La Piccioletta Barca

Words know their place. They seek a homeland. The location is never arbitrary.

1. Outwood

‘Trees at night are like an army marching.’ So begins Nicholas Mosley’s novel Accident. Trees are not blocks of wood...

Big Sky Promise

Whenever she thought of her first flight of 2021—after fifteen months as a bird with clipped wings—Nessa Fielder...

Reading Marx

Twenty-six-year-old Rónán Joshua Fielder was struck for the first time in his sheltered life by a colpo di fulmine...

Six Degrees of Stephen Sondheim

Ira Fielder could never be certain, but he chose to believe that their son Rónán had been conceived on Saint Valentine’s

Dyslexic Mischief

MONS, Belgium, 1918: the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month ...

Sun

Ayshe Dengtash

They sat silently on the bed closest to the window and took turns gazing out through the gap between the curtains ...

Diamond Life Master

Paul Rabinowitz

An idea for the elusive ending of the story I’m writing woke me this morning. ..

Moustache

Deya Bhattacharya

It first appeared atop the pale-brown lip of an aristocrat, two inches across and a half-inch down and rendered...

3. Playing Your Cards Right

Laurine was going through a bad patch. She had foolishly got involved with a married man...

2. Mozart assassinated

I am sitting in the waiting room of a very large university hospital in Paris, alone.

1. The Child in Your Head

The real danger is the child in your head. Even before they’re born, you give them substance, you project things...

The Two Sisters

Allison King

This story is based on the group of murder ballads known as “The Two Sisters”, found in various forms throughout Europe.

Petros and the Anatolian Wolves

Shannon Savvas

The winter has been heavy. Claustrophobic. Petros is tired. Tired of being confined to the small walled compound of...

Agamemnon

Stefan Ferguson

Agamemnon, having returned victorious from the Trojan War, finds himself defeated in other ways: haunted by his...

The Birdcatcher's Son

Alice J. Moone

No one bears witness to the capture of the birds. It happens at night, after all the people of the town are in bed.

Come Here - Part Two

Our apartment in Warsaw was a grey, cement building—like all the others I remember in that neighborhood...

Come Here - Part One

In August of 1980, aged twelve, I found myself going to school in Warsaw, Poland. I didn’t speak a word of Polish...

Sennentuntschi

Isaac Feist

A sennentuntschi is a type of living doll or scarecrow found in Alpine folklore. In the stories, a trio of herdsmen...

The Shadow Child

Amy Cook

The form is in French and Hebrew, complicated by the fact that my cousin’s handwriting is dishevelled. My eye is...

Addendum

Finishing here, Jim rubbed his chin. Next thing, he opened a new window and continued to search the world wide web...

Human

“One time, I was in a shopping centre and a group of teenagers who were goofing around...

Animal

One time, I was holding an ice cream when a seagull tried to take it from me...

The Field

Ted J. Gibbs

He stood alone out in the field. The wind was heavy, hitting him in waves, and creating in his ears the sounds of...

Frozen Fireworks

Christina Nation

Warm fingertips press into my shoulder. In my periphery, I see Colin perched beside me, on the leather sofa’s narrow...

The Animals

Nacho Oliden

We lived at a ranch near Balcarce, at I don’t know how many hundred kilometres from Mar del Plata.

Too Short

Thomas Hutchinson

I find my eyes amongst the hailing greys, / central, like the principal teaching / in an overcrowded frame

The Shack

Ted J. Gibbs

Standing by the railway line, and the bridge overhead. Looked into the stars because they were many and secured up...

William Morris in Love

Paul Acker

I knew Christopher and Iben when they met and fell in love in Iceland, lolling in the hot water pools in the hills...

Journey to the Centre of My Room

Mark-Peter Howe

The long room runs from one side of the old mansion to the other, with original Georgian windows at each end rising...

I Learn My True Nature

Lorna Gibb

This is what I was told.Our house was small and indistinct. My father was a fisherman. My mother, a midwife.

The Fischer Man

Lauren Tom

He himself was very ugly, but he liked beautiful things. Distinctly he recalled the moment of this realization.

Curating Care - in Conversation with Ellie New

Micaela Brinsley

Ellie New and her take on art for how's sake.

Renascence

Ted J. Gibbs

There was movement in the trees and in the fields, and they were open and full of light. And from the swaying curtains..

In Praise of My Eraser

Rose Strode

A thousand years from now my poems are unlikely to survive, and I doubt I’ll be remembered, but I hope my eraser will...

Artistic License

Kip Knott

Even though Mallory knew everyone had a bad seed buried somewhere within the depths of their psyche, she had never...

The Museum of Lockdown

Roman Gerodimos

I started shielding at home on 10 March 2020 and continued until two weeks after my second vaccine, on 17 May 2021.

Venice Bl

Tom Laichas

In adjacent second story apartments live an old she and an old he.She is disabled, living in her unit thanks to...

The Calf

Isaac Feist

They had finished slaughtering the oxen. The hunters stood near the bodies on a stretch of level ground.

The Charles

Ryan Napier

Last winter, I wrote a short story called ‘The Charles.' It was about a couple—a man and a woman. One summer day...

Limpid Footprints

Isabella Garces

He mimicked the landscapist Wang Hui — conical mountains, dragon veins, and hemp fibre foliage.

The Anatomy of Disconnected Lines

Tim Harris

I first noticed him on the other side of Westbury Avenue, as we both made our way to the bus stop.

Yoyogi Park

Michelle Egan

From her seat in the park, all Narumi sees is punctual and she’s unaware of figures moving through her ignorance.

Requiem for a Weeping Fig

Matt Ferraz

“This is my nephew, Matheus. He doesn’t work. He’s a bum. He’s a writer.” That’s how Uncle P. introduces me to one...

Acis and Galatea

Ryan Napier

When I was in grad school, I was ashamed of many things. For instance, I had never read the Odyssey.

Pigs

Reg Taylor

Old Griff had pigs. Only two and always the same two, in one of those chicken-wire-bedframes and sheets-of-iron pens...

Roza Kosma's Song

Peter Newall

The ship’s cabin would have been entirely dark but for the single brass-rimmed porthole above the upper bunk.

Removals

Robert Appelbaum

The first time they took something out of her was seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-six.

Dreamless Sleep

Holly Brians Ragusa

Power left these northern hills that summer’s eve when sun ceased to set and night became all encompassing day.

Dreamland: Part III

“You shouldn’t be here,” Adam said...

Dreamland: Part II

I’d taken drugs before. As I entered Dreamland, I felt something quite familiar...

Dreamland: Part I

In the sprawl of Soho, hidden amid the din of drunken chatter, I asked where to find Dreamland.

Dreams of the Minotaur

The Kingbeast rants a maze unlit by science. His hooves imprint on cobbles clayed with blood.

Gandy Dancers, Building Rail

The tang of a Great Plow forces history to roll up before it like a curling wave of loam.

Lost Colossus

In an aged land the infant child of a fading regency cries in her swaddle. And her name is the Trouble of Ages.

The Foreman and the Labourer

Konstantinos Doxiadis

It took me a few weeks of working on-site before I realised something was off.

Ritorno

Zoe Fairtlough

I’m returning home but it doesn’t feel that way, not when I’m greeted at the airport by kevlar soldiers

Patterns of a Postal Address

Chariklia Martalas

All of my encounters with Ndebele artwork have been so removed from the people it belongs to.

The Veil of Ignorance

Eponine Howarth

I wouldn’t exactly say that Rawls is my muse.

Ino and the Death of Time

Konstantinos Doxiadis

They called her Ino, the beauty of Boeotia, mother to Learchus and Melicertes, and daughter of Cadmus of Thebes.

A Movement in Chrome Primitive

Michael Salu

Makers

Scheherazade Loft

Cups and plates and mugs and bowls line the cupboards of most of the houses in the little town of Braunton.

Janek

Eszter Bencsik

Youth. The word flickered through my mind unexpectedly, violently...

ajunaarneq

Zoe Fairtlough

He calls her again: ‘I can’t stop thinking of you. I need to see you.’ And she incredulous...

A Cabin in the Fog

Vladi Voinich

“Thus, I’m fighting for myself when I ask you to stop” said the last sentence of the letter.

Teddy and Roosevelt

Steven Simoncic

They call it Friends Group. But there are no friends, and there is no group. Just me, a state-funded Social Worker...

Writing searches for a homeland. Behind a poem or a story is a landscape, or several if there is a journey. The setting may be in a wild, remote place. Or it may be in a city.. Or it may be an imagined place, like Xanadu.

Meditations From A Restless Night

Stephen R. Minnich

For a restless soul, the night is an endless possibility. A stage upon which experience and imagination collide. How different would be the day if just one thing only changed? If everything changed but only just? Countless are the variations that one might imagine. These poems welcome what arrives when rest is unwelcome and restlessness embraced; when one learns, perhaps, to stand on stage between the infinite collisions, letting each one try itself out.

Ambivalence

Micaela Brinsley

Somewhere in between knowing, ambivalence is a feeling that never quite acts like one. It’s more of a filter, that blurs reality until the moment it snaps, cracks under its own ephemerality. Here you’ll find a drive between prose and poetry, effort and surrender, loss and its clarity.

Out of the Woods

Civilisation and Nature often have a difficult relationship. Writing about Nature seeks harmony between town and country.

Follies

These three linked short stories anecdote the cosmopolitan fictional Fielder family: Ira, wife Nessa, and son Rónán, from the mid-eighties—which Rónán likes to call B.R.—to summer 2021.

Seoul Metal

Michael Howarth

'Seoul Metal' explores the Mullae Dong district with a series of ten photographs. Visit this neighbourhood in Seoul, with an eclectic mix of metal workshops, artists’ studios, bars and restaurants. Join this loud, boisterous and very industrial trip with Michael Howarth.

All That Glitters is Not Gold

"All that glitters is not gold” is a three-piece story that examines a woman’s abortion from three overlapping angles. "The danger of the child in your head", “Mozart assassinated” and “Playing your cards right” each explore the pains of an abortion, crumbling relationships and the pursuit of hope.

L'Escargot

Geoffrey Heptonstall returns in the Thread with a collection of essays inspired by Henri Matisse’s L’Escargot. Go down into the labyrinth. You will find a discussion about art, darkness, tragedy and memory with Francois Gilot, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Cocteau, Horace and Aristotle amongst many other guests.

Come Here, Chodż Tutaj (or, A Tribute to Mother Courage)

Come Here, Chodż Tutaj (or, A Tribute to Mother Courage) is a three-part essay that revolves around the author’s experience in Warsaw in 1980 and 1981 as a twelve-year-old boy, as well as the life of Anna Walentynowicz, the Polish activist who inspired Solidarity. It explores notions of memory, language, history, and labor unions with several literary references along the way.

Way Out in the Old West

Sam Price

Stories of the American West have largely been relegated to the past. Reading about gratuitous, racially-charged violence in a world brimming with gratuitous, racially-charged violence -- most readers are wise to pass. Yet, something gleams in those far-off hills, gems like True Grit, Warlock, and Lonesome Dove. These genre classics remind modern readers the stories we construct about our own pasts are, like the legends of old, more mythology than history.

Digital Truth Serum

Mulan Fu

How does the virtual world control how we perceive ourselves and can animation help us identify how we unknowingly subject ourselves to its terms? Constructed in relation with artist Mulan Fu's visual language of abstraction, this is a record of the development of a work of animation from conception to production. A simulation.

700th Anniversary of the Death of Dante

Antonio Melloni

Seven hundred years ago, Dante Alighieri died in Ravena. Broadly read and criticized, his Comedy has been – and still is – a sea in which many have ventured to find poetry, philosophy, history and religion. Some, moved by the Italian, attempted their own creations inspired by such waters. Here, two essays and a poem intend to be, if nothing else, a compass for an eventual reader to find his way towards Dante´s work.

Animal v. Human

Two miniature collections of short stories and a short essay on the theme of animals and humans, written by a human.

Dream Journey

Dream Journey is an account of the images that a mind encounters on first waking. It begins with a city walk at night. Before nightfall, there is a strange feeling that the world is neither light nor dark. The noise of the day gives way not to silence, but to the sounds of the night. In the early morning at first light it may seem that the stones come alive. They may appear to move or to speak. Of course it is only the mist of a grey dawn.

Dostoevsky is 200

Jakob Brønnum

The Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, turns 200 on November 11th. "Dostoevsky is 200” is a quartet of short essays that explores the writer’s understanding of the problems of Russian society and his characterization of human nature. His vision of the human person is so strong and pure that there is much to be learned from reading him.

Through the Lens

Nacho Oliden

Through the Lens offers a reflection on photography, memory and identity through essays and poetry. You can expect to encounter Bioy Casares, Manoel de Oliveira, Joaquín Sorolla, Nacho’s friend Simón, as well as others along the way.

In Constant Motion

This collection of essays investigates the poetic form, the life of poets, familiar streets and places of learning. A journey within the mind, with language and within the world at a moment of transformation. You can expect to meet T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Hugh MacDiarmid, Sally Purcell, John Wain, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop and Amanda Gorman along the way...

On History

Dylan Howarth

‘On History’ comprises three critical reflections on the depiction of historical events in cinema, on the role of the historian in the study of history, and on the historical depiction of madness in American literature. Through this collection of essays, join a voyage through history, from the late Stalin and Khrushchev eras, to ‘Hitler’s War,’ and 19th and 20th century America.

Dreamland

December 2030. Tom is a young man intent on saving his older brother, who resides in ‘Dreamland’. Dreamland is a drug house for the rich, hidden underneath Soho Square. No man has ever left Dreamland.

The Muses of October

This collection of essays offers a reflection on the decay of empires. From Ancient Greece, to the Roman Empire, to the Aztecs, the story of the fall of ancient civilisations in 'The Muses of October’ provides some insight into contemporary political developments.

Lockdown Meanderings

Eleonora Narbone

'Lockdown Meanderings' offers a critical reflection on some of the effects of the pandemic. This collection of essays and short stories explores the passing of time, the subtle beauty of routines, the importance of storytelling, and the immense joy of seeing people again after lockdown. From Boccacio’s Decameron, to running in Ancona, to the beauty of moka coffee, enjoy a virtual trip to the heart of Italy.

Singing Cicadas

Chariklia Martalas

According to Socrates in the Phaedrus, when the Muses were born, song was birthed with them. Some people became so intoxicated with singing that they forgot to eat and drink and so they died. These humans became the Singing Cicadas who sang until they died and then reported to the Muses which humans have honoured them. Chariklia openly admits that she wants the Cicadas to report to the Muses that she has honoured them, so she can give these pieces of writing as offerings.

The First Words

"When the first words were written it became possible…" This trilogy explores the role of writers and literature, as well as the art of writing; these notebooks filled with possibilities, improbabilities and nonsense. A true manifesto that explains why it matters very much how you say what you say, why nobody can tell you how to write and why the true self is the imaged self.

A Chapter in the Book of Existence

Colby Torbett

This collection of essays offers a reflection of life’s place in space and time through the physical environment of three different settings: Space, the arctic, and the jungle. A Chapter in the Book of Existence seek to express the beautiful, finite nature of our planet as it exists in the universe through the lenses of science, human nature, and exploration.

Celebrating Beethoven

Jakob Brønnum

Beethoven was born 250 years ago in December. We do not know his exact birthday, but records show that he was baptized in Bonn on the 17th. 2020 should be a celebration of his intense artistic and unswervingly humanistic musical legacy. “Celebrating Beethoven” looks at four large and well-known works, attempting to identify some ways Beethoven widens his time and his métier into matters relevant to philosophy, romantic spirituality, abstract art and the dawning of modern, personal identity.

On Voices

Myko Philip

Join the odyssey through the voices that one hears while deciphering Eliot’s The Waste Land. Are you hearing the voices? What happens when you don’t quite hear the voices that Eliot wants you to hear? What happens when you do begin to hear the voices? What happens when you mistakenly hear the other voices?

Some Notes from Chile

A trip to Chile, exploring its history and present, from Pinochet and the Chicago Boys to O-18 and Covid-19. Notes on political unrest, streets coming to life and creating a new social pact. Interventions by Neruda and references to Bolaño may shine light on the rebellion, or simply provide solace.

In Search of Lost Words

Zoe Fairtlough

A reflection on family legacies and the search for purpose, threaded through with the origins of Italian gelato and the etymology of related words.

On Poetic Creation

Nacho Oliden

Embarking on a journey into the past – from ancient Greece, across the Seine and the Sistine Chapel, to Hollywood and America – this is an exploration of the intricacies of the poetic process, the interaction of poetry with history and philosophy and the uniqueness of different art forms.

On Loss and Solitude

Pamela Mandell

Ruminations on the natural cycles of life and death inspired by the bildungsroman of a life companion. The Noki Trilogy, named after the author’s canine companion, builds on casual conversations in the form of three short stories, stimulating all five senses, and exploring the depth and clarity of the perception of loss.

On Writers and Writing