CHRISTOPHER HIGGS’ ORIGINAL: FIJI & THE GROCERY STORE A bird and crickets and a parrot and a little boy on an oxygen machine. The hum of the tone. The constant breathing of the baby. This forest is dense with suburbia. This constant is nagging. Pay attention to the signs. Look both ways. Pirates make quick…

MICHAEL KIMBALL’S ORIGINAL: THE BIRDS, THE LIGHT, EATING BREAKFAST, GETTING DRESSED, AND HOW I TRIED TO MAKE IT MORE OF A MORNING FOR MY WIFE I had fallen asleep, but my wife hadn’t died. I had woken up, but my wife hadn’t woken up too. She hadn’t moved either. I whispered into her ear that…

J.A. Tyler’s original: Variations of a Brother War (Education Triptych) Breathe In When Gideon was a boy his father held out the rifle, ball loaded and powder locked. Gideon’s father let him cradle the stock, spoke about how the weapon is a woman and where a woman carries her ammunition. And to Gideon it wasn’t…

This will be a month of literary remixes. The first seventeen days of December I will post “remixed” versions of stories and poems I solicited from various writers—works I cut apart, recast, disfigured, and redreamed into new shapes and horrors—while the last half of the month will find the tables turned, and many of those…

Hi Necessary Fictionites— Thanks for having me on as the writer-in-res this month! I’m off to Kenya for a month as of Wednesday, so this is my finale post. I’m sharing a short glimpse of the novel-in-progress, A Life in Men, that I’ll be working on revising while in Kenya, with a goal of getting…

Following up on yesterday’s interview with Vanessa Carlisle, a self-published debut writer, I’d like to spotlight another young writer—on the complete opposite end of the country, in Florida to Carlisle’s California—who also opted to self-publish his first novel rather than wade endlessly through the conventional publishing hoops. Raul Palma, Jr., a Miami native, was a…

As one of the finale features of my residency here, I’ve decided to spotlight a young writer of particular interest to me, Vanessa Carlisle, whose short fiction Other Voices Books will soon be publishing in an exciting new anthology of women writers depicting sexual experiences from the point of view of male characters. The anthology,…

Apologies for the delay in Dzanc Books week here on Necessary Fiction! We went to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s dad in Beavercreek, Ohio, and in the rush of packing for three kids and myself, I left all the Dzanc titles I wanted to cover this week back in Chicago . . . I’ll do…

As some of you already know, the book press I co-founded and currently run, Other Voices Books , is now referred to as an “imprint of Dzanc Books.” We get a lot of questions about this, ranging from “Uh, how do you pronounce that?” (answer: Da-zaynk) to “Do they have to approve the books you…

Hey all— The next installment in the Body Parts series is coming tomorrow, but in the meanwhile here’s a link to a piece I wrote about “risky writing” on The Nervous Breakdown. Emotional risks that writers take when we tackle difficult content . . . but also the more logistical risk of what people in…

Hi everyone at Necessary Fiction. Thanks for having me on as November’s Writer in Residency—you’re all going to be walking a crazy journey with me as I prepare to leave for a month in Kenya (departing December 1 and returning New Year’s Eve.) This, in addition to my usual, chaotic schedule of running an indie…

I’d like to close my residency by saying a big thank you to Steve Himmer and Necessary Fiction. It was an honor to be a part of a magazine that consistently does such fine work. I look forward to seeing what Gina Fragello has in store for us in November. For those who enjoyed School…