STORY BOY
By David Huddle

My grandfather is a loquacious man who loves talking about the old characters in town.  Old men walk up to his house just to sit around listening to him spin his yarns.  So even though I can’t name it, have little understanding of it, and don’t know what will come of it, I have precedents for what I’m about to do.

SMALL LOVE LETTERS
By Kim Dana Kupperman

The real history of the world happens in small ways. A glance might shift the order of everything. A heartbeat might slow the unfolding of a wing, which may in turn cause a brief lull in the tide.  A boat might then be delayed.  That series of small hesitations might change history.  I like to think of this quantum condition as a matter of small love letters.

COMFORT FOOD
By Lisa Ohlen Harris

I woo Jeanne’s appetite with her favorite Southern foods. Grits, banana pudding, Miracle Whip and bologna loaf on white bread. French dressing over cottage cheese. Sausage gravy over biscuits: pallid sauce so thick with grease that the leftovers will congeal, gray and lumpy. Tomorrow I will reheat them to mash over her toast.

ON BEING A TRUCKER
By Lia Purpura

I used to talk about driving trains, metaphorically, and wrecking trains. Train-wreck as state-of-being: the induced chaos, blind curves and collisions. I still like watching junkyard magnets pick up cars and move them around or drop them into a crusher. I like even more the wrecking ball – not the metaphor, but the thing itself.

NEW CRAFT ESSAYS AND INTERVIEW

In our Craft Section:

Lockie Hunter dissects a writing exercise that works ( most of the time) and examines the importance of locating the self

Bryan Furuness contemplates the "worst writing teacher" he ever had and why we must be open to wonder; and

Brendan O'Meara gives us an interview with Thomas French, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives. 

VIRGA
By Deanna Benjamin

I scooped a pool of rainwater with tadpoles into a plastic cup. I got an ivory-handled magnifying glass that once belonged to someone’s grandfather, a handful of stickpins, and a steak knife from my mother. With the knife I opened a tadpole. With the pins I separated strands of black and beads of brown and white. With the ivory-handled magnifying glass, I imagined intestines, a heart, an egg cluster. I didn’t see you.

THE PALM READER AND THE POET
By Greg Bottoms

She grabs my hand, turns it over, palm up.  I let her have it.  I get a good look at her as she looks at my open hand.  Black hair, wild black eyes, skin white as an egg under this light.  Sick-thin.  Sweaty.  Almost feral.  Could have flown in fanged from the alley over there. “Look at this lifeline.  I read palms like poems,” she says.  “I’ll stare down into the souls in your sperm.  I’ll take your metaphor into me and decipher it.”

A STRANGER AT DUSK
By Robert G. Cowser

Daddy led the man to the porch and helped him sit down on the stoop.  He was a pathetic sight, for he had little control of his body.  Then Daddy motioned for Mamma and me to go back inside.  He followed us into the front room.  “He said he was tryin’ to git to Bill Smith’s place.  I guess he’s Bill’s son.  He couldn’t have walked fer in his condition.  He must’ve rode with somebody.”

EVELYN
By Carol Guess

I heard a scritch and looked across the backyard to someone’s porch. The someone was an elderly someone, fragile, stooped nearly in half. She wore a bright red crocheted vest over a purple polyester shirt and beige polyester pants, with some brassy things for decoration. Her hair was silver, curled into ringlets. She opened the flap to her mailbox, then let it snap shut.

INTRO TO CREATIVE WRITING
By Dani Johannesen

He strolls into his classroom wearing his uniform–faded black jeans that sag in the rear and a worn fleece pullover. He slings his bag onto the table up front and checks his watch–he’s five minutes late, as usual. The students are already seated and he surveys the assembly. In the back row a girl scribbles furiously in a fancy journal.

LITTLE THINGS
By Susanne Antonetta

Is the dollhouse the home she always wanted, I wonder, and if so, why has she chosen so capriciously not to have it? It may be the alchemy of family, where the dollhouse forms a philosopher’s stone and we an intransmutable lead. It may be the good home can only be small, small enough for fingers to glue whatever breaks, for survival to be as simple as bungee cord.

THE WOUND
By Jonathan Starke

Teddy had a bunch of cowboy friends over and they were all drinking too many beers. He got down on a knee next to the horse and put his hand out and poked the tender flesh. The horse reared back and screamed.

DIAGNOSABLE
By Joshua Wheeler

My mother’s family swears they invented the Church of Christ a few generations back. The Booth family. The most famous member being John Wilkes. This is probably why they are so adamant that the lesser-known cousin, Henry C., invented the Church.

NEW BOOK REVIEWS

On our Book Review page:

Debbie Hagan reviews Sue William Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir

Deborah Thompson reviews Neil Shubin’s Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

David Wanczyk reviews Ander Monson's Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir

M.M. Wittle reviews Stephen Markley’s The Unbelievable Story of How I Wrote, Sold and Published This Very Book, and

Dinty W. Moore reviews Philip Graham's The Moon Comes to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon