In Tim Burton’s film “Corpse Bride,” my favorite movie when I was sixteen, a young man accidentally proposes marriage to a dead woman. After a ceremony in a moonlit winter woods, he leaves his drab Victorian village and enters the land of the dead. In the end, he almost prefers what he finds to the lot of the living.
Read MoreHFR is pleased to introduce Mark Dostert and his essay, "The Saint of 3F." This is the first installment of The Dock. Look for new online content next month.
HFR: Who has had the greatest influence on your writing?
MD: I was finishing the first draft of Up in Here: Jailing Kids on Chicago’s Other Side about the time that Anthony Swofford published Jarhead, his marine sniper’s account of the Persian Gulf War. In revising my manuscript and starting various adapted personal essays like “The Saint of 3F,” an interview comment of Swofford’s proved instructive.
Read MoreHave you heard about the new staff of HFR? Our intrepid intern Kacie Blackburn already spoke with Brian Bender, our new international poetry editor, and now she's interviewed one of the prose editors, Gary Garrison. Check out their interview below, and if you want to put this new staff to work, check out our flash prose contest--deadline: May 15th!
Read MoreWhen I began writing “The Year of the Great Forgetting,” I didn’t yet know the cause of my son’s ailment. We were still in the thick of it then, still held captive by the uncertainty of the mystery we could not solve. What, after all, was the cause of his continuous low-grade fever? Was it cancerous, infectious, or merely a misstep courtesy of a couple of overprotective parents?
Read MoreWith fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!
Here's part two of our interview, featuring: Anthony Varallo, a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy, a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato, a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50. Check out part 1 here!
Read MoreWith fifty-three issues published, nearly twenty-five hundred contributors accepted and tens of thousands of submissions read, we start to wonder where our previous contributors have run off to. Fortunately, I was able to catch up with a few of them, and we were able to go through a round-table discussion of questions and answers in order to find out what some of them have been up to!
Anthony Varallo is a fiction contributor in Issue 47; Hugh Sheehy is a fiction contributor in Issue 36; and Liz Prato is a nonfiction contributor in Issue 50.
Read MoreIn a progressive move, the Vatican Library announced (3/22) its plans to digitize its collection of ancient handwritten manuscripts. The long-term goal of the project is to make 40 million pages of documents available online. Some of these texts contain important historical works in math, science, law and medicine.
Read MoreGrade school, junior high, and high school were all difficult for me. It always felt like I didn’t know quite how to act like other kids—though I had friends, I often felt apart from them. In the second grade, my teacher sent home the following note with my grades: “She’s a loner who gets along well with the other children.”
Once, I spent an entire afternoon on my stomach in my front yard, searching every clover for the four-leafs. The neighborhood kids had been teasing me and I hadn’t even noticed. I was too excited about all the luck I was amassing.
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