Spring

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Winter 2017 ♦
In memory of Martha One winter in the late afternoon my aunt and I took a drive out into the countryside and watched as the sun began to set over icy fallow farm fields its shallow oblique light the very thing she wanted me to see because it was beautiful.…
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Winter 2017 Editor’s Note

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Winter 2017 ♦
One of the most formative moments of my life was when I acquired a library card. I was around seven, and one day after school my father, a high school history teacher, took me to the squat, brown-bricked building in downtown Pineville, Kentucky. The kind librarian at the desk handed…
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Last Light

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Winter 2017 ♦
The house had the appearance of a French villa but it was here in the middle of Ohio. Icicles hung from its eaves and the beige brick was bright against the snow, which had melted and then frozen again, forming a crust that Edward’s boots sank into once he stepped…
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Interview: Julie Hensley

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Winter 2017 ♦
Most artists carry their childhood landscape like a native language,” poet and fiction writer Julie Hensley states, an observation that contains the framework for her captivating short story collection Landfall, recently published by The Ohio State University Press. Winner of the Non/ Fiction Collection Prize, the book centers on Conrad’s…
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2016 Denny C. Plattner Awards

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Blog ♦
We are proud to announce the winners of the annual Denny C. Plattner Awards, which were established in 1995 by Kenneth and Elissa Plattner to honor their late son and his love of writing. The awards are given to the finest pieces of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that appeared…
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Fall 2016 Editor’s Note

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Fall 2016 ♦
Ask any fiction writer and they will likely tell you there are glimpses of themselves in nearly every character they create. Their obsessions, desires, and fears are often tucked away in the shadows and clefts of their characters, a small part of the fictional whole. Readers are left to wonder…
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Gospel River

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Fall 2016 ♦
Despite my animosity toward Sunday school and church: the huge helmets of grey hair capped by tight buns, flung back in hallelujahs; the spirit-filled oxblood wingtips loping to and from hard seats, and all the cloth— giant flowery dresses billowing up aisles, flapping dark suits and long ties lolling like…
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