Here we are back at Saturday, and I hope the week has been good to you all.

The subway line I live along here in Boston is closed for the month to finally catch up on years of deferred maintenance (this will surprise no one who has visited our thunking, clunking city), so I've been commuting on a different train with all the adjustments that brings. While doing so I decided that instead of reading a book as usual I'd try to catch up on all the articles I've saved to my ereader intending to return to "later." One of those, "Maintenance and Care" by Sharon Mattern at Places Journal, makes the case for and offers diverse examples of maintenance as an alternative ethos to creation, innovation, and accumulation. I recommend giving it a read.

Mattern's essay made me think about the community-building and community-keeping of literature and publishing and art. We write books to hopefully sell a few copies, sure, and most of us probably allow ourselves the occasional daydream about how that brilliant short story of ours might be noticed in a journal by some literary agent or editor or movie producer who ushers us toward bigger things. But it's also important to tend the small things, the zines and websites, the local meetups and regional writing conferences, the networks and connections — the "repair ecologies," in Mattern's terms — that remain when the big international write a novel in a month organization collapses, or the platform you rely on for reaching your audience degrades under new ownership.

Plus yesterday's mail brought the first new print issue of the rejuvenated — repaired! — The Onion after many years, so here's to more of that in our future. Maybe we'll be reading alt weeklies again before long, dare to dream. But in the meantime, here's what grew in our patch this week:

On Monday, Court Ludwick reviewed The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager from Dzanc Books. Court has reviewed a number of books for us now and we're always glad to have her return. You'll find more of Court's writing at her website.

And our featured story this week was "For Agnes We Pray" by Melissa Darcey Hall, appearing in our pages for the first time. 

Elsewhere, friend of Necessary Fiction Emily Adrian — author of the excellent new memoir Daughterhood from Autofocus, among other books — will teach an online fiction course for 92NY soon and you have just enough time left to register.

And the annual Conversations and Connections conference hosted by our friends at Barrelhouse is also coming up in Philadelphia. This is our favorite writing conference to attend both as a journal and as individual writers — I've presented there a few times, and I know our fiction editor Lacey Dunham (of the forthcoming The Belles!) has had a great time there,  too. We can't recommend it enough and the registration deadline is coming up.

I've written here before about Abundant Number, the new mail art publishing project from contributor Éireann Lorsung. If you'd like to get into the Fluxus spirit and submit a classified ad for the next edition (and why wouldn't you?), there's a form where you can do so.

Finally, submissions of fiction on the theme of "Hunger" are open until September 30, with guidelines available here. Those stories will be published in December, following our annual batch of spooky stories in October then a month of unthemed stories in November.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve Himmer

PS I can't let pass the opportunity to mention that Influx Press just published a new, revised edition of Marshland, Gareth Rees' brilliant book of hybrid place writing. I've urged Marshland on many people over the years, because it gave me one of those rare, perfect reading experiences of finding a work of art that does exactly what you've been waiting for art to do without quite being able to say so. If tramping around an urban marsh, turning over layers or ecology, history, psychedelia, decay, and possibility sounds good to you, please check it out.