At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Join us in beautiful Taos, New Mexico, for SOMOS’ 27th Annual Storytelling Festival on Saturday, October 11th, 2025. Participate in a two-hour workshop with featured teller, Eldrena Douma, an afternoon storyswap, and the main event at 6pm. Tellers include Eldrena Douma, Sage Vogel, Celinda Reynolds Kaelin, and musician Chuy Martinez. FMI: view flyer or visit our website.
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The Colorado Authors League (CAL) supports and promotes its community of published writers while connecting with and adding value to the reading world. Formed in 1931, authors become members to: keep up with changes in the craft of writing, publishing, and marketing, gain greater visibility for their writing, join a group of like-minded people who love writing. View our flyer to see new releases by members and learn more at our website.
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Palooka celebrates 15 years of supporting the literary arts community as a global literary magazine of ‘daring’ fiction, poetry, nonfiction, artwork, photography, and graphic narratives by new, up-and-coming, and established writers, artists, and photographers. All of Palooka’s published content comes from unsolicited submissions. In keeping with their moniker, Palooka ‘upholds, encourages, and fights for underdogs’ and ‘only pursues the writing and art they love.’
Readers can enjoy this celebratory issue with fiction by Katherine Flynn, Jacqueline Kaufman, Kevin Novalina; poetry by Yvonne Higgins Leach; nonfiction by Eric Day; Ian Dooley’s graphic narrative “The Little World,” and a portfolio of artwork by Judith Skillman. Some content is available for readers to access online.
Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy’s newest novel, creates Shearwater, an island not far off the coast of Antarctica (based on Macquarie Island, she says in a note at the end), where a family of four lives in a lighthouse. There’s a seed vault there, which they’re supposed to load up and take on a ship which will arrive in six weeks, as the sea will soon engulf the island. While there’s no clear date as to when the novel takes place, the world outside seems to be even more ravaged by climate change than our current world, a reality that serves as the backdrop for everything that happens.
There are ghosts haunting this island, whether the death of the mother of the three children or the violent history of the island, as men used it as a place to hunt whales, club seals, and kill penguins, almost to extinction. The father, Dominic, is haunted by his wife’s death, and his children often overhear him talking to her. Fen, the daughter, is so frightened of something, she sleeps in a boathouse or on the shore of the sea. Raff, the oldest son, has a violent temper, which his father tries to channel into punching a makeshift boxing bag in the top of the lighthouse. The youngest son, Orly, is obsessed with the seeds and can list information and facts about many that most people have never heard of.
The family seems to be functioning, even after the researchers have left, until a woman washes onto the shore. Rowan’s appearance is mysterious, as there shouldn’t be any ship in the area, so the family tries to understand her while she asks questions about the situation there. The mysteries that underlie all five of these characters drive the tension in this novel, as they move from mistrust to building a type of family, which the truth threatens to undercut. In the same way that all of the characters in this novel must face the realities of their lives, McConaghy wants the readers to own up to the realities of climate change. In each case, characters and readers will need to change their approach to the world to have any chance of survival.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Over the next 25 years, 5 billion kids worldwide will enroll in primary and secondary schools. These kids will need an education that meets 21st-century challenges, but most programs, Blumenthal and Pianta write, rely on a one-size-fits-all model that assumes that every child can learn the same material in the same top-down way. It isn’t true. “Learning should invite discovery, exploration, and risk-taking,” they write, and should be “personal, relational, and active.”
Retention suffers when this doesn’t happen. According to research and interviews conducted by the authors in more than 70 countries, when a student is academically disinterested, “one-third of the info presented to them is lost within 15 to 20 minutes; half is lost within the first hour, and three-quarters is lost within a day.” After a month, four-fifths is gone. Students may pass a test — hell, they may even get an A — but unless the coursework taps into their curiosity and allows them to investigate, probe, and connect with others, their engagement will likely be stifled and temporary.
But change is possible: Since today’s students are the first generation to be globally connected, Blumenthal and Pianta see endless potential for cross-cultural collaboration, with children, teens, and young adults working together to pursue scientific discoveries and find solutions to poverty, hunger, environmental calamity, and other pressing social issues. It’s an optimistic, if perhaps pie-in-the-sky, assessment.
The book does not tackle political repression, the massive influence of AI, the school privatization movement, or the necessity of teacher buy-in; nonetheless, Kids on Earth is a provocative conversation starter, relevant for everyone who wants to help kids develop the foundational skills they’ll need — including reading, writing, and basic arithmetic — to kickstart their creativity and stoke their passions.
As a roadmap for lifelong learning, the book serves as an antidote to staid scholarship. Provocative and likely to stir debate, the text asks important questions and offers bold suggestions for making education meaningful for future generations.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Coming up with new inspiration is never easy. This week, my mind kept circling back to two ideas.
The first was the old saying that things come in threes—a memory sparked by a YA series I read years ago. I thought it might’ve been The Westing Game, though I’m not sure anymore. One character had a string of bad luck, but by the third time something happened, his fortune had shifted. Maybe good things come in threes after all.
Then there’s the idea of lightning.
We often say lightning never strikes the same place twice, a comforting phrase meant to reassure us that rare, painful events won’t repeat. But how true is that, really?
Growing up, we had an ash tree in our backyard that weathered countless storms—until it was struck by lightning not once, but twice. Scarred the first time, split the second. What are the odds?
You be the judge.
✍️ Inspiration Prompt: Lightning Never Strikes the Same Place Twice
click image to open flyer
That’s what they say. But tell that to the ash tree in my backyard—scarred but proud after its first strike, split and silent after the second. Now it’s just a memory, like the shed that once stood beneath its branches.
And tell that to the people who’ve survived not one, but multiple lightning strikes—living proof that the improbable can happen again, and again. What does it mean to be marked more than once by the same force? To carry the charge of recurrence in your body, your story, your silence?
This prompt invites you to explore repetition, inevitability, and the myth of safety. What happens when the extraordinary returns? When the pattern repeats? When the storm circles back?
Write, draw, compose, or create something that wrestles with recurrence—a second chance, a repeated trauma, a rekindled love, or a pattern that refuses to break.
Does lightning strike again in your story? And if it does, what’s left standing?
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In her collection of essays, I Want to Burn This Place Down, Maris Kreizman doesn’t hide her purpose, stating in the introduction that she has moved further to the political left, and each of these essays ties to that idea in some way. However, rather than writing ideological jeremiads, she uses her personal experiences and her reading of culture to show the problems with America’s move to the right and how a move to the left would be more humane and beneficial.
In “Copaganda and Me,” for example, she writes about the television shows and movies she and her brothers watched when she was younger: Miami Vice, CHiPs, and Police Academy. She excavates what that media taught them about the police and their relationship to the public, contrasting that portrayal with what her experiences in life, such as “stop-and-frisk” laws in New York and George Floyd’s murder, have shown her. Her two brothers become police officers, while she moves in the other direction, protesting police actions; she loves her brothers, but she’s unable to talk to them about politics.
Kreizman circles back to healthcare in several essays, such as the first essay “She’s Lost Control Again” and “I Found My Life Partner (and My Health Insurance) Because I Got Lucky.” In that first essay, she talks about her struggles with Type 1 Diabetes. While she spends significant time talking about trying to keep her blood glucose numbers where they should be, that leads her into an exploration of insulin costs and the ways the healthcare system fails people. In the latter essay, she focuses on healthcare more directly, arguing that nobody should have to rely on luck or marriage to have healthcare, an idea she complicates by pointing out that she’s reliant on her husband for it, taking away some of her freedom/independence.
The weaving of the personal and political works well to remind readers that those two are always cojoined, no matter what politicians argue. She shows readers again and again that policies affect people’s day-to-day real lives because they affect her real life, as they do all of ours. Such an approach is more convincing and more moving than another political screed, so one hopes readers will take note of the effects that political actions have on Kreizman and so many more.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Black Silk and Other Poems: Creative Work of Ruth Mountaingrove Edited by Vincent Peloso & Sue Hilton Many Name Press, March 2025
Ruth Mountaingrove was a songwriter, musician and composer, artist and photographer, editor and publisher of WomanSpirit Magazine and The Blatant Image: A Magazine of Feminist Photography. Mountaingrove was also a playwright, Humboldt State University radio show producer, tech teacher, multimedia performer, and above all, a lifelong poet. This edited collection gathers poems from friends, family, and the University of Oregon archives, along with prints, photographs and art pieces. A passionate lesbian feminist, and a very creative artist and writer, Mountaingrove passed away in 2016 in Arcata, California, at the age of 93. With a generous grant from the Ink People in Arcata, California, this collection is a deserved tribute to this outstanding maverick working for women’s rights, equality, and freedom in all things through art, music, and writing.
In her fourth collection of poetry, If I Had Said Beauty, Tami Haaland honors “known and unknown” ancestors and searches for herself within “The lines leading to this body.” In “Prelude,” the first poem, we learn the poet’s heritage is “mostly Scandinavian, then / British, Irish, German.” Haaland is as interested in “the traits of women and men who / have made me” as she is in the “lines… deeper.”
Her investigation of her people’s “migrations, / and landings,” “their stories, their histories” is geographical, genealogical, “mitochondrial,” psychological, and spiritual. Throughout the collection, the poet poses age-old philosophical and evolutionary questions about who we are and who we “want to be.”
The unstructured sonnet, contrapuntal, palindrome, and prose poem “give form, proportion” to Haaland’s inquiry. Each form provides either a “flip side,” doubling possible inheritances, or a “line between here / and not here,” bordering possible legacies. These “deliberate pairings” of content and form substantiate the exploration of “my recessive/dominant other.”
“Double, double.” While Haaland’s meditative lyrics honor her position between “My mother, long dead,” and “my son / ahead,” she admits she’s “not content with reduction to a few generations.” Haaland’s “in a long / conversation about omens.” Her poems are populated by “ghosts,” “angels,” “shadows,” and, in a “desire” to “expand the circle,” various other beings, including dogs, flies, and trees. Each is as much a “part of the conversation” as the “watcher,” “protector,” “coward,” and “romantic” aspects of herself.
Instead of a fixed identity, Haaland views herself in a process of “becoming” that allows her to continually rethink her existence, which in turn allows her poems to reframe it. Death’s “eccentric shadow” coexists with beauty’s “brilliance on a hill / covered in blossoms, each / a cluster, a spear.” And in Haaland’s poems, each is “a glimpse of the infinite.”
Yiyun Li’s memoir, Things in Nature Merely Grow, is a meditation on the suicide of her youngest son, James, who died at the age of nineteen. That death took place a bit over six years after the suicide of her older son, Vincent. This book is not an attempt to explain why James made the same decision as his older brother or to come to any sort of understanding of what Li and/or her husband could have done differently. Li is clear that speculation doesn’t do her or her husband or her sons any good at all. Instead, as the title of one of her chapters says, “Children Die, and Parents Go on Living.” One of the threads that runs through this book is the idea that she must take life as she finds it, not as it might have been.
One of the other main ideas is that of the abyss, which is where Li and her husband now find themselves. She reflects on the idea of grief and how some people view it as something one gets through, an idea that seems to repulse Li. She sees it as an insult to the dead if, at some point, she were to believe she has gotten through grief, dusted herself off, and gone back to life. Instead, she believes that she now lives in the abyss and will always live there, that the grief is simply a part of her life and that she will always shape herself around.
It might strike readers as odd, then, that Li talks about how she behaved after her son’s death, as she had a piano lesson days after receiving the news, in addition to her continuing her work writing a novel and teaching. If someone didn’t know her well, if they were only looking at the outside, it would seem her son’s death hadn’t affected her. However, as Li uses her title to remind readers, her way of dealing with grief is to continue doing what she loves and what makes her who she should be, just as nature will continue to grow, whatever happens in the world.
Li’s approach to grief is not one that some readers will share, which is all the more reason for them to read her book. We can never understand how others sustain themselves when such tragedy strikes their lives, but works such as Li’s provide an insight into at least one person’s way of processing such suffering. Reading such a work should provide us with more empathy not only for Li, but for ourselves and others, especially when we deal with grief and loss in ways others might not understand.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Happy Friday! Just like that, another week has flown by. With September nearly halfway over, many submission deadlines are fast approaching—don’t miss your chance to share your work! And keep an eye out for our monthly eLitPak newsletter, arriving next Wednesday afternoon—packed with extra literary goodies and submission calls.
Remember to take a break, stay hydrated, and indulge in that movie marathon or back-to-back album binge while catching up on your reading list. When you’re ready, NewPages is here with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities and inspiration to help keep your writing flowing and your submission goals going strong.
Discover new works to read with NewPages.com New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine Issues, highlighting literary and alternative magazines with new issues of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art.
Each month, we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content blurbs for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and much more!
A question you may have asked upon inheriting family heirlooms or perhaps as you consider the future of your own collection of life writing. And now, an answer!
American Diary Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to collecting, archiving, and honoring American stories by preserving diaries and journals from everyday individuals. Much of their collection is available online for free for educational and research purposes, ensuring these personal histories are not lost. They accept diaries from both living and deceased individuals, with their physical collection housed in Cleveland, Ohio. The project also publishes articles on the significance of diaries and supports LGBTQ+ and BIPOC experiences.
American Diary Project employs a meticulous approach to archiving diaries and journals, beginning with documentation, where each item is categorized by details like year, location, and author information, with ongoing efforts to digitize the collection for online access. Following Library of Congress guidelines, the project ensures careful handling and storage. Journals are protected in acid-free boxes within a temperature-controlled, dry environment with minimal light exposure. Strict rules prevent damage from food, drink, paper clips, tape, or sticky notes, ensuring these memories are preserved for the future.
Baltimore Review 2025, an annual print compilation published by The Baltimore Review, features the poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction — the work of 63 writers — in the summer and fall 2024 and winter and spring 2025 online issues. The book also includes the winners of the summer 2024 (Final Judge Kathy Flann) and winter 2025 (Final Judge Francine Witte) short-forms contests: Amanda Auchter, Taylor Ebersole, and Al Dixon (summer 2024) and Dawn Dupler, Marika Guthrie, and Kayla Rutledge Page (winter 2025).
The Baltimore Review, founded in 1996, is a literary journal publishing poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The journal’s mission is to showcase Baltimore as a literary hub of diverse writing and promote the work of emerging and established writers from the Baltimore area, from across the U.S., and beyond. Visit the journal’s website to read current and past issues, and to submit your own writing.
Meet the editors at the upcoming Baltimore Book Festival (September 13-14), Baltimore Writers’ Conference (November 15), and AWP 2026.
In our college creative writing classes, our beloved professor often reminded us: the best fiction we can write is our own truths and observations disguised in the guise of a fictional story. That wisdom has stayed with me. This week’s inspiration prompt was born from that idea—and from nearly twenty years of caretaking in some capacity since graduating, layered on top of my normal work.
✍️ Inspiration Prompt: Caretakers and the Unseen
As lifespans stretch and support systems shrink, more people are stepping into the role of caretaker—often quietly, often without recognition. Whether tending to aging parents, disabled siblings, or chronically ill partners, these caretakers navigate a world of advocacy, sacrifice, and emotional labor. Their work is rarely glamorous, but it is deeply human.
This week, we invite you to explore the lives of those who care for others—not just professionally, but personally, intimately, and imperfectly.
Consider:
What does it mean to carry someone else’s needs while suppressing your own?
What invisible burdens do caretakers shoulder?
What moments of grace, resentment, humor, or heartbreak emerge in the daily grind of care?
Your Challenge:
Tell the story of someone who tends to others—quietly, invisibly, or imperfectly.
Paint the unseen. Reveal the emotional terrain.
Let your work honor the complexity of care.
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The Main Street Rag Summer 2025 issue opens with an interview with Chuck Joy, poet and playwright, whose newest book of poetry, White and Blue, is forthcoming later this year from Main Street Rag.
Also included in this summer issue of The Main Street Rag is prose by Jackson Herring, Nathan Rohan, Fiona Sinclair, Scott Bassis, Margaret Benbow, and Dr. John A. Wilde; poetry by Rick Adang, Kenneth Baker, Rachel Barton, Francis Carpentier, Gianna Improta, Sasha Reese, E. Laura Golberg, Patricia L. Hamilton, Jane Hammons, Daniel Edward Moore, Colleen S. Harris, Mark W. Kumming, Craig Kirchner, Donald Levering, Alison Luterman, Daniel Thomas Moran, Will Nixon, Paul Rabinowitz, Anne Rankin, Laura Ann Reed, Timothy Robbins, R. James Sennett, Jr., Robert Sparrow-Downes, Diane Stone, Linda Stryker, Richard Allen Taylor, Jim Tilley, Dan Veach, Eric Weil, and Daniel A. Zehner.
Readers can also find book reviews of Love Sick Century by Elly Bookman, Bus Poems by Michael Franchioni, Midlife Calculus by Britt Kaufmann, and Only Believe by Jennifer Bartell.
The Queer Allies Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Being an Empowering LGBTQIA+ Ally by NV Gay Ig Publishing, March 2025
While the United States Federal Government continues to add to its growing list of banned/flagged words, including “gay,” “gender identity,” “hate speech,” “LGBTQ,” there are counter efforts to document and respectfully make space for the lives other work to erase. The Queer Allies Bible: The Ultimate Guide to Being an Empowering LGBTQIA+ Ally by author NV Gay offers a means to continue fighting for inclusivity in discussions surrounding gender and sexual identities.
Emphasis is placed on three main pillars: learning and understanding, being respectful, and advocating. The author uses various techniques to educate readers on all aspects of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as provide personal narratives to help bring the material to life. There are chapters explaining how to apply the techniques of allyship, such as conversation starters, responding to anti-LGBTQIA+ remarks, supporting the coming out process, religion and the LGBTQIA+ community, creating inclusive spaces, and more.
Whether these conversations are happening in workplaces, legislatures, social media platforms, communities, schools, churches, and more; many are taking place without the voices of those within the community. The Queer Allies Bible, cuts through all the noise and provides a much needed guide for how to be an effective affirming ally.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten takes on authoritarians, autocrats, oligarchs, and fascists — terms she uses interchangeably — in Why Fascists Fear Teachers. The book is a fierce denunciation of the political movement working to destroy democracy, undermine trade unions, subvert multiculturalism, and decimate public education. It’s also a clear and passionate argument in support of teachers and public schools. “We cannot create a truly democratic, inclusive nation committed to opportunity for all without public schools,” she writes. “Fascists fight against public education because they want to control our minds, control our ideas, and control the future. And what do teachers do? They teach. It’s that simple.”
Conversely, Weingarten writes, fascists support banning books, limiting the free exchange of ideas, and narrowing curricular offerings, all while simultaneously championing white, male, Christian supremacy. Moreover, the Trump administration has made privatizing education through universal vouchers and charter schools an explicit goal —shifts that the AFT and other unions have lambasted as wasteful of taxpayer money and often hurtful to students.
The dichotomy Weingarten presents could not be clearer, with teachers on one side and fascists on the other.
Weingarten draws on history, from ancient societies to the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Pinochet, to expose the manifold harms caused by authoritarian rule. She also outlines the looming danger of fascist governance here in the U.S. and zeroes in on the harm caused by DOGE and Executive Orders outlawing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
Weingarten sugar-coats nothing; nonetheless, the book is not all doom and gloom. Multiple examples of teachers working with community residents to meet the needs of unhoused, hungry, and disabled students showcase teachers’ largely unheralded and inspiring work. Moreover, Weingarten is optimistic that we can derail the Trump agenda if we organize in the streets, in our union halls, and at the ballot box.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/
If you’re looking to fill out your final lazy days of beach reads and hammock chillin’, check out our monthly round-up of New Books. Each month we post the new and forthcoming titles NewPages selects from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles and recent reviews.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
Atavists, Lydia Millet’s latest collection of short stories, continues her preoccupation with the climate crisis, the backdrop (or centerpiece) to most of her recent writing. In these interlocking stories, she follows one family and various people connected to them, giving each character one story titled with something ended in -ist, such as “artist,” “mixologist,” or “optimist.” The “atavist” in the title raises the question of whether Millet means to imply that the characters are rediscovering some genetic characteristic after several generations of absence (perhaps a concern with the climate crisis) or are organisms that have characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism (ignoring the climate crisis, as generations of people have done). Or both, of course.
One of the main characters concerned with the climate crisis is Nick, who has attended Stanford to earn a degree in scriptwriting and who has moved back home to live with his parents and sister while he writes his first screenplay. Through various stories, it becomes clear that he is unable to write his fantasy screenplay, and he’s losing interest in LARPing (Live Action Role Playing), which causes him to lose his girlfriend, Chaya. He doesn’t see the point in most of what people do, given that there’s little chance of a foreseeable future. He does, however, find another girlfriend, Liza, who is taking a gap year from college. When her parents suggest volunteering, she finds purpose in helping residents of an assisted living facility understand their technology, which then morphs into helping them simply manage life.
Millet also shows characters who are not quite who they seem, sometimes through a clear contrast between the title of their story and how they behave, but also sometimes through their use or misuse of technology. For example, “Pastoralist” reveals the main character, Les, to be a predatory user of women, finding those he believe will be insecure because of their weight, then staying with them for no more than a few months until he gets bored and moves on to what he would describe as another sheep that needs to be sheared.
In the final story, “Optimist,” Millet makes it clear that she’s not one when it comes to people’s acknowledging the reality of the environmental destruction they have already caused and that only continues to worsen. She does portray characters who care, though, both about the environment and one another, even if they don’t always know what to do with those emotions, which helps elevate these stories beyond simply drawing attention to the climate crisis to a portrayal of our day-to-day lives.
Atavists by Lydia Millet. W.W. Norton, April 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
The Missouri Review Summer 2025 issue is themed “Location, Location, Location,” as Speer Morgan comments in the Foreword, “Location is as important in literature and art as it is in real estate. When and where and among whom — setting and milieu — anchor readers and allow them to enter an imagined world.” Referencing the unique perspectives of Honoré de Balzac, Andrew Wyeth, and Syd Mead, Morgan concludes, “The essays, poems, and short stories in this issue of TMR are quite different yet illustrate that location in art matters. These writers all take us somewhere special.”
Additionally, readers will enjoy new fiction from Katherine Cart, Thea Chacamaty, Maria Kuznetsova, and Perry Lopez; new poetry from Andrew Hemmert, J.S. Westbrook, and Emma Winsor Wood; and new nonfiction by Seán Carlson, Zack Ford, and Rose Whitmore. Also included is an art feature about the painter Suzanne Valadon. The publication’s feature ‘Curio Cabinet’ highlights “Alfred Cheney Johnston: Master of the Publicity Photo” and his “contributions to the iconic flapper figure.”
The final week of August was personally very stressful, and that carried over into the first week of September. Hopefully, you’ve been having a better week. Remember not to beat yourself up over those goals and ambitions. Taking a break—or taking it slow and easy for a while—is a necessity to recharge and come back with renewed energy for your writing and submitting goals.
NewPages is always here with our weekly roundup of submission opportunities and an inspiration prompt—ready whenever you are.
Although ten years have passed, Rhett Littlefield has always blamed himself for his father abandoning him and his family. When the troubled fourteen-year-old gets kicked out of school for his latest run-in with the vice principal, his frazzled single mother sends him to the hollers of Eastern Kentucky to stay with his Uncle Theo, a man of few words who leads an isolated existence with his loyal dog, Chekhov.
Resigned to make the best of his situation while still longing for the day when Mama will allow him to return home, Rhett settles into his new life. Rhett barely remembers his uncle, but he’s determined to get to know him. As he does, Rhett discovers that he and Uncle Theo share a connection to the past, one that has altered both of their lives, a past that will soon come calling.
The Thing About My Uncle is an engaging and heartwarming coming-of-age story that explores the cost of family secrets, the strength of family bonds, and the importance of reconciling the two in order to move forward.
Inspiration often strikes in the quietest moments. Over Labor Day weekend, I sat on a bench overlooking the still waters of Lake Huron. The surface was so calm it looked like glass—reflective, serene, deceptive. It reminded me of a line from the movie Deep Blue Sea, where a character, standing above an oceanic research station, remarks:
“Beneath this glassy surface, a world of gliding monsters.”
The line refers to sharks lurking below, but the imagery reaches far beyond the literal. Glass reflects like a mirror, yet it can also distort—warping what we see, hiding truths, creating illusions.
What lies beneath a polished surface? What dangers—or wonders—glide just out of view?
This week, explore the tension between appearance and reality. Use the idea of a “glassy surface” or “gliding monsters” to inspire your work across genres:
Fiction: A character peers through the “glass” of a perfect life—only to find something monstrous beneath. Or perhaps a respected figure’s reflection hides a darker truth.
Nonfiction: Write about a time when appearances deceived you—or the world. When did calm waters mask dangerous currents?
Poetry / Prose Poem: Explore the tension between reflection and distortion. What happens when you break through the surface?
Research / Hybrid Work: Investigate the mysteries of the deep—new species, unseen ecosystems, or the science of perception itself.
Visual / Experimental: Contrast clarity and illusion, surface and depth, beauty and menace.
What glides in the shadows, waiting to be seen?
Time to plumb the depths.
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The MacGuffin August 2025 features an expanded (and expandable fold-out) art portfolio of Sculptor Pascal Piermé to celebrate their fortieth volume in print. Returning contributor Max Blue offers a review of an obscure film by French auteur Jacques (“An Appeal to Unreason: On L’essai, the Banned Film of Jacques), and Ron McFarland revisits in poetry what is undoubtedly Vivaldi’s most famous work (“L’inverno”). Go for a ride with Angela Townsend’s nonfiction work, “Out to Dinner,” but do pull off for a pit stop to get the car’s-eye view in Colby Vargas’s fictional “Beast Runs.” Multidisciplinarian Laura Vogt bridges poetry and prose in a two-part mini feature, “Three Words for What We’ve Lost,” and in the poem “When My Kids Start to Speak English,” Kuo Zhang bridges cultures in a bilingual household to close the issue.
Welcome to The Fiddlehead’s Summer Creative Nonfiction issue!
Summer is a time to enjoy the great outdoors, but make some time in your schedule to enjoy an extra large helping of the best creative nonfiction The Fiddlehead could find! Inside this collection of 23 pieces, readers will find a diverse series of forms, including flash, hermit crab, lyric, collage, and diptych essays, along with personal narratives, a conversation between two nonfiction writers, and more traditional forms.
The issue features the winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s 2025 contest, Karen E. Moore’s “Our Reflection in Flames.” The contest judge Danny Ramadan describes this piece as “a genre-bending essay on loss, grief, sorrow, and the aftermath of an intense trauma.” Other writers featured include Brian Braganza, Harper Hugo-Darling, Line Dufour, Ariel Gordon, Kevin Kellman, Frances Peck, and many more!
Stay tuned to The Fiddlehead website for details about a hybrid launch in September, as they continue to celebrate 80 years of publication!
Providing “a literary home to stubborn artists and writers,” Chestnut Review maintains a strong business model, paying writers and staff while maintaining financial transparency. Their summer 2025 issue is available open-access online, with an interview by Kate Caraballo with Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, author of Uncensored Snapshots, as well as poetry by Amy Thatcher, Bethany Jarmul, Emma Bolden, Joemario Umana, Noreen Ocampo, Oladosu Michael Emerald, Ossian Houltzén, Sayuri Matsuura Ayers, Tim Stobierski, Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi; prose by Esme Kaplan-Kinsey, Mhembeuter Jeremiah Orhemba, Pauline Holdsworth, Sara Quinn Rivara, Yasser El-Sayed; and artwork by Camellia Paul, Jacelyn Yap, Mike Wheeler, Sholanke Boluwatife Emmanuel, and Rachel Feirman, whose gorgeous work, Monarch and Milkweed, is featured on the cover.
Chestnut Review also offers weeklong creative retreats for writers, providing workshops, professional feedback, and community in a supportive environment, with upcoming retreates in Wales, United Kingdom, and Merida, Mexico.
With acrimonious relations going back almost 50 years, it can be easy to forget that the United States and Iran were once close allies. After a CIA-backed military coup granted shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi authoritarian powers in 1953, U.S. presidents and policymakers deemed Iran a source of Middle East stability for a quarter century and growing demand for oil during the 1970s made Iran’s elite rich. By the end of that decade, a dying shah’s admittance to American exile for cancer treatment triggered a diplomatic hostage crisis and the end of the special relationship.
“Collapse on the magnitude of that which occurred in Imperial Iran in the 1970s simply cannot be attributable to the actions of one king,” Scott Anderson writes in his new book, King of Kings, explaining that the incompetence or corruption of many actors played a role in the Iranian Revolution. Anderson provides a compelling narrative relying on previous research, documentation, and his own interviews with inside sources like Americans employed in Iran at the time and the shah’s now octogenarian widow, Farah, still living in American exile.
Though a hostile government prevents a truly clear view of the event, King of Kings succeeds in giving Western readers a picture of a revolution that’s had great consequences for both the Middle East and the West to this day. It may not be light reading, but those looking for a better understanding of how modern Iran came to be will certainly benefit.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a writer, editor, and literary critic based in the Philadelphia, PA suburbs. He is the creator and editor of the Philly Chapbook Review, and his critical work has appeared in Fugue, The Rumpus, Jacket2, and The Adroit Journal, among other venues.
When Janet Kintner graduated from law school in 1968, she was rejected by employers who told her point-blank that they did not – and would not – hire a woman. This, despite the fact that she had passed the bar exam in Arizona and California and had graduated at the top of her class. While she eventually secured a much-loved position with the Legal Aid Society in San Diego, Kintner never forgot the sexist banter she heard or the demeaning comments directed at her by male attorneys and courthouse staff. But she refused to quit.
A subsequent job with the City Attorney’s office gave her the opportunity to prosecute exploitative businesses, and she developed a niche in the then-developing field of consumer law. Her work drew notice and, in 1976, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed her to the bench. At the time of her swearing in, Kintner was 31 years old and seven months pregnant. Two years later, a contested election to maintain the seat forced her to face two male adversaries, one of whom hurled a near-constant barrage of personal insults at her. Her account of the successful campaign – when she was again pregnant – and of juggling a toddler and a demanding judgeship, is both humorous and harrowing.
Kintner worked as a judge for a total of 47 years before retiring, and her look back, A Judge’s Tale, is important. Nonetheless, while she offers a stark denunciation of sexist behavior, she seems wholly disconnected from the many feminist campaigns waged by law students and attorneys to win equity and respect. Likewise, she alludes to unspecified marital discord, but offers few clues about why she waited three decades to call it quits. They’re disappointing omissions. Still, A Judge’s Tale is an inspiring book, detailing one woman’s quest for recognition and power. It’s a worthwhile memoir.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent. https://www.eleanorjbader.com/
Hopefully you’ll get a chance to rest and relax this weekend—or head out for some fun festivities. Let your mind take a break so you can come back refreshed and ready to tackle those submission goals. Just remember, with August ending and September beginning, many submission windows are closing soon—don’t miss out!
To help, NewPages is here with our weekly roundup of opportunities and a dose of inspiration to keep you going.
This week’s inspiration takes a cue from Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana singing “If We Were a Movie”—but with a twist: What if your life were a musical? Imagine the opening number, the show-stopping finale, and all the harmonies in between. Would it be a glittering Broadway spectacle, a gritty rock opera, or something entirely unexpected?
Revolute, a digital literary magazine published by the Randolph College MFA program since 2019 has students contributing to every part of the publication process. Volume .006 features an interview and CNF from Lauren W. Westerfield whose book Depth Control: Essays and Autofictions (Unsolicited Press) was published spring 2025. The online issue also includes poetry by Jared Beloff, Mirande Bissell, Robert Krut, Tina Posner, Mary Simmons; fiction by Jon Doughboy, Teresa Milbrodt; and nonfiction, Jeff Dingler, Jess Lettieri, Sara Javed Rathore, Rachel M. Reis.
“Loss is a sentry,” writes Kimberly Blaeser in Ancient Light. In her sixth collection of poems, the Anishinaabe poet, photographer, scholar, and activist stands “in the shadow of old losses,” watching over the human and ecological wreckage caused by some of the most devastating social issues of our time, including the epidemic of violence against Indigenous Women, the “hidden graves” at Native American boarding schools, the unrepatriated Ancestors who “wait” on museum “shelves in numbered boxes,” the disruptions to daily life, work, and family during the COVID-19 pandemic, “Politics / a super spreader,” and extractive environmental practices like “clearcutting” and “copper mines.”
Blaeser fills her narrative, lyric, and visual poems “with left behind,” with “an abundance we make / of the broken.” Each poem is a “vessel of fire,” carrying the “torch of language” to pay homage to Ancestors and praise legacies of “kinship” with all beings and land. Through poems, photographs, and drawings, Blaeser offers Indigenous stories and lifeways as a means of hope and resilience: “Let us mask / ourselves in hope — all broken of these histories.”
In stunning contrast to “this legacy” of trauma, Blaeser offers a series of ten poems, scattered throughout the collection, entitled “The Way We Love Something Small.” Each of these poems offers “a writ consolation” and “a mended silence.” By connecting to the “sweet notes” of other beings such as “spring peepers,” “newborn mice,” an “egret heronry,” and “Vowel sounds from the land” — “each oldest song / survivance.”
Throughout Ancient Light, Kimberly Blaeser artfully balances speaking “ill of the living” and blessing “the hollowed out sorrows.” Emerging from the despair of “these histories” and “lost futures,” Blaeser’s ceremonial poems use words to “transfigure” this “memory-tangle,” this pain-tangle into an “ancient ballad of continuance.” Ancient Light is a compassionate, wise, and necessary book.
Ancient Light by Kimberly Blaeser. University of Arizona Press, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
The newest online issue of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry (#168) features Hester Knibbe’s “The homeless roamer,” translated from Dutch by Arno Bohlmeijer; Elí Urbina’s “Beyond the Unnamed Thickets of Silence,” translated from Spanish by Jeremy Paden, and works by Tara Skurtu, Sydney Lea, Mary Jo Salter, Jane Springer, Gary Soto, Sharon Dolin, Christopher Buckley, Christina Pugh, Billy Collins, Ron Smith, some of which include audio recordings, and commentary from the poets and translators.
The issue also includes “A Master of the Living Art: A Conversation with Paisley Rekdal by Frances Richey” and featured essay, “Obeying the Call of Luminous Things: Writing in Paris with Czeslaw Milosz by David Havird,” which “exegetes the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czesław Miłosz’s Aristotelean obsession with particulars over against ‘universals,’ which he referred to repeatedly in his poetry as ‘luminous things.’ In so doing he reveals just how effectively and memorably Miłosz transformed the recondite expression of philosophical parlance into ‘memorable speech.’”
Maritime history is full of drama—and here in Michigan, where the Great Lakes behave more like inland seas, the stories run deep. Beneath their glassy surfaces lie shipwrecks caused by reckless captains chasing speed, tragedies swallowed by fog, and yes… even pirates.
Real-life pirates in the Midwest! These freshwater swashbucklers weren’t after gold, but lumber, illegal alcohol, and wild game meat—sailing the lakes with stealth and grit.
McGulpin Rock stands firm against the waves of Lake Michigan, with the Mackinac Bridge looming in the mist—where history, myth, and mystery converge.
This week’s inspiration prompt invites you to write into the tension between surface calm and hidden danger:
A lake that never gives up its dead.
A family heirloom with a watery past.
A pirate hat that fits a little too well.
A ship that returns every year on the same foggy night.
What stories lie beneath the still water? What truths surface when we stop pretending the inland sea is tame?
Craft an ode to imaginary freshwater pirates—or real ones like Jack Rackham, James Jesse Strang, and Dan Seavey. Write a story of a town on the edge of myth, haunted by a foggy ship every November. Dive into the history of the Great Lakes in a lyric essay. Create a poetry collage weaving verse with images of pirates, Petoskey stones, and more.
Dive in—the water’s full of stories.
📬 Want more weekly inspiration, literary news, and submission opportunities? Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a prompt that stirs your imagination or a contest that fits your voice.
When award-winning professor and writer Ashley Farmer (Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era) discovered that there were no full-length biographies of influential Black nationalist Audley Moore (1898-1996), she set out to rectify the omission. The result, Queen Mother, charts Moore’s ascent as a community leader, first as a follower and supporter of Marcus Garvey, then as a leader in the US Communist Party, and finally as an advocate of reparations to the Black community for the sin of slavery and the continuing damage wrought by racism and white supremacy. It’s a powerful, insightful, and evocative look at a woman who eschewed feminism but made sure that her voice was heard by the men who led the movements she championed.
For most of her life, Moore was a revered speaker, writer, and activist, and spent decades working to galvanize support for the establishment of a separate Black nation within the US. She was also outspoken in her opposition to the integrationist efforts of those, like Martin Luther King Jr., who believed racial equality was both preferable and possible. Moore vehemently disagreed, and her efforts brought her into contact with the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, as well as leaders of numerous newly independent African Nations.
Dubbed Queen Mother, she hobnobbed with controversial figures including dictator Idi Amin and Louis Farrakhan, and spoke out in favor of polygamy. Thrice married and the mother of one son, she nonetheless made “the movement” her priority. While readers may question this and other choices made by Moore, Queen Mother is a brilliant look at one woman’s passionate quest for social justice, peace, and racial equity. It’s a beautifully drawn and provocative portrait of a fascinating activist and leader.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
“America’s Farthest North Literary Magazine,” Permafrost is a literary journal run by the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Readers can enjoy both print with online access and online-only issues each year featuring high quality poetry, prose, and hybrid works from both established and emerging writers. The newest print issue (46) includes poetry by Joshua Boettiger, Margaret Carter, Tyler Heath, Carol Durak, Emily Wall; fiction by Charlie Rogers, Alex Juffer; nonfiction by Brian Benson, Angela Townsend; and a hybrid piece coupling poetry and art by Dale Williams. Cover art: “Germination Sequence” by Kyle Agustines, 2024. Visit the Permafrost website to read the full content online.
In The Real Ethereal, Katie Naughton explores the complex interplay of human experiences within temporal, economic, and artistic constraints, emphasizing the processes of “making and / unmaking.” The collection is organized into four distinct sections, each unfolding from a “weighted center / stretching extending.”
The opening section, “day book,” presents a speaker positioned “between / occupant and occupy,” wrestling with the dichotomy of what “takes me” versus what “I take.” Through a single expansive poem, Naughton explores the continuum of daily existence in a city, reflecting on the “proximity” of life through the lens of a window. The imagery the poet conjures encapsulates a world fraught with constructs both built and “torn down,” confronting the viewer with urgent realities, including “waste mass” and microplastics. The speaker sorts “waste carefully,” grappling with the moral implications of what choices to make “when something’s / really / wrong.”
The anxiety surrounding time and economic pressures continues in the second section, “hour song.” This part consists of six poems, each composed of two to four fourteen-line sections. While the sonnet multiplies, the focus shifts from day to hour, “where time passes / like in dreams suspended and waiting.” Here, the intensity of attention grows, encapsulating the notion that daily rhythms and poetry are overshadowed by “the choirs of history.”
In “the question of address,” the third section, nine epistles reflect on personal loss and nostalgia in relationships. As time unfolds elegiacally, the speaker considers familial bonds and the haunting presence of absence — “What was your voice? / Was mine?”
The final section, “the real ethereal,” raises profound questions about the act of recording amidst the failures and chaos of existence. In her thought-provoking and somatosensory debut, Katie Naughton concludes that “the only mark of unendingness we have / the refusal to stop” making.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award.
Cursed Daughters, Oyinkan Braithwaite’s highly anticipated second novel [following 2018’s My Sister, The Serial Killer], brings readers into the middle-to-upper-class community of Lagos, Nigeria, and its adjacent suburbs and tells a complicated story that questions the role of fate in determining how our lives unfold.
The story centers on the economically comfortable Falodin family, whose older generation believes that the household’s women are plagued by a long-standing curse that prohibits them from forming lasting heterosexual relationships. For cousins Ebun and Monife, both of whom consider themselves modern and well-educated, the idea that they can be punished for the sins of past generations seems preposterous. At the same time, their intellectual skepticism runs head-on into tradition, and when Monife unexpectedly dies at age 25, her death leaves 21-year-old Ebun scrambling to make sense of what has happened.
Her difficulties are made worse by the premature birth of her daughter, Eniiye, on the day of Monife’s burial. Moreover, her emotional upheaval is exacerbated by the fact that Eniiye looks shockingly similar to Monife, a reality that has neighbors, family, and friends dubbing the child a reincarnation. This not only leaves Ebun reeling but puts tremendous pressure on the child who wants little more than to be herself.
It’s a soap opera, for sure, but Braithwaite is a spectacular writer who manages to make this a compelling and satisfying intergenerational drama. Although some of what transpires is predictable, the deft handling of Eniiye’s coming of age and her subsequent pursuit of romance is touching and emotionally resonant. Cursed Daughters is told in the alternating voices of Ebun, Eniiye, and Monife and moves back and forth between several decades. But as the puzzle pieces come into frame, secrets, silences, and superstitions are parsed and upended. The end result is that Eniiye does what her foremothers could not and emerges as an autonomous, bold, and independent woman. It’s a transition to cheer.
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. Doubleday, November 2025.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
Publishing poetry online since 2018, River Heron Review 8.2 features an interview with Rosa Lane and new works by Christine Degenaars, Jessa Queyrouze, Michael Lauchlan, Chrissy Stegman, Darren Demaree, Daniel Lurie, ariel rosé, Kathryn Petruccelli, William Rieppe Moore, David Eileen, Mike Bove, Cole Pragides, Alison Tanik, Rebecca Faulkner, and Lauren Elaine Jeter. Included in this update is the River Heron Poetry Prize 2025 Issue, spolighting the work of Winner Alison Tanik, Winner and Finalists Julia Foshee, Annette Sisson, and Maria Surricchio.
River Heron Review offers structured and generative workshops facilitated by experienced writers and editors following the Amherst Writers and Artists model of positive reinforcement to guide each writer in developing their unique voice. Limited seats are also still available for the River Heron Review Recharge: A Poet’s Retreat focusing on “Rewilding the Poem” scheduled for October 2025.
TGIF! Happy Friday, everyone! It’s been a long week of coding nightmares and endless link-checking—such is life when you run an online portal for recommended literary magazines, presses, creative writing programs, and submission opportunities.
If your week felt underproductive a well, NewPages is here to help you reclaim a sense of momentum. Whether you’re writing, submitting, or just seeking inspiration, we’ve got you covered. This week’s prompt draws from the real world—and a shared frustration with scientific jargon. Plus, we’ve rounded up over 80 submission opportunities to help you share your work!
Let the good times roll.
🧪 Inspiration Prompt: The Chemistry of Words
From causation and correlation to chaos and confusion, what makes people dig in their heels in the modern age? What sparks outrage, blind allegiance, or misunderstanding?
Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, takes the form a of diary — or a devotional, perhaps, as it does reveal a type of devotion — of an unnamed narrator who withdraws from the world. The narrator first comes to the convent as a way to escape the world, which has begun to seem overwhelming to her. Her husband has moved to take a new job, and the narrator thinks it’s obvious that the relationship is over. However, the main motivator seems to be her feeling that she can’t do any good in the world, which had been her career and focus.
She ran the Threatened Species Rescue Center, but she now feels she has done as much harm as she had good. Thus, she visits the convent to take some time to reboot. In the second section of the novel, however, she has become a participant in the community, though not quite on the path to become a nun. In fact, she doesn’t really have any faith in God, though she likes the idea of attention as a type of devotion. She left rather abruptly, as she references people from her previous life who feel betrayed by her quick departure, especially given that she didn’t notify them.
The convent is also near where the narrator grew up, and she seems to be mourning the relatively recent death of her mother — who had died before her first visit to the convent — who did good in the community in a quiet manner, unlike the narrator’s work. She interacts with a schoolmate from her childhood, Helen Parry, an activist nun who has come to the convent during the pandemic to deliver the bones of a nun who worked with her, but who began her time at this convent. The narrator admits that she and others bullied Helen when she was in school, though Helen doesn’t seem to concern herself with that part of her childhood, as she had a mother who struggled with mental illness and was abusive.
This novel is pared down to the essentials, much like the landscape that surrounds the convent, focusing on the narrator’s reflections on what it means to live a good life, mainly through the contrast between an ascetic life as a nun and that of a highly visible activist. Neither the narrator nor Wood attempt to provide an answer to that question, as they want readers to answer it for themselves.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Happy Tuesday! This week’s writing prompt, featured in Monday’s newsletter, was inspired by a video of a gynecologist explaining the difference between correlation and causation—a concept that’s often misunderstood and misused in shaping public opinion and policy in the U.S.
While the video’s core message is serious, one example stood out: the correlation between shark attacks and ice cream sales. It’s attention-grabbing, funny, and oddly perfect for storytelling.
Sometimes, even in dark periods, a spark of inspiration can lead not just to serious exploration and discussion, but also to a break from heaviness—a light-hearted stretch of the imagination.
click image to open flyer
✨ Inspiration Prompt: Correlation isn’t causation—but it sure makes a good story.
Did you know shark attacks and ice cream sales both spike in summer? Coincidence? Absolutely. Causation? Not quite. But the pattern is seductive—and dangerous when misunderstood.
And maybe, just maybe, someone is behind the screen painting the mice to make the experiments work.
This week’s prompt invites you to explore the tension between correlation and causation—the seductive power of patterns, the danger of assumptions, and the emotional fallout when we mistake one for the other.
🧠 What happens when patterns deceive us?
We live in a world overflowing with data but starving for understanding. People see two things happen together and assume one caused the other. Fear spreads. Certainty calcifies. A coincidence becomes a conspiracy. A trend becomes a truth. A symptom becomes a scapegoat.
This prompt is your invitation to interrogate the illusion of cause—and the human need to make meaning, even when the dots don’t connect.
✍️ Try exploring:
A character who builds their life around a false belief rooted in a misinterpreted pattern—or one who manipulates statistics to justify a personal or political agenda.
A society that spirals into fear from imagined connections—or a world where every coincidence is treated as divine causation.
A scientist, artist, or mystic haunted by ambiguity.
A visual piece that plays with misleading graphs, painted mice, or absurd experiments.
A poetic representation of data that tells two conflicting stories.
A collage or graphic narrative that juxtaposes real-world headlines with imagined consequences.
Create in any form: fiction, poetry, nonfiction, scripts, songs, graphic narratives, collages, or other art forms.
And have fun unraveling the stories we tell ourselves when we mistake patterns for truth.
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Donal Ryan’s latest novel, Heart, Be at Peace, reads like a collection of interlocked short stories, with each chapter having a different character as the narrator and focus. Thus, the novel shows several scenes from different perspectives, changing the way the reader sees each character again and again. As such, Ryan’s focus is on character and community, as opposed to plot. The characters live in a small town in Ireland where everybody seems to know or be related to one another, but the area is changing, largely due to a group of young men selling drugs. The question that runs through the novel, then, is whether anybody will do anything about that problem and, if so, what will they do and who will do it.
At the core of the novel, though, is the idea of heart — as the title implies — and relationships. Some of those are traditional, romantic relationships, such as Bobby and Triona, who have what seems to be a solid marriage and family, though Bobby worries that he’s worse than his father was; or Sean and Réaltín, who don’t have a healthy marriage, though Sean tries to find a way to set them back on course, taking an unhealthy way to try to get there.
There are also a number of parent-child relationships or even grandparent-child connections. Millie develops a bond with her grandmother, Lily, whom people believe to be a witch, a description that might be accurate, only to risk that relationship because she begins dating Augie, the main drug dealer in town. Mags’ father Josie tries to rebuild the connection with his son Pokey, who has just gotten out of jail for fraud, and the relationship with his daughter whom he pushed away because of her sexual orientation.
Throughout the novel, characters define and redefine what love looks like for them and for others, often through the question of what they’re willing to do for those around them. Those answers often surprise them and those they love as much as they do the reader, but they can’t deny their hearts, even when they lead them astray, but especially when they lead them back to those they need.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Following the acclaimed launch of its debut issue, Thorn & Bloom — the literary magazine redefining self-care as resistance — presents its bold second edition, Breaking the Cycle. This quarterly publication continues its mission to fuse personal healing with collective liberation, now turning its lens toward dismantling oppressive narratives that bind us.
Thorn & Bloom 02: Breaking the Cycle features bold voices that interrogate societal conditioning and explore how unlearning can forge pathways to personal and political freedom. Where the first issue laid the foundation for self-care as radical honesty, this edition pushes further, offering language as a tool for fracture, freedom, and rebirth, all through essays, poetry, fiction, and expert insight.
“True liberation begins when we disrupt the stories imposed upon us,” says the editorial team. “This issue is an invitation to unlearn, to rise, and to rewrite.”
Inviting readers are over two dozen contributors, including Kara Dorris, Agbeye Oburumu, Grace Flaherty, CJ The Tall Poet, Rita Moe, Melanie White-Heron, Kristy Ettel, Mars Gorman, Mary M. Brown, Margaret Gibbs, Taslym Umar, Tinamarie Cox, and Rachel Turney, among others.
Rooted in inclusivity and empowerment, Thorn & Bloom is a haven for stories that break open and build a new, where vulnerability meets defiance, and self-care becomes revolution. Here, storytelling is not just art but alchemy, turning pain into power and words into weapons of liberation.
Nussaibah Younis’s debut, Women’s-Prize-shortlisted novel, Fundamentally, follows Nadia, a young woman from England who begins a job working for the United Nations deradicalizing women who joined ISIS. She has no training for the job, only an article she wrote in graduate school, and she takes the job to get out of an unhealthy relationship as much as for any other reason. She is out of her depth, as she readily admits and as her new co-workers can clearly see. However, she begins working as best she can on a program, which leads her to go to a refugee camp in Iraq, where she’s based, to meet the women there.
Everything changes when she meets Sara, a young Muslim woman from England, who reminds Nadia of herself when she was younger. Nadia was once a devout Muslim, but she has left her faith behind, which led to a falling out from her mother, exacerbated by Nadia’s relationship with Rosy, her roommate and sometime lover (Nadia believes it’s more than sometimes). Sara doesn’t engage in the programs Nadia begins, but they talk almost every time Nadia comes to the camp, and Nadia begins planning ways she can help Sara. Part of the problem with that help comes from the UN itself, as Younis ‘sends up the bureaucracy’ and in-fighting that prevents any true progress from occurring. Nadia angers almost everybody involved, but then finds a way to placate them again, mainly through providing them with money through budget lines and some sort of control, or at least the illusion of it.
However, when Nadia tries to get Sara out of the refugee camp and back home, a number of circumstances prevent that from happening, so Nadia goes outside of the traditional UN structure to try to help Sara. She has help from her co-workers, who seem as disenchanted with the organization as Nadia does, but she begins to realize that Sara is not quite who she seems to be. Younis uses her comic novel to critique Western views of Muslims, as well as those organizations that work to help, but often find themselves out of their depth, all while creating characters readers can both laugh at and resonate with.
Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Tiny Reparations Books, February 2025.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of +scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
In A Physical Education, Casey Johnston mainly spotlights her personal story, beginning with her focus on running and dieting to lose weight and the unhappiness that brought, leading to her discovery of weightlifting and the varieties of strength that came with it. She weaves in her relationships that reflect the emotional strength she ultimately developed from weightlifting, as well as her relationship with her mother. Last, Johnston clearly uses research to help her view the world at large, so she works in a variety of sources that talk about weightlifting and dieting, especially as it relates to women.
My only complaint about the book comes from the fact that I’m a runner, and Johnston didn’t have a positive experience there, but that’s because she connected it to weight loss and diet culture. One aspect of lifting she values — the importance of fueling to perform and the need to recover — is similarly important for those of us who try to run our best times, as she does with lifting. Though, to her point, when she was focused on running, the conversation around weight and diet was much less healthy than it is now. That said, her critique of diet culture is spot on, as she moves away from a system and culture that repeatedly tells people — especially women — to deny themselves, then criticizes them when they fail to do so.
Johnston also presents the positives of lifting, especially within the gym, where she expected to find a masculine approach that wouldn’t welcome her. When she reports a man filming her, the two young men working the desk act quickly, confronting the man and banning him from the gym. When she struggles to complete a lift on the first day, Dimitrios, an older Greek man who spends hours in the gym each day, helps her out, but encourages her, as opposed to shaming her.
Johnston not only builds physical strength, but that development leads to her inner development, as she leaves an unhealthy relationship and begins to develop a stronger sense of self. In fact, she becomes her best self by the end of the book, stronger in every way, a heavy lift that she has worked toward for years and finally accomplishes.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels.
Submission/Registration Deadline: August 31, 2025 Submit your fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction to Black Fox Literary Magazine’s Summer Fox Tales Prize with theme: Feast! Deadline: August 31, 2025! Registration is also open for our September Lunch Break Writing Sessions. View our flyer for more information and links to our website.
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Holli Carrell’s Apostasies, winner of the 2025 Perugia Press Prize, is now available for presale at Perugia Press and Asterism Books. The sale rate at Perugia is offered until 9/15/2025. This debut, hybrid collection explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the lingering ramifications of being raised within a repressive and patriarchal American religious ideology. View flyer and visit website for more information and to purchase.
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LIMITED SPACE AVAILABLE FOR THE FICTION WEEK, OCTOBER 5-11, 2025. NONFICTION WEEK IS SOLD OUT
Whether you’re just beginning or already well on your way, these seven days will be a life-changing time of inspiration and creativity. Internationally bestselling author Bret Lott has been writing and teaching writing for four decades and will be leading you through a time of finding your path as a writer in both mindful and practical ways. This all-inclusive retreat includes luxury accommodations at Villa Poggiano just outside Montepulciano, as well as curated excursions into the Tuscan countryside for historical and literary and culinary pursuits. Together with trusted providers, The Tuscany Writing Retreats has created a truly bespoke Italian experience. Everything is included so you won’t need to worry about a thing. Registration ends August 31. View flyer and visit the website to learn more.
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