As a little girl, I often encountered dead bodies on my way to school during the Baby Doc dictatorship in the 1980’s. We’d hear the gunshots fired outside of my Catholic school and take cover under our desks. There were…
How to Write a Book While Parenting by Isabel Mader
When your second child is born, you and your partner will decide that it makes the most sense for you to be a stay-at-home parent for a little while. Not forever, just for a little while. And you are thrilled…
Welcome Guest Editor Heather Lang-Cassera!
If you’re a newsletter subscriber, then you already know we’ve got lots of BIG plans for Black Fox Literary Magazine this year. Today we’re announcing one of them! Over the years, we’ve received requests from poets asking if we ever…
Hemingway Looks at Himself by David Massey
Ernest Hemingway led a famously adventurous life, going to wars when he did not have to, hunting big game (and getting a great nonfiction novel, Green Hills of Africa, out of it), becoming an afficionado of bullfighting, boxing in his…
5 Prompts for National Poetry Month
One of my favorite things to do is participate in National Poetry Month! I don’t consider myself to be a poet, but I love writing poems without the pressure of trying to get them placed. I leave that for my…
On Styles by David Massey
I’ve been thinking about styles in writing. Narration, dialogue, description, syntax—all these things. By far my favorite American fiction writer is William Faulkner, and if I had it in me, I would probably write like him; but I like sparer styles,…
Writing Advice from the Murder Hornet by PS Nolf
I look at the newspaper photo of the latest invader of the Pacific Northwest, where I live. The yellow ruler with its black calibration documents the two-inch “Murder Hornet.” A thing of nightmares, the Asian Giant Hornet sports huge, black, demon…
Character Fill-In-the-Blank by Rod Martinez
Our love for the written word may have been generated from any number of avenues growing up. We, as artists and students of our beloved art, yearn to learn as much as possible about our craft. That is where the…
What Do Writers Need? Sitzfleisch! by Lev Raphael
That’s the term my European-born mother used about doing anything and seeing it through. It comes from German and means the “power to endure or to persevere in an activity.” Literally, though, it’s your butt: the flesh that you sit…
Novel excerpt from Hockey Moms by Eric Rasmussen
On screen the audience sees an empty gravel lot behind the metal wall of a municipal sports arena. Where the crushed stone stops a line of arbor vitae protects the no-man’s-land strip of grass and the handful of buildings farther…
Sappho’s Literary Visuals of the Archaic Period by Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
According to Hurwit’s features of the Archaic style, there are several common themes of this time period — “reliance on schemata,” “impulse for pattern,” “domination of surface and plane,” linearity, ornamentality, and “explicitness and impassivity.” While these are obviously traits…
A Conversation with Heather Lang Cassera by Risa Pappas
Heather Lang Cassera holds a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry with a Certificate in Literary Translation. In 2017 she was named Las Vegas’ Best Local Writer or Poet by the readers of KNPR’s Desert Companion. Her poems have been published…