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A note about the work "Dyed" from Anji Shin: At its core, this story is about girlhood — the ways in which girls are coded to behave, and how much of this is taught and enforced by girls ourselves. Within this, I wanted to explore how desirability and belonging become inseparable, and the ways girls are taught to perform and ritualize both. My hope is that I’ve written something true to my own lived experience as a Korean girl growing up in Oxford, but also universal in the tragedy inherent in the endless quest to belong, something that perhaps many of us can recognize in our own stories

A note about the work "Empty Summits" from An Chang Joon: "It was a strange confluence of events that made the essay possible, as the first version of this essay was much more of a revisionist history piece, with a focus on Shohei Imamura’s film, as well as the folklore of ubasute, and how that warped into the myth of the goryeojang. As I was writing this for my MFA program, my grandfather in Korea passed away. Since I was in Baton Rouge, I was the only person in my family who couldn’t make it to the funeral. When I rewatched the film to finish writing about it, I found myself stuck on scenes that weren’t relevant to the topic I had in mind, until I realized why I couldn’t stop watching (and crying at) certain points of the movie. I rewrote the essay, accepting that there was no way to write it without weaving my family into it. My relationship with my family is complicated and difficult. My family is convinced of an afterlife and believes—even finds comfort—in the idea that our grandfather is in a better place. I am unconvinced about this. But I dearly wish I could be—and am saddened to realize I am not."

A note about the work "In Your Video from Beit Lahia" from Yahya Frederickson: "For those of you who’ve had a friend or colleague from Palestine, you’ve probably heard many stories of how challenging life can be. This poem has its origins in one such friendship; my friend is from Gaza, specifically Beit Lahia, at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. My friend left Gaza for schooling and employment in the US, and has since moved elsewhere. But some years ago, before the current genocide, between border closures and Israeli “mowing the lawn” as they call it, my friend was able to return home to Gaza with his family for a summer visit. There, he made a brief video— doing one of the things that both he and I like to do: walking in a garden—and sent it to me via WhatsApp. Since then, I’ve thought a lot about my friend and his 22-second video. I doubt that the setting of this poem still exists. But I hope the poem’s rendition of this scene helps, somehow, to keep our memories and our hope alive."

A note about the work "The Plastic Bag" from Mehr-Afarin Kohan: "“The Plastic Bag” was born out of a philosophical debate— with myself, with my country of origin (Iran) which operates on restrictive principles, and more broadly with a particular way of being in the world, specifically a way of being that feels threatened by difference, diversity, multiplicity and liberty of thought. In a world burdened by so much suffering, inequality, injustice, is there any place left for freedom? What would “freedom” mean in such a world? Would it even matter? In my protagonist’s relationship with a queer man in Tehran, liberty comes to be the thing that matters the most in the face of any other imaginable suffering in their lives because exercising their freedom is exercising a will to life, without which all else loses meaning. This philosophical debate was the driving force of this story as it was transformed through many reiterations, dragging me with it. While it feels autobiographical, the story is fictional. It is fiction that could be autobiographical, as it has strong resonances with my life and important others in my life. This story is part of a linked story collection that is in the process of being published."

A note about the work "Nocturnist" from Celeste Lipkes: “Ultimately, there are always several reasons for everything we do,” writes Judith Hermann “—those we know of, and those we suspect. And those we know nothing of.” It is these latter two categories that haunt my work as a writer, and have increasingly drawn me to the essay form. I began writing “Nocturnist” during the research block of my psychiatry residency; I finally had space and time to wonder why I had become obsessed with our neighborhood raccoon. Underneath this fixation was a deep loneliness, doubt about my career choices, fear of illness, and anger at the physical and emotional demands of contemporary medicine. For an essay with a lot of darkness, writing it was an incredibly instructive and joyful process—and a great excuse to read many books about one of our scrappiest urban neighbors.

A note about the work "The Death" from Mary Jo Bang: “The Death” is from The Museum of Mary, a book-length series of ekphrastic poems where each poem has a debt to a woman named Mary. My approach here, as with all the poems in the series, was to find an artwork that featured a Mary and use that as a stage setting from which a speaker could address any number of concerns. In this poem, the Virgin Mary, as the ever-watchful guardian religion says she is, speaks about the present-day world. It is believed that the original composition of the painting linked to this poem, Mantegna’s Death of the Virgin, included a second painting that was meant to hang above the first; they share the lines of a continuous architectural arch. It is in that second painting, Christ Bearing the Soul of the Virgin, that Christ holds a doll-sized statuette of the Virgin on his lap. The two are wreathed in a cloud punctuated by the heads and wings of red cherubs. The lower painting features Mary at her death, surrounded by eleven of the twelve apostles (one is away preaching). As with all persona poems, the hope is that the speaker, here a divine Mary, will have more authority than a mere poet when it comes to bringing attention to our human plight.

A note about the work "Bad Person" from Joanna Pearson: I’ve been listening to the new Leon Neyfakh podcast, “OnlyFantasy,” an exploration of the popularity of OnlyFans or, as the podcast puts it, “a search for the roots of digital intimacy.” It’s catnip for me. One of my obsessions as a writer is loneliness and our desire for connection—especially how that’s mediated by our access to online spaces and digital communication. Anyway, one of the most interesting parts of this podcast is how mundane many of the interactions are on OnlyFans. People seem to crave those "hi, how are you?/how was your day?" type of intimacies almost as much as any of the frankly erotic exchanges. The podcast just came out recently, but I mention it because, despite certain obvious differences, its concerns feel relevant to what I was considering back when I wrote this story. For additional reading on people complicating their lives with thrills and well-meaning blunders, I’ll recommend three excellent recent novels: The Ten-Year Affair by Erin Somers, Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian, and Bad Animals by Sarah Braunstein.

A note about the work "Wild Light" from Sarah Gerkensmeyer: When my youngest son was in early grade school, he was asked (on a worksheet) to write a sentence using the words "wild" and "light." He wrote: "Is the light wild?" For about a decade now, that sentence has haunted me in a good way. I knew it could morph into the title of a future story, and perhaps even a future story collection. I didn't find a story to attach that title to until I took one of Lindsay Merbaum's incredible "Pick Your Potions" writing workshops called "The Forgotten: Lost Goddesses." As we read and discussed Carmen Boullosa's The Book of Eve (a feminist twist on the Book of Genesis) and several articles about how weird and monster-y and wonderful goddesses are (looking at myths about creation, fertility, etc., from all over the world), I realized that ordinary human women are very much monstrous goddesses. I was able to circle back to this title that has been haunting me for a very long time and have so much fun with it.

A note about the work "Fear It" from Sophie Ezzell: I started writing this piece because I had an ex-girlfriend who called herself a swan. For years, I just kept putting little facts about swans in my pocket and started seeing connections between water, religion, and swans. I also like the idea of complicating this beautiful, feminine, fairytale creature into something capable of harm as a means of showing that abusers aren’t always the people you expect. And of course then Hamlet found its way in there, as Hamlet always does.

A note about the work "I Can Imagine It for Us" from Mai Serhan: I wrote this memoir to understand myself as a Palestinian who’s never been to Palestine and who is denied the right of return. By narrating an absence, I hoped to make Palestine tangible to myself; to resist erasure and to find a way to return, even if only through memory and imagination.   I’m a second-generation Palestinian in the diaspora, born and acculturated elsewhere. I rarely saw myself reflected in literature. I never threw a rock at a tank nor harvested olives, or held the key to an ancestral home. My markers were different: airports, time zones and international calling codes were what connected me to my Palestinian family. My geography is fragmented, and I wanted to bring my dislocation to the page, to bear witness and place my testimony on record. I also knew there was a story here that hadn’t been told. As far as I know, no narratives follow a Palestinian in China, where the main plot unfolds. Setting the story there pushed the theme of alienation to an extreme and allowed me to explore inheritance, severance and erasure in ways that closely reflected the story I wanted to tell. But I wrote it for another reason too: to feel less alone. There are more than seven million Palestinians in the diaspora whose lives echo this distance and fragmentation. Someone once said that a good story is like a handshake across the ocean. I wanted to extend my hand, to make others feel seen and to invite them to imagine alongside me.

A note about the work "Sunday at Mt. Carmel" from Jesus De La Torre : I started this story nearly a decade or more ago, so I can’t say I know with any sort of certainty what its genesis was. I do recall in those years writing about Mexican people living in the U.S. who couldn’t attend to their sick or their dead back home because of their status in the country. They couldn’t leave the country and guarantee a safe return. Perhaps with this story I wanted to write about someone who could attend their loved one’s burial, but, despite proximity, had lost any connection to them, there’d been a rupture not related to distance. But also, I used to drive by the funeral home in the story a couple of times a month. Perhaps I was simply passing by one day and imagined my protagonist there and wondered what he was doing there and how he was holding up.

A note about the work "Talismans" from Marcela Sulak for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I had been reading the poetry of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), the Syrian poet, and one day came upon a passionate and beautiful poem called "Talismans," which describes a yearning for love.  Its warmth and quotidian language, its organic materials, invited me to imagine married love in which the wife responds to the joys and challenges of living with her husband through the language of talismans.

A note about the work "There were no poets of motherhood," from Leah Falk for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: Motherhood has animated my poems since I became pregnant with my first daughter in 2019, but in this poem I return to a memory from before I had children, when motherhood was still an abstraction. After graduating from college, I worked in a bookstore near a prestigious university, and it was there that a well-known scholar and critic contended that there were “no poets of motherhood.” The claim seemed absurd to me even then, since I had been reading contemporary poets like Kim Addonizio, Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Zucker, and so many others who use their motherhood as a touchstone. My memory of her talk was among the first in which I realized that I could have an opinion that differed from someone so senior, and have evidence for it, too. In this poem I explore the imagined boundaries some might erect between scholarly and artistic pursuits and domestic and menial work, and what the cost of such borders might be to both art and labor.

A note about the work "Sun Theater Sonnets" (Stanzas 5-7) from Deema Shehabi for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: I wrote this poem as an exploration of how daughters are perpetual placeholders for their mothers even after a mother’s death. This is manifested as inheriting the mother’s memories as one’s own, which can be enriching yet challenging due to the lack of differentiation that can occur. It took me years to understand my memories as distinct from hers. What remains, however, is nature’s solace as a backdrop for memories, both hers and, in turn, mine.

A note about the work “War is always silent until it's done” from Ezza Ahmed for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 Issue: Warsan Shire has a brilliant poem called “War Poem” and in the second stanza there’s imagery of war giving birth to another war. With that sentiment in mind, I was looking at the exit strategies from the stories of my loved ones and that’s how this poem began to take shape. I have a fascination with looking at the things they packed with them, items they thought they could not live without or wouldn’t find anywhere else. I wanted to see what items they treated as “ingredients” for a fresh start. Though, what I found most interesting was that in all the accounts that were shared with me, what you want to exit from always weasels its way in.