The person at Waffle House
drops my card and starts crying.
She’s here alone until 2. It’s 2.
Kind of hard to avoid the fact
that I am part of the problem.

A few more beers in, we talk rejection, the places we’re sending our stories, how it doesn’t seem like there are many outlets where the editors might be having these same conversations about pop culture and writing, how the whole landscape just doesn’t seem like much fun at all. Hey, one of us says, too many beers in now: What if we started our own literary magazine?

One summer, I started explaining myself. There was no reason for it, or if there was, I couldn’t clarify it even to myself. It could have been the lack of talking in the previous summers, all leading up to the taciturnity of winters, the dry mouths and moody colds. Then again, talking wasn’t the same as explaining.

My career as an international bank robber was brief and unprofitable but at least I never got caught. After three decades I’ve stopped watching for INTERPOL over my shoulder.

As Catholics, the Church is our house, everything from the hearth to the lock to the floor we stand on. When we leave, we build ourselves new homes, log by back-breaking log.  

Our latest online issue is a themed issue that explores what happens when parenting intersects with famous musicians. Entirely fictional, of course. Edited by Hannah Grieco.

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.