I once read about a small town in New Mexico that was overrun by tumbleweeds. After further research, the location became more realized to me: Clovis is a military town close to the Texas border where the land is flat and relatively featureless compared to the rest of...
As a writer who constantly deals with writing blocks and boredom when it comes to writing at home, I have found it helpful to move around. Exploring has always encouraged creativity and I have often found myself wandering around different parts of Albuquerque in...
“If I must die, you must live” – from “If I must die” by Refaat Alareer What do we do when a poet is killed? How do we respond—as a magazine, as students, as writers—when a poet is imprisoned, tortured, expelled, exiled? When a poet is executed? When a poet is...
A Series of Unfortunate Events is a chapter book series written by Daniel Handler that follows the Baudelaire orphans and the treacherous ordeals that they experience. The first book, The Bad Beginning, was published in 1999, and was an instant hit. The series...
I was not much of a reader until my early twenties. I grew up in rural Montana, and I was made to believe the only writing about the West came from people like Norman Maclean or James Welch — stories about cowboys, about men thinking, about fishing. While I have since...
Next to me someone asks, “What inspired the order of your book?” Michelle Otero smiles broadly and explains that she had a bunch of pieces written but didn’t know the order. She felt it was important to acknowledge the trauma and recreate that sense. She tells us of a...
