BLOG

“An Excess of Grossness” by Emmy Newman

“An Excess of Grossness” by Emmy Newman

I never want to stop being interested in imagining what my phalanges look like under all this skin, how mushrooms grow in cow shit, what led sea cucumbers to vomit their intestines in self-defense, what brains look like under microscopes. I ask the reader to bodily identify with themselves in the end, with our own human grossness, and I ask them to recognize how amazing that is.

read more
“Thoughts from a Writing Challenge” by Lisa Low

“Thoughts from a Writing Challenge” by Lisa Low

Most days are unspectacular, but on the worst days, nothing is in my fingers. Or in my brain. I don’t like anything I’ve written, so I repeatedly type and backspace the way I tell my students not to do during in-class writing activities. I click through old poems nostalgically as if to harness the magic of a moment when something sprang forth out of nothing. I feel like I’ll never write something good again. It’s as if negative self-talk itself will produce the poem…

read more
“Self-Portraits” by Emily Townsend

“Self-Portraits” by Emily Townsend

Sometimes I believed my body and my brain were two entirely separate entities. I constantly struggled with figuring out where I belonged during those bad-lucked years: I was displaced from my hometown due to my parents’ divorce, I was purposely making everything harder for myself as punishment. So I took this superstition of broken mirrors and blamed my unhappiness on the accidents of dropping cheap glass onto my bathroom floor…

read more