FICTION
Carolyn Byrne
The Half Life of
Quentin Hayes
The Bomb was fat and disappointing—a bomb like other bombs, only more of what it was. It was sequence, geometry, like paper creased into a plane or a child’s fortune teller. Cootie catchers. That’s what they had called them in school, doom-saying from their sticky desks.
Carolyn Byrne
What are 2-3 books (regardless of genre) that you’ve read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath is breathtaking. As in, I caught myself holding my breath and had to take oxygen breaks. The women in Donath’s study were pressured into motherhood by partners, family, or social norms, and after birthing their children did not, as they were promised, become different people with different desires for their life. I've never liked required-reading edicts, but this should be required reading for every human with reproductive potential.
Carolyn Byrne is a fiction writer from Long Island, New York. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and BA in English from Cornell University. In 2018 she was a Minnesota State Arts Board Grantee, as well as a MacDowell Colony Rona Jaffe Fellow. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Emily Abendroth
Excerpt from: It Looked Like What You Needed and Then It Needled You
Sousveillance Pageant has one older brother who is in lock-up and one ex-lover who is there. Within any single given year, the Pageant also has anywhere in the whereabouts of three to four companions who rotate in and out of an assortment of state-enforced and gated walls.
Harris Lahti
You're a Legend!
Last minute order comes in and you rip the ticket, hold it an inch before your face. Squint one eye. You’re near-sighted. Myopic. Also, pre-diabetic, wet-brained, irritably bowelled. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Harris Lahti
What are 2-3 books (regardless of genre) that you’ve read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life blew my hair back and scalped me too. Honestly didn’t even feel like reading a book..more like living an experience. Elizabeth Ellen’s Saul Stories was a scalp ripper, also. Troy James Weaver’s Temporal, as well.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
Aside from my parents? My mentor, David Ryan. I just finished up an MFA at Sarah Lawrence, and while I had some good teachers, David was such a gift. He really goes above and beyond for his student. The material he teaches and the passion with which he teaches it..I don’t think it’s possible to come out of his class unchanged. SLC is better for him, and so am I.
Who would win in a fist fight: Ivanka or Jared? Why?
No one wins in a fight, but I hope they both lose.
What would be the worst “buy one get one free” sale of all time?
Any sort of bulk fruit item, because I already have enough fruit flies dancing around my one bushel of overripe bananas.
If you were the CEO, of a company name one thing you would make compulsory in the office and one thing you would ban in the office.
Compulsory: Microdosing,
Harris Lahti's work is forthcoming or appeared in Post Road, New York Tyrant, Elm Leaves Journal, Yemassee, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. He edits fiction at Juked and Fence. Read more at: harrislahti.com
Kate Petersen
Horses Under the Bridge
Horses under the bridge, my father would say to me. Knowing it wasn’t what people said. He meant, let it go. He meant forget about it. Where it equals one of four hundred things I refuse to forget.
Kate Petersen
What are 2 - 3 books (regardless of genre) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch. Whereas by Layli Long Soldier. Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli. Chemistry by Weike Wang. Basin and Range by John McPhee. Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing by Marianne Boruch.
Who is someone you admire who does work that you feel really benefits your “local” community, and what kind of work is it that they do?
The clerk at the NAU campus post office is about as kind as anyone gets, and improves our community of stubborn letter-senders and needers of stamps, as well as the farther-flung web of letter-getters out there. One day I asked her for a 'boring' stamp to mail a utility bill with, but I ended up liking the boring one she offered so much that I bought a sheet of them. She showed me the other books she had: Dragons; scratch and sniff popsicles. "My whole stamp drawer smells like watermelon," she confessed, "but I try to pick the fun ones." Also, the place is super-decked out for Halloween, and I have a real soft spot for some under-stretched fake spider web. I suspect that's her doing, too.
I also admire and am deeply glad for the work of all those who drafted and commented on Flagstaff's Climate Action Plan, which seeks to reduce our city's greenhouse emissions 80 percent by 2050, and seeks adaptive measures that prioritize those most vulnerable to climate change. In light of the alarming IPCC report on 1.5C global warming, such bold and thoughtful local efforts are absolutely imperative.
What part of a kid’s movie completely scared you when you were young?
Fantasia was pretty terrifying, I dimly recall. Also, the fateful horse-dive in Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken, making me the first person ever to admit in print to seeing that movie.
Kate Petersen Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Epoch, Paris Review Daily, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University, she currently serves as coordinator for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.
.jpg)
Kim d. hunter
2 Stories
Once there was man who did very little besides go to work, blame others for the world’s problems and inhale the images and sounds that were transmitted to the implants in his brain.
kim d. hunter
kim d. hunter is
Megan Martin
7 Stories
Walk past baby grave, baby grave, baby grave: so many rows of brand new skeletons, fresh like vegetables in the ground.
I try not to step on their faces. On their tiny plastic caskets of despair.
Megan Martin
Megan Martin is the author of a collection of tiny stories, NEVERS (Caketrain 2014). She teaches writing and literature at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.s
Natalie Rogers
Novel Excerpt: Queen Fatty
After school, Fatty tied her siblings to the dining table at home, then headed across the courtyard to her friend Mui Mui’s building.
Natalie Rogers
What are 2-3 books (regardless of genre) that you’ve read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
The Complete Stories of Lu Xun; JM Coetzee's Disgrace; Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart; Esme Weijun Wang's The Border of Paradise; Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World; Junichiro Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales; Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City; Alvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death.
Natalie Rogers was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. She is currently working on a novel, titled Queen Fatty, set in Hong Kong in the 1960s.
