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GRANDE DAME LITERARY
WOMEN WRITERS VIBRANT VOICES
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Fish Opera
The life of a fish ends in bad luck. A hook in the mouth is a break with the ocean. Spectator birds screech with excitement. Scales cling like jewels on the fisherman’s fingers. Feather gills lock tight when the belly is slit. Salt water and guts spill splash on the table.
Annie Fahy
1 day ago
I Have a North Star?
On Learning To See What Was Always There Whose brilliant idea was it for us to decide our entire lives before our frontal lobes have fully formed? And, to that point, what evolutionary purpose could there possibly be in making the part of our brain responsible for … 1. risk assessment, 2. planning, 3. impulse control, 4. decision-making, and 5. complex logical thinking …the last to mature? When I started college, I knew I wanted to be a psych major, which w
Lauren Reisner
2 days ago
Heartbreak is a Myth
We need to give those hens the right idea, but make em think it’s their idea, then she laughed her humming laugh that made a snort and then she double laughed at the way her own laugh sounded. My grandmother gave me a basket with three glass eggs. I carefully placed a pale blue egg in each nest box. The next morning we put on our mud gear to feed and gather. I sprayed the grain over the dirt while frenzied hens pecked the feed off my boots. After, she tells me to go into
Annie Fahy
3 days ago
The Dog Bite
It was dinnertime and I was expected home. I was eight years old. The sun was setting, and the street was quiet. Most families were already inside, at their dinner tables, talking about their day. I could peer into windows lit softly, glowing amber gold. I imagined children being asked about their day, parents listening closely, smiling at one another over details that seemed to matter. As I walked up the block toward our house, the dread started to settle in. It happened e
Carol Ornstein
5 days ago
The Top of the Hill
Today was brutal. After months of doctor’s appointments trying to understand your back pain the doctor finally had an answer. It wasn’t overdoing it on the tennis court. It wasn’t hemorrhoids. It was cancer. Stage IV lung cancer. How could this possibly be real? You were just 49 years old. Otherwise healthy. Never smoked. Thin. Active. No other health issues. And if lung cancer wasn’t enough the monster had already invaded your bones. We satin our dark bl
Carol Ornstein
6 days ago
Dancing in the Water
“You can’t swim without a lifeguard.” The voice cuts through the hum of the lake. I crane my head and find a blur of bodies gathered around a campfire further down the shore. Their faces melt together into a smear of orange and brown above the flames. A girl—teenager, maybe—stands at the edge of the group with two hands outstretched on either side of her mouth. From this distance, her face is round and nickel-sized, and her features are impossible to make out, but she is dre
Rosemarie Rotundo
Mar 13
Amateur
Egg hums, shell cracks wings wet spiral-wrap bird born to stillness. Stillness shifts to twitch both scratches and causes the itch. Itch brings words swaddled with wings. Words that strive toward wonder— ideas are flutter-life, bird sings, Sings, then stops, lost in thought murk and muddle, blocks the flux Fingers blindly search for nativity Nativity waits till the star emerges Huddles in shards of shell until wings unfurl bright words line up on the wire. Wire of
Annie Fahy
Mar 13
Half-Known
They met on the 5th of July, and by autumn, had fallen in a strange rhythm: sharing a bed and kissing at night, all under the label of friendship. He’s going out with another girl now, and they’ve started a strained, limited friendship since, with minimal physical contact. He misses their emotional closeness and connection and she misses his arms around her at night. It’s her birthday and they’re on a ski trip with some mutual friends. “Hello,” he says, stepping into the
E.Q. Lean
Mar 7
465
In the winter of 1955, I was a young girl from Queens who yearned to become a famous writer. My childhood had been unremarkable. I had loving parents, a few honest friends, and a modest, pleasant apartment overlooking a busy street. I went to a good school and passed the time writing poems and stories filled with different characters who had more interesting lives. Thinking back, I should have relished in the repetition and routines—the stability of my life. Though dull and g
Faye Klutke
Mar 7
How Dolly Saved Me
I am weeping nearly as loudly as I am singing Dolly Parton’s “Just Because I’m a Woman,” as I drive the Turner Turnpike from Tulsa to Oklahoma City. Hurtling down the turnpike through uncontrollable tears may sound risky, but I know people who read the newspaper while making this trek. Or trim their nails, apply mascara, work on their laptop or even change their shoes, for Chrissake. The flat, straight road which rides atop treeless plains does not speak to my soul’s geograph
Rebecca Hinshaw
Mar 7
Judgement Day
“Why would someone want to dig around in my memories?” I said. “Long ago and some best left forgotten.” “But you haven’t forgotten, have you Mrs. Mac? Yours goes back to, what age did you say?” Haley laughed and made the “snuk, snuk” noise I’d told her about, when my dad took me out of church and spanked me for being a hellion and me, embarrassed at not being able to control my snorty sniffles when we came back in. “Dad said later I would have been three. Apparently, it cur
Lois Hibbert
Mar 5
Home
“You live in an apartment? I think it must be cute,” offered my friend naively when I reluctantly admitted I lived in the apartment complex everyone called Fat City. I coveted her home, her two-parent household, her sunken bedroom, her thriving Barbie collection. Much like Molly Ringwald’s character in Pretty in Pink (“I don’t want you to take me home, okay?!”), I was petrified to ever let anyone in my hometown see where we lived, whether it was the green shag apartment in
Nicole Irizawa
Mar 4
Raven in an Apple Tree
When I was a child, my father taught me a trick about how to make yourself wake up at a certain time if you didn’t have an alarm clock handy or even how to remember something you had to do the next morning when you went to bed. He said that what you should do was to picture a blank blackboard, like the kind I knew from school, and then picture yourself picking up a piece of chalk and writing on the blackboard exactly what you wanted to remember the next day. “Try it and see,”
Eleanor Lerman
Feb 25
Marvelous Peggy
My dreamscape shifts, images fading in and out of consciousness. The flickering movie speeds up, then slows, finally resolving into something recognizable: My kitchen. The room is filled with a flat light that casts few shadows, the middle world. A dark-haired woman sits at my cherry wood dining table, examining bone china teacups neatly arranged on a silver tray as if I'd been expecting company. "Your mother loved these," the woman says, holding a translucent white cup wit
Jesse Devyn Crowe
Feb 25
The In Between
There is a certain time of day I call the in-between. The sun is still there, and yet it has already begun to descend. I love this hour because nothing feels final. Not day. Not evening. The light shifts. The day exhales. For a moment, I am not reaching for what comes next. It feels like crossing time zones midair, where two realities exist at once. I have lived here before. Between diagnosis and acceptance. Between goodbye and silence. Between the woman I was
Carol Ornstein
Feb 25
The Inheritance
The Inheritance Delisia had braved rush hour traffic to pick up her sister at the airport, navigating the congested access road filled with anxious drivers and a constant stream of cars, as overhead, wide-body aircraft roared their way on a flight path to the western runways. Now she perched on an armchair in the guestroom as her younger sibling unpacked the few things she had brought for the extended weekend. Extracting jeans and a black blazer, Aline then dug around in t
Sylvia Sensiper
Feb 23
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Has someone else read your work?
Yes. Progress to #2. No, have someone else take a look.
We all think we've written something marvelous. -
Did the person give you constructive feedback or was it a friend being nice?
Yes, constructive. Progress to #3. No, it was someone being polite.
Friends are great, but a fellow experienced writer or editor will tell you what is missing. -
Are you willing to make changes and deletions?
Yes. Progress to #4. No, ask yourself why not.
Read through the suggestions and comments, take a break, and then decide what changes you can make that will enhance the reader's experience. -
Did you check for typos and adhere to the journal's formatting?
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Formatting mistakes and too many typos can disqualify your work.
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