ISSUE 7.2 welcome issue contents > fiction > nonfiction > poetry contributors interviews featured art our editors Amanda Baldeneaux“There was no winning, and the message seemed to be that being a girl was wrong and shameful as soon as a threshold of age was crossed, maybe around eleven, if not before.” Janelle Blasdel“My hope is that there’s maybe a moment where readers do a double-take at one of those details (‘Did he just—?’) and then another moment when the reader is like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s definitely what he meant by that, oh no!'” Robert Boucheron“The cities we love and want to live in do not happen by accident. Someone designs them.” Jennafer D’Alvia“Imagination is a tangible part of the human experience. Our imaginings are an integral part of our lives; they tell us our concerns and help shape our identities.” Margaret Erhart“In flash, so much has to be said so quickly. This is great training for getting to the heart of things, getting in and getting out, and slimming down language to its essential meaning. Flash is the lean cuisine of fiction.” Ed Granger“For me, imagination is an element that should not be too quickly abandoned in favor of ‘what really happened.'” Quinn Carver Johnson“[It] must be hard to kind of separate the fictional version of you and the real-life version of you when they’re both saying the same things.” Babo Kamel“I do believe that language can provide a speaker with a sense of safety and of being at home.” Joshua Kulseth“Chickens evoke the image of a rustic, calm, steadily-paced farm life, and I wanted to ruffle the feathers (if you’ll forgive the pun) of this image.” Tom Laichas“I can’t count the times the city’s past has creaked open, revealed something I didn’t know, and then slammed shut.” Geoff Martin“While I’m pretty lighthearted in my day-to-day life, my essay writing tends to veer towards more somber, historically-laden topics. I wanted to play for some of Sedaris’s deadpan humor that he mines so well from everyday occurrences.” Nicole Mason“The writers that we think of as canon did the same thing, it’s just that their notions of pop culture were history and mythology. Shelley has Ozymandias and I have Elon Musk, I guess.” Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade“Anyway, our sidebar about sandwiches made us both hungry, and I think it was Brenda who said, ‘We should write about them!’” Dean Rader“To me, that is one of the great pleasures of art—to enter into conversation with the greatness that precedes you.” Randall Van Nostrand“I think confronting big grief is the emotional equivalent of trying not to drown. People use whatever they have to survive.” Sherre Vernon“Growing up or letting go doesn’t mean we remain unmarked by our earlier lives. And it doesn’t mean that what we gave up was completely without beauty or value—even if it was harmful.” Laura Grace Weldon“All of us have necessary stories. I am captivated by the way stories ring bells deep in the listener, the ways sharing a deeply personal experience can’t help but connect us.” Marilyn Westfall“When I wrote the poem, both the hospital and the garden served as symbols of hope and recovery from that centuries-long pandemic that is, unfortunately, still active in some regions of the world.”
