Silences have always been uncomfortable with my mother, as though ticking down to an explosion. We seek to fill them with idle chatter, always careful to keep it surface level. So much still remains unsaid that its breadth terrifies me. I catch her as I caught my poem, Mother Never Smoked A Cigarette, in bits and pieces that …
The sun melted into my arms and back as I walked into the darkness of The Rose. I sensed the place never closed and the stink of liquor and cigarettes hit me as soon as I entered. My eyes screwed up in a squint. There was another smell too, which I imagined was the afterlife …
Pretty is something you’re born with. But beautiful, that’s an equal opportunity adjective. Author unknown The ancient Greek philosophers …
Recently, I have become obsessed with examining colloquialisms, particularly in supposedly intimate dialogues. So often, I feel we censor ourselves, even when we are talking to those closest to us—for me, the subway is my main inspiration, because I literally overhear how people live, how they survive. Through overhearing these conversations, I always notice there …
Continue reading “Dreams and Reality in Dialogue: Exploring the Non-Censored Mind”
The female nether regions divide Americans into two distinct camps. On one side are the people who cannot bring themselves to say, hear, or read the word vagina no matter how legitimate the circumstances that prompt its use. Depending on whether they over-identify with daytime talk show hosts or public leaders, the anti-vagina crowd either …
Guns. A divisive bullet between British and American cultures. If I had one, I would hold up this C2C Quiet Zone until the perpetrator of the seeping sewage confessed. It’s a cornea piercing stench that doesn’t move when the train doors open at Pitsea, Basildon, or Benfleet. Those of us standing, waiting for seats, experience …
Continue reading “The Impolite Realities of Living in a Polite Society”
To me, flash fiction is characterized above all by the extraordinary compression of its form. In its extreme incarnation, flash borderlines narrative poetry and is even mistaken for it sometimes. The flash story is lifted by intense feelings, situations and actions, and takes off and up and up, but never glides leisurely on warm currents. …
Do you notice what other people wear? Do you ever feel self-conscious about your own clothes? Although we may dismiss clothing as surface-level compared to the body and personality, clothes are central to ways our bodies are experienced, presented, and understood within culture. Clothes mediate between the naked body and the social world, the self …
Weeks after my girlfriend ended our relationship of seven years, I moved from the island side to a quieter, greener part of Hong Kong, hemmed by country parks, opposite a reservoir. She ended up moving to a nearby block on the same street. Together we had accumulated three stray dogs and three stray cats, and …
Some years ago now, my daughter found a possum skull partly buried in the woods behind our house. She was sixteen. She dislodged the skull from the earth with her fingers, washed it with a hose, then left it on a retaining wall by the back driveway. I could see the skull from my office …
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.