Would not a proper memory of one’s father presuppose a proper father? I’d think so. In the memory I have there is nothing about either it or the father that qualifies as proper. Or usual. As it happens, it is my first-ever memory, one powerful enough to have lodged itself deep into the crevices of my baby brain and body, one to be carried through all the days, years and decades to follow. The thing is, until five decades on, I didn’t know for sure whether or not it was my father. …
and the mother sees it as her job to chisel her out. To Michelangelo her. The tools are sentences like, “You look washed out without makeup” and “you should suck your stomach in.” At the daughter’s age, the mother had to use her fingernails to hollow out space enough to pound her tiny fist against the rock encasing her. That’s how she got out of her block of marble. Her daughter would benefit from the array of chisels the mother had picked up: the point, the round, the flat, the claw. The mallet …
The City Kathryn McCawley The City is a short graphic narrative exploring the life of a young woman in a desolate abandoned city. Having come to it in promise of paradise, the woman is now trapped in a decaying landmark where its few remaining residents aimlessly wander from place to place through a directionless subway system. This graphic narrative explores issues of social isolation, of contemporary urban life’s omnipresent impermanence, and of the haunting sense of aimlessness that we all …
Texas A&M University Press, 2020 Winner of the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize Still Life with Timex submerges the reader into the mind of a grieving mother, whose distant son has fallen into a coma and inevitably passes. Elisabeth Murawski approaches this subject intensely, rarely straying from the intimate perspective of the mother. She focuses on how grief numbs a person and turns their world into something radically foreign. She pairs raw emotional despair with formal structure …
This interview took place on March 13, 2021. Randy James is the author of a debut chapbook, Shifters, published by Nomadic Press and is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of San Francisco. His poetry has been published in Myriad, Westwind, Red Cedar Review, Palette, and Fem Newsmagazine. Randy has performed in venues across Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. His work is featured in Hayat Hyatt’s “Villanelle,” which has been archived by Collectif …
Paul Beatty is the author of two books of poetry and four novels, including The Sellout (2015), for which he became the first American author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Since graduating MFA, Beatty has built a career in writing that has traversed genres of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction alike. Through unrivaled observation and understanding of both place and identity, the characters and worlds he builds are …