Tag Archives: #Fiction

Interview with Ellen Birkett Morris

October 16, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #WriterslifeLeslie Pietrzyk

by Bradley Sides

Memorable characters guide much of the work of Ellen Birkett Morris. Her story collection, Lost Girls, gave us a splendid cast of female protagonists dealing with loss, grief, and acceptance in and around Kentucky. Her new novel, Beware the Tall Grass, goes even further in developing strong characters. It tells the story of the inexplicable connection between Eve Sloan, a modern mother whose young son has past life memories of war, and Thomas Boone, a young soldier in Vietnam. This is a book ripe with the truth of its characters; this is a book that successfully explores the big themes of life such as loss and love and family. As we read page after page, we want to know–have to know–how the stories of Thomas and Eve will end.

It was a pleasure to be able to talk to Morris about her writing.

Bradley Sides: Ellen, you are so good at creating and building characters. I want to start by asking you about them. As you begin a project, whether it’s a story or a longer project like Beware the Tall Grass, how do you find your characters? Do you feel like you know them well as you get started? Or do they develop as the project grows?

Ellen Birkett Morris: Thank you. I built the character Eve with the idea that I needed a character who would have the hardest time with the uncertainty and pain of her young son being traumatized by memories of war. Eve had a rough childhood and dreams of giving her son the perfect childhood, so Charlie’s challenges were a nightmare for her. I have come to believe that my job is to develop a character with specific traits and then put them in situations that test their nature in every way, forcing them to find a new way to look at the world.

One way I get to know them as I start is to give them passions (sculpture for Eve, horse for Thomas), past memories, friendships, family relations. These choices begin to come together to form the characters. The more I populate their world with specific detail the more real they become to me and readers.

Eve developed as I wrote, her emotions got deeper, and her understanding of relationships got more nuanced. It was fun to see her develop on the page. I had to take my time to let that happen. The same was true of Thomas, who went to war as a naive boy and had his values tested at every turn.

BS: With the kind of depth they have, do you ever have trouble letting them go once the story is over?

EBM: The women and girls from Lost Girls have stayed with me. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them come up again in short stories. I think I have told the stories of Eve and Thomas to completion. That said, I think of Thomas a lot. I love his character and commitment to doing the right thing.

BS: Expanding just a bit, but how did your writing process differ from creating stories for Lost Girls to creating a longer narrative with Beware the Tall Grass?

EBM: I really considered myself a short story writer when I started writing the novel. I was so used to drawing characters sharply in a small space and dropping in on their peak moments. So, I wrote Eve’s story as a short story first. I was published in Upstreet under the title “Landing Zone Albany.” I was at the Antioch Writers Workshop in Yellow Springs when my instructor Erin Flanagan suggested the story would make a good novel. I knew I needed a way to make myself comfortable with the process, which for me meant pretending I was writing something much shorter and tackling it short chapter by short chapter. I also knew I needed another POV character, so I came up with the idea of a soldier fighting in the same war that Eve’s son Charlie has disturbing memories of. Adding Thomas’s story allowed me to create a braided narrative that had echoes between each section and held more meaning and significance. I also made sure I had a narrative roadmap for each character, a step-by-step sense of places they would go either in the quest to help Charlie with his disturbing memories in Eve’s case or areas/battles in Vietnam in Thomas’s case. I won’t lie, the writing was hard work. I jokingly compare the creation of this novel to chipping away at a mountain with nail scissors.

BS: To play off construction, I’m always so impressed when I read novels that balance multiple perspectives and timelines as well as yours does. Did you write the book going back and forth with Thomas and Eve? Or did you write the stories separately and later combine them to form a cohesive narrative?

EBM: I wrote the novel alternating between the Thomas and Eve sections. I like an intuitive approach and knew that I could clean things up later if needed. The best thing this did for me was to allow for unconscious (and later, in revision, conscious) echoes in the text, repeated images, tone or mood that helped heighten the bond between the different sections for the reader. One example is a section midway through the book where Eve revels in a peaceful evening at home, while Thomas goes walking in the night and encounters deer. Both characters got a moment of grace before the drama ratcheted back up.

BS: Beware the Tall Grass explores the idea of past lives, which I find to be absolutely fascinating. When did the inspiration come?

EBM:In 2014, I was on a road trip with my husband and heard an NPR story on the University of Virginia Medical Center program that attempted to corroborate the past life stories of young children with the experiences they describe. These children talk about being in war, the Holocaust and being present during terrorism. The researchers would hear the stories and look at news accounts and records to see if they matched the details of the story the children told. A surprising number of times they did match. The idea was so big, so fascinating. The only way I had the courage to try to tell a story based on this phenomenon was to let myself off the hook when it came to explaining the unexplainable. I wrote the story in as straightforward a fashion as I could, deeply exploring each character’s experience of it and letting them draw any eventual conclusions as to what was going on. I was anchored in the telling by my desire to explore a truth we all know: the life we get often isn’t the one we expected to get. We are all tested. What matters is how we rise to the test.

BS: In what ways, if at all, do you see your books as being in conversation with one another?

EBM: I think they are both books about courage in the face of adversity and what we will do for love.

BS: Since we both graduated from the Queens MFA program, I think it’s only fitting that I ask you this question to end our time together: How did earning an MFA impact your writing career?

EBM: It reinforced lessons I had already learned about craft and provided me with a wonderful community. The most important thing it did was help me grow in confidence as a writer. One of my mentors, Steven Rinehart, called me a “prose stylist.” Susan Perabo said she believed the truth of what was happening in a short story I shared with class. David Payne has been a great supporter of my work post-MFA. That has been an enormous gift as I have found my way as a writer.

***

Bradley Sides is the author of two short story collections, Those Fantastic Lives and Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, and the upcoming novella, The Volcano Keeper, which will be out from Regal House in the fall of 2026. His fiction has been featured on LeVar Burton Reads. He lives in Madison, Alabama, with his wife. On most days, he can be found teaching writing and literature at Calhoun Community College. For more, visit www.bradley-sides.com.

Read more about Ellen Birkett Morris: https://www.ellenbirkettmorris.com/

Interview with K.E. Semmel

September 23, 2024Blog, Fiction#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #WriterslifeLisa Hase-Jackson

This interview is reprinted with permission from Work in Progress (www.workinprogressinprogress.com)

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

THE BOOK OF LOSMAN is about a literary translator in Copenhagen with Tourette Syndrome who becomes involved in a dubious and experimental drug study to retrieve his childhood memories in a tragicomic effort to find a cure for his condition.

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Daniel P. Losman—who goes simply by Losman—was very much a fun character to write. I’ve written 7 completed manuscripts over the past 30 years, five novels and two collections of stories (there were more manuscripts I simply abandoned). Nearly all of those manuscripts contain stories and characters that involve background research. This is especially so with one manuscript, a retelling of Beowulf set in the Southern Tier region of New York State. I spent 10 years writing that book, which is called IN THE COUNTRY OF MONSTROUS CREATURES. To do it properly, I had to read and reread Beowulf, I had to research the process of fracking (which plays an outsize role in the novel), and I had to invest a great deal of time learning more about this region of the state. I am from New York State—I love New York!—but I grew up in the Finger Lakes. There are great differences between these regions. Since I was after a certain degree of verisimilitude, research was necessary.

I pitched agents and eventually signed with one who loved the Beowulf retelling. He shopped it around and I got a lot of wonderful responses from major editors and publishers, though all of which were, ultimately, rejections. So I ended up giving up on the novel. Now it’s just a lonely Word doc on my laptop. I mention all this because, with The Book of Losman, I wanted to tell a simpler story, one that didn’t take a decade to finish or force me to spend countless hours doing research. I felt I knew Losman from the start. The two of us share some commonalities. He is a literary translator with Tourette, like me, and because of this his character traits slotted into place rather easily. Also, he lives in Denmark as I once did. Losman is not me, far from it. But because my life experiences are close to his, I didn’t have to do as much research. As a result, I was able to write the first draft in less than two years.

The hardest character for me to write was Losman’s crush, Caroline Jensen. She’s an artist, and a bit of an odd duckling. I had to figure out a way to create her character without resorting to caricature. I didn’t want to write a story with a traditional romance, either, so there’s this awkward tension between them throughout the novel. Balancing that tension took some effort.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

One interesting tidbit: this book actually started as a memoir. But the writing felt forced, and I limped along, not certain how to go about putting together a memoir. Besides, I kept asking myself, who wants to read a sad story about a boy with Tourette? I sure didn’t. I wanted to write something that contained both sadness and humor but was still entertaining. I’d been chewing on one particular idea for years—What if there was a pill that could return our childhood memories to us?—and it dawned on me that this was the perfect story for that idea. So I pulled one small scene from the memoir, the “truest” scene, and reimagined the entire book as fiction. Once I did that, the flood gates opened and the writing gushed. Fiction has always been my preferred medium. (Though I will add that I published a personal essay in HuffPost that served as all I wanted to say, or would have said, in a memoir.)

My agent loved this manuscript too, and he gave me some feedback that I incorporated. The book went out on submission but, like with the Beowulf retelling, I ended up getting only rejections. They were nearly all uniformly praiseful of my writing, but such praise often feels hollow when it’s accompanied by the words “it’s not right for us” or “we hope it finds the right home.”

While the book was out on submission, I began writing a middle grade novel. Once it became clear that The Book of Losman was going to suffer the same fate as In the Country of Monstrous Creatures, I made the decision to drop my agent (it was an amicable split; he does not represent middle grade books). I assumed, wrongly, that I would be able land another agent. I still don’t have an agent—and it’s not for lack of trying!

But I never stopped believing in The Book of Losman, so I submitted the manuscript to SFWP’s Literary Awards Program two or three years ago. I’ve known the publisher, Andrew Gifford, for years. SFWP published my translation of Simon Fruelund’s collection of stories, Milk, in 2013, and I even published a number of interviews with translators at SFWP’s online literary journal for a few years (“Translator’s Cut,” I called my interview series). Since I playfully incorporate stories and characters (and themes) from Simon’s work in The Book of Losman—the opening chapter is very much a reimagining of Simon’s story “Kramer” from that collection—the manuscript found fertile soil at SFWP. The manuscript didn’t win the contest, in fact it only made the longlist, but Andrew liked the story and decided to take a chance on publishing it. Around the same time, another indie publisher offered me a contract to publish the book, but I knew SFWP was the right choice. This has absolutely proved true.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Don’t take rejection personally. Your work can be rejected for many reasons, but you’ve got to keep plugging away, chasing your vision, and getting better. Once you find your stories, good things will happen. It may take 30 years, as it did for me, but if you’re patient and willing to work through all the rejections, you’ll publish your work eventually.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

I don’t write with an outline. I put a character in a situation and see what happens, building the story as I go along. So in this sense, everything that happens is a surprise. It’s this kind of creativity that excites me enough to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get back to work. It’s not until after the draft is complete that I go back and make sure things connect properly. Sometimes I have to rewrite or remove scenes, but generally speaking, in the first draft, I want to write as though I’m a reader engaging with this story for the first time. Which I am.

The biggest thing that surprised me in this particular novel is just how much Simon Fruelund’s work influenced the story. Perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise, since I’ve known him for more than fifteen years and I’ve translated three of his books. Simon’s ideas on literature and fiction have also proven hugely important to me. And he’s a friend. The Book of Losman is, in a sense, an homage to his work.

Still, even though I deliberately began The Book of Losman with a reimaging from one of his stories, I didn’t quite anticipate that Losman would share certain character affinities with Pelle, say, the main character from Simon’s novel The World and Varvara (published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023) or that Losman would also be working on a book, like Pelle, with a publisher breathing down his neck. It was only after writing the manuscript that I realized how deep the connection ran. I don’t mind this at all. I love Simon’s books, and I think it’s wonderful that my novel is engaged in a dialogue with them.

How did you find the title of your book?

The Book of Losman has been the title for as long as I can remember, though I did hem and haw a bit once I realized there were already a lot of books that included “The Book of—” in the title. I debated just calling it Losman. But I couldn’t shake one important thematic significance that would justify me calling it simply Losman. There’s a kind of meta-quality to this novel, right from the opening sentence:

“When he moved to Copenhagen with his Danish girlfriend, Kat, fifteen years ago, Losman imagined his life like a Fodor’s guidebook, rich with possibility and adventure.”

Simply put: As a character, Losman is a kind of “book” to be read, translated, and understood. The narrative follows a circular pattern that only becomes clear at the end. So, to me, The Book of Losman always had to be the title. I’m happy with it.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)

My favorite Danish pastry makes an appearance: Tebirkes! They are hunks of buttery deliciousness.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://kesemmel.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Losman-K-Semmel/dp/1951631374/

Interview with Jody Hobbs Hesler

September 17, 2024All Journal Content, Blog, Fiction#authorinterview, #Fiction, #novel, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

When Noreen is eight years old, her beloved aunt Nonie dies from suicide. This loss, compounded by the family’s fears that Noreen will follow her aunt’s troubled path, reverberates through her life, planting doubts about her own judgment and landing her in the novel’s present day. The same age now as her aunt was when she died, Noreen is a young mother stuck in an increasingly precarious marriage whose imminent crisis will force her to choose between allowing history to repeat itself or setting a new course. (More details below!)

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And, which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

Both Noreen and her aunt Nonie act as point-of-view characters. Of the two, Nonie arrived in my mind more fully formed. She’s a deeply complicated person who struggles with self-worth and mental illness, but I enjoyed every moment of bringing her to the page. I loved her whimsy, her close-to-the-bone vulnerability, and her big, beautiful heart.

Noreen’s character demanded more from me. The sweep of the novel’s timeline encompasses a much broader swath of Noreen’s life than Nonie’s, following her from eight to twenty-seven years old. Rendering her character consistently, but with believable growth across decades, was tricky. Sometimes I resorted to writing letters to her in my journal, posing questions about her personality and motivations. Asking the questions implied answers could exist, so the rhetorical exercise nearly always yielded them.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

By the time the world started opening up again after pandemic lockdown, I had two books ready to shop around—my story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better and Without You Here. I’m a careful vs. high-volume submitter, so I curated my way through lists of agents before turning to small presses and curating my way through them, over months and months. Without You Here came awfully close to acceptance at a different publisher in spring of 2021. That rejection after a particularly close call, punched me in my hopes. I felt like I’d already queried the universe, so where was I meant to turn now?

In a wacky turn of events, Cornerstone Press accepted my first book, the story collection What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, in September of 2021, then that December, Flexible Press accepted Without You Here. Going from zero books to two within three months after achingly long years of near misses, new projects, rewrites, and busts, knocked me sideways—in the best possible way. For a long while, it felt like a few hamsters were galloping on their wheels in my head, stopping short every now and then to say to each other, “Two books? Two?” before hopping on again. And both presses have been truly lovely to work with.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I have a couple. In a writing conference workshop, someone asked Tim O’Brien about how to avoid sentimentality, and he said, “Don’t worry about sentiment. Worry about fraudulence.” Which I love, because a lot of writers favor action over poignancy or skew in the opposite direction by overtelling emotional reactions. So don’t avoid feeling, embrace it. Show its ugly neediness or extravagant beauty with precision and honesty.

Another favorite comes from Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners: “It’s always wrong of course to say that you can’t do this or you can’t do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.” Which is something I tell students and fellow writers when they’re trying something wild and new. Yes, it could work—Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible just because it hasn’t been done—but don’t expect it to be easy.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

The final (hard-won) draft of this book follows a nonlinear structure. I knew from early on that maintaining the pressure of a past event over the course of twenty years of Noreen’s life would require something different structurally, but I had no idea what. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode, which explores a host of nontraditional plot shapes, assured me that an asynchronous timeline could work, and my adult children helped input chapter descriptions into a spreadsheet then organized them into a potentially functional sequence. I wasn’t sure until I’d finally fit all the pieces together that this spiraling timeline could achieve what I’d wanted it to; realizing that it did was a happy surprise.

Along the way there were plenty of other surprises. Nonie and Noreen are bigger risk takers than I am, so I had to create misadventures for them that I would never have joined. I was always surprised, and relieved, when those episodes rang true. It was also interesting and surprising when snippets of my own life experience showed up in a scene here or there, disguised completely as belonging to the characters in the book.

How did you find the title of your book?

For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title worked for me because it showed their fondness for each other and the depth of their affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, but they strike me as cutesy and saccharine. This isn’t a cute story, so I didn’t want anyone making the same association.

A late-stage revision generated a scene where Nonie says to Noreen, “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” and that line resonated right away. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. Almost as soon as I wrote the line, I knew I’d found the title.

****

Interview with David Ebenbach

August 19, 2024Blog#authorinterview, #Fiction, #writinglifeLeslie Pietrzyk

reprinted with permission from Work in Progress

Give us your elevator pitch: what’s your book about in 2-3 sentences?

A loner teen accidentally unlocks a social life with his sense of humor—but can he unlock meaningful happiness that way, too, or will he first have to face and understand himself?

Which character did you most enjoy creating? Why? And which character gave you the most trouble, and why?

The book is told from the point of view of Jacob—that loner teen from the elevator pitch—and I really enjoyed spending time with him. He’s based (very loosely) on a teenaged me (and the book is set back in the late 80s, when I was a teenager), and so it was like hanging out with a version of my younger self, getting to observe all of the hopeful foolishness and chaotic earnestness—but from a semi-safe distance this time around.

His friends were harder to write, because of the particular nuance I was trying to capture: that these characters could be perfectly great people, and yet still struggle to supply whatever it was that Jacob ultimately needed. In that way, folks can be disappointing without actually being at fault.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to publication.

Well, the lowest low was when my agent told me that the book wasn’t to his taste and didn’t feel like he was the right person to submit it to presses. Yeah—that was a low point. He said it nicely, though—he’s still my agent—and he told me it was okay if I wanted to take it out to presses myself. He’s not a possessive guy. And so I did take it out myself, and luckily found people who connected with the book more than my agent did.

In particular, Regal House Publishing got excited. So one big high was them sending the contract, and me signing it. After that, there were the usual rounds of editing and proofreading and finalizing a cover and so on, all of which were smooth. And then, finally—I started working on this book back in 2016—Regal House sent me a physical copy of the book. That’s a very high point right there. As Salman Rushdie writes in his excellent new memoir, Knife, “the best moment of the whole process of book publication is this one, the moment when you hold your printed book in your hand for the first time, and you feel its reality, its life.”

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

Don’t write what other people want you to write; write what you have to write.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.” What surprised you in the writing of this book?

This is such an interesting question, and a hard one for me to answer. In a certain sense, everything surprises me when I write a book—I never know how it’s going to play out before I get to the page. Or at least I never know that I know. Because, in another sense, nothing about the process surprises me. In fact, I typically write not toward surprise but instead toward whatever is most emotionally difficult for me to get into. The hard stuff that’s already there and that maybe I’m somewhat aware of, the way that you’re aware of shadows in the room, but that I haven’t been willing to look at directly. And so, a lot of the time my writing process is more about uncovering than about discovering. Maybe the surprise, each time, is that I’m able to go there—and come back out unharmed.

How did you find the title of your book?

Coming up with Possible Happiness, the title of this book, was a process. Oy. For a long time I called it Fern Rock, after the Philadelphia Broad Street Subway stop—but that made it sound like the novel was happening in some rural paradise instead of in one of the grittiest cities in America. So I lost faith in that option and just called the book “that high school novel” for a long time. It remained “that high school novel” through failed experiments with titles like Where Do the Children Go (based on a song from the time), Subway-Surface (based on public transportation), and We’re Getting There (the actual, I’m-not-making-it-up slogan of SEPTA, Philly’s public transportation organization, for many years). None of it really suited this particular high school novel.

And then I thought about the scene where protagonist Jacob goes into a kind of occult shop on South Street where all of the purported potions have anti-lawsuit hedges in their names like “so-called” or “alleged,” and he sees something called Possible Happiness Syrup. I thought: that’s what my guy needs. He needs a possible happiness. He needs to stop fighting for some generic kind of happiness that works for everyone else or some magical kind of happiness that only works in the movies. He needs to turn his effort toward getting a real happiness, one that’s possible for him.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated with your book?

Well, the main character is a teenager, and not so great in the kitchen, so he’s not the kind of person who produces recipes. When he’s home alone, his single mother working yet another double-shift, he just heats up some frozen mac’n’cheese. So maybe that could make for a good book club treat? Though, if you want to be true to the time period (late 80s), you’ll have to find the Stouffer’s frozen mac that comes in a foil tray, and you’ll have to heat it up in a conventional oven. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

*****

READ MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR: https://www.davidebenbach.com/

ORDER THIS BOOK FOR YOUR OWN TBR STACK: https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/possible-happiness/

Spring / Summer Issue, 2023

July 2, 2023Blog#creativenonfiction, #Fiction, #Poetry, #WriterslifeLisa Hase-Jackson

Fiction

Awful Big, Awful Good by Matt Izzi

Dead Cats by Patrick Strickland

Living with Wolves by Christie Marra

Revisionist History 101 by Mike Herndon

The Loneliness Cure by Mark Brazaitis

Creative Nonficiton

I Remember by Linda Briskin

Marking Time and Place by Alice Lowe

Person. Place. Prey. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime. by Honey Rand

To the South are Banana Plantations by Harris Walker

Poetry

a different sort of blues by Dana Tenille Weekes

biographies by David Galloway

Charisma came to me like a rubber doll by Susan Michele Coronel

How to Pick a Padlock by Patrick Wilcox

Most people have only one skeleton by Nadine Ellsworth-Moran

Magnolia by Greg Nelson

Mapping by Ellen Roberts Young

Roswell Mills: July 5, 1864 by Ann Malaspina

The Seagull that Melted by Kevin Pilkington

Uncle Bob Told Me by Christina Baumis

Yes, Fallen by Gordon W. Mennenga

Essays

The Dollmaker: Why You Should Have Read This Book Long Before Now by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Book Reviews

Fiction: The Woods of Fannin County by Janisse Ray, Review by John Krieg

Nonficton: Benjamin Banneker and Us by Rachel Webster, Review by Olivia Fishwick

Poetry: Through Our Water Like Fingers, a Review of Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway by Robert Manaster

Summer Issue Featured Image: SkyOceanBirds by Linda Briskin

Linda Briskin is a writer and photographer. She is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. The fluidity between the natural and the constructed fascinates her. Her focus, then, is on inventing images rather than capturing them. Her photographs have been exhibited and published widely. https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/

South 85 is Open for Submissions

February 9, 2023Blog#Creative Nonfiction, #Fiction, #Poetry, #Writerslife, South 85 Journal, writingLisa Hase-Jackson

South 85 Journal is excited to announce that we are open for general submissions until April 15, 2023. We consider all quality work and are especially interested in writing that demonstrates a strong voice and sense of place.

As the online literary journal for the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program, we are entering our 11th year of publication. Our editorial staff is comprised of experienced readers, writers, and editors who carefully consider every work of writing they receive.

We publish two issues online each year: the summer issue, which is published June 15th, and the winter “contest” issue–which features each year’s Julia Peterkin Literary Award winner–published December 15th.

We also nominate excellent works for the Pushcart Prize and the annual Best of the Net Anthology.

Past contributors include: Dustin Brookshire, Luanne Castle, Anthony D’Aries, Benjamin Garcia, Caroline Goodwin, Ann Chadwell Humphries, Justin Jannise, Eric Rasmussen, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Chris Stuck, and many more.

We published two stellar issues in 2022: The summer issue celebrating our 10th anniversary and the winter issue highlighting this year’s Julia Peterkin Literary Award winners and finalists in flash fiction and poetry. You can read them here:

Fiction

Awful Big, Awful Good by Matt Izzi

Dead Cats by Patrick Strickland

Living with Wolves by Christie Marra

Revisionist History 101 by Mike Herndon

The Loneliness Cure by Mark Brazaitis

Creative Nonficiton

I Remember by Linda Briskin

Marking Time and Place by Alice Lowe

Person. Place. Prey. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime. by Honey Rand

To the South are Banana Plantations by Harris Walker

Poetry

a different sort of blues by Dana Tenille Weekes

biographies by David Galloway

Charisma came to me like a rubber doll by Susan Michele Coronel

How to Pick a Padlock by Patrick Wilcox

Most people have only one skeleton by Nadine Ellsworth-Moran

Magnolia by Greg Nelson

Mapping by Ellen Roberts Young

Roswell Mills: July 5, 1864 by Ann Malaspina

The Seagull that Melted by Kevin Pilkington

Uncle Bob Told Me by Christina Baumis

Yes, Fallen by Gordon W. Mennenga

Essays

The Dollmaker: Why You Should Have Read This Book Long Before Now by Jody Hobbs Hesler

Book Reviews

Fiction: The Woods of Fannin County by Janisse Ray, Review by John Krieg

Nonficton: Benjamin Banneker and Us by Rachel Webster, Review by Olivia Fishwick

Poetry: Through Our Water Like Fingers, a Review of Millicent Borges Accardi’s Quarantine Highway by Robert Manaster

Summer Issue Featured Image: SkyOceanBirds by Linda Briskin

South 85 Journal is excited to announce that we are open for general submissions until April 15, 2023. We consider all quality work and are especially interested in writing that demonstrates a strong voice and sense of place.

As the online literary journal for the Converse University Low-Residency MFA program, we are entering our 11th year of publication. Our editorial staff is comprised of experienced readers, writers, and editors who carefully consider every work of writing they receive.

We publish two issues online each year: the summer issue, which is published June 15th, and the winter “contest” issue–which features each year’s Julia Peterkin Literary Award winner–published December 15th.

We also nominate excellent works for the Pushcart Prize and the annual Best of the Net Anthology.

Past contributors include: Dustin Brookshire, Luanne Castle, Anthony D’Aries, Benjamin Garcia, Caroline Goodwin, Ann Chadwell Humphries, Justin Jannise, Eric Rasmussen, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Chris Stuck, and many more.

We published two stellar issues in 2022: The summer issue celebrating our 10th anniversary and the winter issue highlighting this year’s Julia Peterkin Literary Award winners and finalists in flash fiction and poetry. You can read them here:

For more information and to submit your work for consideration, visit our Submittable page