miCRo: “Demolished” and “Crumbs” by Nicole Rivas
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: As a genre, micro fiction attempts to do the impossible: establish a protagonist with a clear conflict, all within a tiny, less than 500-word frame. The author must find a way to show the reader what is physically or...
miCRo: “Not Sorry” by Sarah Salway
Associate Editor Molly Reid: This one-sentence story is not a gimmick, and it is not sorry. An honest, almost-cruel moment opens out into wonder and uncertainty. Read this one out loud and let it take your breath away—and then do yourself a favor, and listen to Sarah...
miCRo: “My Husband’s Story from the War” and “Assisted Living” by Nance Van Winckel
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: What better way to herald the change of seasons than with a miCRo double feature that simultaneously registers and resists time’s passage? In this week’s two micro nonfiction pieces, "My Husband’s Story from the War" and...
miCRo: “A Drift: The Year She Moves Back Home” by Amanda Bales
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: When I read through submissions, the question I return to again and again is "What is this story's occasion?" Well-crafted openings put forth an answer for why the story must start where it does. What has changed or is in...
miCRo: “Up” by Tanya Whiton
Assistant Editor Jess Jelsma Masterton: Whenever I read or teach a piece of fiction, I always think about movement. As a reader, what pulls me through the piece? What keeps me racing toward the end? In Tanya Whiton's "Up," movement works on both a literal and...
miCRo: “Spoils” by Paul Haney
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: Paul Haney's innovative sonnet “Spoils” gestures toward the ecstatic tradition in English-language poetry while reveling without restraint in the excesses of contemporary life. Artfully blending an antiquated diction register...
miCRo: “Dissecting the Tay Whale” and “Odontocetiphilia” by Rajiv Mohabir
Associate Editor Molly Reid: To my deep shame, I don't read enough poetry. As a fiction writer, I tend to get impatient with books of poetry—where is the story? I want to feel something. But I recently picked up Rajiv Mohabir's The Taxidermist's Cut, and I...
miCRo: “A Posteriori,” by Terese Coe
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: With a miCRo this diminutive, we'd like to keep our own words about it to a minimum. Suffice it to say that the Latinate title and austere form belie the depth of the message behind the poem, which is a reflection of this...
miCRo: “The Hunted,” by K. C. Mead-Brewer
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This story opens with teen girls being teen girls together. The added twist? The mother of one girl is a real-life witch, with tarot cards and all. Mead-Brewer has crafted well-wrought scenes in which the teens try to scare each...
miCRo: “Mercado de Sabado por la Noche; Con Barbie Negra como Plato de Entrada,” by Kathy Z. Price
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: The opening of this prose poem dazzles with description of scene, a super Mercado on Saturday night; I think of Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California": "Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!" Kathy Z. Price's poem...
miCRo: “Old-Growth Forest” by Catie Rosemurgy
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This hybrid, elliptical piece draws from the language of fairy tales to illuminate the experience of adolescence (perhaps; in part), as one character is "a little girl on some days and a young woman on others." With references to...
miCRo: “From the Minister of the Cabinet of Admonition,” by Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: In this poem—from her series imagining different cabinet members who preside over particular parts of the pysche—Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer scrutinizes the challenges of speech, in particular where our words come from. In spare lines,...
