The debut short story collection, Turmeric & Sugar: Stories by Anna Vangala Jones (Thirty West Publishing House), is a feast for the senses and a tour of the challenges of love, triumph, and regret. Throughout, Jones’s prose is a wonderful mix of magic...
Retreat - Synergia
My Fave Five- May 2021
May 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew May Selector: Andrew Bertaina What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
MY FAVE FIVE- APRIL 2021
April 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew April Selector: Minyoung Lee What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
BENDING GENRES PRESENTS!!! Meg Tuite interviews Garielle Lutz about writing, life and so much more! So honored to have these two amazing writers in conversation…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTIyc9wIjL0 And you can order Gari's new book, WORSTED, from SF/LD here: https://www.hobartpulp.com/books/worsted
My Fave Five- March 2021
March 2021 Series Curator: Jonathan Cardew March Selector: Hannah Grieco What’s rare, what’s bright, what’s new? This is what we ask a new writer every month in search of the best hybrid, poetry, and flash writing from the previous month. In this edition, we catch up...
Bending Genres Reading for SMOLfair- March 5, 2021 at 9:00 p.m. E.S.T. This Friday, we have a great line-up for our Bending Genres Reading for the SMOLfair book fair event happening March 3- 7. Fiction Editor, Meg Tuite and EIC Robert Vaughan will be hosting a...
What Are The Chances? by Robert Scotellaro (review by Paul Beckman)
In Robert Scotellaro’s latest collection of gems, “What Are the Chances” he tells us the chances that way only he could write of lovers, friends, family, and more in a way that leaves you shaking your head in wonderment with these fast-paced stories filled...
Time. Wow. by Neil Clark (review by Jonathan Cardew)
Full disclosure: I am a complete and utter sci-fi nerd. Give me Star Trek. Give me LeGuin. Give me 2001: A Space Odyssey. Give me anything that is not of this planet/ space-time continuum-related/full of stars. So when I first came across Neil Clark’s small,...
Demolition in the Tropics by Rogan Kelly (review by Alina Stefanescu)
Rogan Kelly. Demolition in the Tropics. Lewisburg, PA: Seven Kitchens Press, 2019. 28 pages. $9.00. Some readers expect to be punched in the gut repeatedly. Demolition in the Tropics is not for them. Rogan Kelly's poetic line is wistful, impressionistic, similar to...
Death, Desire and Other Destinations by Tara Isabel Zambrano (review by Dan Crawley)
Tara Isabel Zambrano’s full-length flash collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations (Okay Donkey Press, 2020), illuminates, enchants. I’m awestruck with Zambrano’s effortless talent, her swings from stark realism to inventive magic realism. She is...
Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich (reviewed by Audra Kerr Brown)
Audra Kerr Brown lives betwixt the corn and soybean fields of southeast Iowa with her husband and two children.
Bending Genres Q & A with author Karen Stefano (What A Body Remembers) and Emily Bertholf
Q & A : Interview with Karen Stefano, author of What A Body Remembers. Emily Bertholf: Your latest book is a memoir about the life-altering night in 1984 when you were violently attacked on your way home from work and your long struggle of dealing with...
Round, Racy, Nut & Plum
We left the door open like a bottle. Imagine all the wine stains over the years. We’ve blossomed closer, archived past-lives, footnoted each other’s autobiographies, cross-referenced reincarnation. Each step you take is a word I write each word I write is a posted...
Special
Ava was born without skin. The doctor delivered her gingerly, cradling her clacking bones, as he pulled her sinewy muscles and ligaments from her mother’s body, her lungs and heart puddling through his thick fingers. Ava’s mother cried when she saw her daughter and...
Brave New Girl
Seven-year-old Melody always leaves a space on the swing for her guardian angel. She’s too new yet in a world that barely hides pains of hunger, shivers of cold on a night when the coal stove burns out hours before dawn, smells of ageing urine in the bedside pot and...
Wooded Witness
No one suspects the tree Silent, stationary,a bit of a sway Defines the universe Form encased within fabrics of root hairs Facile, ribboned, tight, invisible Strung up as a form suspended No animation Where the body vegetates, spirit Free to wander, no, tethered Xylem...
Big Sisters
Big Sisters My best friend and I in Catholic School were both the eldest daughters with younger sisters we were committed to having complete control over. We did this by distorting their perceptions of reality and telling them lies about how the world really works,...
All the Tropes We Cannot Eat
The blinking neon sign should have been a warning. Then the room number—pure bad luck. And the night clerk’s goatee, Jesus. You needed gas, don’t we all. A back wheel jammed while crossing the parking lot. Wheel of Fortune. The Price was Right. Jeopardy. I’ll take...
Say a few words for the dead
Grandma sings: a pinch of grandpa there you see sprinkle him around like sweet sugar. She’s given the two of us cousins a plastic cup of dirt she had collected from the garden. She’s wearing her best housecoat and given us each a pouch of grandpa’s ashes. We didn’t...
Ligatured Letter
OK, sorry I've packed several items up for today. It's just that this has been a stimulating workshop! Here's a visual tidbit I crafted. At first I thought it'd make a cool colophon, from a rare book, that isn't meant to be read. Could still work, I suppose -...
Inherited Horror
I was born into a family with a history of horror so dehumanizing and pervasive that it felt like I would never escape it happening again to me. It was the transmission of horror so deep that it became known in mental health circles as Secondary Post-Traumatic Stress...
The Migration of Marion Crane
In my other life, the one I never got to live, I’m a silver-haired woman with six grandchildren, and I love them all. Not in the precious, clinging way my daughter loves hers, or the office-manager love my son doles out in little chits, like badges for good behavior....