Krista PuttlerFOUR EMOTIONAL CORNERS I often start a piece of writing with an immediate emotional response to something I have read, something I have overheard, or most recently (as in my piece Origin Story in Cleaver Magazine issue 48), in trying…
A Craft Essay by Bev Boisseau StohlWriting About Another (Who’s a Public Figure!) Without Malicious Intent Working and traveling with my boss was easy—easy, that is, compared to writing about him. Noam Chomsky, a man I call simply Noam, is…
Danuta HincEXPLORE THE UNKNOWN As a writer, you are a creator, shaping landscapes, cities, and people from the ether. Remember, the worlds you build are not just settings—they are living, breathing spaces where time and space dissolve. Once a story…
Miranda KeskesTake Your Teenage Son’s Advice Okay, so maybe you don’t have a teenage son to listen to. That’s okay. A daughter will do, or a significant other, a close friend, a neighbor, even your hairdresser: basically, anyone outside your…
Interview by Andrea Caswell THE FINDING OUT: Megan Marshall on her latest book, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (HarperCollins) In her memoir After Lives, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Megan Marshall trains a biographer’s lens on her…
A Writing Tip by Billy DeanPOEMS FOR PEOPLE If poetry were a tree, its roots would be deep in the ground of human history, and its branches would be the way it evolved to reflect the practices of professional and…
Deborah Bacharach11 Ways of Writing About a Blackbird. . .or Anything Maybe you love description. You can spend an entire poem detailing the smell of a new shoe, the squeak it makes across a kitchen floor. Maybe you excel at…
Flash by Gretta Trafficante MORAINE We first formally meet playing hooky from the gay kickball league. Our refuge is the back nook of the only thrift shop in town to house an almost-adequate selection of 2XL vintage. I’m mulling over…
Poetry by John CalderazzoGOOD MANNERS —Mt. Alice Trail, Seward From the road, through a wall of brush, huge, dank cave of trees, mushroom bursts, mossy yews, spars bent like dancers holding poses on an unlit stage. Path so steep in…
Nonfiction by Federico EscobarUNWRITING An energy healer told me I was a vampire in a previous life. She was deep in toning, stopped, and told me this. It seemed bizarre enough to be true. I didn’t know what to say.…
Flash by Miranda Keskes ON THE EVE OF THEIR TWENTY-FOURTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY After answering the front door and declining another neighborly cup of coffee, she closes the door, places another casserole on the kitchen counter, walks past the row of…
Fiction by Caroline Beuley TOUCH POOL The visitors grab, stroke, and poke, slipping their hands beneath the water’s surface. They touch the creatures, hoping touch will bring knowledge or understanding. When they leave, they bat their damp hands against their…
Fiction by Andrew Graham Martin HERE IN THE HEAT He enters through the window. The family’s on the ground. Why? Slumber party? Who does this? It’s June. Maybe the only air conditioner is in here. Is he really doing this?…
Fiction by James Seidler ARE YOU FEELING BRAVE? The summer before his freshman year of high school, Adam Lake and his pal Denny spent a good week building a tree fort in the woods near their houses. It was just…
Flash Nonfiction by Jocelyn Jane Cox TO THE DRIVER OF THE GREY SEDAN WHO HIT ME ON MY BIKE AT THE CORNER OF WALNUT AND 37TH I’m writing to let you know that was me in the green helmet traveling…
Nonfiction by Robyn Wheelock THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ELSIE MAE Elsie Mae was born beneath Spanish moss and big bright stars a stone’s throw from the Louisiana border. It was April. It was the Great Depression. There were copperheads…
Flash by Andrea Bishop WORKING WITH BLANKS My husband says, if you’re going to have to kill something, it’s best to practice beforehand. I say I don’t think I will; I have you. And if I’m not here to keep…
Flash Nonfiction by Sarah C. Baldwin PIETÀ I wanted to be thin, thin like Earlene. College food and a middle-class life had left me doughy, but decades had whittled her into something edgy and lean—a slash of charcoal, a licorice…
Fiction by Colton Huelle NECROPANTS Erik’s set to fly out of Logan at nine in the morning, and I’m crashing at his place so we can get on the road early enough to beat rush hour. It feels just like…
Visual Narrative by Clifford Thompson CONNECTICUS Clifford Thompson’s books include What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues and Big Man and the Little Men: A Graphic Novel. His book Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays is coming in October from the…
Poetry by Adam Doniger NEGATIVE BOTANY (I ALMOST WEPT) plants do not actually sleep nor do they lie or even bluff they do, however, expose their genitalia (Anne Carson) I climbed the tallest mountain in New York in the middle…
Nonfiction by Lisa K. Buchanan THANK YOU, COCO CHANEL Nobody had to tell us it was healthy. We were teenage TV watchers, California girls up on the latest—margarine instead of butter, baby powder for hygiene, lite cigarettes. A suntan meant…
Fiction by Jodi Paloni BLING LIKE STARS Sparrow’s little brother hums at the kitchen table and talks about what it would be like to float on a giant Cheerio as an inner tube, kicking up the milky sea whenever he…
Nonfiction by Ess PokornowskiHAUNTED Witch It is Halloween night in Ypsilanti in 2020 and I am in the upstairs bathroom of our big, blue farmhouse. This is the pandemic Halloween–the year we are desperate to share, to be in the…
Nonfiction by Rhea Borja CONDIMENT SANDWICH You are hungry when you wake up. You are hungry when you go to bed. But you are the most hungry after school, when you come home to an empty house. First, scout the…
Poetry by Matt Thomas EPIPHANY Those times the light is uncertain, forgets to lick and mother the shapes of the world usually homogenous, become brittle and brail speaking in sharp little barks A fluorescent second in the grocery store maybe,…
Poetry by Derek GrafGENE THERAPY Carrion beetles swarm the distant river. Her father erodes from cancer, his slow death grinding its teeth. She steps inside a shower full of leaves. Within the host cell she hears herself screaming. An actual…
Flash Nonfiction by Vicki Mayk WHAT I WANTED TO SAY WHEN YOU ASKED WHY I LIVE IN AN OLD FACTORY Because my father grew up in a Pittsburgh house surrounded by warehouses near a river. Because his father was an…
Flash by Rachel TalbotSO FAR IN THE DISTANCE A box turtle hits the cold fireplace at dawn. The rousing smack on the hearth calls Glenda from bed. No easy feat, tentative morning legs needing time to feel solid. Her knee…
Flash by Jeff Friedman THREE MICROS Our Daughter’s Glow Our daughter Willow glows in the dark, not a pale glow either—enough to read a book by. Her light is gold, soothing. When she goes to the bathroom at night, she…
Poetry by Jeanne Obbard HOW IS A LILY BEST UNDERSTOOD Not forwards but backwards, its shape a bell curve in time. As heat, lowering; as thunder coming up from the south. As milk-white, as incarnadine, as burgundy, as wine, worn…
Flash Nonfiction by Brian Benson DON’T FIND ME Every hero needs an origin story, and in mine, I’m the size of a trash can, squatting in bushes, crying. I’m crying because I’ve just learned I can’t go to the circus…
Lindsey Godfrey EcclesProtect Your Weeds, Sharpen Your Edges Workshops can be helpful–even lifesavers–for the camaraderie and feedback they provide, but they can also be dangerous. So often I’ll be sitting around a table listening to writers talk about each others’…
Nancy JorgensenClickbait Gets a Bad Rap—But It Might Be the Key to Better Essays I waste too much time on word games. Eliminating letters to find the Wordle. Digging for clues to solve a Spelling Bee. Shuffling vowels to decipher…
Poetry by Marjorie Maddox, reviewed by Lynn LevinSEEING THINGS (Wildhouse Publishing) Marjorie Maddox’s newest collection of poems Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing, 2025) is a stylistic tour de force that sometimes directly and often slantwise bravely engages very difficult themes: an…
Jeremy StelznerStay Close to It I’ve sat through hundreds of lectures on craft and writing workshops with authors of all sorts. Here’s what I’ve learned. Writing tips will ultimately contradict each other, craft essays often imply their way is the…
Andrea CaswellRevision at the Bitter End Ten years ago, I married a sailor. Sailing language soon entered my life, as sailors really do speak using specialized terms. My husband was building a wooden boat at the time, a 17-foot Swampscott…
Fiction by Paul Cody, reviewed by Rachel Shaver WALK THE DARK (Regal House) From the very first sentence of Paul Cody’s Walk the Dark, we are primed for a story of discovery, not just for the main character Oliver, but…
David WatersForget Your Expertise You are a writer, but you likely have another career or important interest, and it is natural that you would want to write about that, or include an aspect of that in your story or poem.…
Beth KephartWriting about yourself? Why not start with a list? Of the things you loved enough to preserve them. Of the things you gave away. Of the things you outright lost. * Of the things in the pantry of your…
Terri LewisA Rabbit Hole of Words The scene: 1945. The action: Earl makes a move on his girl. I wrote the moon, the jalopy, the romance, but Alice pushed him away and flounced down the sidewalk. Then, to my surprise,…
Poetry by Jai Hamid Bashir, reviewed by Daniel MillsDESIRE/HALVES (Nine Syllables Press) Jai Hamid Bashir’s 2024 debut poetry collection, Desire/Halves, from Nine Syllables Press opens with the following lines from Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem, “Consciousness Self-Learns”: World is undivided, observer and…
Jessica KlimeshDON’T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET: THE BENEFITS OF MULTITASKING AS A WRITER When I was a kid, my brothers called me “Jess the Mess.” My young creative brain was always working, and I’d flit from one…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Bunkong Tuon On Writing “What Is Left” and How a Poem Remembers and Speaks My poem “What Is Left” picks up where my other poem “The Carrying” ends. “The Carrying,” which is about my uncles,…
Fiction by Hildur Knútsdóttir, translated by Mary Robinette Kowal, reviewed by Dimitris PassasTHE NIGHT GUEST (Tor Publishing Group) It is rare to encounter a novel of the horror tradition that dares to abstain from the trademark visceral descriptions and gore…
Eileen ToomeyFIND THE CONTRAST I had a happy childhood despite difficult circumstances due to my father’s alcoholism. Luckily, my mother had an ability to focus on what she called the “little things”—moments of clarity, beauty, and humor that shaped our…
Fiction by Kay Chronister, reviewed by I.S. Nugent THE BOG WIFE (Counterpoint Press) The Bog Wife begins with a burial and a missing monster bride. For centuries, the Haddesleys, an ancient and noble family, have lived on a cranberry bog…
Interview by Beth Kephart A CONVERSATION WITH CLEAVER EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KAREN RILE Beth: I hear myself through the years asking you questions. About violins and Mozart’s sister. About trapeze art, birds, organs. Rhubarb. The New Yorker. “Hansel & Gretel” (the play…
Interview by Catherine ParnellAN INTERVIEW WITH JOEANN HART, AUTHOR OF ARROYO CIRCLE (Green Writers Press) In her latest novel, Arroyo Circle, JoeAnn Hart explores the climate crisis. What does it mean to address climate change and our complicity in today’s…
Jessica KlimeshLET YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS DO THE WORK There’s no question that writing is hard work. But thinking too much about what you’re writing can make it even more difficult, hindering your progress. This may be especially true if you’ve received a lot of feedback…