Charles Holdefer
Andrea Adamo indebted herself $72,000 to get an MFA with a thesis of poetry erasures. Her parents are hurt and bewildered.
Marvin Beaver is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. They never publish his work but he sends it there anyway.
Allen Duncan is a fiction writer and a McDonalds’ fellow. He sets up his laptop in a back booth and uses the free wifi.
Barry Hodgkin’s story in this issue is his first published work. Previous stories under his name weren’t really his own but were shamelessly plagiarized. No one has noticed yet. He lives in fear that someone might actually read them.
Lisa Ingersoll is very nice and would like you to notice her piercing. She writes poetry and paints, too.
Matt Jackson is presently working on a book of interconnected short stories about a writer who has no friends and is writing a book of interconnected short stories. He is not very nice.
Wanda Mendevez loathes the preening and meretricious displays that are typical of a magazine’s Contributors’ Notes, which she considers part of the Corporate Death Machine. Fuck you all!
Bobby Newsom has discovered that calling himself a writer doesn’t impress women as much as he’d hoped and it is actually less successful as an ice-breaker in conversation than showing off his ankle bracelet.
Aoife Soronan’s sequel to her memoir, Me, with a working title More of Me, has just been completed and she is looking for an agent to represent both volumes. Visit Aoife at MeMeMeMe.com.
Elaine Terwilliger applies translation software to found pieces which she then submits under an alias to her homeschooling creative collective on East 81st Street for their Spanish lessons.
Mitch Thomas is an attorney by day, living and working in Evanston. Since 2004, he has managed to include the word “tumescence” in every story, poem and essay he has written. He is presently at work on a novel.
Melanie Titus fears her family and friends will now hate her because of her creative nonfiction piece. She panicked and tried to withdraw it but too late: it had already gone to print.
Tim Underwood sends creepy and vaguely menacing messages to the editors who decided to publish his poems, just to be on the safe side.
Bruce Vandermeer’s story, “The Road to Preston,” won the Fulmont Fiction Prize at The Fulmont Quarterly and was nominated for Best American Short Stories, an O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He has also received the Fulmont Medal for his contributions to the humanities. He lives with his alpaca on 20 acres and edits The Fulmont Quarterly.
Charles Holdefer is an American writer based in Brussels. His fiction has appeared in the New England Review, North American Review, Chicago Quarterly Review and in the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. His novel DON’T LOOK AT ME, about Emily Dickinson, basketball and the tenacity of literature in a post-literary age, will be published in October 2022. Visit Charles at www.charlesholdefer.com.
Photo by Elisa Calvet B. on Unsplash
