The primary thread of the Robin Hood myth could be distilled to this: a group of ardent citizens use illegal activities to battle crooked authorities on behalf of powerless citizens. In “Honeymoon Bandits” (Willow Springs) Nick Fuller Googins captures the present day complexities of civil (and uncivil) disobedience, from the perspective of a small town…
The games children play can tell us a lot about ourselves as human beings, regardless of whether we attribute the inspiration behind them more to nature or nurture. In “Fiddlebacks” (New South), Kimberly King Parsons makes good use of the games played by three siblings, exploring what they reveal about the hidden fears and desires…
I remember a conversation I had with a professor in grad school, where we discussed the various blessings and difficulties of trying to produce art using the same materials—language—used for so many other, less graceful, purposes (for example, junk mail and mudslinging). In “Wagyu Fungo,” (Harpur Palate) explores a similar dynamic, though from the perspective…
A critique often heard in creative writing workshops is that the protagonist of a story is too observational—read: passive—and not enough involved in the action, rendering a story that is either too “quiet” or a protagonist with too little at stake in the outcome of the plot. I think that this critique is often valid,…
When one deals with loss they also, inevitably, also end up exploring the nature of justice in the world: whether matters of life and death are indeed fair, or something else entirely. In “Ghost Jeep,” (Sycamore Review) Micah Dean Hicks navigates these questions through three ghosts who meet a young girl who wants to become…
Leaving one’s spouse takes a lot of courage, and in the culture of the 1950s, that was even more the case. In “Sudden Squall” (Connotation Press), Judy Reeves explores a mother making that difficult choice, employing a particular sentence structure to shape the thematic content and reveal her protagonist’s character. Two versions of this structure appear in…
In “Bethlehem” (One Throne Magazine), Chika Unigwe explores the ways in which a community’s sources of pride and ignorance can cause tragedy in the lives of those who don’t fit into the conventional molds. In the first section, Unigwe presents clues to the conflict between the protagonist Chimelumma and her infant Beth (short for Bethlehem)….
In his short story, “What to Do When Your Spouse is Burning” (Moon City Review), Matt Cashion uses a list of instructions to subtly reveal the dissolution of a marriage. Cashion’s narrator begins by offering wry examples of what not to do when one’s spouse is burning. Don’t waste time, at this time, constructing a…
In the flash fiction piece “Off Days” (The Adroit Journal), Shane Jones captures the comedy in the small moments characteriing his day-by-day struggles with memory loss before a full shift in his reality becomes manifest. We meet Ted and his wife Gina at the supermarket. Ted mistakes a younger woman in the soup aisle as…
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