Welcome to Saturday, friends, and happy Independent Bookstore Day — for real this time!

Apparently I was off by a full week last Saturday and celebrated prematurely, but who can blame me when it's the first year with a bookstore right here in town, something I've been begging bookseller friends to bring us for a long time. Not that the Boston area is starving for other good stores, but now I can order and pick up my books a mere few steps from the station where I get on and off the subway each day. It's going to be both a blessing and a curse, I expect. Just like last week, I hope you'll have a chance to visit a store or two in your area, if you have some good ones nearby, or to support an independent bookstore from a distance.

This week, editor and frequent reviewer Diane Josefowicz wrote about The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, published by Biblioasis.

And our featured story was "Downstream from the Hollow" by Jeff Thompson, a writer we're pleased to have in our pages for the first time.

On Monday, May 5, contributor Steve Edwards will offer an online workshop for 27 Powers on "Rediscovering Your Story." And on Tuesday, May 13, contributor Sarah Fawn Montgomery will offer a virtual craft chat for the Writer's Center on "Writing and Disability, Chronic Illness, and Neurodivergence." Sarah also has Abbreviate forthcoming, "a small collection of small essays," forthcoming from Small Harbor Publishing.

For our readers in the UK, Pattern-book, a new poetry collection by contributor Éireann Lorsung, will be published in May by Carcanet Press. There's currently a code for 15% and free UK shipping — that code is ELPB15, when you order directly from the publisher. US readers, Pattern-book will reach us in July so will share that information when the time comes.

Last, I want to share something that happened this week at work. I've been teaching an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop with a terrific group of student writers. They've been giving presentations on literary magazines, to learn about the submission and publication process and the many niches and nooks often overshadowed by more prominent publishing houses. A pair of students presented on Fork Apple Press and their journal The Core Review, without knowing that Fork Apple is the project of several of my former graduate students (to be clear, that's a coincidence, not me taking credit!). The undergrads were excited to learn that and to see how they, too, might undertake DIY projects of their own. And when I told the Fork Apple folks, they were so pleased that they gave me enough copies of the journal for the whole class along with buttons, stickers, and their first poetry collection to spread around.

It was a moving reminder of how thrilling it is as a developing writer to discover the ecosystem of writers, editors, artists, and publishers starting magazines and presses and reading series and collectives not for the money (whatever that is) but for the love of literature and its community. And how great it is to see that awareness and its legacy passed along the same way it was for me when I was a younger person starting to write, glad to find whatever little magazines crossed my path — first in print (shout out to Jim Behrle's Meanie!) and later online.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Steve Himmer