fiction

John Venecek

John Venecek served as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 1996-1998 during which time he taught English at a small university in Yekaterinburg, Russia – an experience that has been the inspiration of much of his early writing. John is also a graduate of the Writing Program at DePaul University and has published a short memoir in the Prairie Light Review. John currently resides in Orlando where he is the Librarian for the Humanities at the University of Central Florida and is affiliated with the Jack Kerouac Project of Orlando.

The Two Glenn Goulds

The Two Glenn Goulds

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He had an idea to get the two Glenn Goulds, the one from 1955 and the one from 1981, to line up. He said to Tina, “Watch me work some wonders,” and then, at that very moment, the sun went behind a cloud. He couldn't seem to get the brilliant but near-dead Gould and the ecstatic young revolutionary Gould to merge. Still, he could have claimed credit for the cloud and the sun.

Steve Gilmartin

Steve Gilmartin’s fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Double Room, 14 Hills, 3rd bed, elimae, Mad Hatters' Review, Poemeleon, Drunken Boat, and Eleven Eleven. He works as a freelance editor and lives in Berkeley, California.

Picturebook

Picturebook

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In one of the photographs my daughter runs across the yard, the baker behind her carrying a three-tiered cake. The girl is wearing white spiked platform heels and a knee length pink dress with short puffed sleeves. You can see the big white gardenia in her blonde hair. Her shoulders are hunched and her head is down as if something has been forgotten. Her seriousness makes you look the harder at the preposterous shoes.

Karen Kevorkian

Karen Kevorkian has published White Stucco Black Wing (poems). Journals publishing her work include Antioch Review, Fiction International, Five Fingers Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Los Angeles Review, Mississippi Review, Shenandoah, Third Coast, VOLT, Witness, and in chapbooks at Archipelago.com and thedrunkenboat.com. Formerly on the creative writing faculty at the University of Virginia, she now teaches in the English department at UCLA.

Dennis Must

Dennis Must is the author of two short story collections: Oh, Don't Ask Why, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, CA (2007), and Banjo Grease, Creative Arts Book Company, Berkeley, CA (2000). His plays have been performed Off Off Broadway and his fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary reviews. He resides with his wife in Salem, Massachusetts.

A Family Story

A Family Story

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Jesus, if you could smell the fifty cats my great-great-great grandmother kept in that cluttered red room, stuffy with years, stinging with piss, you would have died, you would have choked, it would have crawled through your mouth down your throat into the pink of your lungs and filled them up with the reek of wet hair. Imagine what those felines did to the rugs and the curtains and the Victorian chairs. But she loved to hold them and bury herself in their scent. She loved the taste of fur.

Anne-E Wood

Anne-E. Wood's fiction has appeared in Tin House, Agni, New Letters, Karamu Journal, The Chicago Quarterly Review, Other Voices, The Cream City Review, Fourteen Hills Magazine, Beloit Fiction Journal, Fiction Attic, and others. She is the author of the short story collection Two if By Sea, Winner of the 2006 Michael Rubin Chapbook Award. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and teaches writing at Rutgers University, The New Jersey Institute of Technology and The Gotham Writers' Workshop.

Collision

Collision

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The hospital room was the size of a birdcage. Only a flimsy curtain separated me from the Russian man. His dumpy wife was visiting again, her sagging face done up in bold paint, and atop her head, a pink pillbox hat. Sure enough, the room was filling with ugly clouds of Russian.

Nina Schuyler

Nina Schuyler’s novel, The Painting, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, was named a Best Book by San Francisco Chronicle and nominated for the Northern California Book Award. It’s been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Serbian. Her short story, “Water Babies” won the Santa Clara Review’s Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction, her short short, “Black Holes” won the Big Ugly Review Short Short Contest for 2008; and she was a finalist in the 2009 Stanford Fiction Contest.