alcoholic mother's potential rehabilitation (Michele Alouf's “Leaning Too Far”).

POETRY: There's a baker's dozen of salvage in Laura Sweeney's “13 Ways of Describing a Car Wreck,” and Lynne Burnett's “Trust Account” takes hope from life's sorrows. What is salvaged by poet Heikki Huotari? An ape, a butterfly, a lily, a “Glockenspiel”?

Click here to sample each author's work.

Salvaged includes Editors’ Choice “Imperfect Machines” by Joyce Hinnefeld and two honorable mentions from our summer 2022 fiction collection submissions: Lita Kurth’s “Peasant Child” and William Cass’ “Redemption.”

Read Salvaged online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook.

FICTION

Death in the Cathedral: A Novella in Five Stories
Fiction by Malcolm Dixon (Winter 2022)

These five linked stories immerse readers in the turbulent, disturbing and sometimes hilarious misadventures and rivalries of Catholic schoolboys in late 20th century Liverpool—Stephen Mattimore, the boy who tries to play by the rules; his rebellious and scornful classmates who torment their cassocked teachers; the misfit who runs the campus sundries shop. Death, lurking in the title story, whether sudden or anticipated, alters everyone. Outside the confining Cathedral College flows “the inky black waters of the Mersey, opaque to the point of invisibility, like the dark unwritten page of [Stephen's] future.”

From “Death in the Cathedral”
Fr Lafayette's face is set like a gravestone. “What in me is dark illumine, what is low raise and support...” His hands clench into fists as big as any docker's fists. His boots promise violence. Of all the Cathedral Brothers, Lafayette is by far the most fierce. Neither Lynch nor 'Pig' Dooley, the champion truffle hunter of all France, come close, even when in a temper. Lafayette's discipline knows no quarter, shows no mercy. An eye for an eye. READ MORE...

From “More’s Utopia”
I see two figures — or three you might think at this distance if you didn’t know one of them were a statue — stopped by the kerb. In an instant I set off after them but they’re moving again, surprisingly quickly, one ahead and one behind. I think O’Hagan is at the back, and they’re carrying the load between them like it’s a roll of carpet. . . . I call out and — startled — they both look over in my direction.
    “Oh no, Lord, help us, it’s the Head Boy,” O’Hagan says in a faux-cringing voice. “We’re surely done for, now! Piss off, Mattimore. This is nothing to do with you. Go on back up the hill to your mince pies with Father Christmas.”
    “I’m not going anywhere without that,” I say, referring to St Thomas More, who is standing somewhat surreally in the middle of us. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

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ISBN: 978-1005928063

FICTION

The Satisfaction of Longing: Stories
Fiction by Victoria Melekian (Summer 2022)

These emotionally rich and ethically complicated stories are suffused in longing and loss. The collection opens with the chance encounter of a woman and man who have endured unbearable tragedy. Other stories are haunted by the specter of troubled or absent (or both) parental figures and spouses. A fatherless woman whose drug addicted husband is in jail has a mysterious benefactor. Two sisters conflict over what to do with their father's ashes. In the final, thrillingly-paced story, a woman flees with her son from her estranged husband who never wanted children. Here are samples of Melekian's compelling prose:

From “How to Spell Egypt”
He walks me to my car, pulls a pen from his pocket and writes his number on my hand. Then he hugs me. He smells like pine and fog and the flannel lining of my sleeping bag. I think about crisp wood shavings curling around our feet. “Call me,” he says, and waves good-bye. I turn left out of the lot, right at the light, and over to the curb. I lick my hand and rub it on my thigh. Lick some more. I’m crying so hard I can barely see the blur of numbers smeared across my hand. READ MORE...

From “Far From Home”
At first it was little things. Lopped off flowers. Missing light bulbs on the front porch, the back patio. Moving my car. Just a few feet. It’s Ray, but nothing I could prove or get the police interested in. Lately, he’s been coming into the house. He reset the clocks. Tore page 26 from every book on the shelf. Retuned my harp.
    Yesterday was the third flat tire in two weeks. No longer happenstance or coincidence. And this morning—a pile of dead rodents heaped on the front porch.
    I call the police. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1005361044

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Up-Ending (April 2022)

Our 12th anthology and 45th issue features Nancy Bourne's “Somewhere a Phone Is Ringing,” a tale of a woman who sees an uncanny resemblance to her own dying self in the repellent grandmother of her childhood. This is the last story Nancy wrote; it was published in a limited edition, print chapbook and distributed to guests at her life celebration in September 2021. We are reprinting it here to honor the extraordinary life and work of our friend and former fiction editor.

Nancy would prefer we not focus on illness and dying, and so we are including stories and poems in this issue that offer both heartache and hope, wonderfully nuanced characters and mostly upbeat endings.

FICTION:
Natascha Graham's “The Roses and the Weeds” is a bitingly funny story of getting on with life despite the heartbreak of lost love. For new and still hopeful love, read Frank Diamond's “Accumulator” where a tough ex-boxer, restaurant dish-washer works through his feelings for a waitress. In Joyce Goldenstern's “His Heroic Courtesies,” a single man with a hero complex rescues married women from abuse or neglect. “Recliner” by D.B. Gardner depicts a security guard/cat sitter in a posh Park Avenue condo who shares a tiny studio apartment with his beloved but depressed girlfriend. “A Good Stunning” by Mary Lewis is about a woman in a troubled marriage whose job is stunning pigs before they’re butchered at the slaughterhouse. In Fabiana Martinez's “Choices,” a widower confronts the suicide of his estranged wife.

NONFICTION:
“Yesterday's Lunch” by Rachel Cann describes the narrator's hilarious and somehow healing visit with her formerly abusive and now demented grandmother. In Mary Cuffe Perez's “Chico,” an 11-year-old girl is disillusioned of an infatuation with her alcoholic dad's charming but surly friend; what she really wants is to ride Chico, his horse. “The Pendant” by Sarah Mullen explores the painful aftermath of a miscarriage between two viable pregnancies.

POETRY:
“Nightingales and Starlings” is a joyful love villanelle by Mark Heathcote. Christopher Rubio-Goldsmith's “My Job” and “Fun Me” are joyous tributes to life and love, and Iris Dunkle's “Far Field” is a bittersweet poem about death and loss.

Click here to sample each author's work.

Up-Ending includes three honorable mentions from our summer 2021 fiction collection submissions:
Joyce Goldenstern's “His Heroic Courtesies,” Natascha Graham's “The Roses and the Weeds,” and Fabiana Martinez's flash fiction “Choices.”

Read Up-Ending online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook.

FICTION

Arrest: Stories
Fiction by Lazarus Trubman (Winter 2021)

A riveting and grimly comic collection, Arrest is the account of a Moldavian-Jewish dissident's interrogation by the KGB, his subsequent imprisonment in a labor camp, and a difficult emigration from the former Soviet Union with his family. The author's life is the source for this fiction, narrated by a character named Lazarus Trubman—a survivor scarred by his experience, who finds a new home in the USA. Here are samples from a stunning novella in stories:

From “A Casual Chat About Nothing”
“The millstones of history never stop,” he had said. “That’s why it is very important not to get between them. In your case though, it’s a bit too late, my friend. Your hands were already caught when I got you.” And I understood: that’s all they needed, a hand, even a finger, then it was only a matter of time to squeeze my body and mind between the rusty millstones and grind me into a flat, blind, obedient human being. Just one fucking finger! READ MORE...

From “An Unexpected Sunday Tourist”
I was dismayed by the thought: I could have stabbed him in the back with my military knife. I knew I hadn’t done it. But why didn’t I? I hadn’t dreamed it either; I merely woke with the thought: a stab in the back as he bent down for his rucksack would have killed him instantly. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

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ISBN: 978-1005593117

FICTION

Snitch: Stories
Fiction by Emily Hoover (September 2021)

A novella in stories, these ten powerful and gritty, interlinked tales take readers inside an impoverished, drug-ridden central Florida neighborhood where the Collins family lives. The three children are being raised by their bartender mother while their father is in prison. The angry oldest son Phillip bullies his siblings—Daniel, who likes to try on his mama's clothes and lipstick, and little sister Tammy, wise beyond her years. Tammy has a crush on Angelo, a boy across the street whose multi-generation Puerto Rican family provides a contrast with the dysfunctional Collinses. Their next-door neighbor Marsha is both caretaker and predator. They are all hiding secrets from each other, yet despite cruelty and bullying, are loyal to their own. Here are some samples:

From “Thief”
Phillip almost didn’t recognize his father when he saw him hobble into the visiting room, wearing a dark blue jumpsuit that resembled nurses’ scrubs. His face looked thinner, his teeth slightly yellower, but the muscles in his arms and neck bulged out more than Phillip remembered, even in the loose-fitting clothes. His face was stern, unshaven, as he surrendered to pat-downs from guards, lifting his arms out to the side and revealing a poorly drawn tattoo of the state of Florida on the inside of his bicep. .. READ MORE...

From “The Tectonics of Time”
It is Fish Fry Friday at Elks Lodge #1291, and Marsha smells like cod, oil, and tartar sauce. She catches a whiff of herself as she slides into her Ford pickup for a cigarette and grimaces, unlit Marlboro Red dangling from her chapped lips. She squirms for a lighter, patting the breast pocket of her polo, then her apron, which is caked with food waste. She must’ve never gotten her lighter back from John the bartender after that last rush. She finds her Zippo in the glove compartment, lights the Red, and inhales, watching the parking lot slowly empty. The nearly dead who frequent Elks Lodge #1291 really know how to pack the house. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1005543785

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Love (April 2021)

The theme for our 11th anthology is love in all its painful, confusing, passionate and joyous diversity.

Read about the edgy and disquieting relationship of two young misfits in the aftermath of wildfire (Dare); a widow recovering from her husband’s infidelities (Submerge); the unrequited love of a divorcee isolated on a Navajo reservation (Crossing Continental Divide(s)); a man's cross-cultural romance with the daughter of an arranged marriage (The High Life); a decades-long, ardent but problematic marriage (Together Forever); or tales of parent-child love: a mother and her adult son confront each other in the wake of a difficult divorce (Owl Boy); a new mother struggles to bond with her baby when breast-feeding is almost too painful to endure (The Climb); a daughter questions inconsistencies between her memories of childhood and her mother's disturbing version (Whisper to a Scream).

Dip into flash fiction, poetry and prose poems about the sublimity of passion or its banal ending, dysfunctional sister-brother love, a father's delight in his child, the importance of friendship to love, the legacy of unwed parents.

Fiction by Louise Blalock, Margaret Emma Brandl, Ed Davis, Stefan Kiesbye, Nick Sweeney; nonfiction by Jane Boch, Ruth Askew Brelsford, Laura Foxworthy, Carmela Delia Lanza; poetry and prose poems by Leonore Hildebrandt, Robert Murray, Jacalyn Shelley.

Click here to sample each author's work.

This issue is dedicated to Nancy Bourne whose loss (March 11, 2021), we who love her mourn.

LOVE includes honorable mentions from our summer 2020 fiction collection submissions: Margaret Brandl’s “Pomegranate” and “Endings,” and Nick Sweeney’s “The High Life.”

We are also pleased to present first publications by two authors:
Louise Blalock’s “Submerge” and Laura Foxworthy’s “Whisper to a Scream.”

Read LOVE online or download a pdf of the entire chapbook.

FICTION

First Kings and Other Stories
Fiction by Ted Morrissey (December 2020)

First Kings and Other Stories was one of two Finalists in the 2021 American Fiction Award in the Novella category.

In three dreamy and introspective stories, award-winning author Morrissey take us to a remote and frigid landscape where blinding white snow and sky are indistinguishable, and those who must venture out to pit their resolve against icy weather lose their way and possibly their senses. We encounter a terrified adolescent girl seeking a midwife for her mother, an older farmer hunting the coyote that killed his sheep, and the village mortician, whose life has long been devoted to the dead, heading out to collect his next client. Morrison describes these linked stories as a work in progress. We think you too will eagerly anticipate more. Here are some samples:

From “First Kings”:
The line between white sky and snow was a ghostly tracing along the horizon. Bitty blocked the icy specks pricking at her eyes as she tried to gain her bearings. It should’ve been a short walk to the Houndstooths’ farm, less than three miles, but she’d lost her way, as Papa and Bobby would’ve predicted, Bitty being a girl and little bitty at that. But Mama said go, her voice strange with pain and panic. .. READ MORE...

From “The Widow's Son”:
He gripped the icy doorknob then entered the salon, his candle held at head level. It took his eyes a moment to sort out what he saw: five cadavers standing upright, still wrapped, head to toe, in their canvas shrouds, in haphazard order like bashful strangers at a tea. Even with the weak yellow light he knew which was Margaret. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1005175924

FICTION

The Estrangement Effect
Stories by Rebecca Andem (August 2020)

Five stories by Rebecca Andem explore the startling, disconcerting, unsatisfying, and liberating moments in which we understand that the most central relationships in our lives are inhabited by strangers, strangers we are deeply connected to, be they lovers, spouses, parents, siblings or children.

From “They Were Strangers”:
Elise flinched against the lewdness in his tone, but the more she resisted, the worse it got. In the presence of her son, her boyfriend had somehow morphed into a letch. He was staking his territory. READ MORE...

From “Inside the Lines”:
She didn’t plan to end up in a trailer in Oak Hill, Florida. She didn’t plan to end, but Sean had been beautiful in a way that absorbed her intentions. She fell in love with the idea of him, with the charming close-ups her mind collected — the freckles on his knuckles, the way he squinted when thinking and talking at the same time, the bend in his wrist when he rested his hand on his chest while sleeping. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1005632649

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Onward! (April 2020)

For our tenth anniversary issue we have selected stories of survival and of loss, poetry and a prose poem that evoke dreamlike possibilities, and a few downright funny tales to lighten the prevailing gloom. Be assured, no protagonists, fictional or actual, succumb to despair. Onward they go, as shall we, into a future more uncertain than usual. Amanda Yskamp's eerie yet strangely hopeful cover art inspired the title of our first unthemed anthology.

The lineup: fiction by Cathy Cruise, Sam Gridley, Ashley Jeffalone, John P. Loonam, Loren Sundlee and Lazar Trubman; nonfiction by Lisbeth Davidoff, Kandi Maxwell, Eileen Obser and Guinotte Wise; poetry by Michelle Lerner and a prose poem by Robert Clinton.

Read about a cancer patient who rediscovers the autographed baseball that long ago rescued her from illness and despair (The Magic Ball). Or a scrappy but unhappy, fifteen-year-old girl who adores her older drug-addicted sister (Farewell to Easter Weekend). At the wake for his favorite aunt, a man encounters his ex-wife and learns why she left him (A Wake). Can an estranged couple survive a freezing night together after an accident on their snow-bound dairy farm (Kicker)? What do a parakeet and a Holocaust survivor have in common (Pretty Boy)? And how does a hot-rod era, scofflaw teen stay out of trouble (Rocky and the Rebel Punk)?

Click here to sample each author's work.

Onward! includes four honorable mentions from our summer 2019 fiction collection submissions that were too good not to publish: Cathy Cruise’s “Gently Used,” Sam Gridley’s “The Magic Ball,” Loren Sundlee’s “Kicker” and Lazar Trubman’s “Northern County, Here We Come.”

We are also pleased to present Ashley Jeffalone's first publication, “Farewell to Easter Weekend.”

FICTION

New Songs for Old Radios
Stories by B. B. Garin (December 2019)

B. B. Garin's closely-observed and exuberant tales are inspired by itinerant guitar players and the women and men drawn to them and their songs. The collection opens and closes with encounters between reclusive loners—a tragedy-haunted barfly, the estranged son of a famous musician—and vagabonds who may or may not stick around. Other stories depict a wanderer who only believes in “long roads and songs with swampy bass guitars,” immigrant rock n' roll hipsters, and a slacker who murders a man for his song.

From “The Last Ballad of Saddler Vance”:
There never was any deal with the devil. No crossroad's magic. No cat's guts or silver coins. No dapper man in a seersucker suit with a neat goatee and a faint cologne of brimstone. There was only me and Saddler Vance at the end of a rotting pier with the salt marsh sunset and my daddy's old service pistol. That's where I killed him. Killed him for a song. READ MORE...

From “Ashes Hit the Floor”:
... A stranger leaned next to her and didn’t offer any usual lines. A new drink appeared in front of her without a word. His shoulders were huge, Red bet he could pick her up with one arm. It wasn’t a bad thought. She’d seen him throwing darts earlier, steady hands. Up close she could see a hundred tiny scars latticed them, like flecks of white paint not quite washed away. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0463564998

FICTION

Female Education
Flash Fiction by Rita Ciresi (August 2019)

Ciresi's 14 thought-provoking flash fictions deal with love, loss, and the hard choices women make. Her characters experience great joy and passion; they endure failed marriages, displacement, rejection, and grief. Their narratives are influenced by contemporary ideals of female empowerment, as well as former "female education" practices that attempted to control women. In spare prose, these stories are hilarious, poignant, and sad, and sometimes all at once. Here are a few gems:

From “On His Way to American History”:
     ... Oh, why hadn't I rehearsed what I would say? Now it would only come out in a rush: I'm sorry I didn't kiss you goodbye that morning. I'm sorry I yelled at you because you didn't cut back the Mexican petunias in the front yard like you promised. I'm sorry the last thing I ever said to you was, Try thinking about someone else beside yourself for once in your goddamn life!READ MORE...

From “Four Ways of Looking at a Wife”:
At first the Wife feels abandoned when her husband falls deep into fantasy football. But then she gets her own fantasy going.
    She picks a handsome quarterback. Two big running backs. Two big wide receivers. A tackle who looks like a Rottweiler on steroids. A flex player with a long name that spreads from one wide shoulder to the next. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0463345870

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Upheavals (April 2019)

The unexpected happens. Then what? The stories and poems in this issue reveal complex personal landscapes in upheaval: While men walk on the moon a teenage girl’s life descends into chaos; a gang of cruel boys jeopardizes the safety of an older woman; adult children startle their mother into confusion; two adolescents confront dilemmas they can't resolve; a bipolar soldier-father comes home and wreaks havoc on his family. Fiction by Sarah Freligh, Julia Ballerini, Catharine Leggett and Emma Wunsch; nonfiction by Grant Price. Poems by Lynne Burnett, Robin Carey, Linda Ferguson, Donna Isaac, Catherine Montague and Jonathan Travelstead capture the disruption of death and disease and the displacement caused by fire, ravaged nature and the tumultuous spin of a distant cosmos. Click here to sample the work by each author.

FICTION

By the sea, by the sea...
fictions by Jim Beane (December 2018)

Maryland author Jim Beane's five riveting tales of the Eastern seashore depict the elemental beauty and terror of salt air and wild water and its impact on the harsh, often stormy lives of coastal dwellers. “Across the Bay” explores class divisions between long-time locals and summer residents, the “richies,” in the wake of a devastating storm. In “Fragile,” a young fisherman befriends a hapless, grieving older man. “Before the Storm” explores the difficult relationship of two brothers, one of whom is seriously ill. “Ocean View” is the sometimes hilarious saga of conflict between local and immigrant workers at a sea-side construction site. In “The Rising Tide,” an older, long-married couple lose their car keys in the sand and rediscover each other. Here's a sample:

From “Across the Bay”:
     “What do you mean, loot?”    
     “You know,” Roy says. “Shit you want but can’t buy, shit the richies won’t miss. Shit they probably don’t even know they have. What’s it matter? Whatever’s left is for the taking. C’mon, dude.” And I go along. I always go along. I don’t want anything, but I don’t want to tell Roy no...

     The island, what’s left of it, stretches out in front of us.
     Roy throttles down and swings the skiff behind Logan’s Hill. Billy, a speck in the distance, brooms the sludge off his old man’s dock.
     No boats. No lights. Nothing. Billy is moving slow, it looks like he’s not moving at all. Roy’s eyes narrow. He scans the wreckage bunched up against the shoreline.
     Everything. Busted to shit. Roofs off. Phone poles down. Houses twisted, bent, leaning. Roy zigzags through all the crap in the water. He jerks the wheel and a bloated dog bumps off the bow. Poor thing bobs in our wake. I turn away. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0463284124

FICTION

Ovenbirds
And Other Stories by Dorene O’Brien (August 2018)

In this disturbing and powerful, sometimes bitingly funny, short story collection, award-winning author Dorene O’Brien explores the disasters and misadventures that shape or distort lives — among them the plight of a young girl held captive in a remote cabin, an elderly woman bewildered by dementia, a man who takes antidepressants to placate his overly-anxious wife, and more. Some samples of O'Brien's compelling writing:

From “Ovenbirds”:
My abductor spoon-fed me tomato soup. He stroked my matted hair and hummed an unrecognizable tune into my ear, and this frightened me more than when he burned my legs. I thought of my parents then, and I thought of them for the first time as Jean and Eddie. And I wondered if this was how death began, with the dissolution of formal ties so that parents became, simply, people with their own lives, lives that would go on without yours. READ MORE...

From “Emma Reflected”:
Emma apologized again before realizing that she was looking at and speaking to a reflection of herself in the vanity mirror. She had been brushing her hair—the knobby wooden handle of the soft bristle brush was still in her hand—when she’d suddenly noticed the strange woman before her and froze, worrying that if she misspoke to this person, they might never let her go home. She laughed aloud at her mistake but quickly cupped her hand over her mouth. What would the staff think if they heard her laughing alone in her room? What would they tell the children? READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-0463531976

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Rites of Passage (March 2018)

Stories and memoir explore the life-changing experiences of concentration camp and other near-death survivors; the healing reunion of an estranged mother and daughter; a young man on the road searching for his vanished father; a female war veteran’s painful transition to civilian life; and a writer coming to terms with her dysfunctional family. Fiction by Antoinette Mehler, Ellen McGrath Smith, Robin Carey, Mariah Smith and Lyn Stevens; nonfiction by Annie Dawid. Poems by Scudder Parker and Diana Sher illluminate shifts in consciousness that are themselves rites of passage. Click here to sample the work by each author.

FICTION

Protected Contact
And Other Stories by Julie Stielstra (November 2017)

Stielstra explores the vibrant and troubling connections between people and the worlds they inhabit, be it nature, art or literature, writing with equal enthusiasm and wit on cloning a woolly mammoth, bee swarms, road kill and a romantic encounter in a London bookstore. The seven stories in this collection are about relationships made, missed, flawed, chosen or avoided. Some samples:

From “Posthumous”:
…William McBride unlocked a door and ducked under the lintel of a narrow stair. Tess followed. He wore soft corduroy trousers in that rich tobacco brown she had only seen in England. They hung loosely off his hips; the wide wales were worn to velveteen across the seat. The elbows of his sweater were bagged into fuzzy mesh.
    Is this where I am raped, strangled and incinerated in the boiler in the cellar? she wondered.
    “You’re not Jack the Ripper, are you?” she asked. READ MORE...

From “Little Deaths”:
    The first she knew of the deer was the smack of meat and bone and its writhing gray-brown mass filling the windshield. The glass exploded in a hail of crystals. The car heaved and slewed, swung its hips off the shoulder and the wet earth snatched at the hubcaps. The deer rolled off the hood and jammed beneath the front bumper, paddling its forelegs. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1370844906

FICTION

Nowhere Is Always Somewhere
Fiction by Robert Earle (September 2017)

In the six tales of Nowhere is Always Somewhere, short story master Robert Earle creates compelling characters caught up in life’s dramas all over the world: Americans imprisoned in Bolivia…homeless kids forging a relationship under a bridge in L.A. …a man whose writer daughter understands him better than he thinks…a Brit encountering the Chechen insurgent who cast him off as a child…a young girl challenging her father’s racism in the South…a son humbled by his father’s nursing home experience in Pennsylvania... Earle's fiction fully inhabits and renders credible an exciting range and diversity of people and places.

From “Nowhere Is Always Somewhere”:
    He said something startling and self-demeaning “It’s such an abjectly humiliating religion that I felt instantly at home in it. You don’t know God and never will.”
    She took a moment to consider this. He was saying in a backwards way that he had never felt at home, always felt humiliated, and was bitter about it. And now he was effectively proposing that she join him in going to meet the human god who abandoned him, his father. Wouldn’t it be terribly cruel to tell him no? READ MORE...

From “The Last Summer”:
   Like that he stopped being whoever he had been so far and became someone else. His voice got lower and quicker. “Missy, I am not taking you off in no truck with everybody knows what your father will do.” He was looking at her in a way that made her cross her arms over her chest, soaked with sweat. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:
ISBN: 978-1941066218 

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1370438518

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Pushing Boundaries/Breaking Barriers (March 2017)

Stories and memoir exploring the outer boundaries of human experience and endurance depict people who are love-lorn, demented, drug addled, guilty of deception or facing near death in a deluge. Fiction by Daniel M. Jaffe, Steven Ostrowski and Erika Staiger; nonfiction by Samuel R. George, Darryl Graff and Eileen McGorry. Edgy poems by Leah Angstman, Joseph Buehler, Josephine Cariño, Leonore Hildebrandt, Michelle Perez and Maggie Rosen stretch the limits of language and take readers across unfamiliar emotional terrain. Click here to sample the work by each author.

FICTION

Lost in Translation
Fiction by Laura Ruth Loomis (November 2016)

A cycle of linked stories about love, loss and the difficulty of communicating emotion in any language. Two men and a woman struggle to mend their complicated, intertwined lives; whether funny, sad, ecstatic or outraged, the voices of Jesse, Roy, and Julie are pitch perfect.

From “The Sign”:
“You can lie in sign language, just like any other, but you have to be good at it. Face, posture, body language, they all have to match the sign. Talkers are careless about that.” READ MORE...

From “Practicing”:
“It’s not Roy’s fault. It’s not Jesse’s fault. It’s not my fault. Why the hell can’t it be somebody’s fault? I want someone I can point to and say, You owe me for wasting the last fourteen years of my life. I want them back. I want someone to make it right.” READ MORE...

From “A Bird and a Picture Window”:
“Roy has this way of looking at me like I was some kind of Grecian god rising naked out of the ocean, instead of a short, semi-cute, hairy guy who’s turning thirty next month.” READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords.

FICTION

Beyond the Line
Seven stories by Jane Turner Goldsmith (September 2016)

In this powerful collection from “down under” — by turns, beautiful, disturbing and funny — Goldsmith gives us resilient characters who push or are swept beyond the lines of acceptable or customary behavior; some of them live in barely sustainable emotional territory. A pregnant woman (in “North of Goyder’s”) tries to protect a refugee in Australia’s unforgiving outback. “RU OK?” tells of a university counselor confronted by an assertive student on World Suicide Prevention Day. On a lighter note, true love prevails (in “Dear John”) over a damaging electronic blunder, thanks to the mailer-daemon!

From “North of Goyder’s”:
On the perimeter of the property, a shape is growing into her line of vision. All black, it looks like a blurred blowfly against the parched land. As it nears, the shape sharpens in focus. Spindle legs, stripes on the body. Like a black spider now, brittle legs protruding and retracting. It takes a moment for her to realise it is a man. A tall, black man, approaching her farm. READ MORE...

From “RU OK?”:
The receptionist dashes into Maureen’s office, looking like there’s been a bomb threat. “I just need to tell you,” she says in lowered tones. “The student you are about to see. Stephanie. Says she doesn’t want anyone to talk to her in a ‘soothing, calm voice.’”
   Maureen looks up from her computer.
  “But…I am a University counsellor.” My job is to calm and soothe. READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords
ISBN: 9781370153770

FICTION, NONFICTION & POETRY anthology

Devices (March 2016)

Sixteen authors explore the ways technology impacts human relations. Fiction by Lewis Gray, Larry Lefkowitz, Ken Poyner and Carole Stivers; nonfiction by Katrina Marks; and poetry by Cathy Bryant, Catherine Edmunds, Casey FitzSimons, Marie Kilroy, Fran Markover, Nate Maxson, Anne McCrady, Lee Nash, Jacalyn Shelley, John Stupp and Laura Sweeney. Click here to sample the work by each author.

FICTION

The Marriage Bed
Fiction by Elaine Ford (November 2015)

View love and marriage from every angle except Happily Ever After in these five stories and two novel excerpts. Ford sympathetically captures the emptiness of faded love, the disappointment of affection misplaced, the humor of narrowly-escaped misalliance. Many err but none are mocked in this sparely-written, humane collection.

From “Birthing”:
“Fifteen months since her wedding day, and she and Tom have not slept together as man and wife a single time. It must be her homeliness, her awkwardness, her not being Sarah, that make him turn his back to her. She’s angry at him, but even angrier at herself. How stupid not to have known that she’d always be a poor second to her cousin, who now lies in her grave. So much did Anner desire this wiry, stubborn, copper-haired cotton farmer that love dulled her wit. ” READ MORE...

From “Original Brasses, Fine Patina”:
“She almost thinks he’d be capable of hitting her now, if not for the guard ghosting the periphery of the room and the pair of suburban matrons who have materialized and are inspecting a Philadelphia highboy.” READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords.

FICTION

Family Ties
Five stories by Ellyn Bache (September 2015)

In these vivid, unsettling tales, Bache has created flawed characters who might be related to any of us. They are the family black sheep you helplessly love or hate — here so finely drawn you will never forget them.

From “Siblings”:
“She had the first inkling then that what it would come down to was caring too much in the wrong places. Letting whatever mattered be crushed to sorrow in the hands of beautiful, brutal men.” READ MORE...

From “Husband”:
“Their last evening together, Anna had paced the room in bra and panties, waving her discarded slip in the air, doing a little hoochy-kooch dance. “You know why you like your job so much?” she teased. “Because you get your rocks off seeing other men frightened and impotent while you’re strong and healthy. It sends you on a power trip.” READ MORE...

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords.

FICTION, MEMOIR & POETRY anthology

Strange Encounters (February 2015)

Life and literature are voyages from one encounter to the next, some of them surpassing strange. Read about strange encounters with a gigantic tuna, an absentee father, a vagrant, a holocaust survivor and a sock puppet, among others. Fiction by Teresa Giordano, Sheree Shatsky, Nancy Méndez Booth and Robert Bradford; memoir by Erika Price, Barbara Hallowell, Amelia Wright and DeVonna Allison; and poetry by G. Timothy Gordon, Meg Eden, Jamie Gage, Katharyn Machan and Müesser Yeniay. Click here to sample the work by each author.

FICTION

Job Hazards
Five Stories by Teresa Milbrodt (November 2014)

Milbrodt's quirky tales probe the impacts of jobs, whether unusual or ordinary, on the lives of a love-lorn circus clown, a racecar driver/pole dancer, a retired sideshow fat lady and her “skeleton man” friend, a 60-year-old, cliff-jumping caregiver, and two shopping mall security guards who are single parents.

From “Job Hazards”:
“All of us in the circus were there because we needed to be watched, because we craved that treacherous moment in the limelight. She worked with a net for safety. I wouldn’t have asked her to do without one, but we all knew people wanted to see the real danger: if she’d miss the bar. They were waiting for me to make them laugh. They were waiting for her to die.” READ MORE.

From “Fat Lady to Marry Skeleton Man: Tickets 25 Cents”:
“I don't know if we were blessed or cursed by genetics. We love our bodies, they earned us a living for many years, but others feel they are acceptable only in a sideshow. Yet where did they expect sideshow performers to go? We can't evaporate, though Errol might come close.” READ MORE.

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords.

FICTION

Monsters in the Agapanthus
Six stories by Jessica Barksdale Inclán (September 2014)

These powerful, edgy stories explore love and estrangement between daughters and mothers, siblings, and spouses. Inclán's characters stretch the outer bounds of family responsibility, creating burdens they never dreamed of.

From “Leaving Mr. Wong”:
“My mother has been known to throw down her cards, turn to me, a prying stranger, and bare her teeth. Or burst into tears. Or press her forehead to the card table. She’s called me names and tossed chairs. And she’s stood up, suddenly in the body of her younger self, and rushed to me, grabbing me by the shoulders, looking me in the eyes, sweeping my hair off my forehead.” READ MORE.

“Salsa” is a tour de force, told entirely from the point of view of a woman with dementia:
“She has an idea and she needs to be very careful lest the nurses discover her secret and send her to the second floor from which no one has ever returned. Not the man who walked around in his underwear or the woman who sat in the corner calling for her daughter. Not the woman in the sack dress and ghastly plastic sandals or the man with wild eyebrow hairs as long as dog hair.” READ MORE.

Also available as a Kindle:

and on Smashwords.

FICTION

Distortions
A novella by Alison Turner (July 2014)

In this subtle and nuanced probing of family dynamics, a brother and sister find themselves “in the middle of the kind of stillness that comes from size.” She wants to disappear; he likes mysteries.

“The sunrise over Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni upset proportion.  The salted ground was so dry it cracked like hammered plaster, but the rain from the day before left round films reflecting purple, pink, and orange.  Dane couldn't tell where the salt flat ended and the sky began, and when he glanced at his sister Jenny she looked like someone thicker.  She wore a lot of layers.” READ MORE.

Also available as a Kindle
and on Smashwords

MEMOIR

Talk in the Reading Room
by Nils Peterson (January 2014)

The first poet laureate of the Silicon Valley meditates on the meaning and mystery of memory, looking back on his childhood as the son of a chauffeur in New York and his college days in Eastern Kentucky. This is an insightful and often funny memoir from a member of the last generation to grow up without TV or coed dormitories.

Also available as a Kindle
and on Smashwords

MEMOIR, FICTION & POETRY anthology

Work (2013)

Personal narratives by Michelle Valois, Marylu Downing, Owen Abbott; fiction by Jessica Hahn, Marsha Temlock and James Stafford; and poetry by Ken Poyner and LouAnn Shepard Muhm. Read about the lives of blue collar workers, fishermen, a warehouse worker, waitress, barista, roofer, marijuana grower, psychotic data entry clerk and tap dancing birthday cake. Click here for a glimpse of the work by each author.

POETRY

Catching the Send-Off Train
by Melanie Faith (June 2013)

A work of imagination and heart, Melanie Faith’s Catching the Send-Off Train traces the impacts war has on the family left behind. With the lightest of touches, Faith’s poems tell intimate stories of separation, remembrance, and return. Each short vignette adds another layer to the narrative and to an understanding of her characters. The collection delivers the emotional accumulation of these well-rendered moments.

Also available as a Kindle
and on Smashwords

FICTION

Our Place
by Atar Hadari (March 2013)

Hadari's multi-layered stories constitute a novella within Hadari's novel-in-progress, When We Were Saved. They are complex and beautiful, funny and disturbing, narrated in a distinctive voice with a subtext of survival and loss, removal and annihilation. The narrator is Natan, who recollects his life in a 1930s' kibbutz and the people whose paths crossed his. Mahmoud, Anschel and Sarah are as unforgettable as Natan himself and the place he has come to love.

MEMOIR

The Old Fever by Rick Gray
(December 2012)

Excerpts from a 1980s’ Peace Corps memoir: It is really about Kenya's spell — the fever of the place that gets into the blood and never leaves, making a return to everything that came before impossible. Includes hyperlinks to photos, videos and background articles to enhance and deepen the reading.

FICTION & POETRY anthology

Found. Seven stories and seven poems (September 2012):
Fiction by Susan Meyers, Tania Hershman, Laura Loomis, Mary McCluskey, Jeff Haas, and Lucille Shulklapper. Poetry by Sara Toruno-Conley, Angela Corbet, Bianca Diaz and Victor Perez. Ten authors write about things found or uncovered—repressed memories, a stolen necklace, fading photos, family secrets, broken promises, a derelict doll, embroidery sampler, love. Click here for a glimpse of each story.

POETRY

A City Full of Eyes
by James Cihlar (June 2012)

“James Cihlar’s poems reflect on the modern mythology of film and its intersection with the lives of those who go about their ordinary existence. Cihlar has a versatility with a range of forms and a confident voice that shifts deftly from his mother's divorce to Carl Jung and back to film divas. The title suggests the cinematic subject matter, but also hints at the theme of life-reflecting-art-reflecting-life.”

—Terry Ehret, Sonoma County Poet Laureate, 2004-06

7/25/2023
James Cihlar has requested A City Full of Eyes be removed from this site as the poems are all now available in his books. See: jamescihlar.com/books

DOUBLE FICTION ISSUE

California Dreaming (March 2012). Excerpts from two novels by Patrick Fanning and Jerry Ratch. Each presents a different historical take on California as an island of possibilities. (Our double fiction cover is an antique map of the Pacific and North America, circa 1715 (when California was thought to be an island).

The Venice of the West by Patrick Fanning offers an alternate history of a 19th century California where the (Mexican) Republic of Alta California prevails from south of the Russian River in Sonoma County and a (Russian) Rossland streteches from Alaska to Fort Ross (the Tsar's summer palace on the coast) and east to Sakrametska (Sacramento). Fanning's narrative switches between dispatches from journalist/novelist Mark Twain and his traveling companion, American impressionist painter, John Singer Sargent, who has come to California to launch a career as a portrait artist and possibly explore his own unspoken sexual preferences. The excerpt includes sketches and watercolors by Fanning, who like his protagonists, is both novelist and artist. It includes a timeline of alternate history versus actual history.

Jerry Ratch's How the 60s Ended follows a van load of merry prankster poets on a road trip from the mid-west to the mad-west of California and the San Francisco poetry scene. It's funny, sharply written with the ear and eye of a poet and captures the charm of the 60s and early 70s, along with some of its excesses and blind spots. It includes Ratch's own poetry from the time. It also makes a fascinating extension to our recent memoir issue, Beverly Jackson's Loose Fish Chronicles (see below). 

MEMOIR

The Loose Fish Chronicles: Excerpt from a Memoir in Stories
by Beverly A. Jackson (December 2011)

Jackson's memoir gives us early 1960's Greenwich Village from a young woman's perspective. The stories are starkly honest and the language glows in their examination of a young woman starting adult life in the New York neighborhood famed for worshipping the arts and rejecting conformity. Greenwich Village became the epicenter for the enormous cultural shift we now refer to as the "Sixties," yet, even there, attractive young women were still expected to hide their own intelligence and talent. These stories are a wonderful read on their own. But we are also, for the first time,  honoring the "E" in echapbook. Hyperlinks to photos, videos, background articles, and Beverly's poetry and artwork add a kind of immediacy that only web-based publication can provide.

FICTION anthology

Loss. Ten stories by eight authors (September 2011):
Cezarija Abartis • T.M. De Vos • Stefanie Freele • Barry Friesen • Jessica Erica Hahn • Carol Reid • Sabra Sanjani • Anca Vlasopolos write about loss and its impacts — painful and funny, despairing and hopeful, violent and tender, ordinary and extraordinary, provocative and thought provoking. Click here for a glimpse of each story.

POETRY

The Wayward Orchard
by Paul Sohar (June 2011)

Paul Sohar's language is fresh and surprising, but never jarring, as if we were hearing these words for the first time. You may find yourself reading the poems aloud. Like the fire trail in "The Wayward Orchard," they will take you to unexpected places.

FICTION

Grace
by Robert Moulthrop (March 2011)

The seven luminous stories collected in Grace range from lightly comic to darkly complex. The voices are diverse — hopeful, angry, uncertain, amused, despairing — even where loss is profound, there are grace notes.

Also available as a Kindle
and on Smashwords

MEMOIR

The Bus Driver's Book of the Dead
by Jesse Millner (December 2010)

The Bus Driver’s Book of the Dead evokes Chicago in the ‘80s, where Jesse Millner drove a charter bus by day and by night drank to erase the failure of his life. His memoir is despairing and redemptive, gritty and lyrical, serious and sardonically funny.

“Millner has survived a fire baptism of religion and alcohol.”
— Dominika Wrozynski, Apalachee Review

FICTION

Trouble. Selected Stories
by Michelle McEwen (September 2010)

"In Michelle’s works, there is no wall between reader, writer and characters, we all mesh into a place and time that we feel we are living in, not reading about."
             — Walter Bjorkman, poet/writer and co-founder/editor of the online literary community Voices

POETRY

Translation of Light
by Ruhama Veltfort (June 2010)

A collection of new and selected early poems exploring the ground of memory, vision and the illuminations of everyday life.

Also available as a Kindle
and on Smashwords

FICTION

Around the Bend. Selected Stories
by Laura Beasoleil (March 2010)

Laura Beausoleil's stories are a lyrical and edgy melding of memoir and fiction.

"This the work of a consummate writer, a reader's dream book."
                  — Ed Mycue

MEMOIR

Scenes From My Life on Hemlock Street. A Brooklyn Memoir
by Arlene Mandell (December 2009)

Coming-of-age stories that portray the vibrant and diverse life on one street in Brooklyn over fifty years ago. Selected from a book in progress.

“A writer does well if in his whole life he can tell the story of one street.”
                     — Nelson Algren

POETRY

I Am a Fact Not a Fiction. Selected poems by Edward Mycue (September 2009)

“Ed Mycue's poetry is a lifetime of surprises. He was born surprised, grew up on wonder, and now surely lives under the ever crashing waterfalls of amazement. His language is pure chirp, flip and rouse. It never ever sleeps. Savor his lines — like memory — for as long as you dare”
     — Hiram Larew, author of More Than Anything and Part Of

FICTION Anthology

Old Cars. Fiction anthology from the no-name writers' convivium (September 2008): Wray Cotterill • Judith Day • Richard Gustafson • Chance Lucky • Orianna Pratt • Jo-Anne Rosen • Linda Saldaña • Susan Starbird

Eight authors, exploring the mysterious allure of cars, write about infidelity, senility, family bonds, friendship, tough times, troubled marriages and more.

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