Author: Heavy Feather

Those Fantastic Lives, strange stories by Bradley Sides, reviewed by Philip Clapper

When we read stories that contain both the beauty of the world and its gloom, we can see our reality for what it truly is. Bradley Sides’ new collection Those Fantastic Lives contains compelling pieces of fiction that use the speculative lens to terrify, delight, and aid us in pondering the true reality around us,…
“Spending Time with the Beast”: Maxwell Malone Interviews Darrin Doyle

Darrin Doyle is an author and English professor at Central Michigan University whose fiction has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Long Story, Cottonwood, Alaska Quarterly Review, and other publications. He has written two novels, Revenge of the Teachers Pet: A Love Story and The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo, and has published three short story…
You’re Pretty Gay, a short story collection by Drew Pisarra, reviewed by Jarrod Campbell

The ease with which queer lives can, in the blink of an eye, turn from something mundane into a moment of incredulous absurdity becomes commonplace the moment a person accepts that truth about themselves. Many components add together and create complex formulae necessary for any concoction: childhood longing and distress, adolescent anxiety, adult damages, to…
Side A: “The Borg EP,” a comic by Rachel Busnardo

*Ed.’s Note: click image to view larger size. The Borg EP Mini-interview with Rachel Busnardo HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)? RB: There are lots of moments that have shaped me as a writer, some big, but many were very, very small little pin pricks…
“Defiance and Dilemmas”: An Interview with Michael J. Seidlinger by Hillary Leftwich

Is writing an act of defiance itself? Or do the dilemmas we face as writers push us into acts of defiance? Michael J. Seidlinger and I got comfy and chatted back and forth via email over a week’s timespan and sunk our literary teeth into the emotions involved with writing—more importantly, the defiance that often…
Two Poems for Flavor Town USA by Avery Gregurich

I Keep Guzzling Bug Juice, Thirsty As I Am I can never leave the Casey’s convenience store without myBug Juice. I just gotta have that sport cap thrill. It’s always gotthe Vitamin C I’ll need, and less sugar than apple juice. There’seven a Straw’ Nana flavor to boot! Some like it hot. Others drinkonly Whistl’…
Excerpt from SCARLET: Three Glitched Still Lives by Francesco Levato

*Ed.’s Note: click images to view larger sizes. SCARLET is a digital visual/poetic meditation on the fractured state of psyche induced by extended social isolation under COVID-19 lockdown. The digital/visual poems are created through erasure of the novel The Scarlet Plague collaged with glitched imagery from everyday life in lockdown. The titles of poems in…
Little Eyes, a new novel by Samanta Schweblin, reviewed by Shannon Nakai

In its eyecatching green-and-white cover and deceptively simple title, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes offers a playful, incisive critique on what it means to follow a global trend in our increasingly connected, yet increasingly virtual culture. With the contemporary feel and multinarrative structure à la Tommy Orange or Marlon James, Schweblin invites us into workspaces, bedrooms,…
“Repetition Is Magical”: Jesi Buell in Conversation with Candice Wuehle, author of FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed

Candice Wuehle’s most recent poetry collection FIDELITORIA: Fixed or Fluxed centers around the magical elements of our everyday lives. Through cosmology, tarot, and alchemy, Wuehle is able to explore the dualities we encounter and transform them from binaries into continuums. I spent some time digging deeper into the collection with the author. Wuehle is the…