By Julian Borda I didn’t know what to expect when I started as an editor for the minnesota review, but as I stepped into the press’ workspace for the first time, my circuits just about went haywire. The gears in my head had been turning mad, banging against brain cogs and mind motors out of … Continue reading How I Became a Coping Mechanic (And Why You Might Be One Too)
TMR Posts
Fanfiction and the Bardic Tradition
By Kaitlyn Grube It’s such a shame that bards are extinct. I first had that thought sitting in my British Literature class while studying Beowulf of all things. It sparked a thread of sorrow in my chest that hasn’t gone away. I’m sure my friends are tired of me going on this same rant every … Continue reading Fanfiction and the Bardic Tradition
I Am a Spectacle and So Are You
By Grace Gaynor Come inside and take off your boots, your thick jacket. Hang the weight of your key ring, heart, and shame on the hook by the front door. What should I call you? Where are you from? (I could say I am from this world, this perfect one I have built on the … Continue reading I Am a Spectacle and So Are You
Love letter from an MFA editor
By Cat Santana This is the end for me and the minnesota review, (tmr) blog. It’s over. Forever. As Taylor so rightly put it, “We are never ever getting back together.” The journal and this blog have been handed from the Virginia Tech graduate students over to the undergraduates, rendering this the second to last … Continue reading Love letter from an MFA editor
Writing and Witnessing Ukraine from Diaspora
by Xander Gershberg In 2019 I traveled around Central and Eastern Europe to visit the places my ancestors had lived. My brother joined me in Poland, the country we were closest to in time. Our grandmother, we called her Safta, was born in the Polish town of Tarnow, one hour east of Krakow. Thanks to … Continue reading Writing and Witnessing Ukraine from Diaspora
Not Yet the End of Grief: Review of Dianne LeBlanc’s The Feast Delayed
by Jayne Marek Diane LeBlanc, The Feast Delayed. Terrapin Books, 2021. $16.00 Diane LeBlanc’s first full-length poetry collection delivers complex personal truths through deft imagery and spare language. Weather and seasons, parent-child anxieties, and the impermanence of physical existence propel the fifty poems in this book. LeBlanc’s principal themes derive from the abrasive truths that … Continue reading Not Yet the End of Grief: Review of Dianne LeBlanc’s The Feast Delayed
Writing CNF at The End of The World: Prompts
By Taylor Portela As we continue to ebb at whatever threshold of the pandemic we’re currently at, the importance of archiving my life has become more important – not only so I can rest my queer mind with having some type of creative afterlife, but so I can begin to come to terms with who I’ve … Continue reading Writing CNF at The End of The World: Prompts
Finding Family in an MFA
By Mina Buzzek I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia alone. When I arrived, my roommates were sitting out on the porch, smoking cigarettes and planning their syllabi for the upcoming semester. I thought to myself: this feels like home. My roommate makes dinner for all of us most nights. They are kind about my diet, and … Continue reading Finding Family in an MFA
The Poetics of Fandom: The X-Men Persona Poems of Gary Jackson and Stephanie Burt
By Xander Gershberg I’m going to use this blog to talk about a cross-section of topics I can rarely find anyone in my own life interested in but know there is an audience for: poetry and comics. Specifically, poetry about the X-Men, the focus of Gary Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis (2009) and Stephanie Burt’s recent … Continue reading The Poetics of Fandom: The X-Men Persona Poems of Gary Jackson and Stephanie Burt
On Developing A Daily Writing Practice
By Kayla Murphy In January of 2021, I began a daily writing practice that I have stuck with for the past ten months. Before this year, my writing was sporadic. Then, mid pandemic, I was laid off. I had been employed as a research assistant for a college, and was set to begin a social … Continue reading On Developing A Daily Writing Practice
Review – Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi
by Nathan Dragon Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi (Tyrant Books, 2018) Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi is a deep and profound novella, paranoid, regimented and preoccupied, incongruent and beautiful. It lacks reasons, answers, sometimes the most important questions, and a linear and straightforward sensibility despite its short and quick sentences and sections. It’s like a … Continue reading Review – Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi
The Hard to Find Films of Kidlat Tahimik
By Hanta Samsa Photo Credit: https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/3125 As third world diaspora, as pilipinx diaspora, I often find myself looking for (and rarely finding) my writing and artmaking elders. It took me an embarrassingly long time to find an elder whose work my own writing would aspire towards—more than 2.5 decades before I finally came upon the … Continue reading The Hard to Find Films of Kidlat Tahimik
Fall Flash
by Kira Homsher Because fall is my favorite season and flash is my favorite genre, it only felt fitting to feature a selection of spooky flash stories from some of my favorite venues. These short, spine-chilling tales span the full gamut of eeriness, with sapphic undead swimmers, rabbit fur coats, gory beauty pageants, Craigslist mediums, … Continue reading Fall Flash
Four Writing Prompts For Your Worst Writer’s Block
By Sonya Lara As writers who juggle busy lives, it can be easy to tell ourselves that we have nothing to say or that we have writer’s block and put off our important projects. But that’s simply not true. Sometimes, taking a moment to read another artist’s work is the inspiration we need to open … Continue reading Four Writing Prompts For Your Worst Writer’s Block
What I Learned From My First Year in an MFA Program
By Florence Gonsalves Last fall, about six months into the pandemic, I moved from the Northeast to a small town beneath the Mason-Dixon line so that I could study writing. Specifically, I came to study poetry. It’d been my dream to get an MFA since I took my first creative writing class in college and … Continue reading What I Learned From My First Year in an MFA Program
The Simplicity of Solitude Is a Hard Thing to Perfect: An Interview With Sam Beebe
Part 1: Master of Hybrid I reached out to Sam Beebe of the music Project Black Bear on a Thursday afternoon. I spent the morning cleaning up a mysterious amount of dead milipedes in my apartment. It was here, like many times before, that the line “the simplicity of solitude is a hard thing to … Continue reading The Simplicity of Solitude Is a Hard Thing to Perfect: An Interview With Sam Beebe
A Reggaeton Playlist for the Summer
by Bessie Flores Zaldívar When I can’t write, when I can’t put my finger on the meter of a poem, the next plot development of a story, the missing image-- I go for a 1:05:48 walk. I mean, I listen to Bad Bunny’s Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana from beginning to end. … Continue reading A Reggaeton Playlist for the Summer
How to Make Dandelion Mead
by Theo Richards Previously, I wrote about not writing as a writing practice. Here’s something to do with all that not-writing practice. We aren’t going to talk about writing, we’re going to talk about fermentation. I think domestic ecosystems are queer. Sandor Katz agrees. It’s spring, get outside. Let’s learn to make some dandelion mead. … Continue reading How to Make Dandelion Mead
What’s it like to date a poet?
by Theo Richards A partner of mine once called to tell me they were getting into fishing. Bought the rod, knew the lures, where the trout slept and ate. But they wouldn’t put a hook on their line. They would sit on a rock in the river and cast their naked line into the water … Continue reading What’s it like to date a poet?
A Renaissance in African Poetry
by Honora Ankong Unlike the widely known, extensively studied, and highly celebrated literary fiction from the continent, African poetry has been largely disregarded in most literary conversations and scholarship. The first time I encountered poetry by an African poet was in 2019, during the last semester of my senior year of college. I had spent … Continue reading A Renaissance in African Poetry
The Minnesota Review 