Maria Duffy

I’ve always loved to write. From the time I could hold a pen, I was scribbling words, which were largely illegible but they were stories in my head. As I grew older, I loved to people-watch and listen in on conversations whenever I could. Something as simple as a woman in front of me in […]

Jonathan Escoffery

I first fell in love with story’s ability to transport, to expand the borders of my reality. I recall crouching beneath my parents’ kitchen counter as a child, losing Sunday afternoons reading. That words printed between book covers could take me to far off worlds, on journeys that left me forever changed, was, to me, […]

Lynne M. Spreen

I was always a writer; always kept a journal. I’m sixty-three and I have journals going way back. The oldest was written in the hospital when my son was born. He’s forty now. After my first divorce I wrote about the house I bought on my own, a chicken coop on a busy highway in […]

Meg Mitchell Moore

In seventh grade my English class was assigned to write a short story of some sort. I don’t remember what the specific parameters were. I’m not sure if they were all supposed to be horror stories, but I do remember that I penned something pretty gruesome about a hit-and-run accident on a lonely road one […]

Renee Macalino Rutledge

One of my favorite quotes is: “The creative adult is the child who has survived,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. When you are a child, everything is new, and you respond to it without artifice. It can be more difficult to maintain that sense of wonder and curiosity as you get older, so people push […]

Ann Y.K. Choi

I grew up listening to jokes about corner variety stores being run by Korean immigrant families. But that’s what my family did for 30 years in Canada. Now that many of us have grown up and left our family-run businesses to do other things, I felt compelled to share stories from behind the store counter. […]

Panio Gianopoulos

I don’t often ask myself this question. The question I usually find myself asking is Why don’t I write? Or even more commonly, why didn’t I write? Why didn’t I write this morning when our puppy woke me up at dawn, scratching and whining at its crate door, and after putting him outside with his […]