Sven Birkerts ALL THAT WAS NOT THERE… When I was in the eighth grade at Berkshire Junior High in Birmingham, Michigan, I had a Spanish class with Mrs. Whittaker. I woke up today thinking about that class, though more than…
Rachel Toliver ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R7, ON WHAT USED TO BE THE R8, ON WHAT USED TO In those days, what I call my girlhood, there was always a man and he was always at the end…
Sofia Sears QUESTION 1: HOW WILL YOU BECOME YOUR MOTHER? Your body is a secret you forgot how to keep. A lesson in scorn & sediment. Loose fingernails, fathers, passageways. A seabed sucked dry, passing animals baited and bled. The…
Federico Escobar ANGELA He got to the bus stop trailed by wet footsteps that merged with the night. His Converse shoes squished as he walked, and his drenched denim jacket clung to a watery button-down with its belly buttons missing.…
Bradley Sides ROOTED IN THE PLACE YOU KNOW You live in a place that doesn’t have a bookstore. You live in a place that doesn’t even have a chain dollar store. The latter is still ten, fifteen years away. The…
Interview by Andrea CaswellA Conversation with Danuta Hinc, author of When We Were Twins (Plamen Press) Danuta Hinc’s novel, When We Were Twins (Plamen Press, 2023), follows a group of characters caught in cycles of violence and war. The book…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileWRITE IN SAFETY Recently I wrote about The Most Dangerous Writing App, an efficient but hair-raising way to generate fresh ideas for your writing. If you haven’t tried it, give it a spin. You might…
Beth KephartI TOOK INSTRUCTIONS FROM MY HANDS Beth Kephart will teach an all-new interactive Zoom masterclass for Cleaver on Sunday, February 24 2-4 PM: WRITING ADVANCED BY CATEGORIES: TURNING OUR OBSESSIONS INTO STORIES. Join us live or purchase the recording.…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileFIRST TO THIRD Here’s the truth: Your first instinct is your best. Write the draft the way it comes to you. Maybe your story comes out naturally in first person. And you nail it, fluently:…
ANNOUNCING Cleaver’s 2024 Short Creative Nonfiction Contest Creative nonfiction is a genre of exploration into ourselves, our society, and our world. We invite short works that explore life in its dualities: memory and imagination, self and society, perfection in flaws,…
Where did this prompt come from? I’ve used it in my Penn classes for more than twenty years. I’ve personalized and fancied it, but I don’t think the original idea was mine. This week I paged through my personal library…
Matthew Guenette THREE FLASH PIECES Pet Peeve A jackhammer hammers somewhere in the school and your armpits sweat through your shirt. You don’t know what you’re doing, and the class knows that you know they know, but you can’t tell…
Matt Thomas ANNIVERSARY POEM II Remember the tracked snow it was last to melt and so was like a suture in the flattened grass, Robins feeding impression to impression hashes as if marking time passed from The Incident that dried…
L M Feldman YOU WILL HAVE ARRIVED: A Semi-Natural History 1. The Valley Green Inn A WEDDING You arrive alone to celebrate someone’s love and hope and future (your faith in such things long gone, a dry river). You’ve donned…
Kelli Short Borges TWO MICROS Manning Up It was Jack’s birthday and there we were—me, Jack, and Thom, the Three Musketeers, wrestling in the pool while Dad grilled a T-bone, Jack’s favorite, he said (we knew it was really Dad’s,…
Erin Mizrahi I MISSED ANOTHER DEADLINE BUT IT’S OKAY IT’S REALLY OKAY & it’s for the best my CV is just a list of sensations & my author bio is a photograph of a fainting couch & it’s ok &…
Krys Malcolm Belc COLLIDING WORLDS Johnny Brenda’s Where Frankford Avenue meets Girard Avenue—heart of demolition, of crumble and shiny plastic—you can see Philadelphia’s most surprising sunset, melting purple bleeding into orange-red, punctuated by Fishtown’s rowhomes and churches. Forget that this…
Beth Kephart SQUEEZE It’s your size. You fit within the squeeze, take the narrow on like it belongs to you, like Camac is your personal arcade of gendered sketch clubs and daytime twinkle and the red balloon of a hibiscus…
Monique Danielle THE LOVE Robin and I arrive at the restaurant at the same time. Today is her thirty-second birthday and she’s chosen The Love, one of her late father’s favorites and the last restaurant we’d eaten at together. She…
Beth Broome RECIPE FOR VIABLE ZYGOTES Start out with a blood test. Inject ten units of leuprolide acetate. Repeat process for approximately seven to thirteen days. Return to office for blood test. Decrease leuprolide acetate to five units. Avoid alcohol.…
Sue Mell TRANSPORTED In my teens, in the early 70s, I often took a Saturday morning train from Grand Central to visit a camp friend at her parents’ enormous house, which you could see from the Hartsdale station. Her father…
Yolanda Wisher germantown avenue speaks & coulter school to school the dark writes itself a poem of youngblood façades playin in the face of founding fatherhoods cobblestones chucklin low—got ghost jokes stagin colonial comedies & catcall sitcoms yoga & ubuntu…
Alyssa Songsiridej FOUR DESTINATIONS AWAY AND NEARBY 4814 Trinity St My tenancy in this house—a longstanding punk house in permanent dereliction—took place from 2011-2013, but this is just a sliver in the house’s long history, a drop in all of…
Jennifer Jussel THIS ONE SMALL THING WILL FIX YOUR SEX LIFE After a few months of back and forth, we finally ordered the vibrator. My husband seemed elated by the decision. In a matter of hours after ordering it, his…
Jeff Friedman FOUR MICROFICTIONS Card Trick Even though it was warm in the house, Callie covered herself to the neck with the afghan and lay down on the couch. Her red and green wool socks pushed out into the open.…
David Waters SONG OF THE REDWOODS June Francis fills a bag with perishables from the fridge: milk for his lattes, oat milk for Lucy’s, salad ingredients, a chicken, leftovers, and random stuff, like the twenty-three-ounce bottle of Frank’s Red Hot…
Robbin Farr TO THE MAN WHO LISTENS FOR ECHOES We were lake-bound on an unfamiliar road. But stranger yet, you were unknown to me. I to you. It was summer. It was happenstance. It was a moment so clouded in…
Ginger Ayla DRINK, ANYWAY, THE LIGHT There are creatures adapted to living so low in the ocean they can only survive in extreme pressure, any attempt to lift them causes disintegration, they lack the necessary compression to hold together scale…
Patricia Flaherty Pagan TIDINGS OF COMFORT AND JOY Before she throws my father’s Christmas stocking into the fireplace, Siobhan brings it out to the porch to show it to us. “I dreamt his cruise ship exploded. Dad drowned,” she says.…
Meg Pokrass MOM AND THE OTTERS There was the time Dad scooted home with a bunch of supermarket flowers, handed Mom what he had to offer, flashed us his new beard, and we chanted Beard! Beard! Beard! like we were…
Interview by Michelle FostA Conversation with Beth Kephart, author of My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (Temple University Press) I had the chance to have a conversation with Beth Kephart, whose new book, My Life in Paper, has recently…
A Writing Tip by Karen RileWRITE DANGEROUSLY The best way to improve your writing is to cultivate a consistent practice. There are many ways to approach your practice, and you might change up your techniques frequently in order to keep…
Nonfiction by Harry N. MacLean, reviewed by Anna LlewellynSTARKWEATHER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE KILLING SPREE THAT CHANGED AMERICA (Counterpoint Press) The stranger asks no greater glory till life is through than to spend one last minute in wilderness. —Charles…
A Novel by Claire Fuller, reviewed by Coralie LoonTHE MEMORY OF ANIMALS (Tin House Books) We’re all familiar with the sense of exhaustion and collective grief that seeped into our bones during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the pandemic is…
A Short Story Collection by Amber Caron, reviewed by Char DreyerCALL UP THE WATERS (Milkweed Editions) “You’re gonna wanna find the biggest branch you can and make a lot of noise as you run.” This was the only terse instruction…
Justin Eells A Conversation with James Sullivan, author of HARBORING James Sullivan and I attended the same MFA program and later shared an office as adjuncts at that same school, Minnesota State University, Mankato. Over those years, we shared work…
Adrie Rose THE USES OF ANAPHORA in Jason Schneiderman’s Poems “Anger” and “Star Dust” When I first heard Jason Schneiderman read his poems “Anger,” and “Star Dust” in a 2021 episode of Rachel Zucker’s Commonplace podcast, I realized both make…
A Short Story Collection by Janice Deal, reviewed by Ellen Prentiss CampbellSTRANGE ATTRACTORS: THE EPHREM STORIES (New Door Books) Janice Deal has said of her earlier award-winning fiction that place is often her muse. Now in Strange Attractors: The Ephrem…
Chelsey Clammer SELF-TAUT I spend fifteen minutes of my life negotiating with an egg. Again. How its hard-boiledness acts like a six-course meal. I have to sit down. Not at the table—too dizzy for that—but on the hardwood floor—quick—back against…
Second Prize, Form & Form-Breaking Poetry Competition In this “American ghazal,” Eileen Toomey braids the distancing, medicalized description of immunotherapy as a cancer treatment with the immediacy of a couple’s weed-infused road trip from Jersey to Chicago while the husband…
Brooke White MERMAIDIA In Greece, there were stories about Poseidon; in the Roman Empire, there was Neptune. Before that, there was Ea, Babylonian god of the sea. Even earlier was Atargatis, the Syrian goddess of fertility who was half-human, half-fish.…
Christian Chase Garner JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC Step #1: Make the curry roux Heat a pan to medium-low heat on your stovetop, or your induction burner, if you live in a twelve-by-forty-foot rectangular building that used to be your…
Alex Behm MAIN LINE His voice is scratchy with sleep and a virus. I ask how he’s feeling. What’s wrong, my father interrupts through the phone. I’m just thinking, I say. Again. My father is in another state, trying to…
Susan Barr-Toman OLD WOMAN BEARING FRUIT My senior year of college, I was set to graduate a semester early. Instead, I took a full-time position at the university and enrolled part-time, hoping it would make things easier. I’d been working…
Jeff Ewing THE OTHER DRUMMER Muriel’s already at the site, waiting for me. I drop my gear on the ground beside hers. The heat is oppressive, the sun’s fist bearing down. Why the festivals all choose summer is beyond me.…
Jessica Klimesh NOBODY TELLS YOU ANY OF THIS Nobody tells you how quickly the face of a dead person loses color, how quickly gray washes over you, how quickly the person who was your mother becomes a body to be…
Will Musgrove HEADED OUT WEST The movers spoke like cowboys. “Tarnation,” said Butch, middle-aged and owner of Old West Movers LLC, as he lifted my dresser. “This varmint weighs as much as my horse.” Butch Junior, his son, whistled one…
Anne Anthony IT’S A MOTHER THING Don’t tell your daughter to text you when she’s back safely on the ground standing beside the luggage carousel at JFK because she’ll forget, she always forgets, and stay away from tonight’s headline news,…
Isabel Cristina Legarda THE BODY During class the Body would lie still like the other cadavers, submitting mutely to the students’ scrutiny. On the first day, the students tried to hide their fear under façades of bravado. Gallows humor betrayed…
Cody Shrum ZENITH Four of them were out that night: two brothers and a couple. They’d been howling at the moon, driving around, being kids—senior year, winter break. Wattles Road was just outside town, nobody around to bother them. The…