Issue #4

JAIME BALBOA is a reader and writer of speculative fiction. He studied writing and literature at Adrian College and now lives in Los Angeles with his partner and their son.

A former army brat, JENNIFER BURNS grew up in West Germany, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Virginia and Florida. After graduating with a degree in journalism from the University of Florida, she moved to London and now lives and works in Cardiff, Wales. Her writing has previously appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She has also written articles for The Miami Herald, Nerve and Guardian Cardiff. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories.

CLELLAN COE is an American writer living in the province of Asturias in northern Spain. Since her first published piece in the New Statesman in 2008, she’s had work in The American Scholar and the Last Line Journal. An essay appeared in The Timberline Review’s inaugural issue in the fall of 2014. David Sedaris, Rachel Cusk, Jane Austen, and Alice Munro are favorite authors. Favorite stories are William Trevor’s “Memories of Youghal” and John Updike’s “Deaths of Distant Friends.”

GRETEL ENCK: Friend. Adventurer. Stargazer. Writer. Bodhisattva. Knows how to have a good time. Tells stories that give people the courage to accept themselves and to love and support others. Likes to climb things: trees, mountains, minarets, courthouse cupolas. Passionate about learning how the world works. Dedicated to civic engagement and the power of community. Learning yet from her many mistakes, grateful for the humility. Strikes a balance between the melancholy and the magic. Last of the Brooklyn cowgirls. Finds herself running a non-profit dedicated to preserving a former segregated Mexican American school in the cow/art town of Marfa, Texas.

JOHN CALVIN HUGHES holds degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of South Florida. His publications include a critical study, The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme (The Edwin Mellen Press); a poetry chapbook, The Shape of Our Luck (Sargent Press); and two novels, Twilight of the Lesser Gods (CreateSpace) and Killing Rush (Second Wind Publishing). He has published stories, poems and literary criticism in numerous magazines and journals, including Southern Indiana Review, Studies in Short Fiction and Mississippi Review. Nominated for a Pushcart in 2015, he is also the winner of the Ilse and Hans Juergensen Poetry Contest and The Thomas Burnett Swann Poetry Prize. His full-length poetry collection, Music from a Farther Room, was recently published by Aldrich Press. He lives and works in Florida.

LOIS ROSEN’s award-winning poems and stories have appeared in over a hundred journals including most recently: Calyx, Conversations across Borders, VoiceCatcher, Alimentum: the Literature of Food, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, and The Night, and the Rain, and the River. She leads two Amherst Writers Workshops in Salem, Oregon where she’s taught Creative Writing at Willamette University and ESL at Chemeketa Community College. She received an MFA in fiction from the Rainier Writing Workshop. Traprock Books published her first poetry collection, Pigeons, in 2004. Tebot Bach Publications published her second poetry book, Nice and Loud, in 2015.

JOHN SHIRLEY’s novels include Bleak History, The Other End, and seminal cyberpunk works City Come A-Walkin’, and the A Song Called Youth trilogy. His story collections include the Bram Stoker- award-winning Black Butterflies, and Living Shadows: Stories: New & Pre-owned. He was lead singer of two west coast punk-rock bands.

SAMUEL SNOEK-BROWN is the author of the novel Hagridden as well as the fiction chapbooks Box Cutters and the Where There Is Ruin. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of literary magazines, including Portland Review, Bartleby Snopes, WhiskeyPaper, Prick of the Spindle, and others. He also serves as production editor for Jersey Devil Press. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his librarian wife and their two cats, Ibsen and Brontë. He is online at is snoekbrown.com.

NATASHA TYNES is a Jordanian-American writer based in the Washington, DC area. Her fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Esquire Middle East, Al Jazeera, Fjords Review, among others. Tynes is currently working as a communications professional at an international development organization. She has an MA in International Journalism from City University of London. She has over seventeen years of journalism experience working as a reporter, editor and a managing editor, and also as the director of global training programs for journalists worldwide with a special focus on the Middle East. She is currently working on her debut novel.

EVAN MORGAN WILLIAMS is the author of Thorn: Short Stories, winner of the 2013 Chandra Prize at BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City). The book earned several honors after publication, including a gold medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. Williams has published over forty stories in such magazines as Witness, Antioch Review, (The) Kenyon Review, and ZYZZYVA. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has taught in a public school for over twenty years. He has held a Writers in the Schools residency, an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship, and he gave the inaugural reading in Eastern Oregon University’s revived Ars Poetica Visiting Writer Series. His story in Northwest Review was included in Best of the West 5 (Norton); more recently, his story in Weber: the Contemporary West earned the magazine’s annual prize for best work of fiction. Williams’ work has been featured at the Lane Literary Guild’s Windfall Reading Series, the Nye Beach Writers Series, Mountain Writers, Plonk Reading Series, and Sacramento’s Stories on Stage: works of fiction read by actors. He has been the subject of interviews on Late Night Library, Farsickness Journal, Antioch Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. Williams is currently at work on a novel and a second collection of stories.

SUZANNE CODY holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.  Recent projects include serving as co-editor for the Seneca Review anthology We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay, and the stage production of a selection of her performance essays, Love, Sex, Shoes.  When not writing essays or poetry, Cody attends to the needs of irises, hamsters, birds, ferrets, and hostas, as well as a husband and a teenager, and gleefully maintains an international audience for her BBC Sherlock fanfiction.

REG DARLING lives in Vermont with his wife and cats. He worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare for thirty years before retiring in 2004. He holds a B.S. in General Studies from Clarion University of Pennsylvania and a M.A. in Studio Art from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. He paints a small watercolor every day and hasn’t missed a day in more than four years. He was an outdoor writer of sorts in a previous literary incarnation, but has wandered off into the rest of his life. His essays have been published in Azure, Backcountry Journal, Dark Matter Journal, The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, Hellbender Journal, Hoot, Traditional Bowhunter Magazine, and Primitive Archer.

MIKE FRANCIS worked for just about every department on the news and editorial staff while at the Oregonian, leaving a trail of broken editors behind him. As a reporter and editor, he embedded with Oregon National Guard troops in Iraq on three occasions.

BARBARA K. FREEMAN lives in western Oregon, with five critters, hundreds of Douglas firs, and abundant poison oak, her daughter’s family nearby. A retired teacher with a PhD from Oregon State University, she has won a nonfiction award from the Baltimore Review and finished the novel When the Earth Slips.

MARLA MULLOY is an aspiring writer with an evolving collection of poems and stories, one of which has recently been published in The Timberline Review. Having been a teacher for many years, she occasionally appears at the the local community school and is involved in the refugee community in Calgary. Much of her writing reflects the experience of refugees, documenting through story the paths that brought them here and how they create home in new places. She loves to run, finds peace in yoga and often has random people for dinner, especially those new to Canada. She lives in the forest of Redwood Meadows, Alberta. She and her husband have three grown children who appear at home regularly. She continues to share her writing through her blog: www.tossingwords.wordpress.com.

Born in 1929, RICHARD PORUS moved to the northwest fifty-five years ago and, with his wife and two daughters, settled in Seattle. Except for a brief interlude in Tucson, he has lived in the northwest ever since. A retired physician, he has spent his free time exploring mountains and forests on foot, on skis and by bicycle.  He began writing personal essays a year ago and now lives in Portland.

CATHERINE ARRA is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York. A former English and writing teacher, she now teaches part time, facilitates a local writers’ group and winters on the Space Coast of Florida. Find her recent poetry and prose in Naugatuck River Review, The Best of Boston Literary Magazine Vol. I & II, Peacock Journal, Gloom Cupboard and Sugared Water. Her chapbooks are Slamming & Splitting (Red Ochre Press, 2014) and Loving from the Backbone (Flutter Press, 2015). She recently completed a full-length book of poetry and short prose, Forged 1955: Girl.

DEVON BALWIT is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon.  She writes daily and can think of nothing she’d rather be doing.  You can find her poetry from 2016 in the following wonderful journals: 3 elements, 13 Myna Birds, Akinoga Press (On the Other Hand Anthology), Algebra of Owls, Anti-Heroin Chic, Birds Piled Loosely, Bonk!, Dream Fever Magazine, drylandlit, Dying Dahlia Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Eyedrum Periodically (12), Five 2 One, Forage, Free State Review, Ink in Thirds, Ink Stain Review, Ink Sweat & Tears, Journal of Applied Poetics, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Lalitamba, Leveler, Love Your Rebellion, Mad Swirl, MAW, Nailed, Of(f) Course, Poetry Breakfast, Rat’s Ass Review, Rattle, Red Paint Hill Publishing, Referential, Right Hand Pointing, Serving House Journal, Silver Birch Press, SoFloPoJo, The Basil O’Flaherty, The Cape Rock, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fem, The Fog Machine, The Gambler, The Literary Nest, The NewVerse News, The Prick of the Spindle, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, The Yellow Chair, Timberline Review, txt objx, vox poetica, Vanilla Sex Magazine, Wicked Banshee Press, and Work to a Calm.

KRISTIN BERGER is the author of the poetry collection How Light Reaches Us (Aldrich Press, 2016), and a poetry chapbook, For the Willing (Finishing Line Press, 2008), and was co-editor of VoiceCatcher 6: Portland/Vancouver Area Women Writers and Artists (2011). Her long prose-poem, Changing Woman & Changing Man: A High Desert Myth, was a finalist for the 2016 Newfound Prose Prize. Kristin is the recipient of writer residencies from Playa and OSU’s Spring Creek Project, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Camas, Cirque, Passages North, Terrain.org, and Wildness. A Detroit-native, Kristin has lived in Portland for 22 years and is co-host of a poetry series at the Lents International Farmer’s Market. More info at www.kristinberger.me.

CHRIS BULLARD is a native of Jacksonville, FL. He lives in Collingswood, NJ. He received his B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Wilkes University. Finishing Line Press published his poetry chapbook, Leviathan, in 2016, and Kattywompus Press expects to publish High Pulp, a collection of his prose poetry, in the winter of 2016. His work has appeared in publications such as 32 Poems, Rattle, Pleiades, River Styx and Nimrod.

ELIZABETH CROWELL was born and raised in NJ.  She has a B.A. in English literature from Smith College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University.  For a long time, she taught high school and college English. She now writes full time.  She won the 2011 Bellevue Literary Review Non-fiction prize, judged by Dr. Jerome Groopman, for her essay, “The Tag.” Her works has been published or is forthcoming in Red Ravina Review, Callisto, Sewanee Review, and Spry. She lives outside Boston with her wife and two children. She has written a novel, American Lit, about the senior year of high school, and is in search of a publisher.

CHRIS ELLERY is the author of four collections of poetry: Elder Tree (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016), The Big Mosque of Mercy (Ink Brush Press, 2010), All This Light We Live In (Panther Creek Press, 2006), and Quarry (Mountain Muse Press, 2005). He is also co-translator (with Asmahan Sallah) of Whatever Happened to Antara (University of Texas Press, 2004), a collection of short stories by the award-winning Syrian author Walid Ikhlassi. His poetry and short fiction have been published in dozens of anthologies and literary magazines, including Writing Texas, Jewish Currents, Concho River Review, Paterson Literary Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, descant, New Texas, Cimarron Review, Lilliput Review, and the Texas Observer. His memoir/travelogue “A Boy of Bethany” won the 2015 X.J. Kennedy Award for Nonfiction. His poem “Shekinah” won the 2014 Alexander and Dora Raynes Poetry Competition, and “Bimaristan Arghun” received the 2005 Betsy Colquitt Award for best poem of the year in descant. In 1999-2000, Ellery was a Fulbright professor in American literature at the University of Aleppo, Syria. A member of the Fulbright Association and the Texas Institute of Letters, Ellery teaches creative writing and film criticism at Angelo State University.

ALAN FELDMAN lives in Framingham, MA and, in the summer, in Wellfleet, MA, and currently offers free, drop-in poetry workshops in those towns. (For his method, “Mockingbird:  Exploring Poetry through Imitation” see mockingbird.pdf). He is married to Nan Hass Feldman, an artist. His poetry has appeared in many magazines over the years—The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and others. His full-length collection of poems, The Happy Genius (New York: Sun, 1978) won the1979 Elliston Book Award for the best collection of poetry published by an independent press in the United States. A Sail to Great Island was awarded the 2004 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Immortality (University of Wisconsin Press 2015) was awarded the Four Lakes Prize, and is the recipient of the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry. His work is represented in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2001; 2011, The Best American Erotic Poems 1800-Present, and To Woo and To Wed: Poets on Love and Marriage. The National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation have awarded him fellowships in poetry.

TIM GILLESPIE drove away from Los Angeles in a beat-up station wagon at age 18, spent six years at a way station in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in 1973 with his wife Jan decamped to the Pacific Northwest, where they raised their two sons. Tim spent almost four decades as a public school teacher in the Portland area, mostly at the chalkface teaching high school English. He has been President of the Oregon Council of Teachers of English, a founding co-director of the Oregon Writing Project at Lewis & Clark College, and one of the original founders of the annual Oregon Writing Festival for student writers. His educational essays and articles have appeared in many national educational publications, and he is the author of a recent book for teachers, Doing Literary Criticism, published by Stenhouse Press. Poems have lately appeared in Windfall, Cloudbank, English Journal, the anthology A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford, and elsewhere. Tim still laments the disbanding of the late, great blues rock band Big Blind, for whom he played harmonica and wrote lyrics.

MICHAEL HANNER is a retired architect whose poems are found in Nimrod, Cloudbank, Mudfish, Rhino, Southern Humanities Review, Gargoyle Magazine, Cascadia Review, and others. He is the author of several chapbooks including The Architecture of Holland, Confessions of Autumn and Avenida Uriburu. His full-length poetry collections are Vivaldi, an autobiography (Tebot Bach, 2013), October (Chandelier Galaxy, 2015) and Adriatica (Chandelier Galaxy, 2016). His often surreal work frequently includes triggers and images from his travels. He has written a highly specialized French guide book, Le Bugue, Périgord & Beyond, under an assumed name, Forbisher Mandangle. He is a member of Red Sofa Poets and Madrona Writers. He loves Toni Hanner. His other interests are gardening, irony, English croquet, French cooking, Argentine tango and photography.

ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982–2012, finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Other honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts, two Pushcart Prizes (in both prose and poetry), the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, the RUNES Poetry Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, after living in the Ozark woods of Arkansas for 35 years, Hollander moved to Portland, where she teaches writing workshops at the Attic Institute and Mountain Writers Series.

JOE MCAVOY drove a battered 1967 VW Beetle convertible into Oregon in 1975 with little more than a copy of Sometimes A Great Notion. His love of Oregon and literatura has only grown since then. He lives in Lake Oswego with his wife, Kyle. Their two children, Conor and Julia, are native Oregonians and he loves them immensely.

LEAH NIELSEN earned her MFA from the University of Alabama. Her first collection of poems, No Magic, was published by Word Press. Her chapbook, Side Effects May Include, which examines the state of permanent patienthood, was published in 2014 by The Chapbook. Among other places, her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, and Rattle. She lives and teaches in Westfield, MA.

LISA MARIE OLIVER is a library worker, Indophile, and avid traveler. She has studied at the University of Oregon and more recently at The Attic Institute. She hosts a monthly poetry gathering at her home in Portland.

PATTIE PALMER-BAKER is a Portland, OR artist and poet.  Although she often combines these two forms of expression in collages of paste paper and calligraphy, the inspiration for and the meaning of the artwork lies within the poem.  Over the years of exhibiting her artwork, the discovery that many people responded most strongly to the poetry motivated her to strengthen her focus on writing. The goal of all her creative output is to translate the inner world into a media that moves readers away from their habitual perception of the world. Some of the journals that have published her work are Eholi Gaduji Journal, Poeming Pigeons Anthology, Petals in the Pan Anthology, The Ghazal Page, Voicecatcher, Postcard Poetry and Prose Magazine, Riding Light and She Holds the Face of the World Anthology (Voicecatcher’s best of the last 10 years). She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2013.

JULIE PRICE PINKERTON lives in Champaign, Illinois and teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her poems and essays have appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Literal Latte, Tamaqua, GSU Review, and were included in the 2014 anthology The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss. Julie is a two-time recipient of the UIUC Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her poem “Veins” won the 2016 Rattle Poetry Prize. She enjoys binge watching Tiny House Hunters with her husband, Scott, and photographing the five foxes currently living in their backyard. www.juliepricepinkerton.com.

TALA ABU RAHMEH is a writer and translator based in New York. Her poems have been published in a number of magazines and books including Naomi Shihab Nye’s Time to Let me In: 25 under 25, LA Review of Books, 20*20 magazine, Enizagam, 34th Parallel Magazine, Blast Furnace, The Timberline Review, and others. Parts of her memoir-in-progress were published in Beirut Re-collected, published by Tamyras Publishers and available in both French and English. Her poem “Pomegranates” is forthcoming in Ghost Fishing: An Anthology of Eco-Justice Poetry, and her poem “Cape Cod” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

MATTHEW J. SPIRENG’s book What Focus Is was published by WordTech Communications. His book Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published by Bluestem Press. His chapbooks are: Clear Cut; Young Farmer; Encounters; Inspiration Point, winner, 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Just This. He was first place winner in the 2015 Common Ground Review poetry contest and is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee. In 2014, at age 67, Spireng, who had no siblings in his adoptive family, was united with nine living siblings in his birth mother’s family. He is seeking a publisher for his non-fiction book, Family, about his discovery.

KIM STAFFORD is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right: Essays of Place, and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His fiction publications include Wind on the Waves: Stories from the Oregon Coast. His poetry chapbook How to Sleep Cold is forthcoming in fall 2016 from Limberlost Press. He has taught writing at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology on the Oregon coast, at the Fishtrap Gathering, which he co-founded in 1987, in NE Oregon, and at dozens of colleges and writing centers. He has also taught in Scotland, Italy, and Bhutan.

ROBERT TREMMEL is a poet and former academic living in Ankeny, Iowa. He’s published poems in a wide range of journals, including The Southern Review, Iowa Review, South Dakota Review, Cincinnati Review, Poet Lore, and Spillway. He’s also published two collections, Driving the Milford Blacktop and Crossing Crocker Township, as well as a chapbook titled There is a Naked Man with Main Street Rag. Bob has B.A., M.A., and PhD degrees from the University of Iowa, and is a founding member and no-account slacker at the Des Moines Zen Center.

SALLY ZAKARIYA’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including Tishman Review, Apeiron Review, Broadkill Review, Poetry Quarterly, Soundings Review, Edge, Emerge, Third Wednesday, and Evening Street Review and has won prizes from Poetry Virginia and Virginia Writers Club. She is the author of Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011) and the editor of Joys of the Table, an anthology of poems about food and eating. Zakariya lives in Arlington, Virginia, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.