"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.”