Coil editor Leah Angstman rounds up the best literary pieces from the indie Internet for you to read this weekend.
There’s a lot of stuff on the Internet to read. Here, let me help you wade through the crap to get to the good stuff. This recurring column features stories, reviews, poems, interviews, essays, and literary whatnot that you might have missed, and you can come back every weekend for new great reads.
“I’m going to walk through a couple preps for those of us that need something to do while we wait.” | ERIC SHONKWILER has an important new column for bugout leftist preppers, When/If, with a new post, “Last-Minute Election Preps,” to guide you through the next few nail-biting days before the election. (Subscribe to the newsletter!)
“It is no secret that writing — which is often difficult anyway, for a multitude of reasons — has come with a new set of challenges during the era of COVID-19.” | KIM MAGOWAN, JERILYNN AQUINO, K. B. CARLE, and ANITA FELICELLI talk about writing during a pandemic in the interview “Conversation & Creation: Four Fiction Authors on their COVID-Era Writing Process” at So to Speak.
“Days you are sick, we get dressed slow” | MARIA HUMMEL slays you with her poem “Station” at Poetry Foundation.
“I’m not sure if you remember, Kathleen, but the first time we went out for lunch, you volunteered, quite casually, that you believed the world is doomed.” | KATHLEEN ROONEY is interviewed by KIM BROOKS about Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey and the characterization of animals in fiction in “‘What I’ve Got Is Half-Hope’: A Conversation with Kathleen Rooney” at Los Angeles Review of Books.
“Before all this started — the staying indoors and the constant cleaning and the calls about who got tested, who had it, who passed and was suddenly gone — I was afraid to go to the doctor.” | KAITLYN GREENIDGE talks about how Toni Cade Bambara’s novel on healing and activism is prescient for the present moment in “Rereading ‘The Salt Eaters’ Helped Me Process My Pandemic Fears” at Zora.
“In Front Street Liquors, hauling two fifths of Benchmark and a thirty of Bud, I see my third grade teacher working the counter.” | TOM WILLIAMS has a killer new story about childhood reminiscences, broken promises, and the need to be remembered in “In Front Store Liquors” up at Mixed Mag.
“The day of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings two years ago, I was applying thinly sliced yellow-dyed marshmallows in the shape of daisies onto cupcakes for my daughter’s sixth birthday party.” | LYNN STEGER STRONG talks about the destruction of women amid the recent Supreme Court nomination hearings in “Slow Violence” over at The Paris Review.
“It’s my former wedding anniversary.” | MAGGIE SMITH shares a post on Twitter about her past as a bride and how we keep moving, including two snippets of poems, and it is everything.
“With a final action that echoes outside the poem, a closure with sensual details that stick to the skull and stay in the room.” | ALINA STEFANESCU bleeds all over this fantastic piece about ending poems and what gets stuck in your head, “21 ways to end a poem or leave your lover,” at her website.
“When I kick up the treble, something in your voice cracks / like a sun ten seconds from going red dwarf, from cracking / the sky open like a pint of your favorite.” | STEVEN DUONG has a poem about music and life, “Ode to Playboi Carti in the Year of the Dog” at Agni.
