Billy Haskins is a mute boy who is loved very much by his parents. They care very much for him and they wish very deeply that no further harm should come to him. Billy’s parents know how little boys can be cruel, how they would make fun of the scars on Billy’s throat and his…

I’m looking forward to this month on Necessary Fiction, and I’m grateful to Steve Himmer for offering me the opportunity to be here. I have no idea what I’ll do with it. The title of the journal alone is deeply intimidating. I’m not sure I’ve written a necessary fiction in my life. Most of what…

This month we’ve prepared for bloat and prowlers and organ misplacement; we’ve looked at things lonesome and infamous and hallucinatory. I want to thank everyone for attending this all-you-can-read-and-see-and-listen with me, especially the writers and artists and teachers who shared their thoughts and words: Meghan Austin, Jac Jemc, Andrew Wickliffe, John Tanner, Mary Hamilton, Nate…

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by…

This is an excerpt from a project-in-process attempting to map both seen and unseeable intersections via image, myth, letters, fiction, lies, memoir, footnotes, and outright exaggeration. The siamese twin demi-goddesses Sanjallentoa and Ltaajsonnale were not born under the Gemini stars, as you astrological gurus erroneously claim. Instead, they were born in fall during a year…

Note from Jess: I asked a few poets I know to share how fiction has informed or influenced their poetry. Eleni Sikelianos I have been as influenced by fiction as poetry. Moby Dick and A la recherche du temps perdu were hugely important to the poems in my book Earliest Worlds — lifted lines, twisted…

There have been a number of conversations lately about the teaching of creative writing (See Roxane Gay , A D Jameson, and Aubrey Hirsch at HTML Giant and Amber Sparks at Big Other), whether it can or should be taught. These conversations revolve mostly around teaching college students. But I want to take a step…

Steve Goodman’s Moby Book by jessstoner There’s so many songs/entire albums based on Moby Dick. It’s good to get a balance for the kinds of bands interested in taking it on. Rose Berlin’s Coraline (Neil Gaiman’s Coraline) by jessstoner Based on Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water Close to Home” The Glasswave’s Lolita by jessstoner The…

Note from Jess: For years now, Beverly Nelson has been writing a book based on the index of a book never written. This is a long-term project. Beverly is not finished with the book. She has, however, been kind of enough to share how she’s writing it.) Douglas Blau’s Index was used as an essay…

In May of 2010, I emailed Yelena Bryksenkova because I I knew that her Georges Perec watercolor for the cover of The Review of Contemporary Fiction would be a perfect gift for a favorite professor. Yelena, so kind and quick on the reply, relayed the bad news: my professor had already bought it. Of course…

Eve tells Adam that it’s newness she collects. That she gathers gestures. “Cubs will nurse from any tiger too tired to object” is her proof. When she doesn’t get the response from him she wants, she says, “You never rub my feet anyway” and tells him, “Fine then, inhabit your own eternal summer.” Somewhere in…

Note from Jess: Much of what has been posted here in the last two weeks has contemplated the hallucinatory leaps, the generative space between things. For Alexander Lumans, Shawn Huelle, Mary Hamilton and myself, these jumps traverse the white space between text and text and image. In Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo, we don’t…