Letters from the Editors
by Gwyneth Henke and Amy Dotson
Comfort
JC Henderson
Art
Issue 50
Fall 2024
Fiction
Tank
by August Reid
Christian Kings and Stolen Cars
by G.D. Holloway
Poetry
Notes on the Back of the Syllabus
by Ceridwen Hall
I’m Not a Mathematician
by Patrick Holian
How to Write a Happy Ending
by Jeevan Anthony Narney
death count of the ghost doctor
by Zoë Luh
Nonfiction
Never Flourish, Never Die
by Taylor Roseweeds
Circle Game
by Erin McAllester
Your Dad Is a Dog
by Kian Razi
Contributors
Nadia Bongo
Nadia Bongo is a teaching artist and translator. She holds a PhD in French Language and Literature from Aix-Marseille Universite. Her work has appeared in Apex, African Voices, Litro online, Solstice, The Citron Review, Taos journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. She has earned a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship and a Boston Writers of Color’s grant. In 2023, Nadia co-directed an experimental short film supported by the University Open Air program presented by Brooklyn Public Library. Across disciplines, her work is about places, belonging, and strangeness, to encourage people to accept their composite realities and identities.
Max Cavitch
Max Cavitch is a photographer, writer, and teacher living in Philadelphia. His photographs have appeared in publications including Al-Tiba9 Contemporary Art, Amsterdam Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, F-Stop Magazine, The Journal of Wild Culture, L’Esprit Literary Review, Phoebe, and Politics/Letters, and they’ve been exhibited most recently at Art Room Gallery, the Biennale di Senigallia, Blank Wall Gallery, Boomer Gallery, the Chania International Photo Festival, Decagon Gallery, the Glasgow Gallery of Photography, and the Ten Moir Gallery. Since 2019, he has been a contributing photographer for the public-science project, iNaturalist.
Hannah Dondero
Hannah, a Las Vegas native, grew up in a multicultural Navajo and Italian household. Originally a classically trained musician, she now works as a graphic designer and occasional writer. When she’s not working, you can find her frolicking outside, petting her cats, or exploring her city.
Ceridwen Hall
Ceridwen Hall is a poet and educator from Ohio. She is the author of Acoustic Shadows (Broadstone Books) and two chapbooks: Automotive(Finishing Line Press), fields drawn from subtle arrows (Co-winner of the 2022 Midwest Chapbook Award). Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pembroke Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Craft, Poet Lore, and other journals. You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com.
JC Chen Henderson
JC Chen Henderson publishes fiction, poetry, and visual art in literary reviews and poetry magazines. Her work appears in journals such as Fourteen Hills, Poetry East, Sunspot Literary Journal, Freshwater Review, The Pointed Circle, The Clackamas Review, and SLANT, to name a few. Henderson strives to express spirituality and sexuality in her work. She has sold hundreds of her paintings.
Patrick Holian
Patrick Holian (he/him/his) is a Mexican American writer from San Francisco, California. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Barrelhouse,The Arkansas Review, PRISM international, Bennington Review, The Acentos Review, and Yalobusha Review, he was a 2019 Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s fiction finalist, a finalist for Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2021 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee.
G.D. Holloway
G.D. Holloway used to be a journalist. His short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in The South Carolina Review, The Forge, Saw Palm, and Bridge Eight. He is the recipient of a Folio: Eddie Award for investigative reporting on sexual and workplace misconduct in the entertainment industry and a Southern California Journalism Award for entertainment-business reporting.
Eddie Martinez
Hailing from Chicago, but never feeling more at home than here in the land of enchantment. I aim to bring color and abundance to the nooks and crannies that need it. Perspectives altered and these magical people and places showed me a world that asked to be captured. Nothing seems mundane when your sight is shifted, so stop more often to feel the way things speak to you. What are they saying?
Erin McAllester
Erin McAllester lives in the wilds of central Oregon with her partner and dog, where she gardens and hosts raucous dinner parties. She is a white-assumed woman from a mixed-race, queer family, with a background in small business operations, which has inspired her to write work critical of capital-driven spaces. She holds an MFA in nonfiction from Oregon State University-Cascades, and you can read her work in Fugue, The Pinch Online, the minnesota review, and various online business blogs.
Jeevan Anthony Narney
Jeevan Anthony Narney was born in India but grew up in Arizona. He is an Indian-American Adoptee poet. His work has appeared in the Georgia Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Verse Daily, Terrain.org, Beloit Poetry Journal, and the Nimrod International Journal for which he won the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize judged by Tarfia Faizullah. He received his M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Arizona. He’s attended residencies at Arteles Art Residency and Vermont Studio Center. He has served in the U.S. Peace Corps and worked as a teaching artist for the Nebraska Writers Collective.
Kian Razi
Born in Iran, Kian Razi fled to the United States with his family during the Islamic Revolution. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, he discovered a love for writing while translating Farsi to English for his parents, realizing its power to express profound thoughts and unlock new worlds. Kian earned a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of San Francisco. A chapter from his memoir, Your Dad Is a Dog, was published in The Meadow, and the memoir itself is a 2024 finalist in the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest.
August Reid
August Reid (they/them) is a writer and artist from Rio Rancho, New Mexico. They received their BA and MA in English Literature from Arizona State University and are currently an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University. They love constellations, rainy days, a good queer romcom, Doc Martens, and their cats, Raspberry and Ophelia. August is at work on a novel.
Andrew Rodden
Andrew Rodden is a photographer and screenwriter local to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He primarily shoots on 35mm film, utilizing his camera to explore different land and cityscapes, both in his home state of New Mexico and around the world. In addition to his photography, Andrew has been working in the New Mexico film & television industry since graduating from Colorado College in 2021.
Taylor Roseweeds
Taylor Roseweeds is a writer, artist, and audio engineer living in rural Eastern Washington. She is a current MFA student at Fairfield University and an assistant editor at Brevity. Her work is informed by her background as an activist, a documentarian, and a failed journalist. She has been most recently published at Write or Die and at Upper New Review, where her essay “Inheritance” won the “Sense of Place” Global Essay Contest. She also publishes zines online and by mail, most recently “Fry Sauce.”
Tim Whitney
Tim Whitney is a self-taught artist living in Madison, WI. He started making art regularly in 2015 with gouache paintings and has since expanded into various media, including acrylic paint, graphite, colored pencil, ink and digital. His focus is figurative, choosing subjects that he feels reflect his sensibilities and tastes.
Ellen June Wright
Ellen June Wright, an artist, photographer and poet, was born in England but raised in New Jersey. Her art work revolves around the power of color and the emotions and memories they evoke. She is inspired by the works of Stanley Whitney, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Howardena Pindell and Frank Bowling. Her watercolors have been published online by Gulf Stream Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, Hole In The Head Review, Oyster River Pages and Kitchen Table Quarterly. To learn more visit https://ellenjunewright.com/
Cynthia Yatchman
Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle-based artist and art instructor. A former ceramicist, she received her B.F.A. in painting (UW). She switched from 3D to 2D and has remained there ever since. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections. She has exhibited on both coasts, extensively in the Northwest, including shows at Seattle University, SPU, Shoreline Community College, the Tacoma and Seattle Convention Centers and the Pacific Science Center. She is a member of the Seattle Print Art Association and COCA.
Issue 50 Masthead
Amy Dotson
Co-Editor-In-Chief
Amy Dotson is a writer from eastern Kentucky, though she has also lived in central Kentucky. She is in her third year of her MFA and is working on a sci-fi novel that’s not not about sea lions. Her work tends to deal with class, places affected by political neglect, and sea lions. Like many twenty-somethings, she has recently gotten really into rock climbing. Like many twenty-somethings, she has hurt herself while rock climbing.
Gwyneth Henke
Co-Editor-In-Chief
Gwyneth Henke (she/her) is a writer from Saint Louis, Missouri. A third-year fiction student in the MFA at the University of New Mexico, she graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in religious studies and creative writing. In her reading life, she loves Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Mieko Kawakami, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joan Didion, and Susan Choi. She also makes paper cut-outs.
Paris Baldante
Nonfiction Editor
Paris Baldante is a writer from Philadelphia and a second-year MFA student at UNM. Her fiction and nonfiction explore strange weather, ghostly locations, liminal identities, and cold intimacies. She loves to read Karen Russell, Jorge Luis Borges, bell hooks, Jennifer Egan, and Jia Tolentino.
John Hardberger
Fiction Editor
John Hardberger is a fiction writer from Lubbock, Texas. As a journalist, John wrote about music, comedy, art, and amateur wrestling for Chicago magazine, and briefly covered the hot dog beat for the Chicago Tribune. His fiction explores the liminal spaces between identities, cultures, landscapes, and religions.
Lucas Garcia
Poetry Editor
Lucas Garcia (they/them) has come home to Albuquerque. They are a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at UNM whose work in many genres explores queerness, resistance, failure, religion, survival and the discipline of hope. Incidentally, they are drawn as a reader to the work of writers with similar foci. They have a noted lack of chill.
Áine McCarthy
Associate Editor
Áine McCarthy (she/her) is a witch from New England who loves Buddhist chaplaincy, contemplative Christianity, and queer tarot. She has published poems and thoughts on labyrinths with Arsenic Lobster and Bitch Magazine. At UNM she is the Director of the Women’s Resource Center and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her favorite writer is John O’Donohue.
Marisa P. Clark
Faculty Advisor
Marisa P. Clark (she/her) grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, came out in Atlanta, Georgia, and relocated to beautiful New Mexico in 1998. She holds a PhD in fiction-writing from Georgia State University and an MA in American literature and a BS in psychology from the University of Southern Mississippi. A lecturer for more than two decades at UNM, she has taught all genres of undergraduate creative writing, queer texts and other literature courses, first- and second-year composition courses, and ESL, along with taking on various roles with Blue Mesa Review. She is the author of the poetry collection BIRD, and her prose and poetry appear in numerous literary publications journals.
Graduate Readers
Stormy Stewart
Undergraduate Readers
Leslie Baca
Theodore Bloyd
Mia Casas
Emmett DiMauro
Renata Gonzales
Molly Johnston
Carolyn Jones
Matthew Lineberry
Kelsa Mendoza
M. Morgan
Megan Osborn
Jasmine Partain
Elijah Ritch
Braydon Thedford
Rose Theresa Vigil
Sydney Walker