My lyric essay “Licked By Our World We Get Licked By Our World,” which you were kind enough to publish (Thanks again!), is the final essay in a series inspired by the four classical elements of Western antiquity: earth, wind, fire, and water. This is the water one. Previous essays revolve around occasions where I’ve eaten dirt, had a radon reduction tube installed in my house and set myself on fire. For this essay, I started my draft with times when I almost drowned.
Kristina Gorcheva-Newbery is a writer to watch out for. In her lyrical and harrowing debut story collection, What Isn’t Remembered, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry provides her readers with the most valuable opportunity in fiction: to empathize with strangers on the page.
I wanted to write a short story that followed Aristotle’s idea of the perfect tragic play: one place, one time, one action. There was a period of about a decade when I traveled frequently between Montreal and Kolkata, and often had long ‘addas’ — conversations — with family members, conversations that involved unresolved conflicts in sitting rooms.
This poem came to be during a workshop in the fall of 2020 with C.S. Giscombe. It was in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic, and the worst fire season I’d experienced living in northern California. Looking back, there was a desire to find fullness and sensuality in the mundane—and precarious—every day of living a life as it is.
What are my values as a poet, as a person, and how am I living those values out in the way I usher this book through its journey? For me, it came down to community. This book is a way to be in community with more humans around big questions and little questions, and just being human together.
When do I know when a moment is a poem? Or worth attempting to see if it’s a poem? For me, it’s a lot about discomfort. When is there a moment where there’s just an edge—there’s something that leaves me with that brow furrow, you know? Like how does that happen? How is that part of the human condition…why? Why, my seven and 10-year-old have been asking the whole time I’ve been lucky enough to be watching them be humans. The “why” is this brow furrow that starts the process and then over time, the sounds and the line breaks are what helps me figure out if this is a poem or if it’s just a journal entry and needs to just sit at my desk for a while.
The editors of Bellingham Review are pleased to announce the publication of Issue 83, our twelfth annual online issue. Inside you will find a collection of new hybrid, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from incredibly talented writers. You will also find a new feature of Cuban poetry translations. The issue’s cover features David Scherrer’s stunning photograph, …
We are pleased to announce the winners of Bellingham Review’s 2021 literary awards—the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction—selected by contest judges Jessica Jacobs, Sarah Einstein, and Kristiana Kahakauwila, respectively. The winners will each receive an award of $1,000 and will be published in the Spring 2022 print issue of Bellingham Review.
The editors of Bellingham Review are pleased to announce the publication of Issue 82, our first ever Spring online release and eleventh online issue. Inside you will find an extraordinary collection of work. Our feature on asemic writing highlights the talents of artists working in an imaginative, stunning field of expression that you truly must …
Submissions to our annual literary contests open Dec.1. We offer three $1,000-dollar first-place prizes for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The final judges for the 2020 literary contests are: Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction: Kristiana Kahakauwila 49th Parallel Award for Poetry: Jessica Jacobs Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction: Sarah Einstein Dedicated to forming a community …
