OCTOPUS WOMB - Layla O’Mara
Octopus Womb is one woman’s investigation of her own body for the first time in forty years. Using her training as an acupuncturist as an anchor, she explores the aftershock of a traumatic pregnancy and birth, questions why she experiences an almost constant panic in herself and unearths the crop-mark histories that her body retains.
“I have been lured to these outskirts where magic might happen, I am hungry for any bit of wilderness that the city offers up. I want to get my hands dirty, to wade and trawl, to taste the alchemy of jagged weed transformed into smooth soup.”
Bio: Layla (she/her) lives with her family in rural Co. Wicklow, Ireland. She has a degree in English and Theatre Studies, was ‘highly commended’ for a short story by the Bridport Prize and has written and directed work in the Dublin Fringe Festival. As well as writing, Layla now works as a Five Element Acupuncturist. Instagram : @mslaylaomara
HOW TO DIE LIKE A GIRL - Patricia Stacey
When my beautiful mother was diagnosed with hysteria in 1969, she immersed herself in the sexual revolution, dragging me along with her on a rollicking, dangerous adventure to prove that sex could be an antidote to heartbreak. My solace was my “family” of intellectual misfits. Could we be saved?
“A remnant of my years of living with Jake, I couldn’t help but collect little stories from my day: married ex-nun in bookstore recommends the Kama Sutra to an old man; psycho on Shattuck says he knows the color of my underwear, guesses correctly; street performer trades facts for money to tourist, revealing that James Dean died with multiple cigarette burns on his body; kangaroos have three vaginas—why, I wonder? To make room for two Johns and a Joey?”
Bio: Patricia Stacey (she/her) grew up during second-wave feminism and has been writing this memoir for over ten years. She has written for O, The Oprah Magazine and The New York Times and is the author of The Boy Who Loved Windows; Opening The Mind And Heart of a Child Threatened with Autism (Perseus 2003).
photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
PISSANT - Jubi Arriola-Headley
In 1980's Boston, a Black teenager faces racism, the AIDS epidemic, his immigrant father's hypermasculinity – and his own queer desires. Exploring barrooms, bathrooms, bookstores, and beyond, he discovers a world of kink and embarks on a turbulent sexual journey to find his authentic self.
“The air vibrated different, hummed, buzzed, the temperature rose a couple degrees when Daddy walked in. I could see – what I really want to say is I could smell (so strongly I could almost taste it) how the other men got physically, demonstrably, visibly, measurably excited when Daddy walked into Hazel’s place. It was not necessarily a sexually-charged energy – not that those men would ever admit – but an undeniably, though I couldn’t name it so at the time, sensual energy, in the way that men cleave to other men when they want to engage in collective release, a literal or metaphorical circle jerk, which, based on my limited experience in the world, seems to most often take the form of violence, enacted as pornography or sports or legislation or rampage, upon women or schoolchildren or poor folks or immigrants or themselves and each other.”
Bio: Jubi Arriola-Headley (he/him) is the author of two poetry collections: ORIGINAL KINK and Bound (forthcoming in January 2024 from Persea Books). Black, queer, and a first-generation United Statesian, Jubi’s writing explores themes of masculinity, vulnerability, rage, tenderness & joy. Learn more at www.justjubi.com.
CÁLLATE! - R. Gurley
Cállate! details a rape that became a nationally televised trial in Bolivia confronting its epidemic gender-based violence as well as its practice of silencio. A newly-widowed middle-aged teacher takes a job in Bolivia, expecting a happy ending. Serial rapists leave her fighting for her life and justice instead.
“Moonlight sneaks between his fingers. His hand presses down on my nose. My eyes water. Moonlight blurs. His face moves closer to mine. His breath hot, smells like Pollo a la Lena, chicken roasted by flame. He hisses.
Cállate!
This word sounds like a demand. My hand scrambles for my purse. “
Bio: R. Gurley (she/her), MA, MFA, is a writer and English teacher with over 20 years of experience with words, whose works have appeared in Coping Magazine, Lehigh Valley Woman’ s Journal, and Midwifery Monthly. She also edits Copper Mountain College’s Literary Review HOWL in Joshua Tree, CA. Her work can be found at www.medium.com/@reneegurley and www.rgurleyrevolution.com
TWO HALVES - Nadia Diggory
Two Halves is a short memoir about mixed-race sisters Nadia and Saira, who are raised as twins and speak as one. Nadia’s coming-of-age sees her find her own voice against a backdrop of unspoken family trauma around her sister’s disability, and the burgeoning identity of an island, post-independence.
“We learn to walk, barefooted, holding on. Table. Sofa. Windowsill. Each other. Three good legs between us.”
Bio: Nadia Diggory (she/her) is an Anglo-Mauritian writer of diaspora fiction and creative nonfiction, and she is currently working on a short story collection on the theme of female dislocation. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the Open University.
QUILT - Hanne Shapiro Steen
Quilt is a memoir that uses journal entries as scaffolding to tell the story of an uncommon life. The daughter of anti-establishment parents who moved their kids to Africa when she was a child, the narrator cuts up, rearranges, and sews back together memories and musings from old journals in an attempt to make sense of the chaos of growing up without a cultural or geographical through-line. From Rwanda to London to Nairobi to Los Angeles, through the nineties and aughts, from addiction to recovery, from loving to losing and loving again, blending fantasy with reality, the author patches the disparate pieces of her life into a narrative all her own.
“We’ll slide down the surface of things, Brett Easton Ellis says. Not here we won’t. We’ll peel back the skin and let it all hang out, legs akimbo, screaming at the screaming waves, fighting for life with a glimmer of golden teeth, a shake of meaty ass, a swig of icy beer. Slide down no surface here. Here we walk barefoot through the trash in the street, here we die all at once of yellow fever, or of broken, festering hearts.”
Bio: Hanne Shapiro Steen (she/her) is an American psychotherapist and writer. She was a 2014 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2022 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her stories have been published in Fugue and PANK, among others. She lives in Los Angeles.
MY MUM WAS A GARDENER - Sarah Forbes
My mum died in the autumn and at first I clung on. I had done death before and I could do it again. But come the winter my life was unravelling. I started to garden and as the seasons rolled by I discovered my past, present and future all hidden within the soil.
"My mum was a gardener but by the end she was so small. She was shrinking, withering. Now she was a tiny speck in a bed and I could only see her on a screen."
Bio: Sarah Forbes (she/her) is a classically trained singer and theatre maker living in Brighton (UK). She found herself writing after the sudden death of her mum in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Fish Publishing Short Memoir Prize 2023.
AMREEKA - Ahmed Kabil
Deep in the heart of post-9/11 Texas, sixteen-year-old Ahmed learns about the America imagined by the 1960s counterculture — and sets off to find it. Blending memoir and history, Amreeka is a tragicomic coming-of-age story of an Arab American’s long, strange trip to discover where he’s really from.
"But the question of where I was from was never one of math, just as it was never one of geography. And I rarely answered it to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of the people asking. For there was always a second question lying in wait behind the first, to be asked anytime I answered incorrectly, anytime I tried to lay claim to a sense of belonging to a place that, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I had not earned: No, but like: where are you really from?"
Bio: Ahmed Kabil (he/him) is an Egyptian American writer based in Barcelona. He is currently studying for an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge. Visit him at www.med.earth