For today’s post, writer and editor Hannah Levy shares her insight into tarot and its role in her creative process. Hannah is Editor in Chief of a tarot-themed print literary anthology called The Rebis, and the latest issue—The Moon—is available now.

She also contributed the poem “God at Geysir” to WRJ’s Issue 34.

Hannah responds to some thoughtful questions from The Rebis contributors Alina Kalontarov and Lexie Rose.

To set the scene for the interview, here’s some background info about Hannah’s approach to tarot and The Rebis:

We take our name, The Rebis, from medieval alchemy and the pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. In many ways, alchemists were looking for the spiritual in the material—they hoped to transmute base metals into gold and find a universal elixir for immortality.

The Rebis references the final stage of the process, where substances with opposing qualities are brought together and transformed into something new—an alchemical magnum opus. The name comes from the Latin res bina, meaning double matter.

In 1968, Carl Jung published “Psychology and Alchemy,” drawing parallels between the process of alchemical transformation and psychological development. In this context, The Rebis becomes a metaphor for the harmonious union of opposites: spirit and matter, soul and body, light and shadow.

This concept instinctively felt like a fitting name for a publication devoted to tarot and creativity, to the pursuit of integrating the conscious with the unconscious and finding wholeness within.

Alina Kalontarov: What initially drew you to tarot? Was there a specific moment you remember when it entered and/or changed your life?

Hannah Levy: My best friend took me to a tarot class for my birthday in 2019. It was taught by Jessica Dore, who went on to write an extraordinary book called Tarot for Change. I was in a shapeshifting portal at the time—I had recently become a mother, was struggling to manage my demanding career at a tech startup with family life, and had set aside my own creative ambitions. I was not making art. I felt very far from my spiritual center.

Tarot gave me a language for deep reflection and self-awareness. I started pulling a card a day from the Rider Waite Smith deck and writing down what I saw, what I felt, and the ideas that floated to the surface as I lingered with the symbols and stories on the cards. I felt myself cracking open.

I wrote a poem for the first time in years. Then another. Suddenly I felt wide awake. I was tapping out poems on my Notes app in the middle of the night; I felt alive, I felt erotic desire, I felt like my teenage self who knew she wanted to be a writer and devoted herself to her craft. I kept all my tarot-inspired writing private for two years, allowing it to incubate alongside my ongoing metamorphosis.

Then one day I pulled the Two of Cups and felt the urge to share my work, to be in dialogue with others, and to create a space where tarot could become a catalyst for art, writing, and connection. That idea eventually became The Rebis, an annual literary publication that invites writers and artists into conversation with the tarot as a rich language for exploring what it means to be human. We publish in print-only issues, once a year, and with every issue we explore a single card.

In the meantime, I still work on my own writing—sometimes inspired by the cards, especially when I feel stuck. I am currently experimenting with lyrical nonfiction essays and prose poetry. It’s fun to be on both sides of the submissions process, as a writer and lit mag editor, and I’m so grateful for the community I’ve found along the way.

Alina: Some believe tarot is an art of divination, while others say its power lies in the human imagination and symbol-play. How would you describe this distinction? Do you think tarot readers render meaning or do they uncover it?

Hannah: I don’t think these are necessarily opposing ideas. The word divination comes from the Latin divinare, meaning “to foresee” or “to be inspired by a god.” There’s something I love about that tension—divination could be about receiving a message from somewhere beyond ourselves, but it can also be about becoming receptive enough to perceive something we couldn’t see before.

For me, tarot is about entering into conversation with story and myth, symbols, intuition, dreams, the unconscious, your own lived experience. The cards become prompts that create the conditions for something new to emerge. Every deck is also an artistic interpretation of the archetypes, so you’re in dialogue with the deck creator as much as the cards themselves. And if you’re receiving a reading from someone else, you’re collaborating with the reader, too. It’s a beautiful co-created experience. Meaning arises in the encounter between you, the cards, the moment you’re living through, and the questions you’re willing to sit with. Tarot is a participatory practice, less about arriving at a definitive answer and more about entering a conversation.

When I pull cards, something meaningful happens. I see myself and the world in new ways. I find words for feelings and experiences I couldn’t find words for before. I think, at its heart, tarot is an act of paying attention. It asks us to notice colors, scenes, small details on the cards. The snail on the 9 of Pentacles. The way clouds look on the Page of Swords. All the patterns, metaphors, emotions, synchronicities that you start to see and interpret.

Maybe that kind of deep attention is its own kind of divination. Whether or not you believe you’re receiving information from beyond yourself, slowing down enough to listen to yourself and the world is a spiritual act. In that sense, I think tarot doesn’t necessarily tell us what is going to happen. It helps us become more perceptive to what is already happening, both around us and within us.

Alina: What, in your opinion, is the relationship between tarot and the creative process?

Hannah: Tarot and the creative process are so connected. Both ask us to enter a space where we don’t really know what we’re looking for when we get started, but we’re willing to stay present while we figure it out. When you pull a card you can suddenly be faced with a story, memory, or question that you might not have consciously been focusing on. In that sense, tarot is a great creative prompt. It interrupts the part of our mind that wants to control and gives the imagination something to push against.

The cards can introduce unexpected tension into a piece of writing, and they can help you move sideways when you’re stuck rather than trying to force your way forward. Both tarot and art-making involve working with fragments, intuition, and the subconscious and following the associations.

Alina: How is your own personal writing informed by your work as an editor and vice versa?

Hannah: It’s so helpful to be on both sides of the process—I have so much empathy for writers who put themselves out there and don’t hear back for months, and I also understand what it feels like to stare at a spreadsheet of 900 submissions as an editor, faced with the reality of narrowing it down to 35 selections for print. Sometimes, as an editor, a rejection is so heartbreaking because the work is devastatingly good but I just can’t accept everything I love. So as a writer, I have learned not to take a rejection personally.

As an editor, I’m paying attention to what makes a piece feel alive on the screen—voice, risk, technique. This makes me look at my own work with a critical eye, especially when I’m trying to do something unusual or let a poem unravel without a tidy resolution. Writing also informs my editorial practice—I really try to edit in a way that protects a writer’s voice. Rather than just providing line edits, I try to ask questions of the work to prompt the writer to offer up edits themselves.

Yokai Yochi Tarot by buboplague, photo by Nick Jacobs

Lexie Rose: Tell us about a food experience you’ve had that was so indulgent or weird or memorable that you could (or did) write poems about it.

Hannah: I love this question because I’m a Taurus Sun and food is such an important sensual experience for me. While I have had many indulgent and weird food experiences, I think it’s the most simple things that call me back into my body. Fresh sourdough bread and thick French butter with sea salt. A square of dark chocolate. Steam rising from a cup of chai. The smell of woodsmoke and bacon on a winter morning. As a poet, I’m trying to continuously excavate the familiar to locate memory, place, desire. That’s how writing works for me, staying with the familiar long enough that it opens into something much larger.

Lexie: How do you prepare and set up your space for optimal focus, inspiration, and creativity? Food, beverages, cozy items, music, etc.?

Hannah: I’m a very tactile person, so my office has been crafted with a lot of care to support my work and my spiritual practice, which are essentially one and the same anyway. My space is full of art made by me, my friends, my lovers, artists I admire. I have what I call my reference library full of tarot decks, books about craft and creativity, and encyclopedias about mythology and archetypes (my favorite is The Book of Symbols published by TASCHEN). I recently swapped out a couch for a piano, and will take breaks from writing to practice, which engages my brain and body in a different way and often helps me get unstuck. In fact, I take a lot of breaks to walk around the block, stretch, lay on the floor, pull tarot cards . . . I focus intensely for short bursts and then really need to give myself space to let ideas percolate. Also: I am a chronic tea drinker and need hot liquid by my side at all times when I’m writing or editing (yes, even in the summer!). And I don’t listen to ANYTHING while I am writing or editing—while I love music and used to be a music blogger back in the early 00s, I need absolute silence to hear myself.

Lexie: What’s the first poem you ever remember loving? What drew you to it?

Hannah: The first poem I became obsessed with was Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—I read it in 4th grade as part of our poetry curriculum. I think it felt immediately recognizable: the visual of spring turning into autumn is such an easy thing for a child’s brain to understand. But I also think I intuitively understood the underlying message about beauty, along with time and death. My middle name is Eve, so by the time I was 10 I was very familiar with stories about the Garden of Eden, and the reference to Eden in the poem felt like it was speaking to me directly. It says so much in so few lines. I memorized it and to this day think of it often.

Hannah Levy is a writer living in Northern California. She’s been published in ONLY POEMS, Electric Literature, Luna Luna Magazine, Gather Poets, Humana Obscura, HAD, and elsewhere. In her free time, she hikes in the redwoods, rides horses, and plays extensive make-believe games with her daughter.

Hannah is the Editor in Chief of The Rebis, a print-only literary anthology dedicated to exploring the relationship between tarot and creativity through original art, essays, fiction, and poetry. The Rebis just published its fifth anthology focused on The Moon archetype, which you can order here. They redistribute all profits to social justice orgs focused on reparations & reproductive justice.

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Alina Kalontarov is an educator and poet based in New York. She collaborates on the editorial teams of various publications and is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, ONLY POEMS, Rattlecast, and elsewhere.

Lexie Rose is a writer and poet who enjoys hiking volcanoes, collecting beach treasures, hugging donkeys in olive groves, and dreams of someday having a home in Italy. She also has a penchant for moss. Her work can be found in upcoming issues of The Rebis, Third Moon Press, and currently in SHAME/less. You can follow her on Instagram (@lexierose.writer) and on Substack ().

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post for our Substack, fill out this Google form.

For this round, we have 8 new publications to share. Enjoy!

WRJ previously published Emilie Lygren’s poems “Insights from Arthropods” (Issue 21) and “Rorschach Test, Mount Tamalpais” (Issue 28). Now, Emilie has edited an anthology of poetry from emerging and established poets, How to Get Home in the Dark: Poems on Mental Health and Healing, with foreward by Danusha Laméris.

Naomi Shihab Nye says, “A LANDMARK ANTHOLOGY!! With immense care, understanding, and affection, poet and teacher Emilie Lygren has created a gorgeous gathering of poems to help us survive our most difficult times. Who among us will not find themselves here?”

Lamp Lit has published its Summer 2026 issue, with three contributions we want to shout out. You can read Caitleen Breen Ehler’s poem “Dog’s Teeth” (pg. 12), Natalie Harveld’s poem “The Fringe Agreement” (pg. 15), and Shannon Wagoner’s analog photograph “Linger” (pg. 38).

Bottlecap Press has published Kelsey J. Austin’s prose chapbook, Domestic Disturbances, and it is now available. Bottlecap Press says, “Domestic Disturbances includes snapshot and traditional narratives where the characters are raw, the world is off-kilter, and the most intimate of relationships are fraught. In noticing and paying attention to the ordinary, the reader sees that life is anything but. Having a first-row seat to the inner worlds of these characters can be a gritty, pessimistic, sometimes humorous ride until the beauty of the human experience is found within the dark.”

Weird Lit Magazine has published Volume 3, Issue 3. You can read Kaylyssa Quinn’s short story “An Hour in 1996,” Chris J. Bahnsen’s short story “Moshing for the Dead,” and Ori Akasara’s short story “polyglass sunroof.”

Here is some praise for the pieces listed above:

“Kaylyssa Quinn gets to the heart of how we experience nostalgia in this imaginative, time-traveling piece. Part joyful memory and part mourning what’s lost, the story asks us to look at how the past lives within our present and future selves.”

“We love how freeing the unexpected elements of this piece move skillfully from a serious, lyrical discussion of grief into the pure, sublime catharsis of a mosh pit in a funeral parlor.”

—Fawn Ward, Senior Editor

“Ori Akasara plunges us into a nightmare economy that manufactures desire to keep its workers compliant. We love how the story’s body horror makes literal what capitalism, AI, and consumerism are doing to the self.”

—Dina Dwyer, Senior Editor

WRJ previously published Rebekah Chan’s piece “There Is So Much to Hold on To” (Issue 31), and it was one of our Best of the Net nominees. Now, Tahoma Literary Review has published her flash non-fiction piece, “The Rain Touches Everything.”

Here’s the opening of the piece:

This morning we walk to school hand in hand sheltered by umbrellas. Do you smell the rain? she asks. I do, I say. I have always loved the smell of rain. I look back at her as if she’s read my mind or if she’s playing a trick on me because I have always wanted a daughter who asks me: Do you smell the rain? It smells . . . she breathes in, perfect, she says.

John Tessitore has self-published American Magpie: Life and Liberal Arts. Part manifesto, part cultural criticism, part philosophy, part theory, part memoir, part literary document, American Magpie is an unapologetic defense of humanism for a rapidly dehumanizing world.

Drawing on a diversity of sources—from Dostoevsky to The Beatles, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Chuck D, from Walt Whitman to Eihei Dōgen—he describes an education that prepares us for a lifetime of chance and change, for the pursuit of every curiosity, and for the inevitable epiphanies that visit us. Most importantly, he champions the disciplines that help us fulfill our duty to understand each other and communicate across our differences.

Yankee Magazine has published Tim Loftus’ non-fiction piece, “The Old Sugar Maple,” as part of its September/October 2026 issue.

Here is the opening paragraph:

I met the sugar maple when I was 15. It was the summer of 1977, and I was working for the Youth Conservation Corps: building trails, hauling felled trees from the forest to build walkways over ecologically sensitive areas, planting hedgerows to support bird habitat. Just over the crest of a forested hill in Spencer, Massachusetts, the supervising forester pointed out the oldest tree he had seen in the area. Based on its four-foot-diameter trunk, he estimated it had started growing “probably around 1777.”

Finishing Line Press has published Camille LeFavre’s debut poetry collection, Sandstone and Kin, as part of their New Womens’ Voices Chapbook Contest. EcoLit Books says, “Sandstone and Kin is a moving and engaging poetry collection that provides a unique personal perspective on the landscapes the speaker encounters.”

Sarah Giragosian (author of Queer Fish, The Death Spiral, and Mother Octopus) adds, “A collection bursting at the seams with wild kin—coral and antlered creatures, coyotes and canyons, roadrunners and ravens, sycamores and scorpions, and the ‘ancestors/ossified in sandstone’—Sandstone and Kin is a love letter to the creatures and places that root the speaker to an oikos (or ecos). ‘I am not a tourist,’ the poet-speaker, Camille LeFevre, says of her relation to the Earth. With precision and a quality of attention both tender and funny, Sandstone and Kin is a vital guide for resituating ourselves in reciprocal relation to the more-than-human world.

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For today’s post, Hap Wilson has shared an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Snow: Finding Paradise Below Zero. It’s available for pre-order from Latitude 46 Publishing. Find out more about the author at his website: hapwilson.com.

To set the scene for the excerpt below, here’s the book’s introductory blurb:

Henry David Thoreau famously explains that he “went to the woods because [he] wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” a principle Wilson adopted when he spent a lifetime searching for answers while exploring Canada’s wilderness in all seasons.

Snow: Finding Paradise Below Zero follows Wilson on his many escapades in the dead of winter, suffering frostbite, isolation, near-death experiences, surviving six months enduring a remote winter with two infants in diapers, and as a park warden in New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

This is a deeper look into the evolution of camping gear and techniques, but more importantly, how to overcome adversity to live comfortably in the wilds of winter, to find paradise below zero.

From Snow: Finding Paradise Below Zero

Hap Wilson

*

PREAMBLE (1973)

When I woke up, there was half a foot of snow covering my sleeping bag. My tiny pole shelter wrapped with a thin canvas sheet was shaking so hard in the fierce wind, I thought it would collapse on top of me. I had just enough firewood to stoke up my trail stove and make myself a pot of oatmeal doused in hot chocolate. I was eight kilometres from the old camboose camp cabin where my friend was, snug and warm, with a good supply of food and a hot fire. I did have enough provisions for another day or so, but I didn’t know how long the blizzard would last. To stay was precarious; blizzards could last several days, and I would run out of food. On the other hand, travelling during a blizzard could also prove to be hazardous. The longer I waited, the worse any of my options were going to be. I chose to break camp and headed for the cabin and safety, the word safety being purely subjective and wholly dependent on the outcome . . . and the intensity of the storm.

We were two months out on a winter expedition in the wilderness of Temagami, making an old lumber camp cabin our home base. From there, we would go on several excursions exploring the area, camping out in a crude lean-to, warmed by a reflector fire. I was on a solo venture, one of many we took during the three months wintering eighty kilometres from the nearest town. Just a week before embarking on this winter trek, I had suffered a burst appendix, which landed me in the hospital in serious condition. Two weeks later, my friend and I were trekking across Lake Temagami, hauling a 150-pound loaded toboggan full of supplies, guns strapped on to the top of the loads, full of anticipation.

Eight kilometres of snowshoeing in the winter during a blizzard can actually feel twice as long. I tried to follow my old packed trail I had made coming into my camp, a kilometre from the main lake where the cabin was, but the fresh snow had covered all signs of my snowshoe tracks. It was wet, sticky snow that stuck menacingly to everything. Once out on the lake, I could see nothing of the far shoreline, trying desperately to follow my old trail, often getting down on my hands and knees to try to locate the packed trail. Trekking out to my solo camp, I had stayed away from the deep snow along the shore, choosing the middle of the lake where the snow was thin and windblown. Now, every time my toboggan veered off the old trail, it got mired in slush, freezing instantly; that required flipping the load over and scraping the ice off with the blade of an axe, over and over again. My snowshoes too were clogged with heavy wet snow. It was at this juncture that I believed wholeheartedly I should have stayed put and waited out the storm. Little did I know that this boreal tempest would last another three days!

I lumbered on for at least four or five hours, creeping along at a snail’s pace, shorelines invisible, the icy blast like windblown shards of glass searing my face, toboggan trace digging into my shoulder. I was getting dangerously tired. I didn’t know where or how far I had gone, and it was getting late in the day. Darkness comes early in the north in midwinter. I kept looking for a light from the cabin window, the single candle, but it never appeared. I hoped for some respite from the wind, but it only became fiercer as I tramped on, stopping every few feet to knock the ice off my snowshoes and toboggan. I knew that if I didn’t see the cabin in the next hour, I wasn’t going to make it. The cold had eaten its way to the very core of my body, and I could feel myself slipping into that fatal zone where you just want to lie down and go to sleep. Call it grit or plain fear of dying, but mind and body numb with cold, one slow step after the other, I wasn’t going to let nature beat me; I was stronger.

[Excerpt is from Snow: Finding Paradise Below Zero. ©2026 Hap Wilson. Used with the permission of Latitude 46 Publishing.]

Hap Wilson is the author of 17 nature-related books, an artist, photographer, and wilderness guide. He is the co-founder of the environmental group Earthroots, and is the recipient of the Bill Mason Award for Lifetime Achievement in River Conservation. His book Voyages: Canada’s Heritage Rivers won the Natural Resources Council of America Award for Best Environment Book, and he has written for many national magazines. He is an International Fellow of the prestigious Explorer’s Club and the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Wilson has travelled over 60,000 km by canoe and snowshoe, has been an Ontario park ranger, a New Zealand park warden, and a wilderness skills teacher for Outward Bound. On the lighter side, Wilson taught actor Pearce Brosnan how to paddle a canoe and throw an axe for the Attenborough movie Grey Owl. He currently owns and operates Cabin Falls Ecolodge with his wife Andrea in Temagami’s wilderness park.

Subscribe to see more guest posts from WRJ’s amazing contributors / Paid access includes editorial feedback for 1 poem each month, Q&A with the editor, and more.

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

For this round, we have 9 open calls to share. Enjoy!

Marrow Magazine (established in 2021) is a quarterly literary online and print magazine which publishes work that “explores dark spaces . . . writing that uses compelling language and imagery to remind us what it means to be human, that makes wonderful the plain and strange the ordinary.” The quarterly print version of Marrow is the collection of weekly online published pieces over the previous quarter.

Submit your original, unpublished fiction and nonfiction (up to 7,500 words), poetry (up to three poems), artwork (up to five images), hybrid/multimedia/other through their website. Remove all personal details from your submission document so that the manuscript appears anonymous to its in-house readers/editors. No deadline is listed, and no submission fee is required. Through Draft2Digital, Marrow is considered a paying market through a royalty share incentive for their print issues and forthcoming anthologies. For more information on this incentive, to review additional submission requirements, and read past issues of Marrow Magazine, click here.

The Adroit Journal (established in 2010) is an online quarterly literary magazine which publishes work that’s “bizarre, authentic, subtle, outrageous, indefinable, raw, [and] paradoxical” . . . work that “lives just between the land and the sky.” This is a paying publication: $100 USD for fiction and creative nonfiction contributors, and $50 for poem and issue cover art.

Send via Submittable you original, unpublished poetry (up to six poems), fiction prose and creative nonfiction (up to three pieces in one document totaling less than 6,000 words combined), and art/photography (up to six images) through October 31. Simultaneous submissions are allowed. Adroit does not charge a submission fee; however, donations are welcome through a separate tab on their website. To read past issues of Adroit, and to review additional submission requirements, click here.

Thomasonian (established in 2025) is an online literary magazine “showcasing knowledge about the natural world from the minds who pay it the most attention.” The editors of Thomasonian are looking for “poems written by biologists and nature essays written by poets, and pieces that “leave readers a bit more grounded with how our world words. And of course, any grounded suggestions on how to save the planet, too.”

Submit your original creative nonfiction (<4,000 words), informal essays (<4,000 words), poetry (up to 5 poems), photography and art (up to 5 images) to Thomasonian through the email listed on their website. Do not include name or identifying information in the body of submitted documents. While they prefer to receive unpublished manuscripts, they will consider previously published pieces. For more information, including additional submission guidelines and to read their first two issues, click here.

EcoTheo Review (established in 2013) is a quarterly print magazine and a weekly website post. “EcoTheo Collective envisions a world in which care for the places we inhabit, the people we encounter, and the lives we lead makes for lasting beauty in art, nature, and community. We pursue this vision through publications, support for creative writers, artists, and theologians, and ways of gathering that embody attention and devotion.”

For their Spring 2027 issue, submissions should respond to the theme of CYCLES. The submission window is open until October 31. Submit through Submittable; there is no reading fee. For more information on EcoTheo Review, click here.

Discretionary Love (established in 2021) is an online, monthly literary journal publishing “stories that have yielded intense joys and uncomfortable no’s.” Submissions are open for CNF (<3,000 words) , poetry (up to 5 poems, no more than 100 lines per poem), and essays (<3,000 words) until October 25 for their upcoming theme “Cheated” (from any perspective) issue. Submit your original and unpublished manuscript and third-person bio to their email listed on the webpage. Discretionary Love does not charge a submission fee although they will accept a donation. Click here for additional submission guidelines and to review previously published pieces.

Tanasi River Review is an online quarterly literary journal dedicated to publishing contemporary poetry of the intersection of people and nature. They publish on “each solstice and equinox, aligning with the seasons. Poems will appear in blog posts on full and new moon dates prior to the quarterly editions.”

Submit your unpublished poems (1-3 poems, max length 60 lines) via the email stated on their website by October 31 to be considered for the winter issue. Expected submission response time is one month. For more information, including additional submission requirements and to review past issues, click here.

The Portrait of New England is accepting poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction from writers with ties to New England until October 31. You can submit up to five poems or one piece of fiction or non-fiction per submission window, with no reading fees charged. Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but reprints of previously published pieces are not. You can submit your work in one MS Word document with an author’s bio of less than 100 words to editors@portraitne.com. See full guidelines here.

Cranked Anvil is accepting short stories and flash fiction for its quarterly flash fiction competitions and short story competitions. Flash fiction competitions take place every quarter, with deadlines on the last day of February, May, August, and November. Short story competitions also take place every quarter, with deadlines on the last day of January, April, July, and October. You can submit up to three pieces of flash fiction of a maximum word count of 500 words each and up to three short stories of 501-1,500 words each for each quarter. Stories can be any theme or genre. Entry fees are £5 for one story, £8 for two stories, and £10 for three stories. Winners for each contest receive £100, publication online, and professional audio recordings of their stories. You can email your manuscripts to crankedanvil@gmail.com after making your payments. See full guidelines here.

Hushmarrow Press is accepting horror, dark fantasy, psychological thrillers, and strange fiction short stories until November 15. You can submit one story of 500-4,000 words for free. Your story can be a simultaneous submission, but it must be previously unpublished. You can submit your story in a .docx file to submit.hushmarrow@gmail.com, and you can view submission guidelines on Hushmarrow’s Substack.

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I’m excited to share an interview with novelist B.K. O’Connor, who tells us all about her new book, Eve, which is available now.

WRJ collaborator Ashley Cundiff conducted the interview, and she offers a set of insightful questions to introduce the book’s main themes.

Here is a bit about Eve:

When Eve and Adam discover a thriving civilization in the fertile valleys of Mesopotamia, Adam is able to find peace, while Eve fights an irresistible pull further. She yearns to understand why she was created, to understand the god that made and abandoned her.

Can Eve find contentment with the vestiges of Eden that remain? Or will she dare to taste the fruit forbidden to her, once more?

In the end, Eve seeks to know the limits to her own power, to sate her hunger, once and for all. Navigating loves, betrayals, and the duties of motherhood from Nippur to the coastal city of Canaan and across the Aegean Sea to Cyprus, Eve will go as far as it takes.

Will Eve cross the threshold from dust to divinity, at last? Or will she return to the river valley, empty-handed, a fractured family left in her wake?

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Ashley: Becky, thanks so much for engaging with these questions, and greetings from a fellow Coloradan! (I’ve lived in Virginia for a good while now, but grew up west of Denver.)

I really enjoyed Eve’s fresh and surprising take on a very old narrative. What drew you to write a novel based on a biblical story, what made you choose to tell Eve’s story, in particular?

B.K.: A John Milton course in undergrad (paired with a decline in my own faith) drew me to rewrite Genesis. In this Milton course, I had to memorize 90 lines of Paradise Lost, and I chose the 90 lines where Eve contemplates the fruits before her. As she considered, her logic was infallible: “Good unknown sure is not had, or had and yet unknown is as not had at all. In plain then, what forbids he but to know? Forbids us to be good? Forbids us to be wise? Such prohibitions bind not.”

Milton, despite his patriarchal values and puritan Protestant faith, understood that Eve was set up. To me, in these lines, Eve went from a weak, tempted harbinger of sin to a brave heroine, refusing blind allegiance. When I was 21, I got a tattoo of William Blake’s illustration of Milton’s forbidden fruits on my wrist—still the only tattoo I have 14 years later—so that I would remember to take the fruit, especially the ripest, out-of-reach fruits we are told not to take by men who claim the power of a single, distant god.

Ashley: The novel begins in an unexpected place—not with Eve’s creation or her fall from grace, but with the birth her first child, Cain. What led you to choose this birth as a launching point for Eve’s story?

B.K.: This is Eve’s creative power. God is a woman! The moment she gives birth to Cain is the moment she understands God as Evil. There is no way God could’ve loved Eve the way she loved Cain and refused to answer her questions, and ignore her callings.

God’s body didn’t break to form us. If God loved us, he would teach us, open our minds, guide our hands to the fruits of enlightenment. And many ancient iterations of the story of the Tree of the Knowledge and Good and Evil do just that! A goddess comes down and freely offers the fruits of wisdom to man.

I am both a mother and a teacher, and I know that presence, awakening, and care are non-negotiable pieces of motherhood and mentorship. No amount of mental gymnastics like “God gives his toughest soldiers the heaviest loads,” or “Hard times and God’s silence help people grow wise and strong,” or “God allows pain and distance so people learn to help themselves and others” can excuse God’s silence when people need him the most. This is not a benevolent creator.

People who love you are there. If he loved us, he wouldn’t demand blind allegiance. He would teach, he would enlighten, he would turn us away from the shadows of the cave, into the wide world.

Ashley: I was intrigued to find that Eve is written in an omniscient third person and that the narration gives insight into the thoughts and motivations not just of Eve, but of other characters—among them Adam, God, and Lucifer—as well. Why was it important to allow perspectives beyond Eve’s own into the novel?

B.K.: So Eve is a feminist, narrative response to Paradise Lost (also written in an omniscient third person). Adam in his loneliness/rejection, Lucifer in his righteous indignation, God in his cruel distance—Milton renders his characters all so vividly alive and human and messy, leading the reader to question the way we all interact with the mysteries of existence, the battle of good and evil, and the murky moral grays. In this, I follow Milton’s example, but I did change the volume and focus of the POV toward Eve’s story, who I found to be the central character as the Mother of Creation.

Ashley: The prose in the novel is very beautiful, with short, uncomplicated phrasing and language that is highly descriptive but not flowery. Did this voice come naturally as you drafted the novel, or was it a result of experimentation and cultivation?

B.K.: I became a writer via travel journalism, so this is how I’ve been trained: clear, evocative, and vivid, but sparse and to the point. But I also believe part of the uncomplicated phrasing comes from my day job: a teacher of young, *becoming* adults. I spend my days in classrooms with blooming minds and curious, lonely, anxious becoming hearts, and it is always crucial for me to challenge the students in my room, but give them points of access and reliability to Shakespeare, etc. It is important for me to say it in ways that can be heard; a decipherable message can affect change. Obviously, this novel is for adults, but I think it has found a home with teens and young adult voyagers out into the world that I didn’t expect.

Ashley: I always love to hear the story of a book’s creation, and Eve has me especially curious given its rich mixture of history, mythology, and imagination. Would you be willing to share a bit about your writing process and experiences in forming this novel?

B.K.: In my younger years, I dreamed of writing books, but, over the years, I was encouraged to become something more practical (hence the travel journalism and teaching).

As a teacher, I was considering how to differentiate a narrative unit, and I thought it would be fun to offer a NaNoWriMo (monthly writing challenge) to any interested student. 60 students signed up! It became a very big thing. The students set goal of 9,000 words for the month. I set 40,000 for myself (the adult recommendation).

I needed something to write a novel about and Eve came to me, her lines still alive and well in my mind. Though, initially, my Eve was a more YA-friendly heroine who began to glow as she took the fruits, but as she evolved, she became my own rule breaker, my own reclamation of the mother and the seeker of wisdom.

At this point in time, I was a mother of a 2- and 4-year-old, and I had lost any sense of myself as an individual between the sleepless nights, grading papers, etc. But, to achieve this massive word count goal, I started waking up at 4 am to write and, six years later, I haven’t stopped. (I’ve since discovered there are many of us, working moms and writers who find our space here before the sun rises, including Sylvia Plath, and I never stopped.)

Ashley: We like to end interviews with some active inspiration for our readers. Would you be willing to share a writing prompt, exercise, or practice they could engage with?

B.K.: It’s the word sprints for me. It’s the 20 minute sprint, the Pavlovian candy rewards, and the room full of writers to do it with. I wrote mornings alone and weekends with my middle school students at the local library, and now I’m meeting writing colleagues at dive bars in Brooklyn for sprints at late hours. The timer and the go. It’s how I block out the world and spill.

A prompt: What can’t you have? Imagine that yours. You took it. What changes? What can be?

B.K. O’Connor is an educator and author. With over a decade of travel writing for award-winning publications, B.K. has roamed extensively, honing a curious, passionate voice–seeking to know and understand the world through its stories. O’Connor has a B.A. in English from University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. in English Studies from Arizona State University.

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Hello Friends,

Last week, we released Wild Roof Journal’s Fall 2026 issue.

For this week’s post, I’d like to share a few pieces from the new issue, as well as offer a re-introduction as part of the Li…

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post for our Substack, fill out this Google form.

For this round, we have 8 new publications to share. Enjoy!

Sontag Mag has published Volume 8. You can read Laura Sackton’s poem “Spring Ephemeral/s,” SM Stubbs’ poem “Pre-Flight Instructions,” and Dennis Hinrichsen’s poem “Barren Form.”

Here is a passage from Aiman Tahir Khan’s “Letter from the Editor”:

“As I’ve been editing this volume of Sontag Mag, my last before I step down as associate editor, I’ve been thinking about this idea, attributed to Camus, that the misery and greatness of this world is that it offers no truth, only objects for love.

The poets in this volume have found many such objects. Spring flowers, aging fathers, lakes that hold echoes, wands, hands, children. Reading about the solitary and pure cry of an ugly bird, I can almost hear it in my own garden, and I think how fortunate we are for these reminders that something other than ourselves is real. Murdoch got there before me, of course: “Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

Josephine Quarterly has published its Summer 2026 issue. You can read Shannon Kearns’ poem “House of Forgetting” and Amanda Rabadeux’s poem “Love in the time of heat waves.”

Here are the opening lines from Amanda Rabadeux’s poem:

I admit, I'm afraid
our days are combustible

I avoid matches,
heavy machinery

and ask, instead, for your softest sound
I'll love you tomorrow

you tell me today
the sun is screaming

possibilities collapse
like oceans

ghosts of trees fill the sky
and the thermostat's broken at 103°

Still Point Arts Quarterly has published its Fall 2026 issue, themed around “The Many Meanings of Photography.” You can read Hecate Foley’s essay “Photographic Evidence” (pg. 16-21) and Beth Jacobs’ poem “Family Photo” (pg. 32).

Door Is A Jar Literary Magazine has published Issue 40, its final issue after 11 years. WRJ previously published J.I. Kleinberg’s visual poems “breath is Ocean” and “living” (Issue 21) and “the refuge of place” (Issue 32). You can now see her latest visual poem “First.” You can also read Marc Janssen’s poem “Against the Sky.”

Digital and print copies are available to purchase.

Susan Long has had three recent publications. Litmosphere has published her short story, “John-John,” while Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal has published her short story, “Cack and The Big White Cadillac,” in their Spring 2026 issue (pg. 59-67). Four Tulips Lit Mag published her short story, “Mountain Mermaid,” naming it as a finalist in their “Out At Sea” contest.

Here is the opening to “Mountain Mermaid”":

The myth of the Mountain Mermaid may have originated in the landlocked mountains of West Virginia with early settlers who migrated from the British Isles in the 1800s. Many of these seafaring men claimed their ancestors could be traced back thousands of years, which, whether true or not, they seemed to legitimately believe.

With the ocean more than four-hundred miles from West Virginia, these men, many of whom labored in coal mines or on railroads, reminisced about the glory of the seas back home. During lunch breaks, they spun tall tales of six-legged monsters that rose up out of the sea and toppled ships, the few survivors describing their own heroics, which included beheading the creatures.

Many also talked about mermaids, their beauty and their danger. There was no mermaid more beautiful or dangerous than one dubbed the “Mountain Mermaid.” According to legend, she was captured off the Isle of Skye and smuggled to the Appalachians in an elaborate fish tank built by her captor, William Campbell.

Angelina Danae is launching From the Hand’s first personal essay contest. She will judge all submissions, and one winner will receive $100 and publication in From the Hand. You can submit one previously unpublished personal essay of 800-1,000 words on Google Forms for free.'

Finishing Line Press has published Nicole Zwolinski’s full-length poetry compilation, Motherhead.

“Motherhead is a love song to mothers. In Zwolinski’s first full-length poetry collection, she barely scrapes the surface of all things motherhood, but the writing peels back the skin to reveal the nerves and the often-unseen experiences of motherhood. In a world saturated with the joy and beauty of being a mother, Motherhead pulls the curtain aside for the nitty gritty reality of it. This exposes the utter strength and resilience of mothers—they truly are the unsung heroes of our society.

Motherhead is encouragement for mothers in the depth of it all. It’s a balm for those suffering from: mom-guilt, feeling touched-out, exhausted from pressure to bounce back, the constant ticker-tape of to-do lists running like a soundtrack, and so much more. Motherhead isn’t a guidebook, but the poetry packages up mothering and delivers it with a bow.”

iExile has published Mark LaMonda’s poem “The World is So Small.”

Here is a snippet of the poem:

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Hello Friends,

It’s time to announce Wild Rood Journal’s Fall 2026 issue. Special thanks to Mindy Wara for this issue’s cover art!

Along with the issue’s introductory note, I’ve included a poem, as well as the issue PDF (and the extra bits for paid subscribers). As always, the issue can be viewed online at wildroofjournal.com.

As a paid subscriber, you get a free submission for our upcoming issues and editorial feedback on 1 poem per month. And it’s a great way to support what we do as an independent publisher!

Our introductory note is written by Amanda Emilio. Amanda contributes the poem “In Praise of Przewalski’s Horses” to this issue. She is a musician and writer from Long Island, New York, and she is a reader for Epiphany. Her recent publication credits include Amethyst Review, Overgrowth, shoegaze literary, and Gather.

~

It is mid-September here on Long Island. I am listening to the faint dissonance of cricket song and noticing that dusk is deepening nearer to full-night sooner and sooner as each day inches closer to autumn. I’ve always enjoyed the strange in-betweenness that this small window of time has to offer; the cool evening air signals summer’s departure, yet the days’ pleasant warmth tricks me into believing we have more than enough sun-filled hours left ahead. It’s the best of both seasons—nostalgia and anticipation—commingling to create a fleeting middle ground. Within this issue of Wild Roof Journal, you will find writers and artists broadening the scope of this transient space, inviting us to consider its discomforts as well as its beauty.

Kat Zagaria does just this in “Horizons,” where motherhood is like a fulcrum upon which identity tilts, in constant flux: “I am acutely aware of our liminality. Its uncertainty grips me. I falter under the weight of expectations: society’s, my child’s, and my own. But sometimes, for one glorious moment, I am in balance, till it is gone again.” And in Rebecca Keith’s poem “White Flowers Like Phonographs,” there is an ephemeral quality to familiarity, to its state of sweet stasis: “Sometimes / there is a breeze. Sometimes it’s that wet city blanket / we would drive into or leave behind / for as long as we could get away / but always return, garbage rising from the pavement / to greet us.” These pieces have reminded me that life itself is circular and nothing in this world is permanently affixed; there is only nowness and how little of it we can truly command.

Nature can often be our greatest teacher when it comes to putting the art of such surrender into practice. In Hikari Leilani Miya’s poem, the elements are sentient beings, inspiring us to reconfigure our relationship with the unknown: “swamp stops asking where all the time has drained. stops asking / why the rivers bleeding away from them have stopped flowing — / water has once again begun to trickle over parched roots, dried veins.”

Mirroring this motif, in Christy Umberger’s poem “Mountain-Cold Clarity,” faith becomes a revelatory act of yielding to the wilderness in order to trust and pause: “The creek pulls me like it pulls itself. Today, I’m obedient: / stopping, even as I fight a tightness in my belly to leave. . . . I have no reason not to sit. I want to sit. Why / have I always done the thing I don’t want to do?”

There is also a pattern of suspension, absence, and a longing for a reality that is “other” to the one being lived in. Echoing this, Sarah Weir’s photographs feature bodiless dresses, appearing to me as memories fashioned like ghosts: semi-present, yet wholly gone.

Throughout Issue 35 we are transported by heartfelt honesty and dreamlike images to realms that teeter and cling, journey far and yearn for home again. The writers and artists featured in these pages capture the inscrutable feelings of life spent at the threshold, reimagining potentials in vivid worlds that exist just beyond the borders of limitations and beliefs.

While reading this issue of Wild Roof Journal, I hope you feel a restored sense of connection to the collective experience as I have. As Heather Swan writes, “suddenly I am a particle / in the cascade of earthly change, minuscule, / and yet still capable of wonder and applause.”

Happy reading,

Amanda Emilio

From Issue 35:

“Diary of a Household Vessel (1)” by Sarah Weir

Melina Charis

car wash

the man I paid to come to my house
to wash my car told me he found
a dead bird in my trunk.

fossilized. probably been dead
about two weeks.

I quickly look up how long it takes
for a trapped bird to die
and read that it can be as quick
as two hours if the car was hot.

or it can take

much longer.

I don’t know if I should
apologize or pay him
extra for the mess
of death.

is that the strangest thing
you’ve ever found in a car? 

I don’t know which answer
to hope for.

I find dead birds
more often than you’d think.

I wonder what he did with it
when he found it.

he didn’t tell me.

I didn’t ask.

*

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Check out the rest of the issue on the Wild Roof Journal website here or click the button below to download the PDF directly.

Issue 35 PDF

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For today’s post, Frances Boyle has shared an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Skin Hunger. It’s available for pre-order from Guernica Editions.

In addition, Frances is a previous WRJ contributor, with the poem “He that shines in the dark” appearing in Issue 31.

To set the scene for the excerpt below, here’s the book’s introductory blurb:

Rowan Shea has spent her life looking for warmth and comfort. After losing her job as a vet tech, Rowan finds a renewed sense of belonging and direction when she falls in with a group of animal rights activists and moves into their ramshackle farm on the outskirts of Vancouver.

Soon, impatient with their inaction and petty disputes, Rowan forges new friendships and creates her own opportunities for protest, until she learns that the activists are targeting a university lab performing experiments on rhesus monkeys—and considering more extreme action.

In another time and another place, Rowan’s mother, Evie, struggles with the conviction that her very essence will harm her delicate baby. After numerous stays in a psychiatric hospital, Evie becomes convinced that her daughter is better off without her cursed touch. Lonely yet wary of forging deep connections, Evie undertakes the challenge of building a new life on her own terms.

Skin Hunger tells the story of a mother and daughter, starved for nurturing and compassion, as they struggle to find a home in the world, one that, despite decades apart, might bring them back together.

From Skin Hunger

Frances Boyle

Author’s Commentary:

This scene appears around the mid-point of Skin Hunger. Rowan, one of the two protagonists, has gone from attending animal rights protests to being a part of one small illegal action, and is keen to take on a larger role. She did much of the groundwork and scouting behind the raid in this scene, “liberating” chickens from at a factory farm in rural British Columbia.

She has been kept somewhat in the dark about the details of the raid, and relegated to a lesser role than she hoped for. Lenka, Brayden and Gregor are long-time members of the activist group while Deirdre is a new member who has, frustratingly for Rowan, been given greater responsibility than Rowan.

Excerpt:

Rowan gripped the wheel as, headlights off, she eased the car along an access road that ran perpendicular to the main road, a side of Faraday’s farm opposite the office building. The crunch of gravel under the station wagon’s tires sounded awfully loud. But then so did her swallowing, and every movement of Brayden, Deirdre and Gregor with her in the car.

Rowan didn’t like driving, was always a little too nervous. Her father had said he wouldn’t waste money on the high school driver training course, so he taught her himself. She could still hear his voice telling her to “shoulder check dammit” and “accelerate around the curve,” the tremble of exasperation at her incompetence always in his voice. She’d never had regular use of a car, so she’d never become comfortable with driving.

She might not be the best getaway driver but, grateful to be part of this plan, she fought down her anxiety. Lenka had told Rowan their liberation raid was happening. “It’s better you don’t know which night though,” she said. Rowan wasn’t sure why, and chafed at the lack of trust.

Every night she’d turned in early, ready to be called upon. But she found herself tossing and turning, startling at every slight noise, even the regular sounds of Whitney’s light snore and Brooke’s raspy breath from the other side of the cabin.

Now, she pulled as close to the fence as she could, and waited while the others crossed the field to the barn. The moon sat low on the horizon. Purple clouds streaked its face, drifted and tangled. As the light faded, the clouds drifted further to let the moon emerge, a snake from a charmer’s basket. They had a good idea of the farm layout thanks to the details Rowan had observed, and what she’d learned from Kyle about the schedule for the security service that cruised by the farms in the area.

The fifteen or twenty minutes the others were inside the long barn seemed like hours. Rowan tapped out a rhythm on the steering wheel, only recognizing slowly that the song it belonged to was “Desperado.” She stopped herself, got out of the car.

Rowan’s chest was tight from anxiety, tight from the pollen drifting on the air, the cottonwood fluff, her boots catching burrs of burdock. Another eternity, standing in the ditch, leaning on the rail fence. Close by the gate, the stretch by the road, the white rails gleamed faintly in the dimness as the sliver of moon. She shifted from foot to foot.

Finally, distant tails of light emerged. The train of flashlight beams pointed low to the ground reflected against the dull red of the barn. She could make out the three figures of Brayden, Deirdre and Gregor, just shadows bobbing cautiously across the side field, the boxes they carried appearing as paler squares. Deirdre’s and Gregor’s faces were two smaller pale blobs; Brayden’s darker face blended into the shadows.

Rowan turned on the engine, left the car in park and returned to the fence. She was up to her calves in weeds, standing in daisies and those tall purple flowers she’d not yet learned the name of. Brayden hoisted a squawking box over the top rung. It was waist-high for him, but level with her chest. Puffing, Rowan struggled to balance it, with the chickens shifting inside.

Brayden leapt the fence and helped her load the box into the car. The two of them went back to the fence and took boxes from Deirdre and Gregor as they arrived. It was cumbersome, with the birds shifting and throwing their weight around inside, raising dander and feather fluff.

The box on Deirdre’s lap blocked the side mirrors. Rowan could see nothing but cardboard in her rear-view. Cardboard dust and the allergens from the chicken clogged her windpipe. Rowan edged slowly back onto the access road and hesitated, wheezing, at the intersection of the concession road.

Gregor leaned forward. “Rowan! Get a move on!”

It felt like someone was sitting on her chest. Rowan turned off the ignition. She rolled down the window, but the air was full of pollen. She could still breathe, but it was like sipping oxygen through a straw.

On the opposite side of the road, headlight beams made silhouettes of the trees. A vehicle approaching. Rowan still couldn’t drive, panic closing in on her as much as the asthma.

“Is that a fucking RCMP cruiser? What the hell, Rowan, why didn’t you get us farther away from the farm?” Deirdre tried to slide over to take Rowan’s place in the driver’s seat but was pinned down by the box.

Rowan scrabbled in her bag and grasped her puffer. The police would call their rescue theft, and breaking and entering. She really might be going to jail.

The vehicle passed their intersection, but then made a U-turn and headed back toward them.

“Ohh, we’re in the shit, now.” Brayden, level-voiced and mild even in a crisis. The inhaler was working, Rowan could breathe a little easier, but now her pulse pounded in her temples. Deirdre and Gregor looked as though they might ditch the car and run.

The vehicle was getting closer. Rowan’s heart pounded; she would have liked to run too.

But it was only a pickup truck, a young guy driving. He waved and drove on once they reassured him that their ignition trouble was temporary. The car headlights back on, Rowan was still shaky, her knuckles tight against the wheel.

Every shadow at the side of the road was a deer. She slammed on the brakes, thinking one was actually about to leap in front of the car. Deirdre swore, and Gregor urged her to take it easy as he righted the squawking box he was holding.

Rowan let out a sigh and forced her shoulders down from around her ears as she steered into the yard at the ranch. She backed the station wagon up to the repaired chicken coops behind the barn.

[From Skin Hunger © 2026 by Frances Boyle. Used with permission of Guernica Editions.]

Frances Boyle is the author of Seeking Shade, short stories, Tower, a Rapunzel-channeling novella, and three well-received poetry collections. Her volunteering includes Arc Poetry Magazine, The League of Canadian Poets, and Ottawa’s VERSeFest poetry festival. Raised in Saskatchewan, Frances has long lived in Ottawa. Skin Hunger is her first novel.

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

For this round, we have 7 open calls to share. Enjoy!

The Good Life Review (established in 2020) is an online journal published four times per year. Their mission is to “lift up the strange, the daring, and the underrepresented to reveal complexities hidden in our heartland and beyond. We seek to elevate writing that takes risks and challenges perceptions; writing that lingers and haunts long after the last line.”

Submit your original, previously uncurated, and AI-free poetry (up to 5 poems / 10 pages), flash fiction and flash CNF (400 to 1,000 words), fiction and CNF (1,000 to 5,000 words) by September 20 to be considered for the winter 2027 issue. Reading fees are $2.50 USD for flash fiction/CNF and $4.00 for poetry, fiction, and CNF. This is a paying market ($60 USD per published piece; $75 for two poems). Submit through Submittable. Click here for more information on The Good Life Review, including additional submission guidelines and access to previous issues.

The Third Wheel is accepting poetry, prose, essays, hybrid pieces, and visual art pieces until October 31st for its second issue, “The Forever Foreigner.” Your work can touch upon being positioned between places and identities, exploring migration, exile, and emotional limbo. The Third Wheel is a magazine dedicated to literature in translation, so the editors are particularly interested in pieces that explore translation itself as a form of displacement.

You can submit translations of up to three poems of no more than 10 pages in total, one prose piece of up to 5,000 words, up to three pieces of flash fiction of no more than 3,000 words, and up to two pieces of creative non-fiction of no more than 5,000 words. You can also submit up to six artworks. All pieces must be a .doc file and sent to submit@thethirdwheel.org. You can view additional submission guidelines here.

Dreamers Creative Writing (established in 2017) is a Canadian-based tri-yearly print magazine with a weekly email newsletter containing “just the right amount of heartfelt writing.” Throughout the year, Dreamers webpage publishes stories, poems, essays, news and information. Their print magazine is “filled from front to back with writing that is from the heart.” They are looking for original, unpublished short pieces (15-2500 words) of stories, poems, personal essays or excerpts (that stand alone) from any genre of writing,” especially if that writing has a connection to narrative medicine, medical memoir, writing the self, and healing writing.

General submission is open year-round. Check their guidelines for submission dates for the several contests they host. Dreamers pays a one-time honorarium between $20 and $60 CAD for work published on their website. The general submission fee is $3, or $10-$20 depending on the contest category. For more information on Dreamers Creative Writing, including submission guidelines, a review of previously published pieces, articles on the writing craft, and more, click here.

Bateau Press is accepting chapbooks for its BOOM Chapbook Contest until October 5th. You can submit one chapbook of poetry, prose, hybrid pieces, and other media of between 20 and 30 pages for $16. Everyone who enters will receive a copy of the winning chapbook. One winner will receive $250 and 25 copies of their chapbook. You can submit your work on Submittable.

Six Word Wonder is accepting submissions that are exactly six words long until September 30th. You can submit up to five six-word stories, memoirs, jokes, or poems for free. One winner will receive $100, and shortlisted entries will be published in an anthology. Your entries can be in American or British English, but they must be original work. You can submit your work and find prompts on the Six Word Wonder website.

Fins Like Arms (established in 2026) is an online independent journal of short fiction. Their inaugural issue is due out in October and they expect to be on a quarterly publication schedule. Fins Like Arms focuses on “deconstructing the boundary between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction [with a] mission to publish stories that offer the aesthetic inventiveness associated with great literature, but which also eschew the monotony and tedium that modern high-brow fiction often wears as a badge.”

Submit your original, unpublished, and AI-free story (1,000 to 40,000 words) via email to finslikearms@gmail.com. Submissions for visual are are requested as well. For more information on Fins Like Arms, including additional submission guidelines, click here.

Odd Lobster (established in 2026) is an online lit mag with two issues already under its belt. They publish poetry (submit up to two poems), nonfiction and fiction (both <1500 words). This new venue expects to publish eight pieces each season that “implicitly inspires something deep, similarly to the Japanese concept of Yūgen” (a sense of profound, mysterious depth).

There is no reading/submission fee. Submit your original, AI-free manuscript to oddlobsters@gmail.com. For more information on Odd Lobster and to read past issues, click here.

Paid subscription includes editorial feedback for 1 poem per month, access to the full archive of posts, and more!

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Vaishnavi Pusapati

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Venezuela

Teams continue to search
as a new Monday struck
the north central region of Venezuela.
Homes, businesses, schools, hospitals:
in the aftermath
of the Venezuela earthquakes.
Affected people sustained
the heaviest losses.
On the ground,
no account for losses.
On the ground:
The search for survivors
as death toll surpasses 1,400.
Children sleep under tarpaulins.
A week after earthquakes tore through,
the risk of disease outbreaks
is rising fast.
Venezuela continues…

This poem began as a United Nations report on the Venezuelan earthquakes. It was never meant to be poetry. It was written to inform. Yet, somewhere beneath the facts and figures, another story was waiting. All I had to do was notice it. That is what blackout poetry feels like to me. It is less about writing a poem than uncovering one.

Whenever I go a long time without writing, I find myself asking the same two questions. What should I write about? What are the right words for that feeling?

Blackout poetry effectively removes both obstacles. The subject is already there. The words are already there. Your only task is to pay attention.

Blackout poetry is a form of found poetry in which most of a page is erased or blacked out, leaving behind only the words that form a new poem. The finished piece rarely summarizes the original text, and more often, it reveals an entirely different message. A news article becomes an elegy. A scientific report becomes a love poem. A travel brochure becomes a meditation on loneliness. The original meaning fades while another slowly emerges.

The beauty of blackout poetry is that it asks you to stop reading for information and start reading for possibility.

Choosing the Right Source Text

If you’re trying blackout poetry for the first time, begin with a long piece of prose. Newspapers, magazine features, reports, essays, and old books all work well. I usually avoid poetry because another poet’s rhythms can be difficult to escape. Prose gives me more room to wander.

One of the mistakes beginners make is reading every sentence carefully. Do the opposite: skim. I let my eyes drift across the page until a word catches my attention. Sometimes it is an unusual verb or a striking noun. Occasionally it is a completely ordinary word that suddenly feels important to connect the words before and after.

Trust that instinct.

Finding Anchor Words

Anchor words are the words that hold the poem in place. They are usually ones that surprise you. They carry emotional weight or simply refuse to let you move past them.

Don’t search for beautiful words. Search for interesting ones. Verbs often make wonderful anchors because they create movement. Nouns establish images. Sometimes an ordinary word becomes powerful simply because of the company it keeps.

I remember one of my earliest blackout poems beginning with the word “fugitive” from a newspaper article. It fascinated me because I would never have chosen it myself. That single word became the doorway to an entirely unexpected poem. If I had sat down in front of a blank page, I doubt I would have found it.

Once you’ve found an anchor word, ask yourself one question: What belongs beside this? Then keep scanning the page. Resist the urge to force a poem early. Let one word lead naturally to the next.

As more words begin to gather, you’ll often notice an emotional thread connecting them. Follow it. It usually knows where the poem is going long before you do.

One of the liberating things about blackout poetry is that you do not have to follow the original order of the text. You can begin at the bottom of the page, skip whole paragraphs, or jump between columns. Some poets draw arrows before blacking out the page. Others highlight the chosen words or cut across the surrounding text. There is no single correct method.

One of my blackout poems came from a page of Girl, Interrupted. I wasn’t searching for a particular theme. I simply opened the book and waited for a few words to interrupt me. They did.

As I followed those words across the page, the original narrative slowly disappeared. That has become one of my favorite parts of blackout poetry. It reminds me that creativity is not always about producing new words.

The title can come from the source text or from you. I usually wait until the poem has finished speaking before deciding what to call it.

A Five-Minute Exercise

If you’re completely stuck, set a timer for five minutes.

Print an article or pull a newspaper from the recycling bin. Circle ten words that interest you before trying to connect any of them. Don’t worry if they seem unrelated. Think of yourself as collecting shells rather than building a castle. Once you have enough pieces, the shape of the poem often appears on its own.

Listening Instead of Performing

People often ask why blackout poetry helps with writer’s block. I think it changes the conversation we have with ourselves.

When we face a blank page, we expect ourselves to produce something original, polished, and meaningful all at once. That expectation is enough to silence many writers before they begin.

A page full of existing words removes that pressure. Instead of inventing, you are discovering. Instead of forcing language onto the page, you are listening for language that is already there. Curiosity quietly replaces performance.

I often finish a blackout poem before I understand why I chose those particular words. It is only days later that I realized that the poem has been circling something I hadn’t consciously put into language. Because the words are borrowed, my inner critic becomes less active.

Perhaps that is why blackout poetry feels like such an effective way of reaching the creative subconscious. It slips past the part of the mind that wants every sentence to be perfect. Instead, it invites surprise.

Before You Begin

• Choose prose text rather than poetry.

• Skim before you read closely.

• Circle the words that make you pause.

• Build your poem around one or two anchor words.

• Let curiosity lead you.

• Black out everything else.

The next time writing feels impossible, don’t wait for inspiration to arrive. Pick up yesterday’s newspaper. Tear a page from an old magazine. Print an article that interests you.

You may not find the poem you expected.

However, you may find the one that has been waiting for you all along.

(Or perhaps you don’t even need to look beyond this page.)

You might discover that hidden inside an essay about blackout poetry is a poem neither of us knew was there.

Photo by Toa Heftiba

Vaishnavi Pusapati is a physician and poet whose work has appeared in Prole, IHRAM Press anthologies, InkPantry, redrosethorns magazine, The Brussels Review, Presence, and Poetry Pea, among others. She conducts Haiku and Blackout Poetry workshops as well. She has been longlisted for the Touchstone Award and the Gotham microfiction contest, and she was shortlisted for the Welkin Prize in 2025.

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I’m excited to share a new piece by Marin Smith, Co-Founder and Editorial Director of Abraxas Review. See our interview with Marin and her partner-in-lit, Savannah Anderson, here:

Please find more about Abraxas Review and submission information at the end of this post. Their current submission window is open until November 30.

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Diving

Marin Smith

It’s morning and I’m on the couch. A child pads out from his room, hair anemonied, and his sister is close behind. My husband offers to refill my coffee. No matter how deep I had plunged—into a black-sludged pond or the rush of an icy river—I climb out of the water and dry my face. Whatever I was about to see in the murk or whatever may have wrapped itself around my ankles has instead floated away.

Writing happens in dips like this—dips and toweling off, sometimes many times a day. It calls for long hours, the unspooling of the taskmaster mind. Tea, undisturbed, in the corner of the house, the sun either rising or setting (but certainly not the full glare of day), and any season but summer, with all its cluttered, washed-out heat. For me, it’s the dark time of year. To write, I must be unobserved—even, somehow, by my own self. I must almost pretend not to write in order to write anything tolerable; I must attempt to care less while also caring about it most, at least compared to enrolling in autopay or examining the upcoming academic calendar or looking at new recipes. Writing doesn’t like the house being remodeled across the street, the air filled with clattering junk, or the guttural laughing of the contractors. Writing prefers inbox zero. Writing likes substances, but only just the right amount: caffeine, wine. Writing, as I get older, hates routine and demands spontaneity, which is, frankly, annoying.

The catch is that writing also needs a tremendous amount of living to occur in order for there to be anything at all to write about. A writer needs to engage with and bathe in the world, as Wordsworth reminds us, to get that “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” We’re talking living here: taking odd jobs, becoming a parent or not, becoming a pet owner or not, traveling or staying put, activating the body and circumstances you’re born into and documenting it all. Living doesn’t have to mean riding wild horses—living could be observing a snail eat a piece of lettuce. Whatever it is, it must immerse you. There’s no better source material than immersion, whether you’re writing sci-fi smut or haiku.

Wordsworth continues: the writer must think long and hard, and feelings need to be “recollected in tranquility.” Lucky for Wordsworth, traipsing around the English countryside lonely as a cloud, etc. Meanwhile, PING calls my phone: a newsletter, shipping notification, a sale, an old friend. God forbid: breaking news. The phone isn’t always to blame. If I’ve plunged in, there are plenty of other disturbances on the water’s surface: my body grows restless, the dishwasher needs emptying, and everyone will be clamoring for dinner soon. Sometimes I take a gulp of writing and hold it in my mouth as I surface, in hopes that I can keep it there till next I’m at the page. Sometimes I swallow it, and if I’m lucky, it comes up later. But sometimes it passes right through me and out, the moment lost.

I cast my laptop aside to embrace my sleepy children and take a warm mug in my hands. Here I find some solace from Mary Oliver: “Things take the time they take.” I come up for air and must trust that the writing within me is loosened for some future time—stolen hours after my children sleep again, or just after they are off to school, or when the sun is slanted just so, or the caffeine has aroused me, or the wine has warmed me, or the autumn fire crackles, or the winter snows start, or the spring wind blows in—only then may I—again and again—dive in.

Photo courtesy of the author

From the editors: We seek poetry, prose, and visual art that cracks the egg.

That means work with arresting emotional impact that’s achieved not by contrived figurative language, but that surprises while serving a larger purpose. Send us your work that is authentic without being performative, that’s experimental without being pretentious, and speaks to the humanity in all of us. Challenging genres and pushing boundaries is great fun, but we look for writing that’s inviting and accessible for an everyday reader. Get fancy, get weird, have fun—but do it with purpose!

When reviewing submissions, we break down what we are searching for into three main qualities:

• Candor: We love to publish work from writers that are unafraid to take an honest look at themselves. This kind of vulnerability creates a sense of intimacy and immediacy that is irresistible. Bonus points for a bit of humor; we love to laugh.

• Intellectual curiosity: We like to think of writing as not only an artifact, but as an act of intellectual exploration. We are drawn to pieces that allow you to feel as if you are part of the journey. We look for work that surprises us with moments of insight or levity. These submissions are often organic in form and content.

• Neo-Romantic themes: We publish a lot of prose and poetry in which writers connect to the world around them through astute observations and concrete images. There is something powerful about finding meaning and beauty in the mundane.

See full submission guidelines here

Marin Smith is a wordwrangler, poet, essayist, mother, and an Enneagram 4. She has an MA in English from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and her work has been published in MER Literary, Milk Art Journal, Literary Mama, Split Rock Review, Oregon English Journal, CALYX Journal, DEHP Journal, and others. She is Co-Editor of Abraxas Review. You’ll find her in the garden, coffee in hand, or connect with her at marinsmithwrites.wordpress.com.

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Our new guest post comes to you from writer and previous WRJ contributor Christy Umberger. You can find her poem “How to Find Your Purpose” in Issue 29.

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I’m a Writer and a Recovering Perfectionist

Christy Umberger

I’ve learned to turn to nature as a guide for my creative practices, but I haven’t always found a beautiful balance in my creativity.

I’m a writer who identifies as a “recovering perfectionist”—a term popularized by Brené Brown, which resonated with me as soon as I heard it. Perfectionism for me means being too hard on myself, which can extend to over-challenging myself, putting too-high expectations on myself, or being overly regimented.

As a writer, sometimes disciplined practice in my creative endeavors can counter perfectionism in a beautiful way, but other times, disciplined practices can cause my perfectionism to flare up in an activating, stressful way. Thankfully, I’ve learned—and continue to learn—how to dance with these different forces in my creative life.

When discipline helps me recover from perfectionism

In the past, I’ve employed self-imposed daily challenges—usually a month long, or once, a year long—that have gotten me out of my perfectionist brain. Forcing myself to write every day meant I had to escape my overthinking brain to get words on the page.

For example, for a month, I’d write a haiku poem every day and then share it on social media. With enough practice, I re-trained my perfectionist brain to write a poem more quickly instead of waiting for the perfect starting point. And to share it much faster, rather than editing on an endless loop before feeling like it was good enough.

Recently, I’ve been writing every day again, as I attempt to write a first draft of a novel for the first time. Daily writing (usually ~30 mins) feels necessary to chip away at this big project. And it helps me prioritize getting words on the page, rather than writing “perfectly.”

Photos courtesy of the author

Needing a new way

At other times, the disciplined part of me adds to my stress. By telling myself to write every day, I can hold myself to an overly high standard and an overly regimented way of working that’s realistically unachievable. In chasing after my goals, I can forget that I’m a human—forgetting that I can get sick, deal with personal challenges, hard days at my day job, heavy days of my period, etc., etc.

Being disciplined with my creative practice can be the key at times, and be the problem at other times.

A writing and life coach who helped me with my perfectionism pointed out to me that the energy I write with will shine through in my writing. If I want to write a magical, feel-good novel (my goal!), then I don’t want to be pounding out pages with a glare on my face, upset at myself for being behind schedule.

Rather, my book would surely turn out so much better (and I’d enjoy it—what an idea!), if I show up to the page curious and excited, filled to the brim with fun new ideas I want to explore. If I enjoy creating it, others are much more likely to enjoy reading it, too. And regardless of the outcome, don’t I want to enjoy my life? (The answer for me is yes!)

Which brings me back to the core of why I want to find better sustainability for my creative practice: I want to fulfill my purpose of creating the things I want to create.

A disciplined, consistent practice sometimes helps me do this. But rarely is a solution black and white. Sometimes it’s not the solution. So instead, I have to lean into balance. But as a recovering perfectionist, finding balance is not easy.

Finding guidance in nature

This is when I started turning to nature as my guide. How does nature consistently create new growth?

Seasons.

One part of the year is a growing period. Another part of the year is a producing season. Another part of the year is death and then dormancy. How can I cultivate that same pattern of balance in my own life and creative practice?

First, I can recognize how every creative practice includes all these parts too, including my writing:

● Growing Season - reading others’ writing, attending classes

● Blooming Season - writing out rough first drafts

● Producing / Harvesting Season - editing and revising rough drafts into polished pieces

● Death Season - sharing and releasing those polished pieces into the world

● Dormancy Season - living (not writing): getting inspired from life and other art forms different from my own

In comparing nature’s seasons to my own writing seasons, I can name all the parts of the mysterious, complex, easeful, and fun creative process, and then dance with all the parts instead of focusing on and forcing just one or two, leading to burn out. Burning out is truly the last thing I want because creativity and creating feels like my purpose in life—the thing that truly lights me up. I want a healthy, long-lasting relationship with my creativity.

So even when I’m in a season of blooming, like right now, as I continue to produce almost daily to write the first draft of my novel, I’ll do my best to allow breaks, gaps, and give myself grace.

I love seeing my word count stack up, and the feeling of getting to know my story better by writing more of it. But just last week, I had an unexpected challenge come up, which led to missing three days of writing. But even on those non-writing days, I had little moments of inspiration hit me on walks, which I scribbled down on a note on my desk. It served as the reminder I needed that even in the middle of a season of producing, a short break, whether forced or chosen, can be fruitful, too.

Christy Umberger is a writer currently based in San Francisco with her partner, Christian, and cat, Pepper. Christy’s poems and collages have appeared in Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, and Poetry (in Brief), among others. Her first poetry collection, Earthly Observations: A Year in Haiku will be out in September.

Subscribe to Christy’s Substack, In The Middle, a weekly publication exploring random theme words through poems and essays, sent out in the middle of the week (Wednesday mornings).

IG: @christyumber

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post for our Substack, fill out this Google form.

For this round, we have 8 new publications to share. Enjoy!

coastlines review has published its inaugural issue, with three publications we want to shout out. You can read Joe Hall’s poems, “70 Sayre Street” and “Douglas Jemal, Hotel Mogul, Union Buster,” Rachel Lauren Myers’ poem, “The Sparks Marina,” and Alex Tretbar’s poems, “School” and “Diesel Therapy.”

WRJ collaborator Ashley Cundiff has had two short stories published recently. You can read “Mom’s Bigfoot” in dishsoap quarterly and “Family Estate” in Necessary Fiction.

Here’s the opening from “Mom’s Bigfoot”:

Four months before she died, my mother pushed away the soup I’d served her for lunch and informed me that Sasquatch was sleeping behind her garden shed. Dementia had forged Mom’s mind into a prism of fractured thoughts and impulses, but her body was still whole and spry, and she was quick to discard her spoon, put on my late father’s old rubber boots, and trip outside to show me where the bigfoot had bedded down. All I saw was a mound of fallen leaves that the wind had blown against the shed wall, but she maintained that a large indentation was proof a sleeping body had been there. There was no denying that something could have nested in the cradle of those sun-warmed leaves, curled in the fetal position. Imagining it made me want to curl up there myself. Maybe it was a deer, I offered, and yawned. I’d been living with Mom for a few weeks then.

WRJ previously published Rebekah Warren’s poem, “Midnight Sun” in Issue 32. Now, Arcana Poetry Press has published her book of poetry, Moon Pull. Here is an excerpt from the blurb:

A swooning, lyrical meditation on longing, Moon Pull explores the intoxicating pull of limerence—where devotion meets fixation and desire thrives on everything just out of reach.

Moving through cycles of yearning, restraint, and unraveling, these poems dwell in the tension between desire and denial—pull outweighs push, what is held is just as often withheld, and absence becomes its own kind of presence. There is a relentless return to the same gravity, even as an inner voice insists: this is not for you.

Penguin Random House has published Chera Hammons’ book of poetry, Birds of America, with illustrations from Sophie Lucido Johnson.

“In Birds of America, award-winning poet Chera Hammons reckons with the intersection of personal violence and the violence humans have wrought upon our planet and explores the beauty that remains among the ruins. With graceful lyricism, she translates seemingly mundane scenes from the natural world—two eagles locked together in a tandem dive, the fresh sweetness of wild onions—into exquisite revelations of human feeling, inviting us to glimpse the hidden magic of the everyday.”

We featured Rachel Turney on Episode #45 of the Wild Roof Podcast. Now, Parlyaree Press has published her poetry collection, Retired Wannabe Club Kid. Parlyaree Press says, “Retired Wannabe Club Kid features an expansive collection of poems spanning decades and continents, all celebrating the power of music, parties, and the night.” It’s now available as paperback, hardcover, and ebook.

Quibble Lit has published Erica Miriam Fabri’s poems, “Raft on a River” and “Exorcist in Brooklyn.” “Raft on a River” is paired with “Concrete Jungle,” while “Exorcist in Brooklyn” is paired with “On What a Lovely Day,” both by Michael J. Clark.

Here’s the opening from “Raft on a River”:

Najib Joe Hakim has had several publications lately. The Sun Magazine selected his photo “Suzy A” for its front cover (shown below) and his photo “Amin Aftim Saba” for its back cover for its July 2026 issue. Consequence published his essay, “From My Pillow,” alongside eight of his digital collages. The Markaz Review published his art, “Send Wings Not Arms,” as part of its article, “Don’t Forget to Say I Love You: Notes on Water.” Witness selected his photo, “Man (The Mirror Within),” as its cover art for its Spring 2026 issue.

Silver Birch Press has published Karen Keefe’s poem, “How to Measure the Point of It All,” in response to Robert Okaji’s poem, “In the Batter’s Box.” Karen would like to thank Melanie Villines, the editor-in-chief at Silver Birch, for publishing her poem.

Here is a snippet:

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For today’s post, novelist, musician, and multimedia artist Gary Barwin has shared an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead. It’s available for pre-order from Book*hug Press.

To set the scene for the excerpt below, here’s the book’s introductory blurb:

Death is a comedian and devoted family man, but everything falls apart when the Fates choose him to guide departed souls to the Beneath. Having to perform this new role erodes his humanity and causes him to do some perhaps unforgivable things, and when his only son dies by suicide, Death realizes he’s likely the one to blame.

Attempting the impossible, Death goes into the Beneath to beg the Fates to allow him to bring back his son. Naturally, things are not what they seem, and Death is forced to reevaluate everything he knows— everything except the deep love he has for his child.

Blending Barwin’s celebrated wit with deeply moving scenes of empathy and compassion, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead is a heartbreaking and humorous journey into the joy and pain of parenthood, and a thoughtful exploration of choice and agency, sacrifice and love.

From The Comedian’s Book of the Dead

Gary Barwin

Author’s Commentary:

In this excerpt, the comedian protagonist of The Comedian’s Book of the Dead speaks about how being chosen to be Death affects him and his family. His role is something akin to the Grim Reaper who comes for the living and guides them into the underworld. Naturally, this takes its toll on him.

The excerpt mentions some of the things he must do. But though I have made him Death, not as metaphor but as a literal fact, I’m also aware of how the way he feels is like real-life situations where one’s role requires one to do things that are harmful, cause people pain, or are just part of tragic circumstances. Soldiers. Bankers. Police. Judges. Doctors. Those that love or grieve. Parents. Partners. Family or friends. I imagine those who suffer from PTSD as a result of their roles.

I think of Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins explaining that he feels “thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” But sometimes the pain is like too much broken glass on too little bread. Both are the suffering of the psyche, the soul. I conceive of this affecting my Death. It’s like he was enlisted as a soldier and has had to do unspeakable things whether or not he thinks they’re right. I worked with a guy who talked about our job putting “dust on the soul.” And (though it isn’t in the excerpt) Death ends up doing unconscionable things, perhaps as a result of how his role has affected him.

One major goal of the novel is to tell the story of how Death tries to reckon with the consequences of being Death and follows him on a journey to the Underworld where he attempts to make things better.

Excerpt:

Betty and me and little baby Grigory sitting in a tree. N-O-T-D-E-A-D. We were a family. A normal family. Mother, father, son.

Father was a small-time comedian. Touring little comedy clubs and bars, corporate events for the rye-and-coke crowd. Take my life. Please. But really, I loved it. My boy, my beautiful and thoughtful wife.

Mother was a baker, had her own bakery. Bread crunchy as bone, insides soft as cloud. Little Grigory in his basket on the counter. Nothing as comforting as being raised with the scent of bread. Such safety in the world.

And for a time—a long time—Betty and I were, as she liked to say, close as flour and water.

Tell me, Betty, I said. I dropped a slice of your bread last night and the buttered side landed on the floor. What misfortune—is there no justice in the world?

What can I do? You buttered the wrong side.

And little Grigory had risen like bread inside of Betty. I’d touch her belly, feeling for life. Those happy times when we anticipated the future, thinking of looking back together when old. Our children. The multitude of our children and their children. A tribe, a people originating from our intimacy. Our love.

Betty and me. Hand-holding, walking with a stroller. Gazing together at our shared life, sleeping in his little bed. Singing. Helping him with airplaning spoons, toddling, with Mama and Dada and the potty.

Even though I was Death.

Years before, when Betty had started the bakery, I’d been there helping. Proud. Excited. We were young, I was fresh-faced, even plump. And I was often honest, frank about what I must do. When the committee had chosen me to be Death—I was only twen-ty-five—I accepted it with the resolution I knew I had to, like a day on which it storms. What could I do? No point trying to throw lightning back into the sky. What the Fates decreed was fated. That’s how it works.

I found Betty in the little office at the back of the bakery, looking over accounts, and I explained: “Something has happened, something I don’t want, something I can’t control .Something I don’t understand the reason for, but something I have to tell you. Something we’re going to have to manage together. It’s happened not just to me but to both of us. It’s hard to believe, and I don’t know why, but the Fates have decided that I am to be Death.”

Of course, there was disbelief. What did we know of such things? Could it even be real? We’d thought we knew the world, our world. Betty and me. Sure, you only know what is true when it becomes true to you. But could this be true? I knew it was.

There was anger. Crying. Betty’s tears blurring the accounts before her. Blurring everything. First she believed it was a cruel joke—my cruel joke, for of course it was cruel, though I could not control it. Then she thought it was my way of saying I was leaving her. Then, as if it were cancer, we held each other, would live out this thing together, whatever it may bring.

No one had come to me. Neither the Fates nor a messenger. Neither a past Death nor an angel. One day, things changed and I knew. The walls inside me, between one cell and another, between one thought and another, had fallen. I had been chosen. It was as certain as the need for breath.

Why was it me and not someone else? What was it about me? What made me the right choice? Did the fact of my being chosen have something to do with Grigory’s subsequent death? With Betty’s? But, I thought, why anything? Why dogs, or toast, or love or bitterness or equilateral triangles? Why had I been born in the first place? Why had any of us? Did I need to know? What to do about what was lost?

We didn’t know what it would be to become Death, how everything would be different. But we had each other and our life together. We were young and electricity hummed through each of our cells. We were vibrant with life and possibility. In each of our cells, we felt the instinct of our bodies, the call of our beings toward living. We would have a child. A child was the answer to death. To becoming Death.

We conceived Grigory, and then Grigory was born.

But by the time Grigory could read and began to go to school, before I even understood it myself, I had changed. I would float in, like a shadow of a shadow, and take him to the park to swing or play in the sandbox or listen to birds. I was a hundred miles away. And I had become less. Eroded by death and all that was death, by all I must do as Death. Knowing that I would be arriving for countless lives, each day, whether wanted or not. That this was the world.

I understood that one couldn’t just keep being Death—keep bringing death—without any consequences. I brought endings, darkness, made couples and presidents weep, caused soldiers and parents to fall sobbing onto the blood-thick ground. I felt it even when death was wanted, longed for, was begged for relief. Did Grigory know? Children, at least at first, know their parents as the world. But he came to know that something was different about his dad. Even around my son, I could not keep the darkness beneath the surface, the abyss within. I tried to hold on to the father I wanted to be, but being Death erodes. And so eventually, Betty had to tell him. Had to tell Grigory about his father. About how I was before everything changed. About my duties. About my new edgelessness. Harvester of endings, reaper of lives. Fixer. Finisher. Fisher.

Fissure.

And then Betty, because she had had to speak it out loud, saw what was lost, saw what I had become. What I wasn’t and could not be again.

In the beginning, Betty had helped me. Though I wasn’t able to describe and explain everything, she could understand without understanding. I was not Death when I was with her—until, increasingly, I was. I felt washed out to sea, Betty on the shore reaching for me. But I was gone.

Eventually there was talk of separation, then there was separation. There was talk of divorce and then there was divorce. And Betty, of course, got custody. I wasn’t to see my Grigory. What kind of a father could I be, despite jigsaw puzzles, baseball, and ice cream? No one knew I was Death, Betty didn’t say, but she painted a picture, described the gist. The excoriated hollowness. And I was so often gone from my son, had so little to show for my ostensible work. For a while I continued working as a comedian, but my shows became sadder and sadder, more and more pathetic. When life gives you lemons and no sugar, you make bitter lemonade.

In truth, I was there but not there. I was Death and then I was myself. And soon, though I walked through life, I felt only Death. A loving father, but that part of me like the weak splash of a stone dropped down a mine shaft.

A wraith, I became capable of anything. So Grigory and Betty remained at the bakery, and I established myself in a basement, like almost every new divorcé. But I paid child support and planned for a home, planned for eventual weekends with Grigory. Planned many bitter things.

[From The Comedian’s Book of the Dead © 2026 by Gary Barwin. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.]

Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist and the author of thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel Yiddish for Pirates was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction. Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy was chosen for Hamilton Reads, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature for Fiction. The winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award, he has been twice shortlisted for their Spoken Word Award. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Subscribe to see more guest posts from WRJ’s amazing contributors / Paid access includes editorial feedback for 1 poem each month, Q&A with the editor, and more.

Subscribe now

Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

For this round, we have 7 open calls to share. Enjoy!

Epistle Literary Magazine (established in 2025) is a quarterly online and print magazine described as “a love letter to educators everywhere.” They publish flash fiction (<1000 words), short fiction (1000-3000 words), nonfiction (<2000 words), and poetry (up to 3 pieces) that “honors and appreciates the impact made on you by an educator or mentor in your life.”

Submit your unpublished work to Epistle by September 15 via their email listed on their website to be considered for their upcoming issue. Epistle does not charge a reader fee. Authors whose work is published receives a print issue of the magazine. Epistle Literary Magazine falls under the umbrella of the World Literacy Foundation. For more information on submission requirements and to review past issues, click here.

Many Nice Donkeys (established in 2022) is an online literary magazine publishing one to three issues per year. They strive to “publish work that’s deeply honest, but could, at any moment, bite your hand.” Many Nice Donkeys want writers to show the lay of the land, to startle them, and to keep them on their hooves. “Bring us your nicest donkeys, but teach them to fight back.”

Submit your original, unpublished, AI-free poetry (up to 5 poems) and fiction/CNF (up to 1000 words). MND requires blind submissions through their online google form. The reading window for Volume III, Issue I closes on September 1. Click here for full submission guidelines.

Superpresent (established in 2020) is accepting poems, short stories, essays, visual art pieces, video art, sound art, and experimental art until September 15 for its Fall 2026 issue on the theme of “Not Knowing.” You can submit up to three poems, an essay or short story between 500 and 2,000 words, and up to three visual pieces. No submission fee. You can submit your work to editor@superpresent.org. See full guidelines here.

From the editors: “The name Superpresent conveys multiple meanings. It could be something very much in the here and now, or something beyond the present state of being or thinking, or something surreal, or it could simply be a great and wonderful gift. In this sense, we seek to present poetry, essays, short stories, and visual arts that are compelling and in someway represent an aspect of the super present.”

Thimble Literary Magazine (established in 2018) believes that “armor can be found in the oddest of places, whether that’s facing a hard truth head-on or reframing it so you can better understand it. [Thimble believes] the stories we tell ourselves to be the most powerful protection for our edges.”

Thimble Literary is a quarterly online and print journal, publishing in March, June, September, and December. They are open for submissions of poetry, visual art, and short prose. Reading for the Fall 2026 issue (Vol. 9, No. 3) is ongoing until September 12, and Thimble asks that you submit to only one category per submission period. Submissions are free and accepted via email. See full guidelines here.

Northern Shadows Magazine (established in 2026) is an online fiction-only magazine featuring dark speculative fiction stories “set in the real world or fantastical realms that resemble the foggy cave shadows of the cold, rocky coasts to the shadows of the trees in the rainy deep forests, crags, and valleys.” They are open to short story (500-5000 words). Genres include horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

For consideration for their inaugural issue themed “What Creeps in the Night,” submit your original, unpublished, AI-free manuscript by August 15 via their email found on their website. Format your submission for anonymity to remove staff reader bias. There is no fee to submit. Click here for more information on this magazine and additional publisher/writer rights, submission details, and to review what the editor and staff readers are looking for in a story.

Bloodroot Poetry Journal (established in 2026) is a biannual online journal. They welcome “all styles of well-crafted writing and particularly admire poems written ‘in response to . . .’ that engage in the world around the poet—poems that are more than solipsistic writing—for instance, poetry in conversation with other forms of artistic creation including painting, films, and other literature or in response to social issues, historical figures and events, or defining moments of transformation in human existence.”

Their reading period is open for the Fall issue until August 31. Submit three to five of your original, unpublished, and AI-free poems via their online form. Bloodroot requires anonymity on poetry submissions, removing your identifying information from your manuscript to remove editor bias. There is no reading fee. For more information on Bloodroot Poetry Journal, additional submission requirements, and to review their first issue, click here.

Indigo (established in 2026) is a brand-new independent online quarterly journal publishing work “captured in the twilight . . . [and that occupies] the liminal boundary between the visible spectrum and the deep dark—where the natural order meets psychological distortion.”

For their inaugural issue, submit flash fiction, short story, essay, narrative nonfiction, and up to three poems by September 30. Experimental, hybrid, cross-genre and medium-bending submissions are greatly encouraged. Simultaneous submissions are allowed, but previously published materials are not. Submit your manuscript through their online Google Form link on Indigo’s website. There is no submission fee. For more information on Indigo, including submission requirements and to read more about what they are looking to publish, click here.

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Our new guest post comes to you from poet and writing coach Melina Charis. Melina also provides the photography for the post.

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Maybe I Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Writer

Melina Charis

I’ll never forget the moment I gave up my lifelong dream of becoming a writer.

I was sitting in a college creative writing workshop, reading another student’s latest short story. We were going around the table to offer each student our feedback, and as my eyes quickly scanned the pages of this student’s jaw-dropping and impeccably written story, something inside me broke.

I’m not good enough, I thought. I’m not meant to be here.

~

Up until that point, I had always thought of myself as “the good writer.” As one of the best in my classes, I was praised endlessly by teachers and peers.

Some of my earliest memories are of frantically scribbling down pages and pages of poetry and prose. Even before I could hold a pencil, I would dictate stories and characters to my mom so she could write them down on paper, so vivid were they in my mind. I remember I always had such a fervent desire to get them out of my head, to let them live outside of me.

Writing wasn’t just a means to express myself—it was fun. It was a balm as I began to grow up and face the harsher realities of adolescence. And, it was pleasure. It was play. It was creation for creation’s sake.

And then . . . somewhere along the way, I forgot that.

Writing became about essays and assignments, getting good grades and thinking about college applications.

It became about a five-paragraph structure, about grammar and syntax, about flexing my extensive vocabulary and incorporating impressive SAT words.

But words have always been more than that to me.

Words are magic.

Words are a portal into another’s life, into another’s very essence.

And what slowly began to happen to me—like what happens to many of us in the high-pressured academic system—is that my words started suffocating under the weight of their perceived importance.

~

Sitting in that creative writing workshop, I knew that I was in a new league, with other college students who were pursuing MFAs at Ivy League colleges and obsessively submitting their latest pieces to literary journals. I realized I wasn’t actually the best writer—maybe I wasn’t even a “good writer” at all.

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be a writer. I should do something more practical, anyway, the fearful part of me decided that day. I stuffed that dream away, deep inside, where I thought I could forget about it entirely. And I almost did—I didn’t write a single thing for another seven years.

And then, one day, slogging through another 8 hours of the administrative job I loathed, I heard my inner voice saying, I don’t have to stay on this career path. I don’t have to stay in this job I thought I wanted. I can change course.

It was so simple, so clear, that it took me by surprise.

Really, I thought, responding to myself as if surprised by my own mind. It can be that simple?

Of course, once you’ve chosen a path and made many small and large decisions toward that path along the way, getting off it is easier said than done. While one part of me realized I could change course, another part was telling me I had already made my choice.

When I had this life-altering thought, I had been working toward a career in education for six years. I was paying off student loans (and would be for many years) after spending two years in a master’s program for education administration. I had spent countless hours applying for jobs in that field and was currently in a high-level role I thought I wanted.

But something wasn’t right.

And the moment that thought—I don’t have to do this anymore—entered my body, I knew it was right.

It was also a thought I knew I could ignore, stuff down, and face later through illness, depression, and anxiety . . . or it was a thought I could realize as truth and then do something about.

And I decided to listen.

~

Over the next two years, I slowly unwound myself from the career I had chosen solely because it was what I thought I “should” do, a career I had chosen because I was too afraid to do what I really wanted.

I started writing poetry again, and I started a new Instagram account. Very few people ever read my poems, since my Instagram account never grew or took off, but the pleasure I took in just being in the practice of writing and creating again was more thrilling than falling in love.

Over the next few years, I took business courses, hired coaches, went on retreats, read books, started my own business, and continued pursuing poetry.

In this career, I get to be myself. Fully. I get paid to create. I get to follow my creative whims. I get to write regularly (more regularly than I ever have). I get to make my own hours and nurse my son throughout the workday. I get to watch my offerings spark creativity and deep transformation in others. There is nothing more worth it than that.

I’ve even learned to delight in the hard parts—in the failures, the offerings no one signs up for, the lack of response to a heartfelt piece of writing, the decreases in subscriber counts or followers, the client sessions that never find their flow—all of it is sacred to me.

Because I’m writing. I’m creating. I’m making deep connections with other writers and creatives. And all of it brings me entirely and fully alive.

Melina Charis is a poet who writes at the intersection of grief, womanhood, and the natural world. She is a PHIL Lit Poetry Prize winner and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Hollow and Sky, The Faoileánach Journal, Opol, and others. She lives with her family in Los Angeles. She writes on Substack at melinacharis.substack.com and her website is melinacharis.com.

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At the end of June, I was fortunate enough to attend a reading by the great Ross Gay, and I thought his work would serve well as the centerpiece for a Notebook Navigation post.

The Notebook Navigation series is intended to be a reminder to write something in your notebook today, a quick refresh for your creative writing process. Today, we will dive into the a poem from Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, emphasizing uninterrupted flow—omitting commas, periods, and yes, even the well-worn em dash—a poetic style that we can, perhaps, carry into our own writing.

Below, I’ve included a link to the full poem, as well as a reading from the author (from the 2015 National Book Awards ceremony).

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To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian

Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
. . .

Poems included: “Burial” and “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian” (beings at 5:10).

Let’s try it out:

Prompt #1

Take your current work-in-progress and move it to a blank page. Take a run through it to revise in these ways:

• Scale back the use of punctuation overall. Although this may create “incorrect” sentences, try to keep punctuation only for places where it is essential for the reader to follow the sentence.

• Find ways to keep the lines unfolding on and on as much as you can.

• If you do keep some periods, don’t end any line with a period (until the end). This avoids a hard stop and the end of a line and keeps the poem’s momentum moving.

• Omit any stanza breaks.

Prompt #2

Take another current work-in-progress and move it to a blank page. Take a run through it to revise in these ways:

• Remove all punctuation.

• Remove all stanza breaks, creating a stichic format.

• Play with word choices and line breaks to add continuity and flow where punctuation would typically direct the lines.

Photo by Natasha Komoda

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Welcome to our new edition of Saturday Shout-Outs.

In these bi-weekly posts, you’ll see new publications from Wild Roof Journal’s contributors and friends. We’ll also let you know about intriguing submission opportunities that are currently open. If you’ve been published recently and want it to appear on an upcoming Shout-Out post, tell us about it here.

Also, if you’re interested in writing a guest post for our Substack, fill out this Google form.

For this round, we have 9 new publications to share. Enjoy!

SAGE Magazine has published its Ancient Future(s) issue, with a few contributions we want to shout out. Michaela Janae Meyer completed the front cover art, “Hidden In The Shadow (Mariposa Lily),” and the back cover art, “Vessel (Whispering Bells).”

WRJ previously published Katrinka Moore’s poems “Coming to light” and “So open and yet so secret,”, and you can now read her latest poem, “Provenance” (pg. 8). You can also read Stephanie Ross’ poem “The Art Thief” (pg. 91) and Aaron Lelito’s poem “End of an Empire” (pg. 74).

149 Review has published Issue 3, with three contributors we want to shout out. Eric Lippe has won the 2026 Summer Nonfiction Craft Prize for his piece, “Firearm Repair Merit Badge.” You can also read Joanna Theiss’ prose piece, “Kismet,” and Nicky Beer’s poems, “Scrip” and “Life List.”

Here is a snippet from “Scrip”:

Hypatia Press has published Maureen Clark’s memoir, Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl. Kristy Crouse has written a review of the memoir for The Paddock Review, and she writes, “Although Confessions of a Once Upon a Time Mormon Girl could be labeled a tell-all, Clark’s skill at bringing to life her memories with physical details and internal reflections makes for a powerful tell-hers that is both a joy and heartbreak to read, and a stake in the ground to live a more clear-eyed life.” You can visit Maureen’s official website to learn more information, and you can buy a copy of Confessions on Amazon.

Superpresent Magazine has published its Summer 2026 issue. We recently published a feature interview with Ryan Di Francesco, and you can now read Ryan’s latest poem, “I Pull a Piece of Paper from My Pocket” (pg. 35). You can also read Jessica Purdy’s poems, “People who hate summer are the most patient people” and “Rain in Dublin” (pg. 94-95).

Wayfarer Magazine has published Rae McMinn’s poem, “Get By,” as part of its June 2026 digital edition.

The Shared Drafts Project has published Issue 3, and you can read WRJ-collaborator Samuel Fishman’s latest poem, “Another Poem About Renee Good.”

The issue also features the poem “Application” by WRJ-contributor Greg Lehman.

PHIL LIT Journal has chosen Jack Bordnick’s piece, “Me and My Shadows,” as the cover art for its Summer 2026 issue.

Storyteller Poetry Review has named Laurie Kuntz’s chapbook Balance its book of the week for June 19, 2026.

Storyteller Poetry Review says, “Wise and skillfully crafted is the best way to describe Laurie Kuntz’s new poetry collection, Balance, in which she opens up her life to us and gives us insight into how to balance marriage, motherhood and aging and learn how to live with the curve balls life throws us.” You can purchase Balance from the Moonstone Arts Center.

Cider Press Review has published Michelle Geoga’s latest poem, “Investigations.” Michelle would like to thank Caron Andregg and the editorial staff at Cider Press Review for giving her poem a home!

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“Peacock works her trademark lyrical magic.” —Alex Gurtis, Rain Taxi

Hi friends,

For today’s post, Molly Peacock has shared two stunning poems from her new collection, The Widow’s Crayon Box.

Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose and back again to poetry, from words to words-and-pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others.

To set the scene, here’s the book’s introductory blurb:

After her husband’s death, Molly Peacock realized she was not living the received idea of a widow’s mauve existence but instead was experiencing life in all colors. These gorgeous poems—joyful, furious, mournful, bewildered, sexy, devastated, whimsical and above all, moving—composed in sonnet sequences and in open forms, designed in four movements (After, Before, When, and Afterglow)—illuminate both the role of the caregiver and the crystalline emotions one can experience after the death of a cherished partner.

With her characteristic virtuosity, her fearless willingness to confront even the most difficult emotions, and always with buoyancy and zest, Peacock charts widowhood in the twenty-first century.

It’s available now from W. W. Norton.

Widow in Kitchen with Yellow Apple

You burst through the door
wheeling your red Swiss
Army suitcase—how had
you packed all you needed 
in that for eight months?
—and I, in my stained yoga pants
stood gaping with delight
(my little red paring knife
in one hand and a yellow 
apple in the other).
You’re home! I smiled,
my face stretching so wide
I’d forgotten skin
could be so elastic,
and as you bumbled
with your suitcase (had
you brought me a present?
your beard needed a trim . . . )
you looked up and said,
Yellow? I only buy
yellow apples now
I almost said but
instead chirped, It’s time
for the new crop of
Honey Crisps! Red, round.
I’ll buy you some red ones.
I said, looking in
your pain-free face, tired
from a journey but
exhilarated to be
home—eyes bright green
—we hadn’t even kissed yet.
It was Saturday,
and I had to stick
my hair in a band and
grab my jacket or there
would be nothing left
at the farmer’s market,
so I almost stumbled
into you in my rush 
to supply your wants,
slightly turning my ankle
against the wheel of
your red Swiss Army
suitcase disappearing
against the door so
securely locked: big
white rectangle shut.
You’d been so real each
hair of your beard glistened
with the outside’s cold air.
The hair on your knuckles
gripping the black handle
curled in little squiggles
as if drawn by a fine
line marker: I saw them,
saw them, the point
of my red paring knife
poised at the yellow peel,
you’d been so real.

Honey Crisp

Hello wizenface, hello apple
understudy in the fridge
since March (it’s September)
hello wrinkly red cheeks,
I’ll bet you’re almost a year old,
born last autumn
kept in the fruit storage built   
half-underground on the farm
then, in the snow, sold to me.
Hello my honey crisp (well,
my honey, no longer crisp . . . )
are you asking why you
haven’t been eaten by now?

Because that man hewed to his routines:
an apple for lunch every day
the same red punctuation. 
You were earmarked for the date 
he slipped from my arms & we both 
slid to the floor, red angel, are you
listening? 911, hospital, hospice
and ten days later (you were
about six months old then) 
he died and was carried 
to a cold shelf.

Hello smiley-stem, hello days
moving you from spot to spot. 
Hello week where I forgot
and left you at the back and
went about my new life.  
Greetings new groceries!
Their jumble causes a re-
arrangement of your bin
so I have to pick you up
—would you rather
have been eaten and 
lived on as energy?
Not yet, not yet, my pomme.
Hello soft wrinkled
face in my palms.

“Honey Crisp” was originally published in The Walrus; “Widow in Kitchen with Yellow Apple” was originally published in Poetry Magazine.

[© 2026 Molly Peacock. Used with permission of publisher. Additional photos courtesy of the author.]

Molly Peacock is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box, The Analyst, and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, all from W.W. Norton. She recently wrote a book about a half-century friendship, A Friend Sails in on a Poem.

As a poetry activist, Peacock was the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series, and the creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University.

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