Something endures: the hot-white center, the teeth and bones of it all. This is what Gifted speaks obliquely around, comfortably nestled in the concrete, mundane details of the everyday.

What distinguishes Dasgupta from other essayists is her capacity to balance joyous and vibrant moments with a sense of discomfort.

Nothing here has value except her own doubled-down commitment to it—there’s a kind of nobility in deciding to hold onto the nothing that you have.

What Hunt reveals is the strangeness of other people, and the way their agonies and compulsions are other to themselves, propelling them.

How do we define the public? What activities should be allowed in public spaces? Who counts as the local community?

Failure To Comply is a manifesto of trans resilience, of choosing to live in an ungoverned body.

2nd person POV often gets a bad rep from writers. I think it’s important for CNF writers to challenge their assumptions in order to experiment and to explore what effect a different POV can have on their work when it’s used in a purposeful way. In this workshop, we’ll dig into some possibilities of why folks are uncomfortable with it and then we’ll explore 5 different ways to authentically and intentionally use 2nd person POV in CNF.

To me, the vulnerability is a metric in essays in a way it is almost nowhere else. It’s a tension on the line in the story. When a vulnerable story is being read out loud to a room, nobody moves. Something is happening.

We’re thrilled to be bringing you a sneak preview of a weird and wonderful new novel from one of our own, Barrelhouse Fiction Editor Tara Campbell’s City of Dancing Gargoyles.

In asking us to “believe in” clouds, this poem surrenders to both the changing nature of things and the instability of self, the ever-shifting interconnectedness of self with other.

With the finesse of a magician, Brundage unpacks, upends, and performs sleights of hand with words we have shoved into closets.

The speaker doesn’t necessarily want her hunger, or maybe just doesn’t always feel comfortable always carrying it, stoking its fire.

As hearing tests and various attempts at treatment consume her life, the narrator seems removed from time, set apart from it.

When I finished, I felt I had been washed clean, that I had sloughed off something old and heavy.

If Mann’s intent in writing Attachments could be distilled into one phrase, fatherhood as multitude may fit.

How many horses are too many horses? Suddenly, I'm thinking about horses more than I ever have.

For the third interview in my series on writer-publishers, I got in contact with the brilliant Courtney LeBlanc, whose most recent collection is Her Whole Bright Life. I first met Courtney when I hosted her for reading in the Fall of 2023 at the bookstore I ran in Orlando, Florida. She is one of those writers that is instantly memorable, funny, and leaves the room a little brighter than when she entered it (even if her poetry is raw and at times heartbreaking.)

How to escape? The collection’s ending offers a clue. The thing that saves her, the thing that gives her wings, is opening her eyes.

What becomes evident in Wagner’s collection is the bloody costs of our collective heritage, and how we pay those costs throughout the ages.

Oh, what we will do to be seen!