Happy Saturday, folks. I hope you’ve had a good week.

Between an earthquake last Friday then the eclipse, it could have been read as a week of ominous signs around here but what I thought about instead while I was out on Boston Common with my students Monday afternoon (not much view of the eclipse from our windowless classroom) was how great it was to see that hundreds, maybe thousands of people had gathered in the park in the middle of a work day to share the event. Just like we’d talked about the earthquake a few days earlier. Maybe a bit like going to AWP knowing you’ll be exhausted, overwhelmed, over budget, and most likely stuck in an airport longer than you’d prefer but also that it’s probably worth it to see all the like-minded people who are there too. (Though ask me about that when I’m hiding in a corner of the conference center next year.)

Anyway!

This week we published Catherine Gammon’s review of The Long Swim, a novel by Terese Svoboda. Both Catherine and Terese have been repeat contributors to the journal and we’re glad to have their names on our pages again.

We also published the second story in our month of nature-themed fiction: "Reaching" by Marta Regn. This is Marta’s first publication with us but we encourage you to read more at Bullshit Lit, Had, and elsewhere.

In contributor news, Ryan Habermeyer’s story collection Salt Folk was recently published by Cornerstone Press. We shared his story “The Jump Humping Handbook for Dummies” earlier this year.

Contributor Austin Ross, along with filmmaker Chris Wallis and other partners, is crowdfunding to make an adaptation of a story we published in 2017, "The Man For The Job." Here's where to learn more about that project and perhaps lend your support.

You might also want to support our friends at Rose Metal Press, currently trying to recover (as so many are) from the sudden and poorly handled closure of Small Press Distribution. RMP are raising funds to reclaim their own books left behind by SPD and to move forward. As I said, there are many other presses struggling to recover from this setback right now so if you're with one of them and have a crowdfunding appeal to share or another way folks can help, please let me know and I'll include it in an upcoming newsletter.

Finally, submissions to our flash fiction summer series will be open until May 1.

Thanks for reading,
Steve Himmer