The classroom had a basket filled with peanut butter crackers and oatmeal cream pies. A coffeemaker held luke-cold coffee. The water basin was bright orange and only had water sometimes. The square room could have had desks for a standard classroom or, like that summer evening, be cleared out to create a giant space for the blue exercise mats laid all over the floor. I was there with my mother; a woman at her work had taken the self-defense class with her daughter and my mom, always looking for a way to spend time with me, suggested we do it.
Heather Wyatt is a teacher and writer by day and food TV junkie by night. Her first book, My Life Without Ranch, is forthcoming from 50/50 Press in fall 2018. The creative non-fiction title will feature that love of food, but also explore the dangerous relationship we can all have with it. She lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and has a slight obsession with her two dogs. She graduated from and instructs English at the University of Alabama. She received her MFA from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, in poetry and several of her poems have been featured in a number of journals including: The Marr’s Field Journal, Public Republic, Snakeskin, tak′tīl, The Broad River Review, Blinking Cursor Literary Magazine, The Whistling Fire, Stymie Magazine, Falling Star Magazine, Linden Avenue Literary Journal, Straight Forward Poetry, The Binnacle, OVS Magazine, The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, Heyday Magazine, ETA Journal, Puff Puff Prose Poetry and a Play, Silly Tree Anthologies, Melted Wing, Vietnam War Poetry, Dămfīno, Writers Tribe Review, Jokes Review and Number One Magazine.
We’d bought the beer and ice at a gas station near Parachute, Colorado. I stood with the pump while my father acquired the goods. I was a couple years off the buying age, although I had a decent fake in my wallet. I laid a bed of ice in the cooler and tumbled the cans in, keeping two for the ride. I cracked his open as he got in and held it out as he put us in gear. He said: “Goddammit, son. Don’t hand me my beer yet. Wait till we’re on the road.”
Gregg Murray is Associate Professor of English at Georgia State University, Editor-in-Chief of Muse/A Journal, and Executive Editor of Real Pants. His essays appear regularly in The Huffington Post and The Fanzine. He also writes poetry.
- Do not be daunted by the eight lanes of cars, buses, trucks, bicycles and pedibikes as they weave a snarled braid of traffic.
- Ignore traffic lights—the drivers do.
Michelle Cacho-Negrete is a retired social worker in Portland, Maine. Her first book, Stealing; Life in America, was published in October. Four of her essays have been among the 100 most notable; one was selected Best of The Net. Her essay, “Street Kid,” was runner-up in Brooklyn Literary Arts. She is currently in five anthologies and has had six Pushcart nominations.
Among the clutter in our attic, unpacked through the twenty years since we moved into this house, rests a large framed photograph of my father taken when he was twenty-nine, or so I’ve been told. That photograph, about twenty-four by eighteen inches, leans against a beam, shrouded in black plastic and sealed with strips of masking tape. It was wrapped that way long before it went into our attic. I don’t remember who had it before me, most likely my late sisters. And I can’t recall the last time the photograph hung on a wall, perhaps before I left for college decades ago.
Walter Cummins has published seven short story collections—Witness, Where We Live, Local Music, The End of the Circle, The Lost Ones, Habitat: stories of bent realism, Telling Stories: Old and New. He also has a collection of essays and reviews called Knowing Writers. More than one hundred of his stories, as well as memoirs, essays, and reviews, have appeared in magazines such as New Letters, Kansas Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Under the Sun, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Bellevue Literary Review, Connecticut Review, in book collections, and on the Web. With Thomas E. Kennedy, he was founding co-publisher of Serving House Books, an outlet for novels, memoirs, and story, poetry, and essay collections. For more than twenty years, he was editor of The Literary Review.
A Martian lands on Earth and captures a German, sedating him and opening his skull, only to find his brain so filled with complicated electronics and difficult-to-read gizmos that the Martian feels exhausted just looking at it. The Martian puts the German’s head back on straight and sends him on his way, but not before capturing an Austrian. When the Martian opens up the Austrian’s head, he finds a single string, which he snips, and the Austrian’s ears fall off.
Americans who have, like me, lived in Germany for more than a decade hear numerous variations of this joke. Like the claim that among the multilingual instructions folded into Ikea electronic products, only the German one insists the consumer call the electrician. Ha-ha.
Melissa Knox’s book, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, is forthcoming from Cynren Press (Winter, 2019). Her recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Santa Ana River Review, The Clarion Project, Concho River Review, The Other Journal, The Wax Paper, and elsewhere. Poems have appeared or are appearing in The Mom Egg Review, NonBinary Review, The Offbeat, and elsewhere. She has written extensively on Oscar Wilde. She writes a blog, The Critical Mom.
On the morning of April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh loaded a truck with explosives and parked next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Two months later, I met my ex-fiancée, Ayesha, an Islamic Khmer.
Timothy McVeigh: “The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.”
Caleb Powell has work in Pleiades, The Sun Magazine, and The Superstition Review. The Seneca Review published an excerpt from his nonfiction book, Love and Happiness and Suffering in Sialkot, Pakistan. He lives just north of Seattle with his wife and three daughters, and he coaches girls basketball.
A baby is a composition the body knows how to create. And destroy. My baby—found and then lost.
I know I should resist the aspen trees. The elevation on the Colorado plains is too low. Below 7,400 feet they’re vulnerable to all the things that can kill them. Still I plant two. I hold their heart-shaped leaves against my palm just to feel the softness. I study the veins of their stems and watch them grow.
They say that miscarriage is an adaptation of the body, a function of a machine working as it should.
Danielle Harms writes from Denver, Colorado, where she works in higher education. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Offing, New South Journal, and The Baltimore Review. She has called Wisconsin, D.C., Hungary, and South Korea home. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University, where she was the editor of Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art. Find her online at Danielle.HarmsBoone.org.
One thing we can agree on about cancer—there is no great time to be told you have it. I got my good news from a urologist named Alton Fitch. He delivered the results of my biopsy the way a vice principal would teach a miscreant the consequences of his bad behavior. “You’ve got quite a bit of cancer there,” he observed. “Cancer in nine of the twelve cores. Your Gleason score is seven, five being the least aggressive cancer, eight being serious cancer. This cancer is treatable. If you had to get any kind of cancer, this is the best kind of cancer to get.”
Hal Ackerman is Co-Chair Emeritus of the UCLA Screenwriting Program. The 15th year anniversary edition of his book, Write Screenplays That Sell…The Ackerman Way arrived September 2017. He has had numerous short stories published in literary journals, among them North Dakota Review, New Millennium Writing, The Pinch, Southeast Review, Passages, and most recently in the 2016 Idaho Review and Fiction International(in the company of many stalwarts). “Sweet Day” was read by Academy Award nominee Robert Forster and is available at the Harper Collins Publishers Digital Media Café. “The Dancer Horse” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is available on Audible, read by Adrian Pasdar. “Roof Garden” won the Warren Adler 2008 award for fiction and is published by Kindle; “Alfalfa” was included in the anthology I Wanna Be Sedated…30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers. “Belle and Melinda” was selected by Robert Olen Butler as the winner of the World’s Best Short Short Story contest. It appeared in the Spring 2013 edition of the Southeast Review. He has published two successful novels in a detective series about an aging counter-culture P.I. Stein, Stoned won the Lovey award for best first novel in 2010 and was followed in 2011 by Stein, Stung. His short story collection, The Boy Who Had A Peach Tree Growing Out Of His Head… (And Other Natural Phenomena) was published in November of 2016. Seven pieces of non-fiction, flash fiction, and longer fiction arrived in 2017.
I spent an entire therapy session on the bamboo. Not about how crazy it is—how wrong it is—that my husband, Paul, planted it in the first place, but about my reaction to it. The waves of anxiety that overcome me whenever I think about it.
Susan Hodara is a memoirist, journalist, and teacher. Her articles have appeared in publications including The New York Times and Communication Arts. Her short memoirs are published in a variety of anthologies and literary journals. She has taught a memoir writing workshop at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in New York for nearly a decade. Hodara is a coauthor of Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). www.susanhodara.com.
Every day during lunch break at Saint Mary’s High in Seattle, a group of boys gathered at a public park across from the school. They’d shoot the breeze, talk sports, and discuss mysteries of the universe. Today’s mystery centered on the old man who coughed up blue spit into his hanky at Sunday Mass. The first to speak was Bud Hanrahan, also known as Boastful Bud because, well, that’s what Bud liked to do. Boast.
Michael Coolen is a pianist, composer, actor, and writer living in Oregon. In addition to three Fulbright Fellowships and four National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, he has won awards from the Oregon Poetry Association and the Oregon Writers Colony. His essay “Let Me Tell You How My Father Died” was given first prize in the 2017 national “Ageless Authors” competition. He’s been published in Oregon Humanities, The Gold Man Review, Best Travel Stories, Clementine Poetry Journal, Creative Writing Institute, Rats Ass Review, Broken Plate Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Quarterly, Mystery Magazine, et al. He’s a published composer, with works performed around the world, including at Carnegie Hall, New England Conservatory of Music, Museum of Modern Art, and the Christie Gallery.
Essay and Other Nonfiction Workshops at Eckleburg
Personal Essay
Lyric Essay
Body Narrative
Modern Memoir
Submit Your Nonfiction
We accept polished creative nonfiction/essays up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise. Preferences veer toward shorter works under 1500 words with an arts and culture focus. If you wish to include a bio, keep it short, under 200 words. Submit your nonfiction.
Essay Collections and Memoir Manuscripts
We publish short works at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.