An interview by Alicia Cole. Angela Brown was born in Meridian, Mississippi on January 5, 1969. Angela works as an assistant for the Department of Hospitality Management at the College of Southern Nevada. She found her voice through writing poetry….
Book Review by Angela Mitchell: “Thank Your Lucky Stars” by Sherrie Flick
Reading Sherrie Flick’s new collection of short fiction, Thank Your Lucky Stars (Autumn House, 2018), is a kind of literary feast, with its gathering of characters, all hungering for love and connection and a desire to better nourish both their…
After Turning the Graduation Cap Tassel to the Other Side by Alan Ferland
I didn’t go for my MFA after graduating from college almost seven years ago. A handful of my classmates went down that path with heads held high and the talent they’d developed during our times together. I didn’t follow them,…
Second Person: Write down, not up by Adam Dove
Second person is like the lonely middle child of writing perspectives. Everybody knows first person, because it’s always talking about itself. It just feels kind of natural, like it’s always been there. And third person – everybody wants to be…
Discontinuity in Fiction by David Massey
Morse Peckham, a professor under whom I took a class in graduate school, had a theory that the role of the arts in a complex, stressful society is to provide discontinuity, so that people might rehearse the experience of it…
Book Review by Lauren Sartor: “Life on Mars” by Tracy K. Smith
The poetry in Tracy K Smith’s book, Life on Mars, examines the limitedness of the human species. The poetry speculates on the smallness of humankind, the incapacity of human intellectuality, and the irrationality of human emotions. The language is accessible…
More on the Senses by David Massey
I want to say a few more words about the senses in literature. So much can be accomplished through visceral detail. Consider the first paragraph of Anton Chekhov’s “The Beauties”: I remember, when I was a high-school boy in the…
On Method by David Massey
I read a statement by an author recently that if one does not follow a regular regimen of daily composition, one is not a serious writer. This was a fairly vain statement, it seemed to me, because it relegates the…
On Style by David Massey
Katherine Anne Porter said as true a thing as there is to say about style: “You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.” When I began writing seriously,…
Leaning on the Senses by David Massey
The senses are all we have. Without them we would be only a blob of protoplasm without even a sense of touch, and therefore with no ability to survive. Fiction is much the same. The fiction writer who best deploys…
How to Write a Sugar-Soaked Story by Noelle Sterne
Taking a break from writing, I flip the television channels and my eyes and remote land at a bright-screen, an urban setting with upbeat music, slick high-rises, and smartly dressed people hurrying about. A respite from the moody brown tones…
The Train Whistle by Nancy Scott
It always startles me. I always feel its vibrating, out-of-place call. Usually, I hear it just before or during rain or snow. I have heard it off and on for the 13 years I’ve lived in this apartment. I never…