Conversation and Connections: A Lit Conference Review, by Sarah Tollok

Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in Write or Die, the in-house magazine of Chill Subs.

Ulrich’s stories poke and prod at the world, creatively and intelligently, and refuse to flinch or turn away from what it offers up.

The stones are burdens given to the speaker, but also accepted. Women are taught to abide. Taught to carry.

The fluidity of the sea finds an equivalent in the fluidity of memory. Crews constructs a world (and a love) that transcends time’s usual strictures.

Above all, Someone Who Isn’t Me yearns to sound a pure, clear note. The note is life, “as if our bodies are expensive stereos and life was a song that lasted only as long as we could hear it.”

This book is fierce. This book is rowdy. Sender’s collection screams, “Pay attention. Why is love so hard?”

All of it combines — maybe it was never separated — the language the character the narration, me, the reader, the world in which we read this.

Here, memory is both personal and communal. The four sections of the collection cross time and space, braiding together difficult experiences.

He scoops my ice cream into a chipped yellow mug I bought at a thrift store before we met and fell in love. Three scoops dug out of the carton with a warped soup spoon and the same for him. He brings it to my bedroom, which has lately become his bedroom, too, though he has yet to leave behind the basement apartment he rents up the street.

To inhabit As If Fire Could Hide Us is like the impossible experience of continuously reading the entire book all at once.

It’s as if the speakers have been starved of their ancestral languages, and so their English reaches for oracular truths.

Crossman doesn’t want to put a bow on things--the fear of loss persists; it’s merely taken new shape.

The title of this collection of essays is as much an admission as a threat. Or rather, as much an explanation as an expiation.

Barrelhouse Editor Dave Housley sat down to talk with Neema Avashia about her big-hearted and absorbing memoir, Another Appalachia, one of the featured books at Barrelhouse’s Conversations and Connections: Practical Advice on Writing conference in DC on April 15, 2023.

I edit a literary magazine called Taco Bell Quarterly, where the only guideline is every piece must contain a Taco Bell reference. It’s a joke. It’s totally serious. It’s a monster writing prompt come alive in the lab, and now I’ve read thousands of pieces of writing about Taco Bell. I have a weird glint in my eye.

As the book drew to a close, I was filled with the same satisfied fatigue as when leaving a vast museum.

So many author interviews start with “welcome to the pages of Driftwood.” New readers will feel the warmth of that welcome.

Green’s “songs” communicate the possibility of finding pleasure and connection in a body previously dismissed as a myth.

Bark On is a horridly perfect novel for this modern American moment.

When I’m reading submissions, I find myself looking for the heart of the questions each manuscript is asking. Are they messy enough? Are they risky enough? Are they beautiful enough? Are they questions I want to end time with?