Are You For Real About The Writing Game? If So I'm Carrying; A Small Browning Pocket Knife A Compass

I work for Meggie Royer and this is so cool that this is happening again. In all ways, it’s totally worth the time and effort I’ve put in to be able to be a little part of this beautiful/ important thing. 

Issue 2 of my literary magazine is now officially live! Thank you to my beautiful, empowering staff for making a second issue possible - we did it. Twice.

To all the abuse survivors whose work is featured in this issue, and all the survivors who will read this issue, and all the survivors in the world - you are the dreamers and the magicians, the dancers and the risen. You are not the left-behind. You are the still-here.

Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your healing. <3

“Ham and Starch” a short story by Claire Oleson

Slowly, with her voice pointed down towards the snow, she starts. “That we aren’t for the morning/ that we aren’t for house-fires./ That if you lit a match in your basement/ and it caught on/ and g…

I’ve had a short story published on the literary blog, The Whale.

What books have you been reading?

Thank you for the ask, here are my most recent ones:

1. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott

2. On Writing - Charles Bukowski

3. Currently reading: Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace 

prof: you use some awkward phrasing in this sentence here

me: me too

prof: what

me, with a brain full of exhausted bees: what

A poem I recently had published by Zetetic Record.

color palettes

               - c. essington 

ha ha published in the Limestone 30th Anniversary anthology with Wendell Berry it’s chill 

I will have a flash fiction piece published in this coming issue of werkloos! 

we’re very excited to announce the launch date of our second issue, in limbo. keep your eyes peeled & your hearts steady, things are about to get lit.

cover image by the talented @ernestvolynec

took a neuro exam, early-voted, found out I’m getting a publication that’s going to pay me for poems, and painted todayp

For the writing thingy! Lighter, lipstick, Lucky penny, marker, camera. :D

Certainly, thank you.

Inventory:1. Lighter2. Lipstick3. Lucky penny4. Marker5. Camera

Clive roved the blue lipstick over his mouth before leaving, two splinters of periwinkle smirking above his teeth. He’d been letting his hair roar down until it dangled near the same piece of body where his ribs ended. The frays of blonde started getting caught on barbs of his life, one of which was a flick of orange in his sister’s hands that she’d held up too high. His trailing strands got smeared with burning before he smothered the flame and confiscated the lighter. After that, his ribs were abandoned by the black-licked blonde and his hair flew up to perch above his shoulders. 

So he went out, lips blue, hair burnt up to his neck, and his pockets lined with change. The metal discs clinked together, pressing up clouds of lint that gathered like cholesterol under his nails. He’d run his fingertips over the currencies, wearing his thumb down to redness on the edge of a penny and calling the soreness good fortune. When he didn’t have pennies to get his hands blushed on, he’d take out a red crayola marker and draw his own sort of luck across his knuckles. 

Clive kept his lips blue and his hands red and his body out of burning the best he could manage. He’d take a photo of it all in a restaurant bathroom, his eyes lowered into the grain the mirror’s reflection, trying to find the place where his colors met his breath. 

                - C. Essington.

Thank you, this was an interesting list. 

If you want to play this writing game, send me a theoretical inventory of five items in an ask and I’ll try to write a person for it.