Good morning everyone.

These past few days, and the next few coming, have felt heavy for so many of us — we've lost artists who served as beacons to peers and admirers across the distances of media, and closer to home we've endured less public losses that have me thinking of friends too far away for me to be there beside them in person. Other changes loom politically, culturally, and historically, some of those predictable and others bound to surprise us. It's hard to feel steady on the icy surfaces of this season. But I hope the reading we brought you this week offers at least a couple of small, steady handholds in your week, and I hope you have around you who and what you need.

This week saw one of our regular book reviewers, Court Ludwick, write about We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine by Deni Ellis Béchard, published by Milkweed Editions. More of Court's writing is available here.

And our featured story this week was "Boy Practice" by Jenny Fried, who is new to our pages but has more work available here.

Elsewhere, I want to draw your attention to a project of the cross-cultural, collaborative kind that gives me hope these days:

Mother Tongue Manifesto is an innovative project, working with short story writers in Taiwanese (Tâi-gí) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), and translating between the two languages. The project is produced by the Scottish social enterprise Wind&Bones.

That's an undertaking from past contributors Will Buckingham and Hannah Stevens (and looking up those links to their work has reminded me that our Writer In Residence archives our a mess in need of cleaning up after we changed publishing platforms a while ago — I will get on that!)

Also, Take It Personally by contributor Claire Hopple is coming soon from Stalking Horse Press.

Finally, submissions remain open until January 22 for our month of stories on the theme of "Return." Regular submissions are still closed and might be for a while, because we're getting booked pretty far ahead and will be shifting to our submissions for our annual summer flash series soon.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve Himmer