They say you should write what you know. Today I want to put in a word for writing what you don’t know.

If I could tell my younger self one thing, it would not be to take a different road, or even to turn back sooner. It would be to waste less time on shame.

In attempts to wage war with self-doubt, I’ve decided to make this the spring of now instead of later.

You never want your doctor to think you are normal, especially not if your doctor’s naked body has spent so many nights curled around yours like a question mark.

we’d jump into a pool of mosaic glass / our hair sleeked / wild as film sluiced from a reel

When I think back to the most meaningful moments I’ve experienced in the past year, they were all when I was taking the time to deeply engage with art, my community, or my surroundings.

The horrible rotten truth is fiction writers need to be good liars.

I molt and yet the feathers / never leave me. I, a wet bird, shake / off the soak.

Every summer, there was a blood-trail running from the bridge over the river to the shed in Danny’s backyard.

At a reading I attended last month, an essayist exploring the nature of holes mentioned that the philosophical term for what surrounds a hole is a host. A hole, of course, cannot exist without its host.

I think what’s great about a literary journal like this one is that you never know what you’re going to get. To read Barnstorm is to continually step into the unknown.

Give me swill, give me / dirt between my follicles, give me sand / from your eye

Perhaps I have a faulty circuit in my brain, but suddenly the most urgent thing was to explore, to find an adventure; something that would allow me to ignore the state of my marriage.

All summer long, the atmosphere pulses with the sense that anything, at any point, can happen. I love the island for this reason.

First, write. Let the monster free. And then, after grabbing that drink and snack, realizing nothing I said made any sense, tear the monster’s skin apart and return to the barest of bones.

I’m afraid for the future of the arts in this country and at my university. And yet, the pieces in this volume imbued me with hope.

She was my best friend in the world, but we fought ferociously, like feral cats, several times a week.

It doesn’t take long for comfort zones to turn into trash compactors.

I cannot bring myself to make the gesture that happens on television.  That, there, is fiction. This, here, is real.

The higher you climb the more you believe you are sky.