Three compact stories explore memory, relationship and the fragile ways people make sense of their lives. Marie Fitzpatrick’s Eden moves between the natural world and human history, finding beauty in what is transient; Jesse Patrick draws memory and emotion through the symbolic presence of water; and Mary Miller looks closely at companionship, changing relationships and the expectations we carry for ourselves and one another. Together, the pieces find large emotional currents within brief, carefully observed moments.
Stephen Zelnick moves from Oliver Goldsmith’s exuberant comic theatre to the fierce, changing poetic voice of Alfonsina Storni and the restless, formally inventive verse of Thomas Hardy. With wit, close reading and a keen ear for language and performance, these essays place each writer within the pressures of their time — love and marriage, social convention, gender, faith, war and mortality — while exploring how voice, form and imagination transform lived experience into enduring art.
Three writers from the early years of The Linnet’s Wings approach love, art and companionship from very different directions. Nonnie Augustine imagines a shared life made beautiful by time and mutual care; Russell Bittner turns the coming of dawn into an intricate, passionate argument for desire; and Martin Heavisides celebrates the unruly theatrical imagination of Peter Barnes. Together, the pieces retain the warmth, wit and willingness to take risks that helped shape the magazine’s beginnings.
|
Across five exuberant sonnets, Russell Bittner turns the coming of dawn into an elaborate argument for desire. Doves, stars, moon, sun and hill are recruited into a witty, formally playful courtship in which arithmetic, prudence and passing time are repeatedly challenged by the sheer appetite to love, risk and delight.. |
Martin Heavisides makes an impassioned case for Peter Barnes as one of the great, insufficiently recognised comic dramatists of the modern stage. Moving through The Ruling Class, Laughter!, Red Noses, Dreaming and Barnes’s shorter works, he celebrates a theatre of extravagant invention in which comedy confronts cruelty, hierarchy, death and received wisdom without surrendering its delight in human possibility. |
“In Time” by Nonnie Augustine imagines a shared future built not from perfection, but from beauty, wear and mutual care. From a rain-sheltered café in Montmartre, the speaker looks ahead to chipped porcelain, faded carpets, Mozart in an ageing car and two lives learning to steady one another. Tender and quietly assured, the poem finds enduring love in the graceful acceptance of time. |
These poems move through memory, love, grief and the lingering presence of the past. Tom Sheehan finds a mother’s labour and affection still held in the worn surface of an old dough board, while Kristine Jensen traces the damage of an angry thought and the longing to recover what has been lost. Iain C. Smith’s Mates reflects on friendship, sudden death and the preciousness of the time still granted to us, and Pipedream returns through storm, smoke and remembered domestic detail to childhood, family tensions and an earlier world. Together, the poems show how ordinary objects, gestures and moments can carry whole lives within them.
These three stories move through dream, memory, and family inheritance, each finding strangeness inside the ordinary. David G. Schwartz’s playful surrealism follows animal wisdom and dream logic into a world of ravens, dogs, dawns, berries, parachutes, and elephants. Beside it, Biswas writes a quiet magical-realist piece that returns a woman to the living power of books and stories, and Bill Frank Robinson’s “Grandma’s Story” roots the gathering in oral family history, where circus roads, prizefighting, early cars, love, loss, and rough humour become part of the Archie family chronicle. Together, the pieces celebrate storytelling as wonder, recovery, and remembrance.
Three works confront the pressures that silence people: guilt and the search for redemption, the double-edged longing for flight and freedom, and the struggle for safety and dignity in the face of hostility. Harris, Walters and Taillefer turn fear, vulnerability and human experience into voices that insist on being heard.
Three stories look at the labels we carry, the lives we have lived and the moments when something finally shifts.
In Yvette Managan’s In the Closet, Mary searches through old clothes before meeting a lawyer, and each garment brings with it a piece of a marriage she is preparing to leave behind. Ramon Collins’ Smell of Rain finds former baseball champion Henry Jenkins on his porch, measuring age, memory and mortality against a record that still bears his name. And in Becky Soto’s sharply comic Labels, a grandmother’s battle with the tiny print on a medicine bottle becomes an argument with ageing, modern life and a world she insists is getting smaller.
Humorous, tender and sometimes defiant, these stories find character in the everyday — in clothes, memories, medicine bottles and the small acts by which people continue to define themselves.
A summer gathering of fiction and essay from Dan MacIsaac, Adam Kluger, and Stephen Zelnick: three pieces that move through story, character, comic unease, and literary discovery, ending with the music and force of Rubén Darío’s New World imagination.
Three poems of haunted places and wounded lives move from the battered Devon coast to a Venetian waterside and the darker streets of Dublin. Sea, rain, memory, and grief bind them together, revealing landscapes marked by absence, sudden sorrow, and the ghosts of what cannot be undone.
Two sharply different stories explore the uneasy claims of the past. In Margrét Helgadóttir’s The Pact, Tuva returns to her family’s abandoned tivoli in a remote mountain clearing and discovers that an old bargain with the mysterious grey people is more than folklore. Alex Braverman’s Mozart and I moves through musical parody, dark comedy and Holocaust-shadowed family memory to examine fathers and sons, artistic inheritance, expectation, and the impossible demand that art should answer history.
Four poems explore the ways ordinary things hold what time threatens to take from us. Kathleen Cassen Mickelson finds inheritance, unease and tenderness in a first attempt at preserving summer, then turns to a snowy Minnesota morning where moonlight, crows, an old dog and a loved one make the everyday feel like prayer. James Graham writes from the harder country of bereavement: confronting the blunt material fact of ash before poetry can return, and later discovering that memory can quietly repopulate an empty house with a familiar voice, a glance and a consoling ghost.
Two mischievous poems turn childhood defiance into verbal play. Little Miss Muffet answers the world with wit and suspicion, while Nolens Volens stages bedtime as a grand philosophical rebellion destined to collapse beneath bears, pillows and sleep. Russell Bittner combines nursery-rhyme rhythms, wordplay and comic argument to create poems that are clever enough for adults and unruly enough for children.
These poems move between grief and wonder, finding thresholds in burial grounds, fountains, birds, islands, insects and shells. Death and departure sit beside renewal, humour and moments of sudden illumination, while sea, wind, light and living creatures carry memory into the physical world. Together, the poems explore how what is lost can remain present — transformed into landscape, sensation, imagination and the small, unexpected magic of being alive.
The three stories gathered here move through childhood, memory, labour, and inheritance. In scenes of rainwater, porch-light storytelling, family grief, and working lives marked by poverty and endurance, the ordinary world becomes charged with consequence. These works look closely at what is passed down: stories, losses, small loyalties, social wounds, and the stubborn human will to keep going.
Three poems explore private lives shaped by longing, weariness and small acts of escape. A waitress finds companionship and comic consolation at the end of a difficult day; a quiet room becomes charged with desire as a man watches his sleeping lover; and a daughter remembers her father through the music, restlessness and thwarted freedom that filled their home.
Four very different pieces explore what the body remembers and what time cannot quite erase. Oonah V. Joslin’s five tankas move through mature love, humour, habit and the tenderness of ageing; Laurel Blossom’s Very Warm for March catches desire in the sudden warmth and recklessness of an early spring, while Red Rewind turns memory back through illness, sisterhood, art and bereavement, where love persists inside the machinery of grief. Linda LShok’s surreal Dark Snow closes the group in a more dreamlike register, transforming appetite, heat, domestic objects and the body into a strange, sensual landscape.
|
Oonah V. Joslin's tankas offer our readers a poetic glimpses into love, nature, and life's fleeting moments. Each verse weaves emotions and memories, revealing the beauty in the mundane and the eternal dance of change. Dive into a world where words paint lasting impressions on the heart and mind. |
"Very Warm for March" beautifully intertwines the awakening of the natural world with the awakening of human desires and connections. Blossom's use of imagery and intimate details creates a piece that resonates with the joy of early spring and the timeless nature of love. |
The poem invites readers to reflect on the nature of sibling relationships, the process of mourning, and the search for meaning in the face of mortality. Through its exploration of these themes, "Red Rewind" speaks to the universal experience of grappling with the complexities of love, loss, and the human condition. |
Dark Snow by Linda Shok is a narrative that seems to revel in contrasts: the tangible with the abstract, the domestic with the natural, and the intimate with the expansive. The prose is rich with metaphor and imagery, suggesting a deep undercurrent of emotion and longing beneath the surface of everyday actions. |
Three galleries drawn from The Linnet’s Wings visual archive, moving from the colour and atmosphere of Summer 2014, through the 2016 Summer Dario Gallery, to Russell Joslin’s darker, more theatrical All Hallows collection. Together they show the range of visual work that has accompanied the magazine over the years — seasonal, expressive, playful and sometimes distinctly strange.
This wide-ranging selection moves between the cosmic, the spiritual and the deeply human, exploring the fragile boundaries between life and death, freedom and confinement, love and loss. Howard Bernbaum’s How Long the Life takes an irreverent journey from a hospital deathbed to the origins of the universe, setting the immense scale of creation against the brief and often absurd circumstances of individual human lives.
Diana Ferraro’s essay on Spanish women writers opens another perspective, tracing a literary tradition in which spirituality, imagination and the supernatural become ways of reaching beyond social and personal confinement.
Together, these works consider what lies beyond the surface of ordinary existence: the vastness above us, the unseen life within us, and the persistent human desire to find freedom, love and illumination in the face of mortality.
|
'How Long the Life' by Howard Bernbaum, a striking juxtaposition unfolds between the cosmic journey of a meteor and the human saga at a hospital. |
In this essay, there's an imaginative spirituality tradition that is vividly represented here by St. Teresa of Ávila, whose mystical poetry transforms death into the promise of a greater life; by Rosalía de Castro, whose Galician poems move between humour, desire, love, reputation and sorrow; and by Gloria Fuertes, whose deceptively simple, rebellious verse insists upon compassion and light in a world capable of extinguishing both. |
In these three wide-ranging works, Martin Heavisides explores the unruly power of imagination through William Blake’s visionary art, Peter Barnes’s darkly comic theatre and the precarious world of Empty Bowl. Together they challenge received ideas about madness, morality, power and human nature, finding flashes of freedom and compassion amid violence, absurdity and disorder.
Three restored artist collections from The Linnet’s Wings archive bring together the work of Maire Morrissey-Cummins, the Clarke family, and Dr Suzanne Conboy-Hill. Moving from landscape and seasonal imagery to urban, tactile and abstract work, the selection shows a wide range of approaches while sharing a strong attention to colour, atmosphere, texture and place
Tom Sheehan returns to Saugus through winter hockey, summer swims and vanished shorelines, where landscape and old friendships endure as memory, story and belonging.
A quiet poem in which Vermeer’s light transforms an ordinary room, turning domestic stillness into a moment of attention, presence and near-sacred illumination.
A missing keepsake leads into family history, humour and inheritance in Gail E. Taylor’s story about the objects through which memory keeps a hold on us.
Squirrel, hazelnut shells, Halloween twilight and bonfire smoke gather into a crisp autumn poem where nature and memory edge gently towards unease.
Wet mist, wipers, deadwood and crow-haunted roads shape a brief gothic poem in which weather and memory seem to carry their own ghosts.
Rabbit, sea, robin, lacewing, cuckoo and island light gather into a sequence alive with wonder, wildness and the small enchantments of the natural world.

Thirteen pieces from across the archive explore the things that refuse to disappear. Ghosts walk beside memory; old stories carry supernatural bargains and strange encounters; graveyards, autumn skies and haunted landscapes keep their own company. Some of these presences belong to folklore, some to grief, and some simply to the uneasy knowledge that the past is rarely as absent as we imagine.

Irish folklore opens a door onto a world in which gold, enchantment and supernatural beings remain perilously close to ordinary life.
Family history and Nordic folklore meet in a story of inherited secrets, strange beings and a supernatural bargain whose presence reaches across generations.

Ghostly encounters draw past and present together as memory, regret and reconciliation move between an older woman and a younger generation.
A mysterious book, superstition and an unexplained death disturb the familiar world, suggesting hidden connections between stories and the lives of those who read them.
A scarecrow inhabits an eerie, desolate landscape in a haunting little tale of isolation, fate and the strange life we sometimes grant to familiar things.
Loss leaves its own presence behind. Memory enters the quiet spaces of absence until remembrance itself begins to resemble a ghost.
A funeral procession encountered at night becomes, in Don Quixote's imagination, an adventure populated by phantoms, danger and all the splendid errors of chivalric romance.
Squirrel, hazelnut shells, Halloween twilight and bonfire smoke gather into an autumn poem in which the familiar season acquires a faintly unsettling edge.
Wet mist, deadwood, wipers and crow-haunted roads create a brief Gothic journey where weather and memory seem to summon ghosts of their own.
Burial, grief, seagulls and memory meet in a graveyard meditation that holds farewell beside the continuing presence of the dead.
Sycamore, winter stone, silence and wren-song surround a grave in a quiet meditation where grief and memory leave room for hope.
A grieving father becomes a kite and asks his child to release him into an October sky: a strange and tender transformation of loss into letting go.
Hobs and Fiddle
More Coming Soon in |