by Amy Cipolla Barnes Michael Gault I see dead fonts It’s one of my quirks. I also didn’t get the ending of The Sixth Sense until I worked backwards with all the red clues in place. In hindsight, a fiction writer should have known better. The foreshadowing was not laid on with a light brush. I also hate Arial and am angry that it’s now apparently the default in Google Docs. I’ll switch this essay to Times New Roman before I finish it. Signs and billboards are my constant writ

by Amy Cipolla Barnes AWP is impending. As in doom. I’ve started having the bad dreams I think only writers have, or maybe just me. Not simple naked-in-a-college-classroom dreams. Or even naked-at-my-first-in-person-readings. That would be too easy. My dreams involve things like wandering out of the hotel (where I share a barracks style room with random people who sing show tunes and steal from the baked potato bar) into long creepy mall corridors, until I’m in a muddy under-

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Tamanna Rumee I’ve struggled to find words in 2023. Full stop. The words stopped. As the year ends, my pantser-self has no list of submissions, acceptances, rejections, books read or not read. I tried. There are scattered documents entitled “2023 writing progress” on my computer. I signed up for and wrote absolutely nothing in several month-long writing sprints. I haven’t managed to write this column in months. I did read thousands of brilliant submissio

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Elmer Cañas I’ve been told there are two best days of owning a boat: the day you buy it and the day you sell it. I think this may also apply to writing a book. It sounds pessimistic in both cases, perhaps. I know there are people who love their books and boats from day one until they go out of print or into someone else’s hands or into the water. But, researching boats takes time. After you buy the boat, you enjoy using it and taking friends out on the w

The Australian National Maritime Museum Ambrotypes by Amy Cipolla Barnes, word west press, 2022 Reviewed by Scott Neuffer If inimitableness on the page is a sign of genius, then Amy Barnes is some kind of genius. To review her collection of stories, Ambrotypes, properly, I would need to get a stack of children’s construction paper, cut it to stars and shards using oversized antique scissors, soak it all with the spittle of a dying garden hose, then catapult the resulting mess

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Timo Volz My sister and I shared a Stretch Armstrong figurine as kids. He came with bandages in case we accidentally cut him and he oozed red goop. And he did. Often. Kind of like our perpetually-scraped knees covered in Mercurochrome. He was supposed to be indestructible but we were siblings sharing a stretchy man that smelled of syrup and vinyl. And so he stretched and stretched and bled and bled until he was a gelatinous, stretched-out heap forgotten

by Amy Cipolla Barnes If you’ve bought an older home, there’s a chance you’ve tried to pull the carpet away from the baseboards — to check for potential hardwoods. You may have pulled up layer upon layer of past flooring choices. You may have researched how to sandblast paint off brick. The white brick trend is back. People are covering hardwood floors with intersecting carpet squares. Why do people cover red brick houses with white paint? Why do they put down shag carpet ove

by Amy Cipolla Barnes @withlovefromchile, Unsplash Sad, emaciated bears in dry pools on an artificial ski mountain. Dancing bears in a Florida flea market. Scraggly bears in a nearly-closed roadside zoo. Bears in top hats on theme park stage that closed a few weeks later. A news story about the last Romanian restaurant bears freed from captivity. Why am I thinking about sad bears when I’m trying to write? I find myself drifting into each memory — analyzing the why, how and wh

by Amy Cipolla Barnes I had a mustard seed necklace as a child. A tiny seed encased in a tiny glass globe, suspended on a chain. There was much accompanying explanation of faith and perseverance and the importance of tiny things guiding my larger life. I wore the necklace proudly, until I lost it. I didn’t lose the faith or the perseverance, only the thing that represented them. My husband and I recently went to lunch at a favorite barbecue restaurant and reached for our favo

by Amy Cipolla Barnes I’ve been in a writing funk. It’s hot. I’m recovering from Covid and our dogs got skunked. We live in a suburban rural area where skunks roam. Our dogs are friendly. The skunks are not. It’s always a stinky ordeal: bathing the dogs, washing fabric items, cleaning floors and carpets, opening windows and turning on fans. The first time the dogs got skunked, the skunk would NOT leave. My son played his trumpet loudly. I checked on Mr. Skunk Skunk’s Removal

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Alberico Bartoccini I’ve always found writing micro fiction to be as hard as longer flash or short stories. Choosing details to include like dialogue or descriptions becomes a matter of words, not paragraphs or pages. My NFFD NZ Micro Madness shortlist micro is only 100 words but it went through major versions along with self-editing and peer edits. Confession: I have a lot of Google Docs of early versions and incomplete stories. The three versions for t

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Imagine yourself in Paris. It’s nearing midnight. You’re at a train station that late because you didn’t know the Eiffel Tower lights up at 10:00 and you stood there staring at it for far too long. You’re miles from your Airbnb. The regular train station is closed for repairs and the announcements say there are no more trains until tomorrow, demain . And yet, there are lackadaisical French people standing on the platform chatting and snacking. You approa

by Amy Cipolla Barnes I loved Mad Libs as a kid and bought them on vacations at Stuckey’s. I created my own Mad Libs on notebook paper and made my friends and family fill in the blanks, hoping for an “Elephant that Ate Crackers in a Jukebox” or something equally wacky. As an adult, I struggle with titling stories and see at least one Twitter post a day where someone is searching for a story title. The infamous blank page can come down to just a blank title. As I look at my ti

by Amy Cipolla Barnes I’ve watched enough medical dramas on TV to know there is something called an M&M conference that doesn’t involve candy — it takes a look at how recent surgeries went. I made a special trip to the Mütter Museum on the last day I was in Philadelphia, so it feels especially fitting to take inventory of AWP and my experience. I lost two pairs of reading glasses somewhere in Philadelphia. Now that I’m back home, I found both pairs (but only briefly). I had h

by Amy Cipolla Barnes The image above is my brain on AWP. I went to Kroger this morning and took the picture to the great confusion of the parking lot workers. There are overturned carts, caution tape and also a gorgeous morning sky. I was there to buy “I miss you” cards and flowers and candy for my teenager. As I write this, I’m still not packed for the trip. I’m still putting together book swag. I have no to-do list even though that would help me. Instead, I’m carrying all

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Vie Studios I have sensitive teeth. Cold. Hot. Air. It all sets them on edge. The special sensitive teeth toothpaste does nothing. March has made me cringe for another reason: near-constant writer discourse. I expect some heated discussions because we’re writers and editors. It’s hard to stop the words and thoughts especially when it feels like everything in the world is a discourse too. What I don’t expect is downright ugliness. The literary discourse h

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Perfecto Capucine I’ve heard through the writer grapevine that I should bring two suitcases to AWP. The first packed with things I need: clothes, toiletries, books to be signed, snacks. And also an empty suitcase for books, journals, stickers and literary swag and Philly souvenirs I want to bring back. I’ll check the weather report before I go. Going to AWP in Philadelphia in March means I won’t pack shorts and tank tops. I think the “two suitcase” rule

by Amy Cipolla Barnes Prachi Palwe Farts in a jar. A reality show celebrity has been selling her farts in a jar. For nearly $1000. She recently had to stop because she nearly caused herself a heart attack trying to make more “materials” to sell. It’s wrong on many levels. And yet, even in the wrongness, I found my writer/self reading the full accompanying article. I also found myself wondering who buys such a thing, who sells such a thing, and how does such a thing make the n

by Amy Barnes Tanalee Youngblood I laugh loud when Maude the tree is born to me , at the age of ninety-three or thirty-three, the years don’t feel like it matters or means anything. It is still far too late to count and I’ve given up counting the days and the months before she arrives. It’s the last time I laugh at anything. I’ve only biblically been with one man and that was from a distance, dissing him with the hissing laugh that I learned from my friend Lilith and that I a