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…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Eileen ToomeyIt Started with a List: CRAFTING A HELIX POEM In August 2020, early in the pandemic, I was lucky to attend a remote workshop with poet Lidia Yuknavitch who shared with us a narrative…
Poems by Sharon White, reviewed by Sara Verstynen THE BODY IS BURDEN AND DELIGHT, (Cornerstone Press) Sharon White’s The Body Is Burden and Delight was the perfect selection for The 2023 Portage Poetry Series, awarded annually by Cornerstone Press. The…
A Poetry Craft Essay by Abbie Kiefer THE GENEROUS ACT OF PUBLISHING DRAFTS: Letting Poems Exist as Iterations Most of the poems in my debut book, Certain Shelter, appeared first in journals—and in almost every case, the book version of…
Interview by Andrea CaswellA Conversation with Sven Birkerts, author of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press) “Nothing defines a writer so much as what they pay attention to.” In his newest book, The Miró Worm and…
Elizabeth Bird HOW I’M RECALIBRATING FOR THE THIRD AGE A Craft Essay on Creative Nonfiction Writing While “Third Age,” certainly sounds more enticing than “God’s Waiting Room,” no matter what you call it, retirement brings creeping intimations of mortality. Time…
A roundtable discussion by Autumn Konopka & Emma Parzybok A DISCUSSION WITH SHANNON ROBINSON AND DARRIN DOYLE Authors Shannon Robinson and Darrin Doyle sat down with Autumn Konopka and Emma Parzybok, Cleaver’s Book Reviews Editors, to discuss their new books,…
Carole Duff WRITING A MEMOIR PARTLY ABOUT A PERSON I NEVER MET I found the journals while cleaning closets during spring break. Six 9-by-6-inch books written by my new husband’s daughter, who had taken her life at age twenty-four. A…
Elizabeth Stone SOMETIMES A REVISION REALLY IS A RE-VISION When a former student died of AIDS and left me his diaries, I couldn’t unearth the real story I needed to tell—until I began wondering why my long-dead grandmother made a…
Stories by Pamela Gwyn Kripke, reviewed by Ashlee A. Paxton-Turner AND THEN YOU APPLY ICE, (Open Books) One of the most basic aspects of humanity is pondering the future—questioning who we are and what we will become. In the mid-1950s,…
Laura Leigh Morris WRITING TIMELY FICTION Picture it: Twenty-five university professors in dresses and sports coats crouched in a dark classroom, waiting for a gunman to walk through the door. More nervous than we should have been, given this was…
Stories by Lena Valencia, reviewed by Jennifer Nessel MYSTERY LIGHTS, (Tin House) As the sun set across our campsite in Rocky Gap, Maryland, I turned to my friends, who had taken great pains to convince me to join them, and…
A novel by Alisa Alering, reviewed by Alana Craib SMOTHERMOSS (Tin House) The Appalachian Mountains may be the oldest mountain ranges in the world. Dating all the way back to Pangea, they have grown and ached and evolved and mutated…
Henrietta Goodman METAPHOR AS SEDUCTION It sounds ridiculous—the first person to seduce me was T. S. Eliot. I was fifteen, in 11th grade English. Most of the poetry we read that year required a process of “translation” from antiquated to…
A novel by Elizabeth Lukács Chesla, reviewed by Benjamin Selesnick YOU CANNOT FORBID THE FLOWER (Tolsun Books) Elizabeth Lukács Chesla’s hybrid auto-fiction novel, You Cannot Forbid the Flower, includes three different voices, each looking through the same historical period: in…
Poems by Nathan Lipps, reviewed by Dakotah Jennifer BUILT AROUND THE FIRE (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) “Mourning doves linger beneath the basket of seeds waiting, discussing applications of empathy or economics, what poverty means” Miles to go before…
Alex Barr ZORAN Even in the distance you looked foreign. Hair frizzed up above a frown, clown’s blob of a nose. Going very slowly, considering the relationship of the bicycle to each building you passed. Yes, a frown—you were always…
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher CREATION MYTHS 1 – Coyote grasps at straws within adobe. careful as threading. an eye of a needle. seeking a key. within river clay. opening a door. finding a face. where to belong. where to rest. beating.…
Elaine Chekich ACCIDENTAL ROOMMATES I hardly knew Quibble when I started sleeping on his couch. We’d served under Lt. Pablo in Afghanistan, but mostly we were on different details and didn’t hang much. Lt. Pablo was a hero in living…
Victoria Korth BEDSIDE When I say darkness, I mean everything I don’t understand, my mother’s breath in mine before I was born. In the dark, her breath pauses and mine goes on, pacing in its neutral candor. Can it be…
Meg Yardley ARE THEY OR AREN’T THEY? Leah was standing in the feminine products aisle. At least, she had always thought of it as the feminine products aisle until just now, when she realized it was also the condoms aisle.…
Robert Garner McBrearty GETTING OUT Everyone is getting out. They’re getting out. My dentist is getting out. The letters are familiar: After over thirty years of service, loving every moment of it, so very grateful to all of you… But…
Patrick Strickland SCREAMING EAST ON I-10 I just want to get home, but home’s never quite where I left it. After work tonight, I glide along the streets of Simi Valley, nearly nodding off a time or two, in search…
Autumn H. Thomas BODY DOUBLE A productivity strategy often used by people with ………….inattentiveness adj. ………….………….pollen sticking to stigma ………….………….brushed by genetic chance ………….………….the limb of the bumblebee ………….………….lackadaisically’d rigour mortis Coming home to the mansion of my mind Unable…
Kate E. Lore FLAME The flame tastes rock but they don’t like it. Spit and sputter, they leave behind a black trail burn, an imitation of shadow, crude like a child’s drawing. The dead leaves are good, and paper, but…
J.D. Isip WHAT USED TO BE MCCARRAN AIRPORT, LAS VEGAS The Spring Mountains out in the distance, if you’re lucky you’ll catch a sunset, the diminished edifices of glistening cassinos refracting a little of the glory in their windows where,…
Mark Liebenow FRAGILE, FRACTURE, FEAR Every evening, I make spaghetti and try out different seasonings in the sauce, including hot spices from the southwest, which you would have hated, or I pull out leftover chicken and eat it cold in…
Ash Trebisacci VOICEMA[LE] TO MYSELF There’s this podcast that I love. The host’s voice is unmistakably, gorgeously trans. It purrs, crackles, ekes out phrases like a song I know by heart but can’t quite get the tune of when I…
SV Bertrand TELL ME IF IT HURTS It happens again. But this time I am not busy dying, so I get to see what happens after. Dad is getting the car refueled, and I am sitting in the back seat while…
Brooke Harries TWO POEMS Transformer Miss him, …………or drinking coffee in bed, reading with a lamp at the bedside. Read an interview with Lou Reed. The one …………where he stops answering by saying Nothing I feel like talking about. Make…
Kindall Fredrickswhere has amelia gone where has she been amelia quiet as an attic ……………………….where is she? where is she? we crawl into her and chew ………………………………………………..make a clergy ………….of our teeth we search god hung over us fat and…
Elisabetta La Cava MEMORIZING ROMAN ROADS In the front yard of my grandmother’s house in Venezuela, behind a four-foot fence, stood a white metal pole. She didn’t hang a flag on it. I was eight years old and didn’t care…
Marlene Tholl BABY DOLL Shanty Point Labor Day. Surging swells, pale over dark, an outlook off into forever. My husband Augustus was surfcasting for striper with an eel on the hook. He pointed out the now mostly submerged rocks that…
Rick Andrews TRASH I’ve got bags full of trash she touched: a pamphlet from a state fair pumpkin carving booth. The pithy tops to Snapple bottles and Jones sodas. Maps, maps of museums, of Delaware, of Boston, maps of Paris,…
J. Bradley Minnick MS. ROBBERS Ms. Robbers taught seventh-grade Spanish at Mann Middle School and was the reason for Bernie Markee’s infamy. Ms. Robbers was white, tall, unmarried, called herself a “Progressivist,” and believed she spoke Castilian Spanish perfectly, pronouncing…
Meg LeDuc APPETITE I have an insatiable appetite for self-loathing. I hate my body’s neediness, the way it presses its wants upon me, always petitioning for more, more, more. I hate my fat body that medications have distended, ballooned. I…
Anna Tomasulo SMALL WORDS We sit at the bar. Our glasses sit at the bar. He and I sat first and they followed. Something about the night makes me want to talk. So, talk I do, about other hes and…
MaxieJane Frazier WE LAUGH After Sarah Freligh When we’re twenty, we laugh and laugh. For the men surrounding us as if we’re gold at the end of a rainbow. For the slurred compliments and bestial breath. From the corner booth:…
Mike Itaya BAD LOVE JR. It was unseasonable noon in August, and I already missed the tangy summer where everything grew like weeds and everyone who was anyone got twitchy pants. Up at Ezekiel Remedial School, I was a no-show…
Finley K Foster CAPTAIN JONAH I miss the set up and the punchline, but all around the table people are laughing. I can’t force a laugh, not a believable one, so I throw on a face, one that says “gotta…
An Interview by Benjamin Woodard, edited by Emma Parzybok AN INTERVIEW WITH KRISTEN VAN NEST, AUTHOR OF WHERE TO NEST Kristen Van Nest’s debut memoir, Where to Nest: A Global Search for Love, Cheap Wine and a Place to Belong…
Ona Gritz WHAT CONSULTING A PSYCHIC DID FOR MY MEMOIR—AND FOR ME About a decade ago, compelled to write a memoir about the sister I lost to violence thirty years earlier, I began the painful process of investigating my own…
Check out Beth’s upcoming live masterclass, The Writing is in the Details, Sunday July 28, 2-4 PM ET. Can’t make it? A recording will be sent to all registrants. Beth Kephart DETAILS, DETAILS, DETAILS The artisans of the telling detail…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileTHE PAST IS PERFECT You wrote a paragraph. You were writing a novel all summer. You had written the first hundred pages on a bus. You had been writing the same old story for years.…
A Novel by E.J. Koh, reviewed by Julia Hou THE LIBERATORS (Tin House Books) E. J. Koh’s latest novel, The Liberators, begins with language, then war, recounting the early memories of Yohan, a newly widowed father in the midst of…
Stories by Shannon Sanders, reviewed by Kayla McCall COMPANY (Graywolf Press) My family’s matriarch has a ritual when company comes to visit. She chases carefully-swept corners with lemon-scented cleaners. The vacuum hums over the rug, then the hardwood, then the…
Alina Pleskova and Kimberly Ann Southwick, edited by Hannah Felt GarnerALINA PLESKOVA AND KIMBERLY ANN SOUTHWICK WANT YOU TO DIY IT THIS POETRY MONTH Alina: Kimberly Ann Southwick and I have traveled in the same extended poetry circles for about…
A Conversation with Cleaver Senior Nonfiction Editor Sydney Tammarine DUALITY IN NONFICTION Estimated reading time: 1 minute What does duality in creative nonfiction mean to you? Do you have any favorite essays or memoirs that explore duality? When I think…
David Galef NO SURPRISE FOR THE WRITER? WHAT A RELIEF FOR ME. Robert Frost’s famous line of writing advice, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” comes not from a poem but from his essay “The…
Richard Parisio FAIRY SHRIMP In my first year of teaching ………………………I led my seventh graders to the woods ………..to study vernal pools. Study? No—to stare ………………………………….astonished at what we found: plump transparent one inch freshwater shrimp ………………………………………………sidestroked across a black…