Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions, was a finalist for the Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize and the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, and appears in Story, Joyland, The Missouri Review, and Fatal Flaw. Her translations appear in Asymptote, World Literature Today, Spazinclusi, and The Apple Valley Review.
Raised in rural Louisiana, Laura now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her first novel. Follow on Facebook and Instagram.
Laura Venita Green (Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff) Photo credit: Sylvie Rosokoff
In this interview, Laura discusses the difference in writing vs promoting a book, pulling unrelated stories together into a coherent novel, and more.
Name: Laura Venita Green Literary agent: Chad Luibl, Janklow & Nesbit Book title: Sister Creatures Publisher: Unnamed Press Release date: October 7, 2025 Genre/category: Southern Gothic Elevator pitch for the book: Sister Creatures follows four women from the same small town in Louisiana, and a supernatural entity that looms over their lives.
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What prompted you to write this book?
Though I’ve lived in New York City for six years and Austin, TX, for 18 years before that, when I sit down to write, my imagination always takes me back to rural Louisiana, where I grew up. I wanted to write a book that captures the place, the people, the culture, and the attitudes. I wanted to write a book that feels true even as it utilizes fantastical elements. I wanted to write something that I could feel proud of and that made me excited to return to my desk day after day.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Six years. It took about four years to write the book, and another two years to learn how to query, find an agent, get a book deal, go through rounds of edits, and finally get it out into the world. I’m not a writer who sets off with a plan, so everything—the idea, the story progression, the themes—came together over time in the process of drafting and revising.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The biggest surprise for me is the difference between being a “writer” and being an “author.” A writer sits alone for years, engaging in a regular, largely solitary practice of shaping words into something good and hopefully even breathtaking. But then, once you have a book deal and turn into an author, you need to switch gears and put yourself out there to advocate for your book. For me this includes posting on social media, writing companion essays, listicles, pursuing media training so that I can talk engagingly during podcasts and other interviews, event planning, pitching my book to reading series, bookstores, libraries, reaching out to everyone in my contacts list to gin up support in advance of publication date, and attending as many author events as possible to expand my community. I’ve really enjoyed it all—I love learning new things and getting outside my comfort zone—but promoting a book is so very different from writing one.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
The book started out as a handful of unrelated stories—a high schooler crushing on her older co-worker, a woman confronting her doppelgänger, two sisters with diverging lives, a shapeshifter in the woods, a mother whose daughter is obsessed with a creepy 19th century children’s book. I had no idea how to complete a book-length project, so I took what I already had and treated them like puzzle pieces. I worked out how these stories were related and how the characters were connected, shifting things around, expanding, and filling in the blanks from there. It felt almost like working out a math problem (something my brain very much enjoys), and over a lot of time and drafts it all came together like magic.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope readers bring their unique experience and interpretations to this book and make it their own while also feeling surprised (and maybe even gleeful!) at certain connections and events. What I take from Sister Creatures is that every single person contains entire worlds, worlds that can be partly unveiled through a creative practice. Also, we all contain a sort of wilderness in our souls, and we each need to find our unique way of coping so that we can stay connected to the ones we love.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Don’t think about your mother when you’re drafting your book! In other words, don’t censor yourself. We want readers eventually, but if we write worried about how some real or imagined person might eventually react, we’re in danger of writing something less—less weird, less racy, less ambiguous, less impolite. Less interesting. I don’t think our goal in creating art is making something that no one can complain about. (By the way, my mother is one of my primary readers, but I do need to get a draft down with her out of mind before I send something her way.)
Since obtaining her MFA in fiction, Moriah Richard has worked with over 100 authors to help them achieve their publication dreams. As the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, she spearheads the world-building column Building Better Worlds, a 2023 Eddie & Ozzie Award winner. She also runs the Flash Fiction February Challenge on the WD blog, encouraging writers to pen one microstory a day over the course of the month and share their work with other participants. As a reader, Moriah is most interested in horror, fantasy, and romance, although she will read just about anything with a great hook.
Learn more about Moriah’s editorial services and writing classes on her personal website.
Congratulations to Eric Reitan, first-place winner in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category of the 94th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition. Here’s his winning story, “The Memory Eater.”
by Eric Reitan
Malachi, who delivered mail for forty-seven years, stands at the screen door clutching a letter. He pictures the route he’ll have to take: north, west, and north again, stair-stepping through Tulsa’s tangled highways.
The branches of the old oak are their own kind of tangle, ice-coated, gleaming like quicksilver in the streetlamp’s glow. Behind the tree moves something large, dark, and shaped all wrong.
The voice startles him. He shakes his head, looks at his fist. There’s an envelope in his grip with an address in blue ink, Claire’s precise handwriting. No stamp. And words scrawled in his own hand: Important. Remember.
Remember. He blinks and shakes his head again.
“Dad? Close the door. It’s cold out there.”
As if on cue, wind rattles the door. Ice-coated branches crackle and chime. A black shape behind the oak shifts into view.
Why is he standing at the door? He looks at his hand. A letter. Important. Remember. The ink of those two words looks fresh. Not like the address. He can almost remember writing them.
He needs to ask Claire. She’d know. “Take me home.”
“This is home now, Dad. You live with us now.”
“How can I live with you? There’s no room.” Claire can’t handle more than a few hours with Dan’s wife. What’s her name? Something with an H.
He likes how the ice coats each blade of grass and shines on the wooden stairs. Not on the street, though. Too much heat from the day. He lifts the envelope.
“Oh God.” It’s almost too late. His heart thuds. He grabs the doorframe. Outside, multi-jointed black limbs settle like tapping fingers on the oak’s trunk. “I have to go! I need to ask Claire.” He shakes the envelope at Dan. The contents stir: the slip-slide of a necklace chain. He pictures a garnet pendant resting below Claire’s collarbone.
“We can’t go anywhere, Dad. Roads are slick as snot.”
“The roads hold the heat. They’re only wet.”
“Except where they’re not!” Dan sighs. “What you got there, anyway?”
“Claire told me…” He shakes the envelope at Dan again. He pictures his route: through downtown, past the Greenwood District. Up to a stranger’s door.
Dan squints. “Is that something from before Mom—” Dan closes the distance and tries to take the letter, but Malachi jerks it back, pressing it to his chest.
Dan sighs again. “It’s got an address on it. We’ll put it in the mail when the weather clears.”
“It’ll be too late. Little Danny will be cursed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I don’t know!” Tears form in his eyes and he blinks them back, swallows them back, refuses to cry in front of his son. “Claire knows.”
“I’m sure she did.”
There’s a pressure in Malachi’s chest, a pressure he can’t allow. He swivels back to the ice-glazed night. Something large and black moves through the freezing rain: a dozen insectile limbs with too many joints; a massive, sagging body the color of tar or black oil; a mouth that…a mouth that…
It opens wide. He sees. He screams.
The living room furniture doesn’t suit the house. He knows these beautiful old two-story homes, built in the 1920s with their creaky floors and built-in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace.
He’s holding a mug, but what’s in it isn’t coffee. It smells like coffee but it’s darker, oilier, moving in a way coffee shouldn’t move.
“You feeling better?”
Malachi looks at Dan. His boy. When did his boy grow a beard? It looks silly on him. “I need to go home.”
“It’s close. You should let Danny walk by himself next time. You’re overprotective.” He tries to picture his grandson Danny, but all he can see is Dan, his little boy Dan who’s got a beard now and is staring at him with sad, angry eyes. How can eyes be sad and angry at the same time?
“Danny started walking to your place when he was eight, Dad. Walked there almost every day before—” Dan shakes his head. “What’s the point?”
Malachi tries to picture little Danny walking by himself. “How old is he now?”
“Fifteen tomorrow. We’ll have a party if the ice melts.”
Malachi lurches to his feet. “Fifteen.” He looks around. “Where is it?”
The black thing oozes from the mug until a spidery limb breaks free.
Malachi wakes in the night and reaches for Claire. His hand closes on emptiness. He sits up, back protesting. Enough light seeps through the curtains to show this isn’t his bedroom. But one of Claire’s paintings is on the wall: a boy squatting by Swan Lake.
“That’s what our boy will look like, don’t you think?” Claire says. She’s toying with her garnet pendant, the one he gave her, the one she never takes off except to shower.
“Of course not, silly.”
“He’s got a beard now. Why does he have a beard?”
Claire doesn’t answer. He looks for her but she’s gone.
He gropes for the bedside lamp, struggles to find the switch. Finally light spills over the rocker, the one they could never part with despite the missing spoke. Why is it here? The world’s all wrong, all sideways. Malachi lurches up and looks for something to wear. The clothes in the closet hang neatly alongside a creature made of oil, with limbs like multi-hinged sticks and a sack-like body with a mobile mouth.
He doesn’t scream because then Dan will come and stop him, and Danny will turn fifteen and the curse will consume him. He grabs clothes and throws them on over his night shirt, slides into the loafers by the rocker, turns his back on a dozen black legs reaching through a gap in the rocker’s spokes, and staggers into the living room.
What’s he looking for? His eyes scan the hutch, stop on the envelope. He snatches it and studies the address. For forty-seven years he delivered mail. He knows where this is.
Outside, everything is crystalline. Tree branches creak under the weight of ice. The landing and steps shine with slickness, but if he can reach the grass he’ll be fine. He grips the black iron railing. He’s stiff but strong. Walked miles every day of his life.
He can do this. Across Utica, through Swan Lake Park, north on St. Louis.
He shoves the envelope into the inside pocket of his tweed coat and starts down the steps. The railing moves beneath his fingers: flexing, unfolding. He flings himself forward. The lawn crunches under him, a hundred blades of grass turned to tender icicles.
A bronze sculpture of a trumpeter swan spreads its wings, preparing to take flight.
The Trumpet of the Swan. One of his favorite books. He read it to Dan and then Danny. Have they finished reading it yet? Danny will want to know how it ends.
A crack like a gunshot. A crash. A car horn starts to bleat.
He looks towards the aftermath: across the street, by a house built with oil money, a house with columns and pretensions and too many rooms. A tree limb has surrendered to the weight of ice, branches splayed over an SUV’s roof, one limb pushing through the glass.
He has to get home. Dan is waiting for him to finish The Trumpet of the Swan. But Swan Lake Park has become a wonderland of glittering slickness. And the tree limb across the street, tired of tapping the horn, rears up, its body a flaccid sack of tar-coated fat, its limbs crackling like the ice as it straightens dozens of knobby joints.
The body heaves and twists to expose a gaping mouth, a mouth full of fire and gunshots, rage and terror, the blackened skeletons of houses, and blond-haired women darting from the ruins, golden prizes in their fists.
Malachi flees, falling by the statue of a mostly-naked youth scolding a swan.
“I need to get home,” Malachi says. “Claire will know.”
“Home is gone. Claire is gone.” He doesn’t know who says it, but it sounds like Dan’s voice when he’s cranky and condescending.
“My house is just half a mile that way!” He flings his arm toward the path he knows, a path written in his bones.
“Where did you kiss her first, Malachi?”
This sounds nothing like Dan.
Malachi rises, turns in a circle, trying to remember the last time he kissed her. Was it here? Claire loved Swan Lake.
“The first kiss,” Claire says. “Not the last.”
He looks for her, but his eyes land on a massive bulk heaving incrementally across the street, piston legs hauling and straining, maw swiveling towards him, releasing the sound of bombs and bullets and the last cries of the dying.
They always go through the kitchen door, the family door. The front door is for strangers and guests, for dinner parties that stretch into the night with candles and Claire’s bright laugh.
The door is locked. He pats his pockets for the key, then looks for the rock under the holly hedge where they hide the spare. There’s no rock, no hedge. Everything is wrong and the black thing is moving in from the side, limbs skittering, bulk-sack body swinging so its mouth flops towards him.
He pounds on the door. “Claire!” He keeps pounding until lights turn on inside, and then the light over the door. A man yanks it open. “What the fuck!” He’s huge and black-bearded.
Malachi flees, skids on a slick patch but somehow keeps his feet. He was always good at that, keeping his feet, but it’s harder now and a monster is chasing him and a strange man shouts after him to wait, come back, come inside.
“Where did you kiss her for the first time?”
They were seventeen when it happened, but they’d always known each other. Malachi never had a sibling. What he had was the girl next door. While war tore the world apart, they played in Woodward Park. When Claire’s brother came home without a leg and everyone called him a hero, Malachi and Claire used their allowances to buy candy cigarettes at Sipes. When the river flooded Riverside Drive, they rode their bikes there to see the spectacle.
But the first kiss happened on a hot summer night outside the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, two weeks before their senior year. They’d been to a choir concert and were waiting at the base of the broad church stairs for Claire’s father to pick them up.
That was when Malachi gave her the garnet pendant. Of course he fumbled with the clasp, and of course she giggled at his clumsiness. She asked him how it looked and he said beautiful.
He clutches the black rail that bisects the concrete stairs, his neck aching as he looks up at the church’s art deco spire: sweeping lines of limestone and terra cotta sculptures that resemble Incan gold. His body shivers. His hip aches and his chest lances with pain. He wonders if he’s broken a rib.
“Where’d you get it?” she asks, lifting it from its resting place on her collarbone. The garnet’s facets catch the moonlight.
“Mom,” he answers. “She gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday. Said to give it to the right girl when I found her. ‘I don’t have a daughter, and I don’t want it anymore.’ That’s what she said.”
He never asked why she didn’t want it. His thoughts were anchored to the first part: When you find the right girl. He knew it would be Claire, even though it took two years to build up the courage to give it to her.
“Why are you giving me a family heirloom?” Claire asks.
“Because you’re the right girl. You’ll always be my family.”
Tears fill her eyes. She rises to her tiptoes to kiss him, and his feet slip out from under him, and he falls onto icy concrete. Pain shoots up his tailbone.
She was here, and it was a summer night, and the stored heat from the day still poured from the church’s limestone walls. His eyes rove up along the spire. The thing perched on top looks like it’s impaled, but then the legs begin to move, and the body slips like liquid through the spire’s blades.
It scuttles downward with a clacking like a hundred metal legs, or a thousand, or the sound of icy tree limbs snapping and crashing all around.
An old man huddles over a trash can lid where paper cups, catalogues, and plywood bits are starting to catch fire. The man’s grizzled face breaks into a smile. He shakes the lighter at Malachi in triumph before settling back to stare into the flames.
Malachi smells garbage, urine, and something sweet, like apple pie. He eases closer to the fire. A glance around shows him he’s in an alley. The black thing is framed by the buildings at one end, but it stays just beyond.
The old man nods to himself before looking back at Malachi. “New here,” he says. “Bad night.”
“Cold,” Malachi answers.
“I can’t do it myself, Malachi. I wish I could, but I can’t anymore. Just…please, it isn’t ours. It never was.”
He blinks at Claire, flat on her back in the bed. Claire always slept on her side, her knees pulled up.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying it’s stolen!”
Malachi shakes his head. Anger rises in his throat. Why would she say such lies? “My own mother put it in my hand.” He shouldn’t snarl at her, not when she’s sick, but how can she speak such lies?
He turns away, his body trembling. He slips, grabbing the dumpster’s edge to slow his fall. Still, he lands with a crack on the cold concrete. The pain surges up his spine.
“I saw it in a picture,” she says from the bed. Malachi blinks back tears, because she’s dead and he’s so angry with her, and her voice is so weak and the pain is shooting up his back and the old man’s face is hovering close.
“I know, I know,” says the old man. “Slick as snot.” His words cover up Claire’s voice, but her words remain, words about the picture in the library display and the throat of a beautiful woman. “Like a Black Mona Lisa,” Claire whispers. “The same smile.”
The old man helps him back to the fire.
“That’s not proof of anything!” he declares. “There could be more than one like it, right?”
“Of course,” says the old man.
“My family. We were never racists.”
But Claire isn’t done. Her voice comes from all around now, echoing in the bricks, gliding across the ice and up his spine: “Looters.” Malachi’s eyes rake towards the end of the alley. He sees them, the looters, running in and out of ruined homes—and the tarry black thing there with them, its maw open and its spider-legs clicking against the alley’s walls.
“How long has she been dead?” the old man asks.
“I don’t know! How can I not know?” He slams his fists into his legs. And then, because the pain feels good, he does it again.
“If you can’t remember, sing. A song she liked.”
“Blue Moon.” Malachi rocks back and forth. The tune slips through his head, swirls out from the little fire in the alley, over the gleaming ice until it touches a single, multi-jointed leg.
“Please, Malachi. I’m too tired to fight. Just…please.” The monster heaves itself up, pushing its bulk between the buildings. Malachi knows what it is. He knows.
“I have to go,” he says.
He kneels in a ring of ice-filmed bricks. “Where am I?” His voice becomes a chorus, flung back to him from every direction.
“Of course there could be more than one,” Claire says. “But there’s a name. Inscribed on the back. I always thought it must be some relative of yours I didn’t know.”
“It’s yours, Claire!” His voice returns to him like the voices of a dozen men, a hundred, a multitude gathered round to stone him for his sins. “I gave it to you.”
“Because I love you!” He staggers to his feet despite the ice, defying the accusers striking him with his own voice. “It’s always been you, Claire, and now you’re going to die and you want me to…to….” He stops because he can’t make his voice work, because the sobbing is too deep in his throat.
All her life she wore it. Always that gift from when they were kids in love, kids who never stopped being in love. How rare is that? How rare and perfect and caught up in the shine of a garnet pendant. And now she’s dying, and he knows what he has to do: hold onto it until Danny turns fifteen. Give it to him then. Give it to him and tell him how his mother gave it to him on his fifteenth birthday, an heirloom to give to the woman he’d marry. Tell him how Claire wore it every day, all her life, more precious than a wedding ring, and now it goes to him, to beautiful Danny whose head is just as full of dreams and yearning as Malachi’s own, a boy more like Malachi than Dan would ever be, who’d choose his own Claire, his own beautiful bride, the pendant weaving through the generations like a thread, tying them to one another so tightly Claire couldn’t die, she’d live on every time Danny saw the pendant at his lover’s throat.
“I can’t do it.” The words return to him like a blow. He’s afraid his ears will bleed. He covers them before he cries again, “I can’t!”
The spider legs reach over the wall’s lip. The body heaves up and over, slapping onto the footbridge. The mouth opens. Screams pour out, and the looters laugh. He sobs.
When Claire hands him the envelope, he shakes his head but takes it anyway. And then he leaves her there, leaves her with that uncertain look on her face, uncertain because she doesn’t know what he’ll do, because he doesn’t know, because he can’t lose her, because everything is dark and he can smell the smoke of countless bonfires pouring from the monster’s maw.
He stands on a street corner. A highway to his left is empty of traffic. Of course. The bridges and overpasses will be slick, slick as black oil, and maybe the monster isn’t coated in oil at all, maybe it’s black ice, invisible in the dark, and it’s a wonder he’s standing, held up only by his hand on a street sign’s pole.
He knows where he is. A mail carrier knows his city.
Did someone drive him here? Is he supposed to wait for someone to pick him up? Maybe Dan is on his way. Or Claire. It’s strange that he’s out on a night like this, the ice making the branches hang heavy and the power lines sag. It must be something important.
“What are you doing?” he asks Claire.
She’s pale and thin, and her eyes are red. She sits at the computer, typing, leaning in, moving her mouth as she reads. Finally she looks at him. “I’ve known for a year, Malachi, and I did nothing. I always thought there’d be time. But there isn’t any more time.”
He turns fifteen today. “Don’t say that.”
“But it’s true. I’m dying and…and I’ve got to do this.”
Fifteen? That can’t be right. Danny’s little. He was only nine when Claire died.
The cold aches in the hollow spaces of his head. It intensifies and he tips back his neck, his eyes taking in the night sky. The darkness has shape. It slides free of the gaps between the stars. He tries to run but falls on his knees at the edge of the street.
He has no way of knowing how close it is. The thing’s size could mean it’s a monster to fill the heavens or that it’s close, that its maw is about to splash hot breath down his neck.
He scrambles on all fours, heart thumping, hands scrambling for purchase, and the darkness has a voice, and the voice is bullets and fire, and the voice is Claire ripping all his fantasies apart, asking him to give it up, to give her up, to forget about nostalgic threads and knots and Danny’s fifteenth birthday because it’s not an heirloom, it never was an heirloom, it’s always been a curse, and there are still things we can fix, even if it’s only garnets and a bit of gold.
He’s sprawled in the street. White light shines through his closed lids. He blinks and lifts his head. Flashing red and blue behind the white, and a shape, a man in a uniform like the one he used to wear.
But no. This is no postman.
The officer squats next to him. “Are you hurt? An ambulance—”
Malachi shakes his head. He reaches into his tweed jacket and pulls it out. “Here.” He beats at the address with his fingertip.
The officer squints at the lettering, at Claire’s precise hand. “That’s right around the corner. Is that where you live?”
Malachi pushes himself to his knees. No ambulance. They can’t take him away in an ambulance when he’s so close. His whole body aches. He imagines broken ribs, a fractured hip. The pain is everywhere but still he rises without wincing, rises to his full height. “I’m fine,” he says.
He put it in a drawer. All it would’ve taken was a stamp, and instead he put it in a drawer. His will over hers. His dreams over her sense of justice. Stowed in a drawer for Danny’s fifteenth birthday.
“Oh, Malachi.” Her voice is kind, too kind for a man like him. “You know that isn’t true. You never took it out of the envelope.”
He blinks as he turns to the officer. The sky is paling. Almost dawn. “I found it two weeks ago,” he says.
“If you could just…” He gestures at the address.
The officer helps him to the cruiser. He sinks into a seat. As the car lurches forward he turns and sees his oily black monster scampering alongside, its gut heavy with stolen memories.
But then it stops. Malachi cranes his neck, watching it recede into the glittery dawn.
As the police car pulls into the drive of the small green house, Malachi takes in the gray shingles and overgrown junipers. Dawn light splashes the white garage door.
“There’s light,” Malachi answers, pointing to the dawn.
I’ve worn this pendant most of my life. I thought it was an heirloom of my husband’s family. In a way it is, but a cursed one, heavy with crimes.
The inscription on the back—R.A. Brown—matches the name of one of your ancestors killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre. Ruth Ann Brown. Last year I saw her picture at an exhibition about the massacre. She was wearing this pendant. Maybe one of my husband’s relatives stole it in the looting.
Its return can’t undo history, but maybe it can do something. I don’t know. But in your hands it becomes what I always wrongly took it to be: a family heirloom.
I hope it brings some measure of joy to you and yours to have something that was taken, restored.
Time to get ready for another month of poetry. I’m currently working on a few creative projects, and one of them is figuring out 30 poetry prompts for the 18th annual November PAD Chapbook Challenge!
Over the years, many poets have contacted me to let me know of the successes they’ve found in publishing individual poems and collections that started with these daily poetry challenges in April and November. And I think this one, in particular, is a great challenge to work toward building a collection.
As usual, the November challenge is a little different than the one in April in that the ultimate goal is to collect the poems into a chapbook-sized manuscript of 10 to 20 pages of poetry. The guidelines in this post should help guide you through this unique poetry challenge.
Here are the basics of the November PAD Chapbook Challenge:
Beginning on November 1 (Atlanta, Georgia time), I will share a prompt and poem each day of November on this site.
Poets are then challenged to write a poem each day (no matter where you live on the planet) within 24 hours (or so) from when the prompt is posted. Don’t worry: If you fall behind or start late, you CAN play catch up.
Poets do NOT have to register anywhere to participate. In fact, poets don’t even need to post to this site to be considered participants.
The Challenge will unofficially conclude around 24 hours after the final prompt is posted. That said…
This Challenge is unique, because I expect poets to take all the material they’ve written in November and create a chapbook manuscript during the month of December. (Yes, you can revise material, and yes, the chapbook should be composed mostly of poems written for the challenge–I’m using the honor system.)
Poets have until 11:59 p.m. (Atlanta, GA time) on January 15, 2026, to submit a manuscript that can be 10-20 pages in length (not including table of contents, title page, etc.) with no more than one poem per page. So if you wrote 50 poems in November, you have to narrow them down to the best 20 (or even fewer). Submit manuscripts to rbrewer@aimmedia.com with the subject line: 2025 November PAD Chapbook Challenge. (The subject line is very important, because I have a very busy inbox.)
The goal will be to announce a winning manuscript before the next April PAD Challenge, but I never know what curveball life with toss my way. That said, I will try my best for a good turnaround.
Write a poem every single day of the year with Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming. After sharing more than a thousand prompts and prompting thousands of poems for more than a decade, Brewer picked 365 of his favorite poetry prompts here.
What do poets get out of this challenge?
If nothing else, they get several new poems, but I’ve heard plenty of success stories over the years from poets who have gone on to publish individual poems from these challenges and even complete collections (mostly inspired by the challenges).
Plus, the winner gets recognized on this site, along with many honorable mentions. That’s a good thing.
Regarding comments, this site has a history with commenting problems, which is one reason why I don’t make it mandatory for poets to post their poems on the site to participate. However, I think poets who do comment get a lot out of it by sharing their work and creating a community during the challenge. Just make sure you save all your work elsewhere too–like in a notebook, Word or Google doc, etc. It’s good to have backups.
If you have any additional questions, shoot them to me in the comments.
I can’t wait to see everyone in November.
Calling all poets! We’re on the look out for poems of all styles–rhyming, free verse, haiku, and more–for the Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards! This is the only Writer’s Digest competition exclusively for poets. Enter any poem 32 lines or less for your chance to win $1,000 in cash.
When I started working on my debut novel, Dust Settles North, way back in 2015, I knew I wanted to write a story about Egyptian American adults like me—raised Muslim in America but often clashing with the values their immigrant parents tried to instill in them. My book started out as a short story written for one of my MFA workshops. From there, the work expanded, and the characters grew into people I could relate to. I found myself writing the type of story I wish I had been able to read—a story where I finally saw myself represented.
As a kid, I was an avid reader, devouring Babysitter’s Club books and Nancy Drew novels, begging my mom to take me on weekly trips to Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP). But in all of those books, most of the characters were white. I never saw myself or my family represented in anything I read or watched, and as a result, I always felt different from my peers, wanting so badly to assimilate. I wonder now if I had seen myself represented in those books back then, would I have felt that same childhood shame about my cultural background?
As I got older and expanded my reading palette, I started to find more books by Arab and Muslim authors. But still, I couldn’t quite connect to them, and I wasn’t seeing my cultural experience represented. Many of those books feature characters that are far more conservative than my family, or far more removed from the American culture I grew up in. And often, there was some subplot about terrorism, perpetuating the stereotype that Arabs are terrorists—or that we’re all just a few degrees away from knowing a terrorist.
When beginning my own novel, I knew I had to write something different. I wanted to show Arab, Muslim characters who lived normal lives in America. Characters who were caught between two cultures, who didn’t follow all the rules of their religion, and who certainly weren’t associated with “terrorism.” There was a gap in Arab American representation, and I intended to start filling it.
That said, my book doesn’t represent every Arab American, and it would be impossible for just one writer to do that. That’s why we need more books by underrepresented authors, so that we can get the full spectrum of experiences. But I at least wanted to represent my own cultural experience so that hopefully others like me could relate and see themselves in a story for the first time.
For me, the first time I felt represented was when the show Ramy came out, depicting an Egyptian, Muslim family living in New Jersey—literally my upbringing. I finally saw a family like mine on TV, and I could relate to the characters in a way I never had before. At the same time, the show’s creator, Ramy Youssef, faced criticism from other Muslims who said that his show did not accurately depict the Muslim experience. But how can just one show depict the entire Muslim experience? Youssef was portraying his own experience, and many, like myself, found it to be relatable.
Through my book, I want others to find something to connect to in the same way I connected to Ramy—and not just Arabs and Muslims. Dust Settles North can be a story for many children of immigrants. My book follows Hannah and Zain, two adult siblings in their twenties, dealing with the aftermath of their mother’s death. Hannah and Zain live between two cultures—not American enough for America and not Egyptian enough for Egypt. Theirs is a common experience among children of immigrants in America, and I hope that through my novel, others can find something to relate to and can see themselves represented in some way through my characters.
Check out Deena ElGenaidi’s Dust Settles North here:
Since obtaining her MFA in fiction, Moriah Richard has worked with over 100 authors to help them achieve their publication dreams. As the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, she spearheads the world-building column Building Better Worlds, a 2023 Eddie & Ozzie Award winner. She also runs the Flash Fiction February Challenge on the WD blog, encouraging writers to pen one microstory a day over the course of the month and share their work with other participants. As a reader, Moriah is most interested in horror, fantasy, and romance, although she will read just about anything with a great hook.
Learn more about Moriah’s editorial services and writing classes on her personal website.
Whether it be a screenplay, a short story, or a full-length novel, there’s an old adage I keep on a virtual Post-It stuck to the right frontal lobe of my overtaxed brain. Imagine the following scrawled in Sharpie on a bright yellow square:
This is a phrase you’ll hear time and time again from both book editors and movie producers, and for the most part, they’re right. It’s a good thought to keep around while crafting a new story or thinking through a fresh idea.
Like most things, of course, it’s easier said than done. I mean, how does one subvert the expectations of a reader?
Great question, and there are a lot of different answers—everything from playful text design (you have to read it through a mirror!) to shattering tropes (it’s a rom-com slasher!) to unforeseen plot twists (the dog did it!) to shocking character development (Grandma’s an axe murderer?!).
The one I like to play with the most, however, is the setting. The stage, or stages, where the players perform your literary script.
To that end, here are four tips on how to make setting an effective device for your next story, and help you subvert those pesky reader expectations:
Make the setting a character (by giving it character)
In fiction, you’ll often notice that the description of a story’s primary setting isn’t given a lot of word count. This is particularly true in thrillers, when the author is more focused on keeping the reader flipping pages, relying on plot beats, dialogue, set pieces, and just enough character development to let the reader know who the bad guys are.
By taking more time, and care, with your story’s primary setting, you can better immerse the reader in what’s happening with your plot and characters and set pieces, because the world your character live within will become a living, breathing entity.
Are your characters stuck in a bathroom? Take a few paragraphs to describe it. What color are the towels? What do the tiles beneath your feet feel like? What kind of tub are we talking about? Are there cracks in the ceiling? Spots of mold in the shower?
There’s a big difference between two characters trapped in a clean, well-lit modern bathroom, or stuck inside one where the sink shudders and spits brown water from a squeaky, rusted spout and the walls are covered in aged, peeling wallpaper decorated with sad clown faces.
You can apply this practice to any setting you may be dealing with: A house, a car, a forest, an office building, or even the surface of an alien planet. Make the reader feel and see what your characters are feeling and seeing by coloring the world around them in a way that enhances the creepy, scary, hilarious, despairing, or unnerving actions of the story.
Make the setting a problem
What do I mean by “problem?” There a few possibilities. We could be talking about anything from a haunted house (e.g. The Amityville Horror, House of Leaves) to a deadly environment (e.g. Sahara desert, sub-zero Antarctica). Or it could be something not necessarily sinister in its own right, such as a crowded amusement park (where children get easily lost and everyone, it seems, is screaming), a hedge maze (a la The Shining), or an aristocratic mansion where the eyes of the paintings seem to follow you across the room and there are hidden doors behind the tapestries.
Of course, maybe your story doesn’t have anything that overt as part of the plot. That’s okay, too. For instance, I wrote a book called Sarafina where three brothers go AWOL from the Civil War and have to trek from Tennessee to Mississippi by foot. Part of the drama in the story is how untamed the terrain is—how there’s a concerning lack of food, how swampy the land can be, and how long a trip it is without any semblance of civilization. In other words, in addition to the wild animals, bandits, and scary monsters in the book, the terrain itself is one more hurdle the brothers need to overcome. It’s a problem.
Whatever your story, chances are there’s a way to up the stakes by making the setting itself more problematic for your characters.
Contain the setting
One of my favorite tropes is “Isolation Horror,” and it’s no surprise that many of my books and stories use a containment device to make sure my characters’ options are narrowed by external conditions. Much like three of my favorite movies, Alien, The Thing, and Jaws, the idea that the characters are trapped in their setting significantly raises the stakes and the terror. Whether your characters are stuck on a spaceship with a monster, or sheltering in a remote outpost surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice, or in the middle of an ocean with a shark bigger than your boat, the setting itself has dramatically reduced the odds for escape or, you know, living.
In my novel Boys in the Valley, I trap 30 orphans in a remote, rural orphanage, surrounded for miles by nothing but land that’s quickly engulfed by a blizzard (the story is set in 1905, so no snowcats to help them out). Now add demons.
In The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, I use a different form of isolation on my elderly residents—no arctic landscapes, endless desert or monstrous ocean, but instead the characters are trapped by their own physical, social, and economic standing. Whether they are simply too broke to leave, in need of care, or unable to find someone willing to offer them an alternate shelter, it strands the residents just as surely as if I’d dropped them on a remote island, or the surface of the moon.
By creating a “hotbox of horror,” you can amplify the tension of your plot because the reader knows there is nowhere for the character to run, nowhere to hide, and no hope for rescue.
Think about the setting of your story and ask yourself if you can build a proverbial moat around your setting, thereby ratcheting up the stress for both the characters, and your readers.
Make the setting unlikely for the trope
Referring back to my two novels, Boys in the Valley and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, one of the things that makes these two stories intriguing for readers—what I implemented to subvert expectations, in other words—is the combination of a traditional trope with a unique or unusual setting.
In the case of Boys in the Valley, I worked from a fairly traditional concept of demonic possession, but then placed that trope it into a 19th-century children’s orphanage. I then amplified the setting by isolating the boys with the help of the aforementioned nasty blizzard, and made the setting a problem by adding a few adult priests who certainly didn’t have the boys’ best interests at heart.
With Autumn Springs, I wrote a story in the vein of the well-worn slasher trope, but rather than put the serial killer in a summer camp filled with horny teenagers, I dropped the story into an upstate New York retirement community filled with kind, colorful elderly people. I then made sure to let the reader know that most of the residents were trapped, therefore isolating the setting, and gave the communal grounds enough description and character that, at the climax of the story, the landscape itself becomes part of the problem.
Writers like Grady Hendrix, who set a horror story in an IKEA-style home furnishings store (Horrorstor), and Bentley Little, who has created horror stories that take place in an office building and even a DMV, are classic examples of authors who have used setting to subvert the expectations of what can be scary, simply by shaking up the venue into something unusual, or even borderline comical. The hit movie Sinners is another example of taking a classic trope like vampires and combining it with a Southern juke joint during the prohibition era, thereby giving it an entirely fresh set of problems for the protagonists.
Placing your narrative in a setting that is surprising, however, does more than just give the reader something different to chew on; it can also create opportunities for you as a writer to invent new directions to take the story you might not have originally conceived of, or create interesting challenges for your protagonists (or antagonists) as they deal with whatever nightmarish destination has befallen them. You might even expand the trope itself into something that breaks entirely new ground in the fiction landscape.
When taking setting into account, and fleshing out your story world in dramatic and interesting ways, you might just find yourself somewhere you never expected—a horrific new playground all your own.
Check out Philip Fracassi’s The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre here:
Central Park is a place of imagination. Writers as illustrious as Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald have seen its meadows as scenes of pastoral innocence, its ravines as romantic chasms, and its forests as haunting wildernesses. Tracing its literary pedigree would fill many dissertations. This modest expedition focuses on the poetry of the park and what the park has to say to and about poets.
The Literary Walk
Let’s start with the Literary Walk. Head west into the park at 69th street, and you’ll reach the south end of the elm-fringed boulevard called the Mall. It’s rich in statues that hallow literary luminaries. No self-respecting poetic tour of the park could leave out Shakespeare. There he stands in bronze with his skin-tight hose making his legs look skinny in contrast to his torso’s doublet and cloak. He made the magic of the English tongue and, to judge from his self-assured expression, knows it. So much voltage, so much zing. Four hundred years, and his work still nightly lightnings from electric lips. Other Bard-related attractions in the park include the Shakespeare Garden, with its plants and flowers labeled with his verses, and the Delacorte Theater, which puts on free productions of his plays each summer.
If you stroll a little further up the Mall, you’ll meet with the Scottish national poet and lyricist Robert “Rabbie” Burns. Everyone knows “Auld Lang Syne”—he wrote the thing. A cloak draped dashingly over his shoulder, his eyes inclined upward toward heavenly inspiration, he is the epitome of a Romantic poet. He seems to be in the very act of addressing his true love “Highland” Mary Campbell, who died young. Part of his poem to her, “To Mary in Heaven,” is inscribed on a scroll at his feet. For a taste:
Eternity cannot efface Those records dear of transports past. Thy image at our last embrace, Ah! little thought we ’twas our last!
Opposite him sits Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish dynamo who packed rapture into expansive novels and panting lyric poems. Wildly popular during his lifetime, he taught grand passions to a bookworm age.
Last, a little further north, the lone American: Fitz-Greene Halleck. Half Yankee Byron, half New York Thoreau, he wrote verse lampoons and nature poems from the outlook of Appalachia’s brow. Though he was a big star in his day, no one reads him now. His work is overdue for a revival.
Cherry Hill
Take a path northwest from Bethesda Terrace, and you’ll go from full sun to the daze of Cherry Hill. Here, toward the end of March, Yoshino and Kwanzan cherry trees, natives of Japan, bloom hot pink and white and emanate a perfume that smells like almonds taste. Every year the Cherry Blossom Festival, a rite of spring, celebrates the sensory banquet this attraction serves up. Visitors arrive in droves and feast their eyes and breathe their fill. A good, deep huff, and you’ll be whooshed westbound across divides and islands, the Date Line, and meditating in a Shinto shrine.
Head uphill under the blossoms, and you’ll reach a round, red-brick plateau and, at its heart, a pool whose finial showcases sheer excess. One chucks modesty to admire the blinged-out bronze petals and bulbs ascending tier on tier. The basin is abrim with liquid art. The water magnifies wheat sheaves, American shields and shined profiles of ol’ Abe Lincoln from whatever year, and every cent is what we most desire.
Strawberry Fields
After you leave the banks of the Lake, hike westward up a steep hill, and you’ll reach the peace garden called “Strawberry Fields.” Pause to catch your breath, slow down and take in the shrubs and trees brought together from all over the world.
There’s spicebush with its scarlet flowers giving off an aroma that’s part cinnamon and part strawberry. There are mountain laurels that launch their pollen into the breeze when butterflies and bumblebees land on their stamens. The greenery grows here in memory of John Lennon, who was shot across the street at the Dakota on December 8, 1980. His widow, Yoko Ono, who still lives there, donated over a million dollars toward the memorial. A great lyricist and performer as well as the composer of the song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” Lennon belongs here in a poetic tour of the park.
A wide, circular gray-and-white mosaic in the pavement centers on the word “Imagine” and encourages the visitor to be “a dreamer” and hope “the world will be as one.” People often leave bouquets to decorate it, as if it were a shrine. Come on a summer afternoon, sit among the ablaze azaleas and listen to the strummers crooning both John’s solo song “Imagine” and Beatles’ classics.
The Alice in Wonderland Statue
Just north of the Model Boat Pond, you can pay your respects to Alice of Wonderland, the Empress of Pretend. As if at home enthroned atop the cap of a bronze mushroom, she is greeting a kitten climbing up her lap. Around her stand the zanies who inhabit Wonderland: the be-Wellingtoned Mad Hatter, the pocket-watch-harassed White Rabbit, and the dozy Dormouse. The Cheshire Cat’s grin is beaming mischievously in the background.
This scene is like a chakra of the imagination, highly poetic because of both its cast of make-believe characters and its emphasis on playfulness, which, as I see it, is an essential creative virtue. What’s more, Lewis Carroll, the author of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” wrote “Jabberwocky,” which many, many people name as their favorite poem.
This sculpture wants you to join it, so don’t stay back at Museum-distance sitting on one of the benches ranged along the fence. Go walk among the wonders, climb and play. Go live a life of curious events.
I hope this brief vacation in Central Park has shown that it both abounds in the sensory material of poetry and incites the visitor to give way to a frolicsome, inventive cast of mind. The former will send you back to your creative life with fresh sights, sounds, scents, tastes and textures to draw on. The latter will help you transform your ideas into art through the magic of an openness welcoming to metaphor and association.
Check out Aaron Poochigian’s Four Walks in Central Park here:
Growing up in the UK, I fondly recall the feel-good, “And finally…” stories reported at the end of the nightly news. They never missed the birth of a panda!
In broadcast journalism these stories are called a ‘kicker’ and are designed to counterbalance (or soften) the inevitable negativity and harshness of hard news pieces that make up most newscasts. They can be about anything positive, from cute animals (baby pandas) to an unusual lottery winning story.
Many local news stations still use variations of this format, and national newsrooms often dedicate specific segments to uplifting stories. Regional and local newspapers are renowned for their ‘local kid does good’ features. Magazines, especially women’s and lifestyle publications, were built on these types of stories. And of course, in the digital age, we can now find soft news on countless websites.
‘Soft news’ refers to lighthearted human interest and inspirational stories, including lifestyle, entertainment, and fashion. Sports journalism and many features also fall into this category, as do listicles, service pieces, and how-to articles. It can also include less positive stories, such as celebrity scandals and general sensationalist ‘tabloid’ fodder. These stories appeal to our emotions, curiosity, and a desire to learn. In journalistic circles they’re often referred to as fluff pieces.
Hard news is urgent and immediate, with reporters informing the public about important and serious current and ongoing events. Soft news is evergreen, the tone is lighter, and stories can entertain and inform, (although some would argue hard news has also become a form of entertainment).
While hard news is obviously important and needed, the constant barrage of bad news is becoming problematic, especially since it can pop up uninvited on social media sites and during online searches, in addition to the existing 24/7 news cycle.
Social media algorithms amplify negative and emotive stories to ensure engagement and this overexposure is having a detrimental effect on mental health, according to the American Psychological Association, leading to “media saturation overload.” Being subjected to a constant stream of negative news stories can’t be good for anyone’s health, but it’s especially harmful to young people. It can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression.
Soft news items not only counterbalance hard news, but in my opinion, they enhance and add to the ‘hard’ reporting, offering value and relevance. For example, while covering Hurricane Helene I researched the extent of storm damage, the death toll, and how flooding decimated entire communities. But among all the bad news were stories on the good work being done by ordinary people. My favorite story was about the Mountain Mule Packers; a team of mules that helped deliver disaster relief to stranded flood victims in North Carolina’s remote mountain communities. This is a heartwarming story, offering hope and joy amidst heartache and pain. It was also informative and useful if you knew of people who needed help at the time. Read the story here.
Some journalists thrive on the excitement and challenge of covering hard news exclusively. Although I like tackling topical issues and enjoy the immediacy of occasionally covering news, I’ve always preferred feature writing and investigative journalism. The best parts of the journalistic process are in-depth research and engaging with people—hearing about incredible personal stories, exploring different angles, and digging deeper into the heart of an issue. I’m not just referring to formal interviews here but just talking to people on their home turf and listening to what they have to say.
There are many layers and angles to each story. Hard news skims the surface and the reporter’s job is getting out facts quickly and efficiently, the who, what, where, and when. Again, a very important job. Features take a little more time and a lot more patience, and they can also tackle some of the ‘whys’ of a story. ‘Fluff’ pieces like listicles can offer quick, useful information about all kinds of things, like the best places to eat pizza in Nashville or the safest car for teen drivers. This ‘soft’ information is just as important and, in some instances, more relevant to people’s everyday lives.
7 Reasons Why “Soft News” Is Important
Here are a few more reasons why soft news is important:
We could argue that soft news is a lot more fun, especially when covering lighter topics. You can write about anything—Bigfoot, haunted cities in America, Mid Century Modern furniture, architecture, art history, you name it.
While the content of women’s magazines is primarily seen as soft (or fluff pieces), they do tackle politics and social issues but approach it differently. They humanize the stories, taking a deeper dive into the personalities involved, rather than giving a general, but detached overview. They also provide important information and advice on health issues, finances, parenting, and relationships.
Stories focusing on ‘soft’ topics can offer valuable and practical information and advice. It could be a feature on an artist, therapeutic horse riding, how knitting can help anxiety, and how to beat the winter blues. The topics are endless.
Soft news is evergreen; these stories have a long shelf life and can be enjoyed for years. Hard news is immediate but quickly forgotten, becoming outdated or ‘yesterday’s news.’
Writers can tackle interesting stories and meet/interview fascinating people. Researching and writing soft stories is just as educational for the journalist as it is for the audience.
Feel-good and inspirational stories really do make us feel better, by boosting mood, reducing stress levels, and inspiring hope.
People are starting to seek more positive, solutions based and constructive journalism. They want to know that there’s a possible solution to all the problems being highlighted. What is being done? Who’s offering help? How are they implementing changes?
Well-written and thoughtful soft news stories are important, because we need to feel hopeful, inspired, and reassured that people still care about each other. We are social creatures and naturally curious. If we must be bombarded with divisive, bad news all day, every day, then we also need access to positive, feel-good stories as an antidote. Otherwise, the public might just switch off altogether and go fully off-grid in protest.
And finally, soft pieces are predominantly nonpartisan, attract a broader audience, and many of the topics are universally appealing and relevant, bridging social, racial, and political divides. They foster community spirit and wellbeing. What’s not to love.
So, go forth and write some fluff pieces for goodness’ sake!
How does a man—or perhaps more importantly, a cartoonist-turned-puzzle-maker—burrow himself into yet another, equally confined niche such as literary translation?
(The Parable of the Puzzle Maker.)
Generally speaking, writers, translators, and the rarae aves that are lexicographers come from all walks of life but rarely from academia—demigoddess Jhumpa Lahiri notwithstanding. This may be due to the nature of the publishing business itself, where craft, endurance, and the completion of tasks within an allotted timeframe trump any other consideration. One way or another, the profession will see all manner of nightly lucubrators flock to it, be it under the spell of a higher calling—the splendid Langston Hughes comes to mind—or out of sheer necessity.
Surely the love of languages which saw yours truly learn English and Portuguese, coupled with an appreciation for dictionaries—a side effect of constructing word puzzles—as well as the awe-inspiring oeuvre of my friend Marc Bernabé all played their part, but the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns would seal my fate.
There I was, unable to leave the apartment and furloughed from my bookstore dayjob while in the midst of writing my first 125,000-word bathroom reader. With the latter’s meager advance already spent and desperate to prove to my Chilean fiancée she wouldn’t end up marrying a bichicome*, I came across IDW Publishing’s Spanish language editions aimed at Hispanic-American readers.
Although more than a decade had passed since I last illustrated for the company on a freelance basis, I had kept in touch with a friend in their distribution department who generously helped me contact the editor in charge. Career capital in comics, extensive exophonic writing, and a native grasp of the target language did the rest.
Several graphic novels later, as the pandemic demand for puzzle and trivia books waned, a surge in sales of public-domain classics—including two Winnie the Pooh volumes I colored anew—ensued. This trend led me to realize that a vast array of Hispanic and Lusophone literature lay waiting to join its Anglosphere counterpart on American and British shelves.
As an author straddling both worlds, I thought I was the right man to bridge that particular cultural divide. However, prose and verse would require all I had—and then some!—in order to plunge head-first into the translation rabbit hole—they still do!
So starting next month, I will be sharing my foray into the techniques, challenges and toil behind this beautiful craft in a series of Writer’s Digest articles, beginning with the bête noire of modern-day translation: AI!
Stay tuned.
*****
*TN: In Uruguay, a homeless vagrant. The root of the word is still in dispute between those who trace it back to the Quechuan wichi (impoverished, ragged), those who deem it a Hispanization of nineteenth-century British beachcomber, and those who to take it to be a conflation of come bichos (“bug-eater”).
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