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!

Michael Tager's Pop Culture Poetry: The Definitive Collection, out now from akinoga press, is a wonderful collection of contradictions: fun, accessible, smart poems that examine our cultural and personal connection with celebrity. Funny and sad, jokey but not a joke, these poems take subject matter like Justin Bieber, Patrick Swayze, and the Golden Girls just seriously enough. We sat down to talk with Michael about the book and making real art out of, as the Barrelhouse tagline goes, pop flotsam and cultural jetsam. 

Writing flash is an act of extreme distillation. Every word counts. Every image and gesture is imbued with meaning. I think first and foremost practicing flash fiction helped me as an editor of other people, to be unsparing on the sentence level. And that carried over into my longer works, which as you point out is a relative term.

Kravetz’s gift is his ability to transcend the rawness of that ache and to suss out the nascent embers of an alternative New England.

If you looked for a textbook definition of a good literary citizen, Michael Wheaton’s name would almost certainly come up. Wheaton is best known for his work as the publisher of Autofocus Books and as the producer for the podcast, The Lives of Writers. He is also a talented essayist, whose debut book, Home Movies, came out in February from BUNNY. Curious about the intersection of writer and publishing, we corresponded over email.