Author: Heavy Feather

Original Short Fiction for Haunted Passages: “Saponified” by Taylor Hebert

So far, the honeymoon had been okay, but she couldn’t rid her mouth of the taste of soap. She had been brushing her teeth three times a day. Only breathing deeply could cleanse her palate—but with the next taste of anything, it was as if she had been gnawing on a golden bar of Dial.…
Haunted Passages Poem: “In the Dark” by David Cazden

Doctors gaze at Mom’s CAT scanthe way astronomers lookbetween galaxies.For space is mostly darklike our old staircasewhere I’d turnby the dim-lit landing,angling to the last steppast my brother’s closed door.Once he didn’t make the turn,winding up on the roof―legs over guttersamong boughsswaying like drunken angels.The last day I see Momin the memory wardshe has forgotten…
“Killing Is Caring”: An Interview with David Kuhnlein by Matthew Kinlin

Writer, poet, editor, visual artist, and actor: David Kuhnlein’s work is expansive and mutant. Working with fellow alchemist Sean Kilpatrick, Kuhnlein has developed a concentrated form of text: concise, insidious, visceral. Blood boiled into tar. His haunting first novel, Die Closer to Me, a work of science fiction set on the planet Süskind, was released…
Fiction Review: Jess Bowers Reads Katharine Coldiron’s Collection Wire Mothers

None of the five short stories in Katharine Coldiron’s debut collection Wire Mothers are specifically about psychologist Harry Harlow’s attachment experiments with infant rhesus macaques and wire/cloth “mothers.” Instead, Wire Mothers earns its title through accretion, as the characters in each of Coldiron’s stories seek comfort from others yet remain unable to connect, just like…
New Prose Poetry: Excerpts from Girlfriend by Barbara Henning

When my longtime yoga teacher, Genny Kapuler, read what I had written about her, she said, “I feel honored to be one of the beads in your mala, one of your sisters.” I like to think of this book like that, as a poetic prose meditation on my friendships with girls and women. I started…
“His Name Is Jonas”: Nicole Yurcaba Reads Joshua Chaplinksy’s Novel Letters to the Purple Satin Killer

In November 2023, a BU Today opinion piece posed a pertinent question: “Why are we so obsessed with serial killers?” Three Boston University-affiliated experts weighed in on the topic, one that came into focus after police arrested Rex Heuermann, a man accused of killing three woman whose bodies were found on Long Island’s Gilgo Beach…
Side A Hybrid Piece: “Your Repayment Eternal (Two Necks)” by Andrew Zhou

Your Repayment Eternal (Two Necks) 1. The hangman arrived home two necks richer—one man sentenced for murder and the other for rustling—and heard a whistling in the air. It was the half-competent kind his father used to make in the mornings before the drunkard hollered at the wrong woman on the wrong porch and had…
Novella Review: Mark Crimmins Reads Ashley Honeysett’s Fictions

Rumors about the death of autofiction have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, claims—in Publisher’s Weekly and elsewhere—that there is no such thing as an autofictional novel (or novella) are themselves less redolent of fact than of fiction. Ashley Honeysett’s genre-bending hybrid novella Fictions is a sign that, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, autofiction…
Nonfiction Review: Jen Schneider Reads Kat Meads’ These Particular Women

It’s a particular type of writer and a particular type of writing that illuminates (ten-fold over ten essays) as much as it informs. It’s also a particular type of writing and a particular type of writer that uncovers details (oh-so-delicious details) as much as it declares and reveals universal truths. These Particular Women, written by…