Find out what lit mags are looking for by reading the best of what they publish, once weekly. Time. There’s too little of it. Work, family, friends—everywhere you turn, obligations. And on top of all that, you want to write and publish short stories. But how do you spend your precious writing time? You just keep compiling that running list of H.L. Menken quotes. Toward what end? Seriously, it’s like you want to fail… “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear

"This game began, with no explanation, the summer I turned seven." The author notes for “Breadcrumbs” (2,600 words), by Andrew Plimpton in the fall / winter 2025 issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, tells us that Plimpton is a playwright. This is no surprise, as his entertaining and ambitious story uses subtext—the playwright’s best friend—to do a lot of the heavy lifting. Most great stories are, at their heart, mysteries. From the prosaic (Was it Colonel Mustard in the library wi

The Mob Point-of-View “Because he served the tourists too well, we threw the hotel manager into the pool." This is where we start in Gordon Brown’s short-but-sweeping “Death of a Hotel Manager,” (650 words) in the Spring edition of The Baltimore Review. And I use we advisedly. We are a mob. This story’s point-of-view is the mob’s point-of-view. Many great stories are rooted in what seem like simple choices, like choosing a point-of-view. “Where you place the camera” in the wo

"I've been carrying this scream all my life." The more I read, the more I realize how important it is for writers to play with form. I’ve made reference in these columns to the saturation of story telling in popular culture, about how we’ve become so accustomed to tropes and cliché that we sometimes accept them as set-in-stone features of a story. There are more writing guides than are countable that break out immutable genre laws (“when writing a romance, these beats are req

"You can't actually burn down a golf course." What makes for a good story title? Writers often fall into the trap of using a reference that’s deeply embedded in their work—something that’s loaded with meaning but only in the context of their story—and expect that to work as a lure into the piece for the completely uninitiated. I’m looking at you, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Jess Row’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (2,000 words) in the current issue of The Massach

A continuous journey away from family. Olufunke Ogundimu’s “ The Bird That Cries Mayday ” (3,950 words), in Prairie Schooner Journal ’s spring issue, starts with a bang. It’s 1942 and we’re alongside a German warplane that’s “sputtering a dark plume from its distressed engine.” The engine stalls, the plane nose-dives. There’s only a brief mention of the plane’s “three occupants.” Other than that, nothing but intense circumstance. How often do we get that in short stories? We’

“Always a river. Sometimes in your mind. Sometimes in the gorge. Either way, a river.” Karen Joy Fowler is a writer you likely know. Maybe from her 2022 historical novel “Booth,” which tells the story of the Booth family—John Wilkes and his siblings—leading up to Lincoln’s assassination. Maybe you’ve read 2013’s “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves,” of which Carmen Maria Machado wrote “I took reluctant breaks from the final pages to be comforted by my girlfriend, wanting

Don't give them 4, give them 2 + 2. The focal point of Kathryn Kulpa ’s story “ Keep Your Visions to Yourself ” (in Trampset Journal ) is its unabashed emotionality, its Stevie Nicks-ness. This super-short story (450 words) is immediately celebratory about a particular type of foolishly-close relationship, the kind that dangles bare feet out car windows, where “toes danc[e] in the wash of exhaust-scented highway air.” “We wanted a world full of drama and magic. Held seances i

"Too big and not enough at the same time." When writing a new story—long or short—I try to present a clear enough path that a reader can form an expectation for an ending. My goal is to then deliver something different and more exciting / moving / shocking / revealing in that ending than the reader’s expectation. We are, all of us, overwhelmed by a constant flow of stories. So much so that the average reader, movie-goer, television-watcher is inured to most genre tropes. They

“Fear Theory” / X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine Check out Lizzie Challen Hubbard’s “Fear Theory" in X-R-A-Y . Remember that name. You’ll definitely remember the story. Challen Hubbard is adept with poetry or prose, but there’s something so effortless about her casual, dark humor, something so decisive in her crisp, clear plotting—even in this one little spark of a story (2,100 words)—that she seems primed to crank them out like Stephen King. And I’m sure King would love “Fear Theo

A strange intimacy between care and harm. You’ll be drawn in right from the start of Grace Spulak’s “ The Four Winds ” in the current issue (Flight v24n2) of Blackbird Journal (8,100 words). The journal’s foreword rightly prepares us to “confront the costs of devotion…and the strange intimacy between care and harm.” In the opening, two women, Martha and Susan, are forced to stop driving so they can get gas in the dark of night. They wind up between two filling stations in a

On the burden of Legacy. There are precious few times that you’ll come across a work of art that speaks to you so clearly that it imprints on your memory. And I’m not just talking thematically—because it mirrors some specific in your own life—but because every individual element of its construction succeeds, and the whole far surpasses the sum of its parts. I feel this way about Erika Krouse’s “ Jude ,” in the Summer 2024 issue of Colorado Review (3,800 words). It’s just an

On World War Two and the cutting of summer lawns.

A lot of story in a small space.

Check out “ Mud Season ” by Amelia Valasek in Split Lip (3,000 words). It’s a police blotter gone awry. We’re introduced to “it” (whatever the hell “it” is) in the opener, an entity associated with the boot-sucking mud that plagues an any-town one chilly April. Then we float through a series of tableaus, a series of lives, each of them poisoned by the appearance of free-wheeling doppelgängers who act on their worst impulses, leaving their doubles to deal with the consequence

Check out “Islands” by Casey Walker in The Common’s latest (8,000 words). It’ll hook you from the first paragraph. It’s two stories in one—insistent memories of a teenage relationship haunting the adult narrator as he negotiates a present-day family drama—and Walker doesn’t delineate when we’re shifting from one narrative to the other. What better way to imply how the past is always hanging there, waiting to wallop us, just a paragraph break away? As both stories careen towar

Check out “Young Sheldon Room Tone” by Nick Mandernach in NER’s latest (2,400 words). It’s a bold, moving, and terrifyingly funny peek inside the mind of a devasted young father. The story’s staccato tone and occasional non-rejoinders keep you right there at the tip of its unnamed protagonist’s tongue, at the front of his fracturing mind. New England Review “gives readers a vital snapshot of the literary moment, four times a year, in its richness, complexity, and diversity.”