“Migrating Fictions is an original work that is especially timely in light of contemporary discussions involving refugees, Muslim registries, and troubling allusions to the ‘necessity’ of Japanese American internment/incarceration.”
—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work
“This highly compelling study will be quite productive for scholars of American literature, twentieth-century American history, race studies, gender studies, and migration theory. It also may engage scholars in postcolonial and contemporary identity theory.”
—K. Merinda Simmons, author of Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora
—Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award, Winner
—MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars, Honorable Mention
—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
—CHOICE Reviews: Highly Recommended
—Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, author of War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work
“This highly compelling study will be quite productive for scholars of American literature, twentieth-century American history, race studies, gender studies, and migration theory. It also may engage scholars in postcolonial and contemporary identity theory.”
—K. Merinda Simmons, author of Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora
—Society for the Study of American Women Writers Book Award, Winner
—MLA Book Prize for Independent Scholars, Honorable Mention
—CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
—CHOICE Reviews: Highly Recommended
Featured Writing:
|
The Threepenny Review NONFICTION: Glossary of Centralia, Pennsylvania Pushcart Winner 2025 Domboski, Tom—a twelve-year-old resident who on Valentine’s Day in 1981 fell into a hole in his grandmother’s backyard because the ground burned to ash beneath his feet. |
|
Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies
NONFICTION PEDAGOGY: In Search of Delight (à la Ross Gay) at the Art Museum: A Writing Exercise with Pen in Hand Each day when I walk to campus the fox squirrels greet me. They are possessive of the nuts in their clutches with a confidence and determination that my 9 a.m. self lacks. I laugh and tell them out loud that I have no intention of trying to steal their acorns. As a born-and-bred East Coaster used to grey squirrels, their Midwestern fur mixed with red warms me. Seeing these rambunctious, we-rule-the-school squirrels is delightful! I started expressing such moments of pleasure after I began teaching Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights... |
|
River Styx
FICTION: "The Stately Old Chemistry Building" An 1898 photograph from McClellan Hall’s earliest days shows maples, forsythias, and a grove of apple trees flourishing on the quadrangle’s lush natural carpet. From behind the greenery four stories of brick emerge with a rose window in a towered peak. In the foreground, a small animal’s motion blurs—probably Jinx, the cat of the kindly chemistry professor Walter McClellan for whom the building is named. |
|
National Flash Fiction Day Lights Out The lights have been out for two days. I’m sure that in other houses candles are burning and dusty attic-ed board games retrieved now that our electronics are dark. |
|
Massachusetts Review (in print only)
NONFICTION: A Community of E-Scavengers On November 1, 2012—over ten years ago now—I awake to the sound of a generator…in another, wealthier building. It is Day Four of the blackout. I cover my nose from the chill in my unheated and lightless apartment. My husband, already awake, wraps his arms around me and gives a quick squeeze. The warmth from his body accentuates the cold of the air. “It’s time to e-scavenge,” he whispers in my ear. We are co-conspirators, taking new actions and finding new words for this strange, new moment.... We are living in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. |
|
Five South
Our Golden Maple Even from this distance across space and time, I can see the halo-colored morning light that my maple filtered onto my bedroom floor. The image takes me right back to the comfort of my childhood. I can feel the shaded cool it lent me during sweltering summers decades ago, around the same time when my mother hung sheer curtains that she bought just for me and then named the tree mine. photo: Kathleen H. Manzella |
|
Gooseberry Pie Literary Magazine The Final Shot Stanley approaches his favorite bar with his arm extended like a man in a desert reaching for an oasis, but his thirst’s satisfaction is deferred. The Final Shot is closed, and not in a to-be-reopened-in-fifteen-minutes-as-the-evening-hours-approach kind of closed, but closed as in condemned. |
|
Superstition Review
The Water's Edge Kal knew he should wait for someone to take his hand to guide him to the shoreline, but he wanted to see how the waves rolled over the tiny shells. Once at the water’s edge, he curled his toes into the sand. The ocean filled the empty space he created so that after a moment he couldn’t tell that he had disturbed the beach at all. He watched the space his feet made disappear over and over again. Also check out the interview tied to the piece! (It's also posted on the Book Reviews/Interviews page.) |
|
100 Word Story The Frog Pond Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist 2024 The rain’s moisture seeps into my car, smelling like the pond where my brother and I hopped across rocks, catching frogs to show to each other and then release. We marveled in their throats expanding, their long legs, but not at our own invincibility. We just were. My brother leading and I following, no matter the path. |
|
Tiny Molecules Intervals on the Beach at Dusk “I’ll hum and you repeat it back,” Teddy said, from his reclining position on our college’s manufactured beach, a softened shoreline for the lake that grew each spring from snow runoff. Night was falling, so we were alone with the evening’s chill, lying on our backpacks as pillows." |
|
South Florida Poetry Journal
A House of Learning The frat house considers its situation, calculating the college boys like math problems. If Jim wakes up before eleven, will he go to his 11:15 class? Jim’s class is only 347 steps from his first-floor room to the library next door, and he said that his professor motivates him to want to read The Last Exit to Brooklyn, but will he get by the Call of Duty game already in progress in the common area? If Brendan gets home from Kelly’s dorm room before frisbee starts on the front lawn, will he do his problem sets? |
|
Fictive Dream
Reduplicatives (Say That Five Times Fast) or Enduring the Apocalypse The Piggly Wiggly may have started as the first self-serve grocery store over a hundred years ago, but now those who are helping themselves are roving hordes. The last time I approached, vicious riff-raff wearing bandannas and carrying guns, like self-appointed militia, were seizing the remaining scraps on the shelves. I needed antiseptic and pain relievers after Mom’s accident boarding up the windows, but that was weeks ago. |
HAD
We Should Do This Again
The last time you saw that colleague who was reportedly your friend was shortly after you quit your job. It was also shortly after the life-startling eclipse cast a shadow so complete over the sun that darkness fell, crickets began to chirp, and the temperature dropped.
|
Indianapolis Review
POEM: The Road Ahead I’m driving, always driving, between here and there, 96 minutes toward Iowa on my 3 day/4 day split. This blacktop treadmill slides beneath me with podcasts, with phone calls to long lost friends—lost not to time but to place across a country of mountaintops of interference in my new car turned office, bought for these commutes. Photo: Abby Manzella |
|
National Flash Fiction Day: FlashFlood
FICTION: Outrage We live in a time of contagious outrage. My husband, on the sofa, is outraged at the lead story on Florida’s evening news. From behind the kitchen island, I am outraged that I am expected to come up with yet another costume for Dutch for some made-up school day meant for spirit and healthy habits. |
MoonPark Review
Nominated for Best of the Net 2024
Morning Love Song (Pianissimo)
In the red Bialetti stovetop pot we bought years ago to recall a trip to Rome, you boil the espresso.
Photo: Abby Manzella
|
Bureau Dispatch Contact My grandfather is momentarily stuck in the middle of his living room, the carpet thick beneath his slippered feet. He has become an awkward statue, a little hunched and leaning forward in a walking pose, like he is waiting for a camera’s click to catch the pretense of an action shot. But there is no photographer, just the two of us: me and him. Photo: Lee Manion |
|
Porcupine Literary
POETRY: Routine Knowledge; Persimmons Outside, an unseen chickadee is stuck on two notes. High, low. High, low. These are the materials she has to work with-- her song simple and short, but music still-- and so I weave a melody around her stable base. |
|
Monkeybicycle FICTION: Sylvie Lied Sylvie lied about her favorite cereal. (Life not Honey Nut Cheerios.) She lied about the book she was reading. (A Bridge to Terabithia not A Room of One’s Own.) She lied about why, three weeks from the end of her junior year, she no longer had a curfew. (“Trust,” she said. “I have my parents’ trust.”) After all, Sylvie thought, no one should know even those simplest details. They were hers alone. |
|
Catapult
FICTION: In the After It all began ninety-three days ago when the world shut down. There was an unforecasted windstorm that covered the state of Vermont from end to end. Bad storms, each bigger than the last....The whirlwinds covered everywhere from Brattleboro to Burlington, and their increasing velocity snapped the exposed telephone poles like kindling. That formerly standing lumber was bent over the knee of the storm and broken into splinters. Out went the power, out went our internet, out went the lights. |
|
trampset FICTION: The Toss Nominated for Best of the Net 2024 Jake tosses the baby into the air like a pizza — not violently, not angrily like Naomi always accuses him of being. He tosses the baby like the lightness of dough aloft, like a meal of your own making when the spray of flour coats your hands and cheeks — just like he and Naomi did when they were kids and it was Cooking Night at the Cantors’: that’s what his mother called it. |
|
Five South FICTION: Ashore The summer that the freak, lone wave crashed ashore was the same summer that Mika Carmichael went missing. The wave, which was more like a falling wall, toppled onto several hundred people and washed them out to sea. In that instant, the water erased not only sand castles on that crowded Jersey coastline, but it also snatched beach towels and umbrellas and coolers full of sandwiches and inexpensive beer. With the rainbow of paraphernalia gone, it was almost like the people who had accompanied those objects had never been there at all. Almost. |
|
Hobart
NONFICTION: For the Birds We’ll leave your hair for the birds, she’d say, so they’ll build their nests to keep themselves and their babies protected. Now, all these years later when quarantine brings us together and yet separate from so much else, I ask if she’ll cut my hair, now tinged red with less gold from so much time indoors. Photo: Abby Manzella |
|
Micro, a Podcast featured on Literary Hub
INTERVIEW: Putting the Macro in Micro: Abby Manzella on World-Building in Microfiction How does a writer fit the magic of an alternate reality into 400 words or less? Hint: even the title gets involved. Abby Manzella describes her process writing “Lepidoptera,” published in Catapult in April 2020, and how it differed from her usual writing process. Plus—a three word challenge. |
|
Micro, a Podcast featured on Literary Hub
FICTION: "Lepidoptera" (originally published in Catapult and named to the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist) She thought the stretching might tear her newly formed and delicate membrane made of scales and hair—but instead the movement opened up a space in her mind that allowed her to think about where she might seek nectar for her family, who had been growing thin since the Great Sequestering. |
|
National Flash Fiction Day on Flash Flood
FICTION: "Within These Walls" Into the nursery a parakeet arrives—the color of a tennis ball and plump like it, too, with friendly speckles in its wings. Cute, says mother. A perfect companion, says father. The girl says, Bad. |
|
Flash Frog
FICTION: "A Missing Beat" It started with music: The Black Crowes, The Police, The Cure. That’s how they spent their time with each other. Leo and Maxine, together in the front seat of his silver Accord, separated by only the stick shift. They sat there to listen to just one more song at the end of the night. Then Maxine would saunter up her driveway without looking back—a performed nonchalance. But before that, he let the car run and the air conditioning blast. Together, they breathed in the darkness of the late hour with the car’s headlights off to keep Maxine’s parents from staring through curtained windows. |
|
No Contact
NONFICTION: "When the Blood Mobile Passed By" Medical vehicle sightings and the auditory blare of their sirens had become more conspicuous in recent months—it had been a long year—but it had been a while since we’d seen a blood mobile actually roaming the streets. We started pondering the possibilities of such a moveable feast. |
|
Fictive Dream FICTION: "Echoes" Lily stares at the concrete overhead where the water’s light reflects. It moves eerily above her like a ghost in a mirror, a replication of something already immaterial. She knows what she wants to say during their newly concocted ritual, but such a formal pronouncement makes her feel shy. She keeps her body turned from Juniper as she readies herself. |
|
Hawai'i Pacific Review
FICTION: "Queen Anne's Lace Kind of Girl" My mother tells me that, as a girl, I should know to be gentle with flowers; their petals, like their perfume, are fragile. Her words teach me to see blooming plants as proper ladies. My favorite, Queen Anne’s lace, greets me when I run through the woods—she regally bows her head in her too-tight ruffled collar, her skin pale and her step delicate. She wouldn’t come home with sunburnt cheeks and dirt stains on her brand-new summer clothes. |
|
Ellipsis Zine
FICTION: "Inconsequential Things" Imagine that the woman survives. Long ago, Chuck had come along and claimed Melissa as his ride-or-die. She wasn't sure about the phrase, but she fell for the sentiment... |
|
Vol. 1 Brooklyn
FICTION: "A Slant of Light" The afternoon sun creeps stealthily onto Dolores’s desk—an ephemeral cat. Its low, reserved angle brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s “There's a certain slant of light…” She recites it as she rests her pen, her voice breaking the stillness. It has already been a long winter. She is tired of sweaters. She is exhausted by seeing her breath materialized like the ghost she feels herself to be. |
|
Bending Genres
"Zucchini Blossoms at the End of the World" She enjoys the rich earth between her fingers as she pushes seeds into the soil. Each day she waters and talks to the ground as she searches for growth. Soon what she has sown bursts forth into seedlings, one with the outside of the seed still attached to its new leaves—like a chick with its head stuck in the shell. She frees the one trapped plant from its casing with careful fingertips so as not to damage the newly forming leaves. Photo: Abby Manzella |
|
Jellyfish Review FICTION: "Snow Sweeping" The weatherman, too young to possess authority, announces that snow flurries may be possible as the day progresses. Katia looks outside her window to the snow that has already been falling steadily for hours. She long ago discounted the prognostication of others. |
|
Bust
"Women Bring Hitchcock into the 21st Century in HBO's Rom-Com Thriller Run" Most notably this story nostalgically invokes Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (NXNW) while updating the narrative with current technology, strong female roles, and the acknowledgement of character complexity. |
|
Catapult
FICTION: "Lepidoptera" (Selected for the 2021 Wigleaf Top 50 Longlist) She tentatively opened her wings, enjoying their iridescence—colored like the bubbles her Mother had blown for her in the backyard not so many years ago. She, an only child, would watch them born into the air from her mother’s breath. Then her Father would point at a low sailing sphere of suds, and she would clap at it, uncertain if she were trying to hug it or pop it. |
|
Electric Lit
"'Little Fires Everywhere' Asks Whether Art--Or Parenthood--Is Theft" But when does adaptation and intertextuality become stealing? To whom does the art object finally belong? And to what extent is anything we “make” truly ours? In Little Fires Everywhere, adaptive art can be a means to establish a larger conversation, to see another’s perspective, and to reject the myth of the self-made and self-sufficient person who has earned the right of sole dominion over something or someone else. |
|
Queen Mob's Teahouse FICTION: Blackout The lights are out. The wind beats the “Welcome” sign that came with the apartment against Trish’s front door. Extending her arms in front of herself, she walks zombie-like through her small rooms, searching for some illumination. |
|
Brevity Nonfiction Blog
NONFICTION: "Taking a Social Media-Free Day" Today is a social media-free day. What that means is I will get through a solid draft of this essay without my mind straying. What that means is I won’t have little hazy moments when my focus drifts to blankness as I pretend that I can multi-task. |
|
The Rumpus NONFICTION: Racism Shouldn't Be Shocking: Toppling American Myths The past is not past unless we actively acknowledge it and change our narrative moving forward; the racism and terrorism of our history is a hard legacy with which we must deal. Saying that hatred isn’t the real America, that it is someone else’s problem, only passes the power back to our leaders who are themselves far too beholden to just such mythologies that have granted them their power in the first place. |
Middlebury Magazine
NONFICTION: Vermont Life
When I talk about the store with other alums, they all mention it as a place of transition and anticipation. Mostly, those who took that route as they drove to campus at the start of every term would talk about its appearance around the bend as a distinctive landmark. It stood as a marker that soon they would reach Middlebury and a return to college life. For me, with that excitement came a shift to ease. College, of course, had its many stresses, but it was also a place where I learned to relax into myself.
NONFICTION: Vermont Life
When I talk about the store with other alums, they all mention it as a place of transition and anticipation. Mostly, those who took that route as they drove to campus at the start of every term would talk about its appearance around the bend as a distinctive landmark. It stood as a marker that soon they would reach Middlebury and a return to college life. For me, with that excitement came a shift to ease. College, of course, had its many stresses, but it was also a place where I learned to relax into myself.
|
Bust
Seven Seconds Tackled Racism and Police Brutality and Earned Regina King an Emmy Nom--So Why Was It Canceled So Quickly? Seven Seconds is a timely drama about how race and class divide us and how one inequity leads quickly to others. In the era of Black Lives Matter, and with an awareness that a diversity of stories and storytellers better all of our understandings of the world around us, we should be watching this show and making sure others like it don't get canceled. |
|
The Rumpus
The NFL and Compulsory Patriotism What we should see is that those protesting are using the privilege and platform they have via their profession that gives them an audience, respect, and class status to make a powerful statement, but their black bodies are too often overwhelming the ability for others to see their silent protest as a call to conversation and action. |
|
PopMatters Is There a Place for Us in The Good Place The hidden premise of the show is inverting Jean-Paul Sartre's idea in No Exit that "hell is other people", or more accurately, that hell is seeing yourself from the viewpoint of others. Although the four main characters don't know it at first, they're locked together in what is supposed to be a hellish afterlife, but instead of responding to their afterlife with each other as hell, they build a sense of community and learn to see from others' perspectives in order to better themselves. |
|
Ms. Magazine Good Morning, Gracie: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Takes Center Stage The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is about a Gracie Allen type taking the leading role on stage instead of remaining the sidekick to George. When two smart women walk into a bar, I’ll keep watching for the satisfying punchlines to come. |
|
Bust Stranger Things and Riverdale: The '80s Are Calling. They Want Their Actors Back. But We'll Keep Them. Part of the experience of this show is that awkward space between feeling these characters as characters, and remembering the actor and the previous characters played by that actor, in a type of casting I’m calling retroacting. In other words, part of the power of their acting derives from their previous roles, producing a kind of split performance that combines an awareness of the past with the present. |
