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"The Storm" by Jennifer Flynn - © 2008
<- FROM THE EDITOR -> A special high school English teacher
by Derek Alger
"Mr. Duffy and my mother both knew I could write, actually thought I would become a writer long before I had any inkling of it. I have no idea what they saw, or how they knew, but here I am writing this, so they must have known something. I can say this, however, it was only years later that I came to really appreciate what Mr. Duffy had done for me as a teacher."
<- ONE ON ONE -> Lynn Aarti Chandhok
interviewed by Derek Alger
"I was always a good writer, but I didn’t think I had an imagination. I liked pottery because I understood that if I just practiced over and over again, I could get a form just right...That’s really how I started to feel comfortable writing poems -— by trying to attend to form...I think the forms gave me a space to work out what really was there in my imagination."
Xujun Eberlein
interviewed by Steven Wingate
"...when I wrote fiction I was often unconscious about which part was from memory and which from imagination. For nonfiction, I tended to double check my memory, and I often turned to other sources to verify my memory. But if I found a conflict between a second source and my own memory, I might believe in myself more."
Mathias B. Freese
interviewed by Derek Alger
"...I believe to become a great writer or a very good one the writer must avoid organized teaching. I think like a shrink, a father, a lover, a mensch, but not as a writer. When I come to write, I go inward, very inward, and I allow my unconscious to blast through, often ooze, into awareness; that is how I write."
<- ESSAY -> Katie Couric is No Friend of Mine
by Paul Casey
"When I figured out the gloved, masked woman’s task, I remembered my advice to my teenage daughter...Sarah, who had the cat on her lap, suddenly thrust the animal off of her lap and screamed. I spotted the problem right away, a turd clinging to the fur on the cat’s ass...I told her if that happened to me I would kill myself."
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<- POETRY -> Sunny Days
by Jack Marshall
The Poet Reads To An Audience of Women
by Renee Ashley
<- MACRO-FICTION -> Virtual Affair
by Keely Kotnik
The subject of Johny Boy is on the tip of her tongue. She knows that confronting Aaron would be the most honorable. But it would give him an opportunity to invent a clever lie,...She’d have to check every website constantly because she would never know whether he was back working one of them.
<- MICRO-FICTION -> A Set Theory
by Letizia Pezzali
Of the various possible partitions of humankind, the division between those who swim and those who don’t is actually a very well-known one. Levante belongs to the non-swimmers set and when he goes to the seaside he is a spectator. Miranda is a protagonist instead...She simply enjoys swimming and if she was presented with the set theory she wouldn’t necessarily understand. “I like sports, that’s all.”
<- BOOK LOVERS -> Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Essays by Ryszard Kapuscinski
reviewed by Mark Mordue
"...This tendency to slide between the past and present, to place events inside an historical echo chamber, to draw us into a world where fact and myth are entwined and time becomes ‘timeless’, is classic ‘Kapuscinskian’ territory."
New York in the Fifties
by Dan Wakefield
reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling
"...Forthright and insightful throughout, this assessment of how writers and their writing are perceived in retrospect is woven throughout New York in the Fifties, the end result being a memoir that situates personal experience in a broader historical context, remaining engaging and enjoyable all the while."
<- GUEST COLUMN -> Pursuing Mediocrity
by Steve Heller
"...Eventually, I am able to maintain the pace of an elderly stroke victim plodding along behind a walker. Toddlers hustle past me on the adjacent grass; I smile and wave at their nervous mothers. I skate on with no regard for my health or reputation. I am relentless. I am the skinny old soldier with the battle-scarred red helmet. I am Slow-Motion Crash Dummy. I am Old Fart on Wheels."
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