Cover: Majestic Wave by Annie Wildey
Matthew Hawkins, “Fragments”
Rosanna Staffa, “Holy”
Tyler Barton, “Alight”
Alexandra Munck, “Stop Sign”
Kendall Poe, “Shallow Lake”
She doesn’t want me around the customers, so she assigns me the task of writing down every ISBN number in the store. While recording numbers, I listen to the formulaic pop music blasting through the store’s speakers and think about my ex-boyfriend—any of them—and how much I miss him. If I think about it, I miss everyone I’ve ever met. It takes me days, weeks, months—what feels like forever—to write all the numbers down. In fact, I’m positive there’s an alternate universe where I’m still only halfway done, watching the FedEx guy roll in more carts stacked with boxes for the impending fall semester while Taylor Swift plays throughout the store. There are so many alternate universes and all of them are terrifying.
This isn’t the story I wanted to tell, but every time I smell burning, I can’t help but picture the wigs my mother found under my bed when I was seventeen; the smell of hair ablaze on the stove; how I can’t help but smell that burning everywhere; how I can’t help but cook on a stove every day, every day, no matter how hard I try.
MyMerrill offers up that other bond
between you—that same same desire, to put
it modestly. You are split open by
the women, grabbing, moving synchronized.
I was back up against the wall, trying to look like I belonged, when Julian Gould walked in. I’d heard stories of his own parties, late night and lawless, where he made people feel, with his disregard for tomorrow, like the hard work they were doing was not only serious and worthwhile but that it had desserts. We’d met once before—our introduction so brief I doubted he’d remember. I watched him notice me.
Avoid “throat clearing”—the tendency writers have to take too long establishing character, setting, time, and relationships before something interesting happens. As readers, we don’t need much information to participate in a story. Start with conflict, with a disruption, and we’ll fill in the blanks about the details (who the character is, where they are, etc.). Conflict gives us a reason to care about the character, and if we have that, we’re more than willing to go along on the journey with you and discover everything there is to discover in your story.
Try to strike a balance between open-mindedness and advocating for yourself. One benefit of working with a good editor is that they will recognize the potential of your work, as well as its existing strengths and weaknesses, which you might be too close to it to see, yourself. If you approach the editorial process with an open mind, ideally your editor will help you pursue your work’s potential, drawing out its strengths, and mitigating or eliminating its weaknesses. But every now and then you’ll work with someone who misunderstands your work entirely. To learn when to embrace a smart editor’s changes, and when you ought to defend your work against editorial changes that would work against its original intention, takes time, but your work will benefit enormously.
Congratulations to our contributors Massoud Hayoun and Becky Hagenston, whose essay and story were selected as Notable Mentions in the 2020 Best American Essays and Best American Short Stories respectively. And another shout out to TSR’s associate editor, Vanessa Cuti, who also received a mention for her short story, which appeared in the Cimarron Review.
We're so excited for Tara Isabel Zambrano's debut short story collection, Death, Desire, and Other Destinations! Tara won our Short Short Fiction contest in 2019 with the amazing "New Old," and we can't wait to dig into this collection of short fiction.
As the spaceship crash lands in our backyard,' matter-of-factly begins one story in Tara Isabel Zambrano’s sexy, strangeDeath, Desire, and Other Destinations: this collection is likewise an otherworldly force, with startling impact.Lesbians have destination weddings on the moon, hearts leap from bodies, dead girls share cigarettes while contemplating their lost lives, women suffer temporary, sex-induced blindness, lovers swallow each other whole, harem girls kill their master’s enemies with poisonous kisses. This is a vivid, wild, captivating book.
—Kim Magowan, author of UNDOING and THE LIGHT SOURCE
Death Desire, and Other Destinations explores the rocky terrain of relationships and their fault lines, and unearths the boundaries between love, longing, and loss. Both real and surreal, lyrical and magical, sci-fi and speculative, these small stories shine a light in the darkness of seeking a human connection across space and time.
Judge Prageeta Sharma’s remarks on when the signals come home by Jordan Franklin:
The first thing that greeted me was the song of the rain/against the hospital windows
The first thing that greeted me when I read this stunning collection was the power of polyphonic verse here, so many voices and ranges: poems about family narrated with indelible soundtracks, deep building emotion, and with added bonus tracks structuring the poignant and perceptual throughout. I simply adore how music and place are deeply entwined, and the dedications and references create such a fierce expanse of scope and pitch making these poems a veritable collection of engaged poetics. When the signals come home is full of potent signals, striking sonorous language, and resolute songs to accompany both addresses, dedications, and storytelling of longing, hope, and grief. We are immersed in popular music references from Prince to The Talking Heads in order to amplify the sonic detail and history of times in these poems. The deep ferocity in these poems is rich, particularly in how the speaker manages to address racial inequity, the strife of sickness and death, and the necessity of naming the racialized self in place, possession, poetry and in song.
After nearly forgetting her first language, Hal Y. Zhang discovered a jagged hole that could not be filled by a second. AMNESIA, her debut poetry chapbook, grasps at the echoes of her mother and sister tongues, 中文 and English. In both subject and form, these poems excavate the personal and the linguistic and map profound shifts in identity to the shape of words and radicals. Find their buried skins, their bitter unfurling, and divine the root forms of their leaves.
