By Sarah Blanchard The gun shop owners are busy with customers wanting gunsmith services and booking time on the rifle range. They don’t know there’s a troll in their midst. She’s the pudgy, silver-haired grandmother in Wrangler jeans, a buffalo-plaid sweatshirt, and well-worn leather barn boots, casually perusing a display of gun oils and cleaning … Continue reading Avoiding Failure
By Gregory Gonzalez Location is everything in the realm of craft writing. Put the main character on the top of a mountain, where they can swim through hidden lakes on its cratered mountain side and then talk to the wisest of sages amongst the tallest of pine trees, and they’re going to have a totally … Continue reading Meta, Cool, Setting
By Emily McGowan In the summer of 1958, Hurricane Lolita made landfall in the USA. It was not an actual hurricane, but a best-selling novel—an erotic morality tale by Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov—and as critics took notice and controversy began to build, Lolita and its author were tossed into the perfect storm. “He writes highbrow pornography,” … Continue reading Hurricane Lolita: The Art of Sex In Fiction
By Allie Dixon “Your nonfiction is too fictiony.” Sorry, what? This was the recurring feedback from my first ever MFA graduate workshop as an ex-fiction writer turned nonfiction. As annoying as it was, it forced me to explore what writers and readers alike have heard over and over and over – you’re not showing us, … Continue reading A Writer’s Take on “Showing vs. Telling”
I was sitting on my concrete walkway, pulling weeds from what you could have called a garden, intermittently looking over at Shelly's house—checking for signs of life.
What power, what excitement, to sweep down Broadway in the sticky summer heat, the crowd parting for her, her long skirt billowing out like a sail.
I want to escape my sober thoughts and become undone under foreign skies.
His feet are large. His hair is hard.
He’s a child, all of thirteen with an incipient moustache and the greasy face of adolescence. I concentrate on his deed, but I can’t threaten him. He spits at my window as I roll it up.
I want a girl who’s dying.
Causeway Lit 