Issue 1Summer 2014

Fiction

We Should Have Named Him by Grant Gerald Miller

We wanted less geometry. Less corn. We wanted the chaotic remnants of ancient flooding. Carved gorges and mountains and rivers that ran through breweries. We wanted burgers with layers of poached eggs and truffles and smoked tomato coulis and cocktails with hibiscus and four different types of ginger. They could keep their Packers and tater tot casseroles. We wanted bookstores that took up city blocks. Burgeoning IT companies and well-maintained bridges and bike lanes and busses that ran on time.

Interviews and Extras

Non-Fiction

Reading Aloud To My Cat by J. Weintraub

Reading my writing aloud—and I write primarily fiction and personal essays—has always been part of the drill for me. It’s the penultimate or even ultimate stage in my obligatory revision/rewriting sequence: from the initial handwritten drafts; through revisions on screen, with their multiple font and type-size permutations; to several printed versions at the end.I once read somewhere about a writer who hung his manuscripts up on a clothes line, like drying laundry, and then reviewed the pages sequentially through a pair of binoculars. I’ve never gone quite that far to gain distance, but I have been known to print out my hard copies in different colors—red, green, purple—to view each with a fresh eye.

Poetry

Applied Science by Keetje Kuipers

To explain, to chart, to graph
what has lasted this long and what hasn’t.

Ought by Keetje Kuipers

Each afternoon heavy clouds form in the north,
and each evening when I take the dogs out, it snows.

Prayer by Mary Buchinger

She’s meeting a friend for a walk through the museum of fine arts and lunch –errands to run on the way…

Kafka’s Wound by Judith Skillman

Toward sunset it bleeds orange, plums,
and wine. The father always at table
with his mug in hand.

What To Give by Jeff Hardin

I could give
my horizon,

the one I see
on cheekbones…

Elegy at Lake Murray by Susan Laughter Meyers

And what of the pines
branching over the lake? Am I to take them
as a sign,
these few drops of rain as mercy?

A Prayer for Marriage by Gary L. McDowell

Let there be woman deranged made of words:
gardeners and snow-ghosts, moving lips
and butterfly-knots. Let there be.

Every Anonymous City by Gary L. McDowell

I knew a girl who closed her eyes
every time she heard a car horn…

Stage/Screen Writing

Reservations by Jeffrey Fischer-Smith

Mid-morning. LIGHTS UP on EDGAR and MAE. MAE stands at a kitchen sink washing and drying morning dishes. EDGAR sits at a kitchen table, reading a newspaper.
EDGAR Good breakfast, Mae.
(MAE turns to him.)
MAE Thank you, Edgar.

Highway 16 by Claudia Barnett

SETTING: A one-room house: a bed, a table, a fireplace. A red neon sign flashes “Granny’s” from a distance, its reflection appearing as if through a wet window. At rise. The sounds of rain and vultures. In the bed: GRANNY lies snoring. On the table: a book of matches and a mason jar. The sound of a door slamming shut. GRANNY sits up as RED enters, dripping wet. RED holds an empty basket.

The Writing Life