Story Behind the Story

Today’s post is written by Dallas Woodburn. Her essay “What My Premature Birth Taught Me About Writing” appears in our Spring 2016 issue.  Being a “preemie” is an aspect of my identity that has shaped my life, and that I have been writing about in various ways for as long as I can remember. In middle…

Today’s post is written by Rebecca Macijeski. Her poems “Sonata for Water and Birds” and “Searching” appear in our Spring 2016 issue. “Sonata for Water and Birds” and “Searching” explore my fascination for what we can become in the gray area where opposing forces or energies overlap. The poems come from a book- length project that tries to…

Today’s post is written by Christopher Woods. His series of  photography “In Transit” appears in our Spring 2016 issue. If I do not move, my heart is still beating. Blood courses through arteries and veins through my body. The engine goes, but where? I stand up. I am in a room. I cross the room. I cross…

Today’s post is written by P. Kearney Byrne, whose short story “The Call Birds” appears in our Fall 2015 issue. In 2013, I saw a UK short story competition with a prize of £7,500; a lot of money at a time when I was indulging in daily fantasies of winning my way into the black in…

Today’s post is written by Bernard Grant. A piece of his creative nonfiction—”Puzzle Pieces“—appears in our Fall 2015 issue.  Sometimes an image causes words to sound in my head, looping like a catchy jingle. The only way to lose it is to write. “Puzzle Pieces” was an attempt to rid myself of one such sound: “The woman…

Today’s post is written by Jenna Kilic-Somers. Her poems “My Father Recites a Story in Low Voice” and “Language” appear in our Fall 2015 issue.  On the day before learning that my father had passed away, I dashed off the first draft of “My Father Recites a Story in Low Voice” for a workshop I had the next…

Today’s post is written by Deborah Bacharach. Two of her poems appear in our Fall 2015 issue.  Twenty years ago, I was lying on the grass at Green Lake reading my mom’s college copy of Whitman and writing what I saw, what I felt. It was a slim green volume with her name carefully lettered on the frontispiece…

Today’s post is written by Richard LeBlond, whose essay “The Basque Shepherd” appears in our Fall 2015 issue. At first I was reluctant to write about the circumstances leading to “The Basque Shepherd.” The essay had already crawled inside itself, becoming part of the story. I didn’t think it could support a third perspective. But when I…

Today’s post is written by José Angel Araguz. “Raro,” a piece of his short fiction, appears in our Fall 2015 issue.  “Raro” is part of a forthcoming collection, Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press), whose pieces deal primarily with what it meant for me to grow up in and out of South Texas. While growing…