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The Shame About LGBT Wrath

In Issue 86, August 2024 by Rhiannon Catherwood

“What is your religion?”
Coming across with the severity of a grand inquisitor, this isn’t a question we expect from a Lyft driver, though it is a question that transports us. It takes us quickly into another scene, another story, another genre.

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In the Realm of Eroticism and Contradictions

In Issue 86, August 2024 by Patrick Sylvain

When a former lover asked me to describe myself, I always answered that I am simple and complex. This response, intended not to be facetious but rather to dichotomize my essence, reflects the coexistence within me of simplicity and complexity. This duality, I believe, is present in almost all socialized and experienced beings.

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Natural Order

In Issue 86, August 2024 by Hunter Prichard

It has been said to me by various barroom loafers – the sort of wise but disordered, self-tortured drunks that would be at home inside Eddie Caro’s Chinchorro, the harbor dive where the therianthropic characters of Brendan Shay Basham’s Swim Home to the Vanished meet to prophesize and lament — that all of which a person has inside of them has been given by their ancestors, that despite how We strive for a different or better life, We all are meant for the track laid by those of which come before us.

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I was too tired to even squeegee

In Issue 85, July 2024 by Elizabeth Ricketson

I was too tired to even squeegee the shower glass door on a recent May morning. Just the day before, my husband Jon and I had set up my solo exhibit at the Ledyard Gallery on the second floor of the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire. I was fatigued by the physical effort of moving art over the previous week and a half as I had also delivered paintings to a few additional locations in my home state of Vermont. The real tired came from completing the goal. The task.

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Just Write: Origin Story of a Writer

In Issue 85, July 2024 by Mira Saxena

My earliest memories of loving stories were when I was sitting in the light-filled corners of the kids’ stacks at the newly built Northland Public Library in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs in the late 1970s. In 1976, my family arrived in the state after my father started a new job. Even before the library collection was moved to the new building from its humbler previous address at what was then called Three Degree Road, the older library was a quiet place of respite for all of us.

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Practicing Care In A Broken World

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Zach Wyner

I was upstairs in the bedroom/office having just begun a writing coaching session with my last online student of the day when I heard the doorbell ring. My son’s feet met the floor with a thud and pounded their way from the living room couch to the front door…

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The Age of Ageism

In Issue 84, June 2024 by Amy Claire Massingale

I despise “isms” — racism, sexism, anti-Semitism. There are too many to count, unfortunately. I have never understood them, have never understood bigotry. But the one I guess that confuses and confounds me the most is ageism because it is the only one that touches us all — everyone ages.

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Where Is Paul Bunyan?

In Issue 83, May 2024 by Christian David Loeffler

I stared at a room full of strangers, students, when my heart most recently shattered. The scattering of its pieces on the classroom floor can be attributed to the following four words: “Who is Paul Bunyan?”

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Life and Death on Cemetery Hill

In Issue 82, April 2024 by Kirk Astroth

Alone, but not alone. Perched atop an exposed, wind-blown ridge in the Sonoran Desert a few miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona, the graveyard resembles a sepia tone image from the 1930s—slate gray sky, brown land.

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Tipping Points in Fiction

In Issue 81, March 2024 by Sandro F. Piedrahita

Ever since the publication in 2000 of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point – about tipping points in the world of business – the term has been used increasingly in a variety of settings. Sociologists speak of tipping points when a community has so many minority members that white flight begins. Climate experts speak of tipping points when climate change becomes irreversible. Physicians write of tipping points in determining when a disease becomes an epidemic. What I haven’t found yet is a full-length book on the issue of tipping points in fiction, a discussion which is sorely lacking, for tipping points are an essential element in any work of fiction.

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How to Write a Work of Magic Realism

In Issue 79, January 2024 by Sandro F. Piedrahita

As a preliminary matter, let me state that I do not believe in “rules” for writing fiction and certainly not for writing works of magic realism. The following essay will provide guidelines and nothing more. I will be describing what I have learned by writing short stories using magic realism and hopefully give you some ideas as to how to do the same.

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1600 Scientists: A Jeremiad

In Winter 2024: Climate Crisis by Glenn Schiffman

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE LAST DECADE OF THE 20TH CENTURY, 1600 scientists, including 100 Nobel Laureates, signed a “letter to humanity” which concluded, “We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

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Economy As Intimacy

In Issue 11, March 2018 by Eric Peter

During a previous artistic project of mine, I explored various one-person endeavours into positive change through dialogue against the backdrop of worldwide geopolitical issues. We would engage in a range of topics—from gender equality to environmental awareness—all with a focus on “the small-scale” and with forward-looking attitude. But afterwards, I was left thinking ideas/opinions on economics or finances were left unspoken.

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See Table 1

In Issue 11, March 2018 by Chris Espenshade

It is argued that it is time to classify the compulsive need to hoard military-grade weapons and ammunition as a mental health issue that would preclude the said hoarding (see Table 1).

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How to Be a Writer

In Issue 9, January 2018 by Anna Doran

If you want to be a writer, distinguish yourself as the last child in your first grade class to read. As a kid, you must reject every printed word that your parents dangle in front of your face and shrug your shoulders in response. Your parents will worry, and they’ll question whether your inability to read is related to your hearing loss.

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Kampuchea

In Issue 9, January 2018 by Tristan Durst

January in South Korea, without enough snow to close schools but just enough icy pavement to make walking treacherous, broke my spirit. For three weeks, the sun never cracked through the grey cement of the sky. I visited a tanning salon adjacent to the U.S. Army base in the hope that some vitamin D might break my foul mood. My co-worker Katie, from Wales, handled the frigid dishwater sky better …

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The Greatest Scientist of a Generation

In Issue 8, December 2017 by Scott Wilson

“The Greatest Scientist of of a Generation” is Scott Wilson’s satirical take on what is the serious problem, CCD, or colony collapse disorder. Scientists couldn’t agree on the source of honeybee deaths, a real problem because honeybees are the pollinators of fruits like blueberries, vegetables like broccoli, and nuts like almonds. Scientists, corporations, and the INTERNET are tagged here.

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And

In Issue 8, December 2017 by Sophia DuRose

Sophia DuRose says it loud and clear in her essay “And.” She refuses to be labeled, having learned a lesson of discrimination against her Jewish faith when she was a teenager. Rather than taking the opinions of others at face value, she writes that we must “create our own opinions of worthiness and self-assurance.” Taking a line from Maya Angelou as her axiom, Sophia DuRose will, “like the air,” rise.

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Why I Am a Writer

In Issue 8, December 2017 by Maya Roe

It’s a summer afternoon and Maya Roe can’t write. The “overdramatic and rambling” prose hitting the page isn’t working. So, she goes out intentionally looking and seeing and feeling. Nature is not symbolism or metaphor. It just is. Stream and Forest. Bees and Moss. Cattails and Blueberry trees. All of this an “inexplicable world” to love.

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Motherhood, Ambition

In Issue 7, November 2017 by Claire Robbins

Robbins didn’t know herself before she was a mother at twenty, but she was determined to know herself as an adult. This is her story about the tension between motherhood and ambition, and how she didn’t allow ambition to lose.