AUDIENCE settles in their seats as curtains rise. CECELIA enters from stage left and looks at the abomination of iron and rope fused to the catwalks the MANAGER jury-rigged from upstage to the mezzani...

The older I get, the more I appreciate writers who leave a personal stamp on their work, so unmistakeable it couldn’t be anyone else on the page. Claire Hopple is one such author. Hopple’s absurdist, ...

the lanternflies arrived the year before, on a cord of imported wood to a jobsite in berks county. within a month they had spread 100 miles in all directions. they lay their dried up bubblegum egg mas...

All of my departures have introduced me to new versions of myself but I’m beginning to resent the idea that there is still so much left to become. I am hoping crossing borders will show me what love h...

The dad is test driving a truck from a used car dealership in order to pick up a refrigerator he found on Craigslist. He tells the salesman, “I need to show it to my wife,” and takes the keys and revs...

The barmaid at Flanagan’s saw George come in and headed to meet him at his regular table. “How was your day, George?” she asked. “It was good, thank you. How was yours, Tammy?” “Mine too. You remember...

My cinematic education started pretty early. My mom introduced me to Humphrey Bogart films and my dad to the Marx Brothers and Elvira’s Movie Macabre all before I was a teenager. Later, I would attend...

1. About a week before the deer trouble starts, the mayor of Westerntown is sitting with his wife in a swinging loveseat on their patio, and their three kids, the two boys, who are four and six, and t...

Author of “Fear Theory” in X-R-A-Y Magazine

Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. “It’s on the second floor,” she’d said. “They say there’s no elevator but that shouldn’t b...

“How’s your night going?” the man asked.  Mary looked into his eyes—his deep brown eyes, beautiful by all objective standards—and knew they were the eyes of a liar. He didn’t mean “Having a good night...

Michael Seymour Blake is just some person with a nice butt in Queens, NY.

For many years, so many we have lost count, a Stairmaster has occupied this room, an unsightly apparatus left to gather dust after a (short-lived) period of committed use, its panels and planks fading...

Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 20...

I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know. As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there o...

Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. “It’s on the second floor,” she’d said. “They say there’s no elevator but that shouldn’t b...

Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. “It’s on the second floor,” she’d said. “They say there’s no elevator but that shouldn’t b...

I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.  At five years old, I was questi...

I despise smokers. With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. O...

Writing at 19 was like glugging champagne while jacking off in a tubful of foie gras at all hours without shame, without shame, without shame. Entry Point (ca. 1998) Probably the man I maybe love is co...

Ever since he was a kid, Restituto Padilla showed a great aptitude for math—it was his one and only aptitude. The austere village school, with its green roof and plexiglass windows bearing the faces o...

They shaved their heads in Virginia. They bought knives from a man named Dog in Kentucky. A tornado twisted through Indiana. Two women offered unconditional love in Missouri. In Montana, they loaded a...

This man who’s in love with you, he’s married. You play in the symphony orchestra together. He’s a second violin. You play the oboe. What he likes best about you, he says, is the purse of your lips wh...

YouTube video by The Practice of Writing (TPOW!)

When I’m getting high on the back stoop, I’ll sink into a kind of cavern, where real life seems both out of reach and stifling, like I’m trapped beneath it. And then I’ll start to panic about how I’m ...

The CEO of Disney sat in his office thinking. He leaned back and touched his fingers together, putting them under his nose pensively, but then he frowned and hit the intercom button. “Get in here Marg...

I am in the gas station watching the CRT television. I hand the cashier a hundred. Terrible smokes. He cashes the bill, takes snail shells from the till. Hands them to me.  Gun starts the horses. Bono...

I’m on my way to my friend’s daughter’s funeral. The day is bright and still expanding.  Above the interstate, it’s all skies and treetops and turkey vultures gliding. I take the Springridge Road exit...

Noah’s never any good without coffee. Two blocks from the high school is a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he races there every day before school so he’s five minutes late to class. He chugs the large black coffe...

MARATHON  I read that this year’s New York City Marathon will be run single file, to kind of shake things up.  FOUND  I found a hat on the sidewalk and I think it might belong to you or someone with a...

For a dollar, paid to a taciturn man from the nearest town, hikers could pass the night in the abandoned Soviet summer camp. Mattresses were strewn across the base of a drained indoor swimming pool wh...

25th November As I spoon potato and spinach into Henry’s open mouth the 5Live DJ stops talking about death tourism and asks, ‘to what lengths have you gone to get back something  you’ve lost?’ It is a...

I was standing in front of the Palms wearing sunglasses. My pupils were dilated. Each one was like the black spot in the palm of the hand of the blind man from Treasure Island. I was trying to be cool...

“Lurch to dispatch.” “Go ahead.” “Hey dispatch, we’ve got a problem up in European.” “What do you mean problem?” “I missed that last part, can you repeat?” “What problem?” “Yeah, up in European.” “Lur...

And so I was walking, as if away from something, although there was nowhere to go, nowhere to leave to, only the road outside the Airbnb to walk down once again. It was dusty, a thin strip of asphalt ...