The pressure that society has placed on women is monumental. From careers, to relationships to social lives: women are made subject to multiple informal life guidelines. At the top of the to-do list, is to develop an aversion to aging…
Guest Post: The Creative One by CL Bledsoe
I always wanted to be a writer, but I was afraid I never could be because I didn’t think I was creative enough. In the fifth grade, my public school moved me into Honors classes based on standardized test scores….
Guest Post: On Drinking and Driving, and On Writing by nv baker
(Dedicated to Idiots, Assholes, Delvers, and Thinkers) Topographies are important. The feel of the land. A lover’s feel, inspirited and hearthsick; caressing hands roughly over protrusions and pressing fingers into the furrows of the terra—that’s how you write, that’s the…
Guest Post: How the Marx Brothers Taught Me to Write Poetry by Marcella Benton
Okay, so maybe the Marx Brothers didn’t really teach me to write poetry, but these wordplay magicians did ingrain in me a love of humor and language that helped seed my desire to manipulate language myself. I’m not the only…
Guest Post: The Guest Poet by Kevin Casey
We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest. — Horace The bathroom remodel is coming along fine, and thanks for…
Guest Post: Loving-Kindness for Writers by Jessica Demarest
Confession: I’m obsessed with yoga. I took my first yoga class three years ago, and I’ve been hooked ever since. As obsessions usually do, my yoga practice has seeped into my everyday life in more ways than one. More often…
Guest Post: Making Piñatas and Making Time by Eva Langston
When I was a kid, the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas stretched, becoming magical and seemingly endless. Each day my brother and I opened a paper window on our Advent calendar to reveal a tiny square of the hidden picture….
A Conversation with Patricia Colleen Murphy
An Interview by Alicia Cole Patricia Colleen Murphy founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her book Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press, 2016) won the May Swenson Poetry Award. A chapter…
Guest Post: Why Some People are Still Afraid of the ‘L’ Word by Lyndsey Ellis
I remember the first time I had the guts to tell someone I wanted to be a writer. I was a sophomore in college. At the time, my horrible grades in math weren’t enough to help me transition into one…
A Conversation with Sharanya Manivannan
An interview by Alicia Cole. The poet Sharanya Manivannan’s first book of fiction, The High Priestess Never Marries, has been described in The Establishment as “a tour de force of language, desire, and ancestral heartbeats.” It has just been published…
Guest Post: Nipple Slips and Murder: a List of Illegal Things by Julianne Berokoff
I was sitting in an office with my poetry teacher during my last semester at school. Her window faced the arching freeway onramp of the 57 North, shooting white glints from cars onto the finger paintings and crayon sketches pinned…
Guest Post: A Late Bloomer’s Guide to Publishing by Chelsey Drysdale
Until I walked into a UCLA Extension personal essay class in January 2013 when I was 39-years-old, I was an unpublished perfectionist with a fear of failure so debilitating I hadn’t written a word in two years. I was a…