In this edition of Inside the Den, we’re pleased to spotlight Cassandra Brown, who joined the Black Fox team in May 2024. An avid reader, poet, and literary scholar, Cassandra brings both creative sensitivity and analytical precision to the submissions…
Inside the Den: Cee Pugsley
For this edition of Inside the Den, we’re thrilled to celebrate two years with Cee Pugsley, one of our most trusted fiction readers. Cee brings a remarkable level of insight and consistency to the fiction queue, offering thoughtful, incisive feedback…
Inside the Den: Sara Sanguinetti
In this edition of Inside the Den, we’re excited to introduce Sara Sanguinetti, who joined the Black Fox team in early 2024. In just a short time, Sara has become a trusted and consistent presence behind the scenes. With a…
Five Mysteries of Publishing by Lev Raphael
Despite two and a half years in a top-ranked MFA program, nobody told me anything about what the writing life was like—especially outside the shelter of academia. In our writing workshops we analyzed the short stories everyone was writing in…
May 2024 National Short Story Month Prompts
We had a blast inspiring you to write short stories this month and we hope you did too! Below is a compiled list of the prompts we posted on our Instagram page throughout the month of May. Feel free to…
As I Loved You by Kris Faatz
Winner of the Fox Tales “Music” Contest Dad’s guitar bites back. That’s why Grace never could play it, even when Dad tried to teach her before he left for France, so you can play for me when I come home,…
A Conversation with Jarret Keene
Jarret Keene earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University. A beloved and highly sought after professor, Dr. Keene is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas where he teaches…
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…
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,…
More on the Suspension of Disbelief by David Massey
I previously wrote a few words on the importance to the writer of the suspension of disbelief. I would like to say a little more because I did not say all that I feel on that topic. Samuel Taylor Coleridge…
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…