Contributor Spotlight: Chelsea Biondolillo

Grade 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.

Sam MartoneJanuary 22, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Nonfiction, Prose, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Michael Bazzett

A few thoughts on “Verisimilitude”:

If I could make short films using my mind, I would.

And if we all had USB ports in our temples and could share those images, strung together by white cords, like two kids sharing earbuds on the bus, what then?

Would those images be a semblance of our desires? How terrifying or transcendent might that be? How tender or tyrannical?

Would our primary goal as creators and composers become receiving a knowing glance?

Applause seems an odd response to art. It stirs the air, then same old silence. Yet I love it when people clap at the movies, which can’t hear.

Sam MartoneJanuary 21, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Poetry, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Grace Bauer

“Mellow Drama” began with the epigraph – a pronouncement I overheard a woman gleefully declare one late afternoon as I was walking along the Jersey Shore. The beach was already clearing out for the day, only a few people around. The sun was slowly sliding toward the horizon – that seam between sky and sea I’d had my eye on, hoping to spot some dolphins in the distance, as one occasionally does that time of day.

Sam MartoneJanuary 15, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Poetry, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Ruth Joffre

In times of distress, I open up The Mine, a folder on my hard drive where I store my early writings, things I produced before I turned twenty. It’s an embarrassing folder in many ways, full of pastiche and self-indulgence and three or four ridiculous, unambitious novels I started writing, but thankfully never finished. But every time I dig in, I manage to find something worthwhile. In the case of my HFR piece, “The Ithaca Moment,” that “something” was a rough draft of a story I had written about Cornell.

Sam MartoneJanuary 13, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Fiction, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Sandy Longhorn

Both “Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country” and “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep” appear in my narrative sequence, Fevers of Unknown Origin, currently making the rounds with publishers. Before this project, I had never written a book-length manuscript featuring one speaker and a clear story; however, I had often looked on those poets capable of doing so with wonder and curiosity. In fact, I didn’t set out to write this type of “project” book. Instead, the first poems in the sequence took shape one after the other, until they built a certain momentum, and I had to keep writing them.

Sam MartoneJanuary 9, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Poetry, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Matthew Baker

– As a young child, the author was raised by a single mother, who, when she needed to go to the supermarket, had no choice but to bring the author with her. The supermarket was a sprawling labyrinth of racks and aisles. And, once, she lost the author there. The author, at the time, was obsessed with cereal boxes—the bizarre designs, the colorful images, all of that illuminating text—the author could stand there forever, in that seemingly endless aisle of seemingly endless boxes, just gazing, awed.

Sam MartoneJanuary 8, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Fiction, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Christopher Kempf

The first Friday of every month, the City of Oakland shuts down twenty blocks of Telegraph Avenue for a night of street performance, open art galleries, and food trucks during which upward of 20,000 people, most smoking weed or drinking PBR tallboys, descend en masse on downtown Oakland. Known as the “Art Murmur,” the night is a kind of Bakhtinian carnival in which the rules of normal social interaction are suspended in favor, as Bakhtin writes, of “a special form of free and familiar contact” between people usually divided “by barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.”

Sam MartoneJanuary 7, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Poetry, issue 53

Contributor Spotlight: Carol Guess & Kelly Magee

Carol Guess:

“With Animal” is the title story of a short story collection co-written by me and Kelly Magee, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2015. All of our stories focus on humans who give birth to animal babies. We’ve got hippos, unicorns, dragons, horses, sloths, and cats giving their parents trouble. The stories were fun to write because we let our imaginations run wild. Our process was simple: we each wrote half a story, then passed it along to the other person to finish. Starting and finishing offered different challenges, demanded different kinds of attention. My biggest challenge in writing “With Animal” was deciding what was in the suitcase.

Sam MartoneJanuary 3, 2014Contributor Spotlight, Fiction, issue 53

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