As we prepare this issue, it happens to be the time of year for envisioning change. And in that spirit, we’re trying something new: after many years of arranging our issues by genre, we’re mixing things up, interspersing the stories, poems, and essays throughout the magazine. We hope that this new layout gives readers a different, […]
In every fall issue we celebrate and publish the winning story from the year’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, established to honor the memory of writer, scholar, and literary editor Liza Nelligan, an alumna of Colorado State University’s English Department. In this issue, we are delighted to present the prize’s sixteenth winner, Bryna Cofrin-Shaw’s “Loss […]
Perhaps it’s because I was born in July that I feel most at home in the summer, when I know myself best, when I feel most knowable to others. And while summer is my country, it has always been an in-between place (such is life on the academic calendar) and one that I am always […]
It’s quite early in the new year as we prepare this spring issue, and resolutions still abound: the yoga studio is suddenly mat to mat, Facebook posts are rife with challenges and promises of change, and many of us are taking this time to consider who we are, who we hope to be, how we […]
Every fall, we have the true pleasure of featuring the winner of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, final judge Margot Livesey selected Shannon Sweetnam’s “Aisha and the Good for Nothing Cat.” This story, Livesey writes, “is set in a place of tragedy—Syria—but the story itself is not tragic. Despite losing various family […]
Unlikely associations and uneasy alliances flash—like summer’s sheet lightning—through the stories and essays in this issue, reflecting, incandescing, sparking: A young museum docent, stalled in her small-town midwestern life, befriends a man on death row (Rebecca McKanna’s “Interpreting American Gothic”). A man who struggles with human connections welcomes an enormous snapping turtle into his home […]
“Something had changed,” writes Marilyn Abildskov in her essay “Scotty’s: A Brief History of Expatriate Time,” a memoir of her time teaching English in Japan. “Something inside me had changed—some boundary had been crossed or become irrevocably blurred, and I couldn’t put the old order back in place.” We often can’t resist trying to pinpoint […]
Every fall, we have the true pleasure of publishing the winning story of the Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction. This year, it’s Katie M. Flynn’s “Island Rule,” in which an environmental biology professor is haunted by memories of the surreally accelerated evolution and ensuing political violence that expelled her, as a child, from her island […]
It’s something we almost all lament at some point in adulthood: how ephemeral summer seems compared to its endless stretch when we were young. Now, before May even ends, the calendar fills with summer plans and obligations until September arrives, the season fleeting, diminishing, disappearing in the rearview almost as quickly as it appeared on […]
How can a thing that is, essentially, nothing—a space where something else should be—have such pull?” asks Emily Sinclair in “Searching for the Duck Hole,” featured in this issue’s nonfiction. It’s a question that resonates throughout the stories and essays in these pages—characters and writers alike bump along and against the walls of estrangement, investigating […]