Excerpted from Late Work: A Literary Autobiography of Love, Loss, and What I Was Reading By Joan Frank • What is it, finally, about letters? Why does this old-fashioned form, even maimed and shrunken, volleyed mostly through ether…
She said she wanted me to meet her parents up in Squamish the week after I came back and that if I wanted to die it would be okay, but only after I meet her parents. So we drove…
just before dawn I. It started in the daytime, my sister says, I remember the light. We were watching TV. Mama and Baba were in their room, asleep. We heard noises that sounded like fireworks. It happened at…
Content Warnings—alcohol overdose, death Welcome to the Grocery Supreme Aptitude Test™. This test is divided into the following five sections: Commuting and Tardiness, Opening Duties, Product Management, Customer Service, and Long Answer Questions. A few important notes: You…
Prince tipped extravagantly. He’d leave $100 bills tucked under the ketchup. He did not condescend, but would wiggle his little fanny all the way out the door. The limos gobbled him up and deposited him at Paisley Park. Lavender…
Acclaimed shortform author Chelsea Stickle has recently published two chapbooks: Breaking Points, which explores crucial moments in women’s lives through a variety of flash forms; and Everything’s Changing, which conjures images of transformation, both magical and otherwise. Chelsea took…
Aaron Burch and Austin Ross first became acquainted when Burch accepted one of Ross’s short stories at Hobart in 2018. Here, they discuss Ross’s debut novel, Gloria Patri, which deals with the aftermath of religious extremism and domestic terrorism.…
By Sarah Twombly • I am at work on a novel, and have been for more than a decade. It is autobiographical fiction, which is to say it’s about me, but also, it isn’t. The same way Einstein might…
Sibling Circus My brother was addicted to dog biscuits and this might have been how our act started. When our mother arrived, he’d pop one in his mouth, throw one to the real dog and then toss one to…
We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark. It’s dark when we pile out of our secondhand pickup. My father, my mother. My brother and me. It’s dark when we start walking the rutted, sopping dirt road that…
The notion of putting this particular story of poverty I’d experienced into words, of picking berries for money with my family as a child, took up space in my head for years. But like a lot of my childhood memories, it felt too complicated, too complex, to be transformed into writing. Writing memories is, for me, like being a translator, and for a very long time I felt I didn’t speak the language of this particular memory well enough. It’s as if every memory has its own dialect, its own syntax, and I hadn’t yet learned this one’s vocabulary. So, I waited. And over the years I’d tune into it. I’d let the memory play out in my mind, waiting to see if there was an image I could latch onto, something simple. Some small little part I could figure out how to translate and from there, discover the language to tell the whole story.
And then it hit. I was replaying the memory from the very beginning—pickups and cars coming to rest in the dirt, before the sun had come up, and all at once the words were right there. “We arrive in the raspberry fields when it’s dark.” That’s all I needed. As if those nine words were a cipher, transforming the entire memory into language so quickly it was as if the story had been there all along, just waiting on me to figure it out. To learn how to tell it.
A lot of people don’t realize there’s a vast difference between being poor and being impoverished. They don’t realize the distance between “living” and “surviving” isn’t miles, it’s light-years. It’s one of the reasons writing my own experiences, especially from the perspective of a child, can get so complicated. What’s the best way to convey what the experience does to you, how poverty sinks all the way into you, changing your emotional and mental DNA forever? And what’s the best way to explain it to myself, to the child inside me, who never got any explanations at all? As an adult, I strive to translate between the two of us, child me and adult me, so that hopefully we both might understand just a little.
WILL McMILLAN is a queer writer born and raised in the untamed wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where he still lives today. His essays have appeared The Sun, Bending Genres, CHEAP POP, and Atticus Review, among many others. In 2021 his essays were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Essays. His essay, “Our Familiar Faces,” was listed as Notable in The Best American Essays 2022, and his work will be featured in The Best Small Fictions 2023. Find him on Twitter at @willmcmn.
