I’m not saying that if everyone picked up a book they’d start holding hands and violence would disappear. But I do believe that reading is the best way to build empathy and understanding, both of which are critical to establishing a positive social environment.

One of the biggest reasons we fight each other is a simple misunderstanding of the other person’s point of view. We fear what we don’t understand. And when we are so far apart on how we not only view the world but in the way we interpret others’ views, finding common ground is impossible. Arguments flourish. Hatred multiplies. The chasms between us grow deeper and wider.

A friend of mine once told me that fiction is a waste of time. He read non-fiction books that described facts and events which he could store away in his brain and call it knowledge. This makes sense from a high school exam perspective, but it fails to recognize the benefits of reading fiction.

Inherently, fiction fills your brain with someone else’s thoughts. As Stephen King put it, “What is writing? Telepathy, of course.”

And he’s right, in a few different ways. First, it puts the author’s thoughts directly into your brain. That’s about as clear a description of telepathy as you’re going to get. But also, it allows the reader to get out of their own mind and into that of the character on the page. You become the innocent man on death row. You become the sword-wielding dragon slayer. You become the murderer hiding in the basement.

Empathy is understanding someone else’s feelings, motivations, and experiences. What better way to do that than to climb inside their head?

It doesn’t matter that fiction isn’t real. The emotions and feelings at the heart of every scene, no matter how fantastical, are as real as the tree outside my window as I write this. These invented scenarios are a shortcut to understanding a feeling, a circumstance, an idea that you otherwise would never have experienced. There’s truth in fables. There are lessons in ghost stories. And even if you don’t feel them soaking into your mind as you read them, they’re lurking in the shadows of your subconscious.

Reading fiction is as much a window into society as it is an escape from it. I work on my computer all day. The internet is a click away, full of disturbing images, inflammatory articles, and messages designed to spark negative responses for stronger engagement. Setting the phone on silent, closing the computer, and opening a book is a shelter from the constant barrage of bullshit. It’s a break. A deep breath. And the fact that about 75% of our country doesn’t gift this to themselves makes it feel like we’re surrounded by people running on a hamster wheel until their brains explode. It’s a little more understandable to see someone flip out after being cut off in traffic because their brains are likely overflowing with digital stimulation from the moment they wake up until they collapse in bed at night.

The mental benefits of reading are just about as persuasive as describing the vitamin content of celery. Celery sucks and reading takes effort. You can’t force anyone into either of them if you expect them to stick with it. But for those of us that enjoy the struggle and release of reading, it’s important to occasionally remind ourselves why we sit quietly alone and stare at paper for hours at a time. According to Nuvance Health, reading “enhances brain activity, memory and cognitive function.” It can also “lower blood pressure, reduce stress and improve sleep quality.”

But perhaps even more importantly, it gives you the tools you need to be less of a fucking asshole. And I think we can all use a bit of that.

JOSH RANK is the author of Estuary. Estuary opens in the disorienting aftermath of loss: Megan Mostly nearly collapses when she finds her son, Lincoln, awake and watching television in the middle of the night-despite the fact that his funeral was only a week ago. As if grief weren’t enough, Stephen Tremble appears at her door the day before, asking an impossible question: was Lincoln his son? For six years, Megan has lived inside a carefully constructed lie. Now it’s cracking open. Stephen, newly returned to Atlanta, is unraveling too. After a fire exposes the hoarded remains of his isolated life, he clings to the one object that survived-a diary he can never seem to lose. Inside it, he finds an entry he doesn’t remember writing. It speaks of a child he never knew existed. As Megan is drawn into a series of unsettling encounters with a mysterious woman who appears without warning, delivering cryptic messages that seem to echo Lincoln’s presence, Stephen grapples with the fury and grief of a father too late to love. Pulled together by secrets, loss, and a child who refuses to stay gone, Megan and Stephen must confront their pasts where memory and longing converge-at the estuary between what was, what is, and what still refuses to let go.

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I’ve never met these people, but I know them.

I know them because I’ve been all of them. We’ve lived each other’s stories. We’ve shared the same feelings: exhaustion, anxiety, defeat.

Sometimes, in the emptiness of night, I stare up at the ceiling and spiral into cascading thoughts. I think about these strangers and odd stories I’ve read over the years. I think about betrayal. Unjust actions of entitled authority figures. The unfair cruelty of being a teen.

It was nights like these that pushed me to write my newest book – The Burntwood Anthology.

A few years ago, the same few topics raced through my mind. The news cycle was a horror show of misogyny, unfair treatment of those trying to understand their sexuality, bitter men unwilling to admit their faults, and self-proclaimed kings whining about not getting their way. I was unsure how to deal with the anger and disgust I felt about the state of the world and even how I have possibly contributed to it.

I felt alone.

I felt helpless.

What do you do when your mind spins and you are looking for answers? Do you talk to a friend? Bury yourself in work? Take a hatchet to the wood pile out back until blisters erupt on your palms?

As a writer, I quieted my mind. I got out of my own way. I opened my laptop.

What emerged was a collection of stories that turned out to be both fictional and personal. It was cathartic, but, oh boy, did I visit some dark places? (That was new for me at the time. I’m usually a more quietly romantic and dramatic writer.)

Thus, The Burntwood Anthology was born: a collection of fiction exploring darkness. Teens trying to understand who they were. Assholes getting what they deserve. Bitterness running so deep it spoiled fruit. And I found ghosts and witchcraft and wild, dangerous beasts. All of it was hiding in the beauty of Northern Wisconsin.

Sometimes the hardest part of writing is editing. Sometimes it is the first sentence or the dark twist. In this case, the hardest part wasn’t in the writing. It wasn’t crafting the gore or stealing the vision for the main players.

The hardest part was sharing this collection. First, with a trusted friend. Then with my writing group. Finally, with the publisher of my most recent novel (In Wells’ Time, Unsolicited Press – 2025 Minnesota Book Award Finalist).

When you create something personal, something authentic, it becomes a release valve on all of those complex emotions that keep you up at night. When you share it, it is a bated breath. You wait to learn if you are alone in your conclusions. Will you be ostracized? Will you be laughed at? Will eyebrows raise and texts go unanswered?

But when I finally share my writing, I’m often reminded that we are more alike than we realize. I remember that I’ve been all the faces in the airport. I’m certain, somewhere out there in the darkness of the world there is someone lying awake, worrying about the same things as me. Maybe it’s you.

If so, we’ve felt the same emotions. We know each other’s sadness because we’ve both cried. We’ve both been betrayed. We’ve wrestled with the bitterness of loss. Hopefully, we’ve both loved and been loved. By a friend. By a guardian. A stranger.

Stories are our way of connecting even when we don’t know the person on the other side of the page. We haven’t’ met, but we know each other. And even the darkest stories like those in The Burntwood Anthology remind me that we are not alone.

And that is a comforting thought.

DAVID LORING NASH is the author of In Wells’ Time and the forthcoming book, The Burntwood Anthology. The Burntwood Anthology is a collection of six stories of dark fiction from Minnesota Book Award Finalist David Loring Nash (In Wells’ Time, Unsolicited Press, 2024). Nash stretches his wings with his first dark fiction collection of six, unflinching short stories. In the Burntwood Anthology, we paddle up North to the fictional town of Wondrous Bluffs, Wisconsin, not far from the banks of the murky and meandering Burntwood River where death claws at those who are deserving. It is a braided narrative of Northwoods horror, eerie introspection, subtle witchcraft, and self-proclaimed kings getting what they deserve. The collection explores topics ranging from hubris and revenge to commentaries on the fluidity of sexuality and dating in the digital age.

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I start by asking: do these places visually and externally correspond to a world within, to zones and aspects of my interior? If extrapolated and perceivable as place, as geography, as topography, would it match the desolate, degenerate, eroded, and scarred? Do these places call to mind or call into being a deep loneliness, a call to lonely places—am I finding my ghosts in the world without?

I believe there are cities, towns, neighborhoods, locations that are our geographical alter-egos, or replicas of our inner world, of our emotional tonescape. There’s something about, a) Time as a silent assassin with its efficient scalpel, b) Time as a hooded ninja that no one ever sees, c) the call to lonely places, d) we are ghosts in our own lives, e) what fades remains, f) the allure of lore, g) there is crackly resin in the air that gives ephemera its due and scroll, h) nostalgia is a death trap, i) empty motel swimming pools harbor secrets, j) you think you are arriving in a certain town and quickly realize the town doesn’t exist, because, k) you have effaced that town with a town of your own narrative and imagining, you have prematurely buried one town and in its place superimposed another town over its bones, which leads to, l) becoming a witness to a geography that is both mimic and delegate to one’s mapped fractures.

I walked to the train station at night. I was going to drive. It was a hot day. I had already been walking out in the sun, and I thought—just drive to the train station. But when it was time to go I decided to hoof it. I knew that I would regret driving there, and not feeling my feet on the earth, not being connected to the streets, not absorbing at a pedestrian’s pace. The pedestrian’s’ pace was equivalent to writing longhand. Walking was the longhand of transportation.

It took me about a half hour to get there. At the station, only a gray-haired man with a guitar, sitting on a bench outside the visitor’s center. The man was softly strumming his guitar, gently plucking bluesy notes, almost as if her were shyly practicing his playing where there was no intended audience. Either that, or he had a lover’s fingers, making sure his touches registered subtly and tenderly, delicate hints preferred to bold statements. The man left after about fifteen minutes.

Now the station was empty. Just me and the legacy of the tracks. Railroad America, and its industrial modeling of eternity, its abbreviated span of endlessness. I called to mind my friend Bear, a road dog through and through—weary, hopeful, forlorn, incorrigibly romantic. Bear was now settled in Memphis, tending to his garden and watching his grandchildren grow up.

Does time-resin sting our eyes? Does desolation call forth our most solitary angels? Desolation allows one to become a vagrant, rooted in blessed nobody, divergently attuned to an original script. The wind writes in the air all the time, but no one deciphers the handwriting.

Nostalgia is a death-trap, eating its own tail and leading nowhere. Now and again and again now never is nostalgia’s recipe and calling card. Nostalgia is the last picture show revived endlessly, a cinematic séance in rose-light and sepia. You whisper to nostalgia as you would a shy and tender lover concealed in a shadowy niche.

How to merge, marry, superimpose archival fragments onto your own presence and narrative in real-time? What is real-time? Was it real-time when I wrote real-time seconds ago, not now real-time is gone, and back again, as I am writing this (in real-time)? Real-time never goes anywhere. It follows the irrefutable principle of orbit. Around and around but never going anywhere except around and around. It never fades or disappears. Real-time is the common nomenclature for eternity. Real-time is eternity’s signature and claim in digestible forms. Real-time is folk in its bones and surname. Eternity is a blank slate disguised as real-time.

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, award-winning novelist, poet, performer, playwright, and screenwriter, John Biscello, has lived in Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man’s Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. His fiction and poetry has appeared in 3:AM magazine, nthposition, the Tishman Review, Paris Lit Up, Kansas City Voices, Yuan Yang, and numerous other publications. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ. The Bride, a chamber film that he wrote and directed, debuted in May of 2024, and was an Official Selection of the Berlin Indie Film Festival and the Tokyo Lift-Off Film Festival.

John’s newest masterpiece (yes, we said it), No One Dreams in Color releases 4/2026.

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For several years, I’ve worn the same red sweatshirt to book fairs, out in the world, in my day-to-day life. But it’s at AWP where it really happens. Every year, without fail, someone stops me to ask where they can get it. Sometimes it’s quick, just a passing question in the aisle. Sometimes it turns into a longer conversation, the kind where you can feel recognition happening in real time, like they understand something about it before they can quite name it.

Until now, the answer has always been the same. You can’t get it. I had just the one made and it has always been mine.

This year, I’m turning 40. So I’m making 40 of them available for those who want to celebrate with me. What can I say? I am a sucker for auspicious alignments.

It’s available through the end of March, or until they’re gone, whichever comes first.

But this is not really about the sweatshirt.

The word “bitch” has always meant something very specific to me, and not in the way it’s typically used.

I call the women closest to me my bitches (with permission because consent is non-negotiable). These women are my ride-or-die people, the ones who show up, who hold the line, who love fiercely and don’t disappear when things get hard. There’s nothing diminutive about it. It’s a term of respect, of intimacy, of knowing exactly who someone is and choosing them anyway. These women know exactly who they are; they are the most capable, emotional, and powerful women I know.

I also call myself a bitch, and I do it deliberately. When I was a kid, I was wildly sensitive (still am) and people could hurt my feelings with just a few words. My mom would look me in the eyes, tears falling down my face, and say, “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words won’t hurt you.” And she repeated it often. I internalized that fucking phrase and built a shield out of it.

And you know what, I own that word because ‘bitch’ has been used for a long time as a way to contain women, to punish them for stepping out of line, for speaking too directly, for refusing to be agreeable. Women get called bitches when they hold boundaries, when they say no, when they don’t shrink to fit into the box built for them by someone else.

I know that personally. I’ve been called a bitch by people when I stopped accommodating them, spoke up a little louder, stopped people-pleasing, held them accountable, and when I refused to hand over my power just to keep the peace.

That word is meant to land as an insult. It’s meant to make you reconsider yourself, to soften, to apologize, to step back into something more acceptable.

I’m not interested in doing that.

There was a moment recently when I almost stopped wearing the sweatshirt. Someone used it against me, threw it back in a way that was meant to diminish what it stands for, to make it feel small, personal, cutting.

And I had a choice. I could let it reshape how I saw the sweatshirt, let it take something that felt like mine and turn it into something I had to second-guess.

Or I could recognize exactly what was happening.

That impulse to weaponize the word, to make it sting, to make it something I should be embarrassed of, is the same impulse that has always been behind it. That’s the whole point. That’s why the word exists in that form at all.

So I kept wearing it.

More than that, I understood it more clearly.

When I say mama didn’t raise no bitch, I am not rejecting the word. I am rejecting the way it is used to define weakness. I am saying that version of the word does not apply to me.

I am not someone who folds. I am not someone who stays quiet to keep the peace. I am not someone who trades self-respect for approval.

At the same time, I will claim the word on my own terms, as something sharp and chosen and mine. A word that signals strength, loyalty, refusal. A word that has been turned so many times it no longer sits cleanly in anyone else’s hands.

There’s a long history behind that, too, the way language gets shaped and reshaped depending on who is allowed to use it and how. If you’re interested in that evolution, this essay is worth your time.

What I know is this: I’m not interested in being a version of womanhood that is easy to manage.

This sweatshirt holds all of that for me. It isn’t neutral, and it isn’t ironic. It’s not something I throw on without thinking about it. It’s a stance, and more than that, it’s a shield.

Not the kind that hides me, but the kind I built a long time ago, when I learned how to take words that were meant to hurt and refuse to let them land that way. This is an extension of that. The word “bitch” has been used to diminish, to control, to keep women in line, and I have felt that directly. But I’m not interested in stepping around it or softening myself to avoid it. I’m interested in deciding what it does and does not get to mean.

So I wear it.

Not as a joke. Not as decoration. As something deliberate. As a refusal to let that word define weakness, or compliance, or silence. As a way of holding my ground without explanation.

And this year, I’m making 40 available because there are other people who understand exactly what it means to take something that was meant to cut you down and wear it anyway.

If that’s you, you don’t need more said.

You can get one here.

When they’re gone, they’re gone.

If you choose to buy one, I do hope you share a pic with me, or show up to a book fair we attend so we can cry and laugh and revel in the madness.

— Summer

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Many years ago, someone close to me called me ‘odd.’ It hurt at the time, maybe because I knew it was intended to, and I had been raised to not be that dreaded word. Plus, it took me completely off guard. My default personality is to assume the best of people. People are genuinely nice, right? At this point in my life, I think I can safely say that a lot of people actually have a hard time being nice–they’ve got so much of their own shit getting in the way. What can you say? We’ve all heard it: hurt people hurt people.

God forbid others’ coldness turns me into one of them, walking around all armored up, blank-faced, and self-concerned. (Listen, when a writer writes that a character’s smile never reaches her eyes, it’s not for mere melodrama). God forbid we turn into a global society of those.

My husband, 16-year-old daughter, and I recently completed watching all seven seasons of The

Gilmore Girls on Netflix—yeah, we were really late to the party. It took about a year or so, off-and-on, and was something fun we could all do together on Friday and Saturday nights. We instantly became addicted. I had wrongfully assumed it was going to be one of those fluffy, dumb shows, all poor writing and gooey romance and plotlines you could see coming from a mile away. How wrong I was! The show is full of a variety of types of women dealing with very real and tricky situations, including one of the best nuanced (and, at times, horrifying) portrayals of a mother-daughter relationship I’ve encountered in popular media. In season one or two, Rory’s boyfriend tells her that she’s odd, but he says it in a way that shows his complaint is also (partly and with hesitation) his overwhelming admiration. Oh boy, I thought. Rory pauses and then says, ‘thank you.’ It was like a jolt to my system. A “normal” girl, a perfectly reasonable woman, could be odd? And in being odd, not bad or immoral or embarrassingly unsavory? An outcast? Yes, not only could a normal girl be odd, but she could be proud of her oddity! It is her compliment; her greatest source of creativity and genius.

Wow, no way.

In the spirit of Rory and Loralei Gilmore and all odd women everywhere (thank you very much),

I give you a lucky thirteen list of my favorite all-time odd women writers. They are gloriously odd by the depth and width of their imaginations; their embracing of non-prescriptive plotlines, characters, and prose styles; their boldness in imagination, prose, plotline, and subject matter. They go where no one has gone before and will probably never go again in just that way. They are visionaries. They do not censor themselves, and they have no qualms about facing uncomfortable truths, especially when it comes to themselves. For women, the art of writing has historically (and, I’d argue, currently) been the one activity where we can exist completely freely: no one peering over our shoulder; no one looking at our appearance and judging, censoring or amplifying; we can even publish under a male name. No one needed to know we wrote the words at all! The following women writers have shattered the ceiling, blown up the room, and are out walking free in the multiverse, often during a time when the majority of good women were relegated to the home. Go out and read them, and, please, add your own favorites to the list–tell me.

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By my late twenties, I had a great career going as a sound editor. I was in the Editors Guild, and I w…

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After moving from North Carolina to Oxford, Ohio for my husband to take a job at Miami University, I had to quit my job. I had worked in the clinical psychology field for the past fourteen years in v…

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No matter how someone becomes a parent, the shift into motherhood can derail a womxn’s creative practice. And trying to get back to it can feel impossible. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be…

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