On Reality, Fiction and Neurodiversity by Victoria Costello
Victoria Costello is a writer and teacher of memoir and auto-fiction based in Ashland, Oregon. Her debut novel, Orchid Child, forthcoming from Between the Lines Publishing in June, 2023, is based on the three-generation family story she first told in her memoir, A Lethal Inheritance (Prometheus Books/2012). As a science journalist, she’s written feature articles for Scientific American MIND, Psychology Today, Brain World, and Huffington Post. She earned an Emmy Award as a writer/producer of documentary films, including This Island Earth and Wolf Nation, shown on PBS, Discovery, and The Disney Channel. Themes of ancestry, neurodiversity, and mysticism reoccur in her latest writings and workshops. Visit her website, victoriacostelloauthor.com for contact info and to read more of her work.
“Where in the body do I begin”: Grass and Hunger in Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas by James Ciano
James Ciano holds an MFA from New York University, and has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and The Community of Writers. His poems have recently appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and Nashville Review. Originally from New York, he lives in Los Angeles, California where he is currently a Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing.
Big Break: A Multiple-Choice Test
Sandra Beasley is the author of Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, and A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, which won the Housatonic Book Award, and she edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Photo credit: Andrew Lightman
This Is Not a Day at the Fair: On Poetry and PTSD by Jennifer Metsker
Jennifer Metsker’s poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise was published by New Issues Press. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit, Rhino, Birdfeast, Gulf Coast, The Cream City Review and other journals. Her audio poetry has been featured on the BBC Radio’s Short Cuts. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.
of being neighbors by Daniel Biegelson
Reviewed by Alison Hramiak | September 16, 2022Ricochet Editions, 2021Small Press Distribution, $15 At first glance of being neighbors looks like a book that concentrates on what its title suggests –neighborliness. A fleeting glimpse at the contents might have you thinking that it is structured almost like a report with subheadings. Do not be fooled […]
Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams
Reviewed by Alison Hramiak | September 2, 2022Cider Press Review, 2022Paperback, 85 pp. $18.95 A Scale Model of a Country at Dawn by John Sibley Williams looks at the world through a different lens – a lens that feels like it came from another world. It comprises a grounded series of poems reflecting on love […]
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos
Reviewed by Sara Biggs Chaney | June 21, 2022 Catapult Press, 2022 Paperback, 171 pages, $16.95 Melissa Febos begins Body Work with an insistence: personal writing is not trivial, craftless, or selfish. On the contrary, it might be the only writing really worth our time. By the end of the book’s first essay, “In Praise of Navel […]
Deadheading and Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap
Reviewed by Mariah Rigg | June 14, 2022Red Hen Press, 2021Paperback, 232 pages, $22.95 Beth Gilstrap’s Deadheading and Other Stories is a love letter to the Carolinas, a collection that takes the much-documented recession and remakes it through the eyes of the Southern working class. As someone who did not grow up in North America, […]
Those Fantastic Lives, and Other Strange Stories by Bradley Sides
Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | June 8, 2022Backlight Press, 2021Paperback, 130 pages, $16.95 A method artists and photographers use for determining the worthiness or power of an image is to distill, in their minds or through photograph technologies, a color image till it becomes black and white or monochromatic. All distractions of color gone, and […]
The Predatory Animal Ball by Jennifer Fliss
Reviewed by Rebecca Pyle | May 2, 2022Okay Donkey Press, December 2021Paperback, 190 pages, $15.00 The shadow of war—our collective guilt, its drifting, numbing effect even many decades later on all our lives—seems to this reviewer what Jennifer Fliss is writing about in her collection of flash fiction pieces The Predatory Animal Ball. The conclusion […]