The best of Writer Beware: 2021 in review
We’ve lost Joan Didion
JK just won’t leave it alone
Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice has died
The most important skill is failure
New imprint, Winning Team Publishing, launched by Trump acolytes
Recent Fiction
Paper Nests, by Laurel Miram—Pale yellow pads are best. They contrast well with black Sharpies. No one can miss a bumblebee.
Recent Poetry
Three Prose Poems, by Kathleen Rooney—This day could use the excitement of receiving a surprise package. Even better if that package reads THIS SIDE UP.
Recent CNF
Thank You, Girls!, by Dvora Wolff Rabino—I’m culling needless items from kitchen, baths, and linen closets. I’m curating friendships. Now it’s your turn to go.
Memories of David Foster Wallace
Following is a transcript of a memorial service held for David Foster Wallace on 26 October 2008 at Underwood Park in Normal, Illinois.
Roadtrip
by Jane Flett
I lean forward to your ear, touch my lips to the point where the hair curls over your lobe, and I wonder about falling inside. I purse them like a kiss and I whisper road trip.
Christine Elizabeth Eldin, 1966-2012
by Stephen Parrish
Aspiring writer, loving mother, and dear friend Chris Eldin took her life at age 46 after a long and baffling absence from public view.
A True-Begotten Father
By Steve Edwards
I see him on a cold blue February night: He steps onto the back porch to drop a garbage sack by the bin and my mother pushes the door shut behind him, turns the lock.
A Proof
by Andrew McCall
My father does not believe / That the small things accrete, / That the infinitesimals / Lean together to form a whole.
Freelance Your Way to Poverty
by Con Chapman
There is a charity in Boston that helps the homeless by publishing a newspaper to which they contribute articles and poems.
Animals
by Robley Wilson
How old was I then? I was in sixth grade, which meant I was twelve. That was another part of my uncle’s argument: I was “old enough” for the fights.
Give Me Your Wife
by Tony Hoagland
because / I like her. I like / the signs of wear on her; / the way her breasts have dropped a little with the years; / the weathered evidence of joy around her eyes.
Bessie Arrowood’s Circle of Life
by Karen Paul Holmes
There she goes again, spinning / her wheelchair ’round the nursing home. / Two years, five thousand laps. So far.
Goldfish
by Lisa Cihlar
Does it matter that a migrating tern / is standing in the Fox River / with a goldfish in its beak? / The tern is a Caspian with a lovely black head / like the back-combed Italian mobsters in old movies.
It all began around a campfire…
Beautiful language
is meant to be heard as well as read, and in fact words were vocalized eons before they were ever committed to clay or parchment. Storytelling began around campfires. We seek prose and poetry that continue the tradition.
Contributor Spotlight:
Difficult Joy
by Brian Glaser
Open Contests
Lascaux Vol 8
by Stephen Parrish, with the editors of The Lascaux Review
