Articles

This time of year the cozy seaside town of Bellingham, of which our journal must thank for providing both a namesake and a home, is nearly done shedding its leaves. The salt-air is crisp and misty.

In the introduction to his anthology Staring Back, Kenny Fries notes that “throughout history, people with disabilities have been stared at. Now, here in these pages . . . writers with disabilities affirm our lives by putting the world on notice that we are staring back.”

How would you like to wear a gorilla suit in public? I put that suit on

every morning and go to class, swinging like King Kong from the campus

lampposts. The college wants diversity, and so here I am. I want it, too, but

the college also wants to congratulate itself, and so it stares.

Ash
ant
air
Simple science fair
My eyes

Tips for Writers by Tipsy Tullivan is a satirical series on YouTube and Instagram.

Suzanne Paola: When did you first become aware of Tipsy Tullivan?

Jillian Wiese: She introduced herself abruptly one night. Just started talking.

SP: Tipsy loves to focus on the AWP Conference. What’s her relationship with this conference? What is yours?

1.

When I was ten I became enamored of a giant wasp nest. The thing was as large as a basketball, perhaps bigger, and it depended from a birch. I loved the very fact of the nest and I loved that I couldn’t see it.

When I set out to write a memoir about my parents sixteen years ago, one of the things that stymied me was early feedback from my peers that the content was “too unbearable” to read about.

I’m on Facebook. Some of my friends are posting their fury, as artists and radicals, about something that’s just happened: A few art students have complained to college administrators about their professor.

Though author Ella Rhoads Higginson (1862?-1940) is little known today, over a century ago she was the most influential Pacific Northwest literary writer in the United States.