I was born and raised in Shanghai. By the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated a more open-door policy, but I still had a deep desire to experience America as well as Western culture. Immigrating to Boston to study art in graduate school, I discovered a more complex society than I had imagined. Longing for a democratic system, I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of consumption […]
[creative nonfiction] To My Daughter, and All the Daughters, This is the letter I should have gotten from my mother, and that she should have gotten from her mother, and that should have been passed down through the ages like baking cloths, or photo albums, or funeral cards. It is the letter that tells you, […]
Dana Johnson is the writer of the short story collections Break Any Woman Down and In the Not Quite Dark, and the coming-of-age novel Elsewhere, California, which was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Callaloo, […]
[creative nonfiction] I should be writing. You are not here. For the next one hundred and twenty minutes, you are not my job. “Are you going to the coffee office?” you asked on the way to preschool, your cute phrase for what I do. Yes, yes. Three days a week, three slivers of a life […]
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is a work of transgressive fiction that follows the life of heroin user Mark Renton, a.k.a. “Rents,” and his friends known as the Skag Boys. The novel takes place in Scotland with occasional trips to London. Trainspotting is told from several different points of views and includes a revolving cast of […]
[poetry] I’m on a bus reading Langston Hughes’s articles from The Chicago Defender and I realize it’s like I have no shadow. I’m on a bus sitting where I want to and in this article it’s 1946, and Hughes is in a restaurant and the hostess insists on seating him at the back of an […]
With a background in geology, Rick Bass splits his time between environmental activism and writing. His work crosses genres and includes non-fiction, essays, novels, and short stories. You can find his work widely published and acclaimed in journals and magazines such as Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, […]
The art in this series, “Art for Your Existential Crisis,” is an ongoing project that began in 2011, when I was in my late twenties and found myself deeply pondering and often immobilized by the most heavy-hitting questions we ask ourselves. Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where are we going? […]
[creative nonfiction] When I get to the top of Masada there are the canyons and there are the fortress ruins and there is the desert that stereotypically stretches out like a blanket location designed to set the scene for biblical abyss. There is this moment we are forced to be in together, all of us […]
[fiction] It was a young and tiny family—a wife, a husband, a three-month old son. They moved into the apartment on the tenth floor of a building which was one of the original high-rises in Chennai. There were six apartments on each floor around a central corridor into which the lifts opened. The corridor was […]
Roxane Gay’s Hunger is a powerful memoir that depicts a very personal narrative while also serving as a work of criticism, exploring society’s inability to see or accommodate the needs of the extremely obese. Her examples range from descriptions of public and private erasure, the dearth of public accommodation, and so much more. In simple […]
[fiction] They called girls like her butterflies. At least the moms on Instagram did. Posting pictures of toddlers with low-set ears and thick necks and little girls with strangely puffed hands and feet. They used hashtags like #butterflygirl or #turnersyndrome. More often than not it was photos of blankets or baby toys bought for daughters […]
Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, and teacher living in Los Angeles. He’s appeared on several television shows including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, CSI, ER, and Zoey 101, in films such as Terrence Malick’s The New World and Wrestlemaniac, and in many plays […]
I live in Los Angeles and spend a lot of time exploring in nature when I’m not working in the studio or teaching. Regardless of what medium I use, my work has a whimsical quality and embodies my love of the outdoors and my awe of the natural world. These pieces are from a large collection of hand cut collages […]
[fiction] The summer I worked at the casino pool, we took shuttles to and from the employee entrance. We were not allowed to park on property, only at a parking lot on the other side of the highway that added forty minutes, unpaid, to our workday. Sometimes in the mornings if I was groggy, or hung over from two-for-one margaritas from the Paradise Cantina, I walked onto the shuttle first without letting graveyard out. I weaved through them down the aisle, sunglasses on, somewhat ashamed yet inoculated to their glares.
Owl of Forest Park Early Saturdays, before the dawn, before the morning birds, I walked the trails of Forest Park beyond the zoo, crushed the arteries of Hoyt Arboretum beneath my spreading feet, turned the fallen petals from the rose garden to shaving peels. It was here, in the darkness of Portland mornings that I […]
Dearest Soon, I think I may be in love with you, Soon. The opening lines of Derrick C. Brown’s latest collection of love poems, How the Body Works the Dark, reveal the heart of his poetry in a sincere, simple declaration. Brown writes about love the way all poets should. His understated tone, diction, and […]
[poetry] Sonnet II: We’re Not in Chinatown Anymore Philly’s Chinatown has no Hollywood, just a bunch of ripped up movie billboards, blockbusters translated into Chinese, signs right in front of the bookshop where I wait: my father is buying his zodiac books, fortunes for the new year. He’s psychic— it’s the Tiger telling his Snake […]
Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress is a quintessential hard-boiled mystery novel. Mosley’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is on par with two of the genre’s most notable characters, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer. Set in 1948 Los Angeles, the sharply written first person narrative pays homage to its traditional genre conceits. […]
[creative nonfiction] My mom sent me letters from Indiana. Stacks of cards with flowers and curly, purple ink inside. Breathtaking cursive spanned the card. My small hands touched the parts where she’d written sweet girl or my name. She had her first nervous breakdown when I was six years old, and was admitted to a […]
Cormac McCarthy’s third novel Child of God, based loosely on an infamous murder in Sevier County, Tennessee, portrays a cycle of extreme isolation, perversity, and violence as representative of the natural human experience. The novel tells the story of Lester Ballard, “a child of God much like yourself perhaps,” who, facing a series of unfortunate […]
Stories from Classical mythology have pervaded European culture. My work seeks to address how mythology and the retelling of myths serve to reflect, reinforce, and influence our gender ideologies. Our perception of women is directly affected by how they are portrayed in art, from the stories and poems from antiquity to the way we see women and girls currently depicted in contemporary art and […]
Create Dangerously begins with an essay about the public executions of Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa in Port-au-Prince. Drouin and Numa were Haitians who had met while living in New York City and had returned to Haiti as part of a guerrilla army that intended to take down the Duvalier dictatorship. François Duvalier—Papa Doc—made sure […]
[poetry] Freehanding Maps of Minnesota I have called you feather down in my sleep, christened you the verge of memory, painted your rivers in the rain. I have written the scene before I even arrive; The breeze floats just enough to rustle the edges of the paper, lines only tenuously drawn. Do your lakes ever […]
Things That Are is Amy Leach’s whimsical collection of nonfiction essays about the natural world. These essays blend poetry, nonfiction, and nature writing—bending the genre and exploring the boundaries of what form creative nonfiction can take. It’s through the unexpected and illuminating prose that Leach seeks to create a relationship between the reader and the […]
[fiction] You don’t know I have a picture of you, because you are dead. Before you were dead, I wondered what it would be like to be trapped in your mouth for eternity, like a wedded Jonah. Whenever you said honey or Leeza or, more likely, Lisa, I would feel the rib cage constrict. I […]
There is a real casual ease by which the poems in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth present themselves. They are not struggling to find a voice, but are grounded firmly in their style and language. This little chapbook feels solid, weighty, and Shire does a fine job of creating consistency in such a short […]
The blurb for the paperback printing of King reveals the title character, our narrator, is canine. But John Berger blurs species lines in this poignant tale of twenty-four hours in the life of the marginalized inhabitants of a French homeless camp. With Berger’s spare, lyric prose, King is granted first person point of view. He […]
[fiction] What would you do if you weren’t afraid? I walk out to the car in a state of unusual calm. In the house over there, which I share with my husband and son, my husband has just now informed me that he isn’t in love with me anymore, that in fact he is in […]
Night Sky With Exit Wounds is woven from deep threads—the experience of fleeing war and becoming a refugee, migration and the sea, parent-child relationships, and queer sexuality. Life is complex. Layers of emotion, memory, and transformation unite in this journey of one human being. Vuong’s stories and structures made me feel huge possibilities in poetry. […]
A literary and art journal
from the MFA community at
Antioch University Los Angeles.