Craft Talk: Writing Weird Stuff That Matters
I originally delivered this essay as a craft talk for undergraduate student writers attending the 2016 James Madison University Creative Writing Conference; it has been lightly edited. As I told those assembled, no thirty-minute talk on this subject could possibly be comprehensive. There are many ways to write weird work that matters—this piece doesn’t even begin to touch on […]
Read more
On Mythologizing and Autofiction
Movement(s) of (Poetic) Identity
Read more
The Exhibit
A restoration was underway at the Hall of Exhibits. I did not know what this meant when I took the position, only that the Grand Reopening would take place in four weeks and that the restoration was in its final intense stage. New exhibits were being installed, given finishing touches, catalogued. I was to be [...]
Read more
Case of the Unkind Cut
Some girls lived in the Lorena Bobbit House. You could stay for a month or for the winter. Janet offered me the couch. Six of us that season, long ago she'd stopped doing meth and me and my best friend too. She rode Ami's back in the living room. We put on My So-Called Life, nostalgic [...]
Read more
Ruda: Ten Remedies
Read more
Mistaken
A Choose-Your-Own Adventure Hip Hop Star Story
Read more
Yellow
oh here i am, footless again sitting in a tiny boat in the bathtub touching each of my eight breasts touching the cluster of hood-hidden nerves, the wait hurts, the wanting moutarde dijon spread on the soles of my feet well haven’t you ever wanted to leave a print, a thick mess of gold [...]
Read more
Echo(II)
if it were years ago and you could lock your voice so it would never unspool itself sheer & strangely mesmerizing like a spider’s silk & you the hunger at its patient center of course you’d want to of course you’d still become a story even years ago the myth is already written your body’s [...]
Read more
from “Acheron”
Know your name Be clear Malinao ………………. Clear thoughts from Clear souls …………………. na isip sway pray sea sink With 1500 pesos I arrive at a divine place where the four corners have split: from the sky lovely white figures sing soprano melodies, from the air the north wind whispers, “it [...]
Read more
Crotalus Horridus
The first time I saw the witch, I asked for a new body. I could not stand my body. I could not stand my thighs and crooked teeth that rubbed together like uneven beach stones caught in waves; hair curled and oily against my face; this misshapen frame. I asked her to give me [...]
Read more
Kill the Sister
It was a game my older brother made up and we only played it once when we couldn’t find Monopoly. “That game sucks butt anyway,” Jamie said, “I have a better idea.” We were in the kitchen. He pulled a knife from its home in the drying rack. It made a shling sound. “Give me [...]
Read more
Hag Stone
Last week’s hobgoblins had been wayward enough, but the booted cat—with its shape-shifting trickery—was even more disturbing for rewarding its lazy human for simply agreeing not to drown it. At tale’s end, the least sensible of a miller’s sons wins the hand of a princess on little more than a cat’s cunning and the young [...]
Read more
