Apr/May 2025

Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing and Fiction Editor. In the 12 years between earning a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and a MPA in municipal management from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught middle and high school English in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin, amassing fond memories, dubious experiences, and debt. Two careers post-teaching later, he now creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides for the man by day, edits Eclectica by night, and feels very grateful for the blessings he has received—chief among them being married to the sweetest gal and the best poet he knows. He and said gal reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with enough rescued lapdogs to field a diminutive Iditarod racing team and the empty-nest echoes of two amazing Haitian-American children who have flown the coop.

Marko Fong is Eclectica's Nonfiction Coeditor. A former Spotlight Author, he lives in North Carolina with his wife, dog, and two cats. He's written fiction and non-fiction for many years, and publications include Solstice, Prick of the Spindle, RKVRY, and Volleyball Magazine.

Christine Potter is Eclectica's Poetry Editor. A former Spotlight Author, she appeared in Eclectica a dozen times before joining the staff. She lives with her husband and chonky cat Bella in a very old house in the Hudson River Valley. Her poetry has also appeared in Grain, The McNeese Review, Rattle, Roi Fanéant, Does It Have Pockets, ONE ART, SWIMM, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily as well as having been featured on ABC Radio News. Her latest collection of poems, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books, and her young adult time travel novels are published by Evernight Teen.

Lana Hechtman Ayers is a New Yorker who made her way to the Pacific Northwest via a dozen-year sojourn in New England. She has shepherded over 140 poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, Comstock Review, One Art, and elsewhere, and her latest collection, The Autobiography of Rain, is available from Fernwood Press.

Jennifer Bannan has had stories in the Autumn House Press anthology Keeping the Wolves at Bay and has been published in literary journals including the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and more. Her short story collection, Tamiami Trail, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her first collection, Inventing Victor, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2003. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Millions, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and others.

Asher Black is an author, musician, and karateka satisfied with the life he always wanted. He reads, writes, thinks, cooks, plays guitar, practices karate, dances, and rides a motorcycle named Lorraine through the tree-lined neighborhood where Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass while editing the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. A polymath artist with degrees in History and Educational Psychology, Asher spent several years as Chief Editor of MYTHOLOG and Managing Editor of The Green Man Review. His literary writing has appeared in Saturday Evening Post, Isele, and other publications. He endeavors to create vivid, thoughtful, and action-filled stories—of pitiless men and malice, and ordinary people who resist them. He writes almost entirely outdoors and deeply about context. By day, he works as a corporate storyteller and digital ecologist®. His brand is MadPipe, a business unit of Free Agent Source Inc. He is also a resident of the Catskills. He says, "It thrills me to have work in Eclectica. As a genre-hacker, I don't feel bound by the scripted requirements of one swim lane. Eclectica defies a culture of literary fit and publishes work in the interstices of conventional thinking, which invites a broader use of creative intelligence and makes an artist like myself incredibly comfortable."

Bob Bradhsaw is retired and looking for the perfect hammock to spend retirement in. He is a fan of the Rolling Stones. Mick may not be gathering moss, but Bob is. Bob has had many poems published on the net over the years, including Apple Valley Review, Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Dodging the Rain, Eclectica, Ekphrastic Review, and many other publications.

Sue Blaustein retired from the Milwaukee Health Department in 2016 after 25 years as a food safety inspector. She's the author and publisher of In the Field, Autobiography of an Inspector (2018) and a chapbook, The Beer Line (2022). A new chapbook, All The Secrets Around Me is forthcoming very soon. She lives in Milwaukee and serves as a volunteer blogger for Ex Fabula ("Connecting Milwaukee With Real Stories") and as a writer/interviewer for the Veteran's Administration's My Life, My Story. She says, "The account in Section 1 of this poem follows a news story from 4/2/1992 in the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel. Sections II and III are based on my visits with Lincoln Forbes when I served as an Environmental Health Specialist (commonly called food inspector) for the Milwaukee Health Department.

Terese Coe has appeared in Agenda, Alaska Quarterly Review, Classical Outlook, Cyphers, Hopkins Review, The Moth, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, Threepenny Review, and many other journals, including anthologies. She has published three books of poems, including Shot Silk, several from Kelsay Books.

Tina Harrach Denetclaw is a clinical pharmacist, specializing in critical care and emergency medicine. Her poetry has appeared in Eclectica Magazine twice before, in Silver Birch Press's Spices & Seasonings series and All About My Mother series, and in Leading the Way: The Wisdom of the Navajo People. Three creative nonfiction stories are homed with Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. She has another poem forthcoming in Silver Birch Press' My Favorite Things series. She was a semi-finalist in Tinderbox's Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She lives in California's San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and five cats. About the poem, "Going with Dad to Check the Cattle," she says, "It begins with a song celebrating the endurance of the Navajo People and their culture. The words mean, 'I'm still here, surrounded by beauty.' Glittering World is the fourth world in Navajo tradition, the world in which the Navajo now live. The vocalizations are sung with social and healing songs. Hózhó̜ náhásdlí̜í̜' is a blessing prayer meaning 'In Beauty I walk: Beauty above me, Beauty before me, Beauty beside me, Beauty all around me.' It is always repeated four times, for the four sacred mountains that encircle Dinétah, the Navajo's sacred lands."

Kavita Dorai has a day job as a Professor of Physics and moonlights as a writer. Someday she hopes to reverse these roles. Some of her fiction has been published in literary magazines like Eclectica and Blackbird. She lives in India and is working on her first novel.

Iyesatta Massaquoi Emeli is a writer, emergency medicine physician, professor, and mom. Her work has appeared in Eclectica Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, Journal of the American Medical association, Annals of Emergency Medicine, the Examined Life Journal, and Midnight & Indigo Magazine. She won the Richard J. Margolis Award for her short stories depicting the impact of war on Sierra Leone's children.

Beverly A. Jackson provided the artwork for this issue. She is a visual artist, poet, and writer living in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is one of 30 co-op artists in the Mesilla Valley Fine Arts Gallery.

Eve Goldberg is a writer and filmmaker who lives in Sonoma County, California. Her writing has been published in American Popular Culture, The Rumpus, The Gay & Lesbian Review, All About Jazz, Cinema Retro, Eclectica, and elsewhere.

Gloria D. Gonsalves is a multipotentialite: author, poet, illustrator, occasional columnist, former United Nations staff, and former tourism and travel professional. Her writing has appeared in various literary magazines, journals, and anthologies in Africa, Europe, and the USA. Besides writing, she is also the founder of WoChiPoDa.com, an initiative to instill the love of poetry in children. Born and raised in Tanzania and later migrated to Ireland, she lives in Germany.

Brad Gottschalk is a writer and cartoonist who has lived most of his life in Wisconsin. His comics, illustrations, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, most recently in Rosebud, The Writing Disorder, Lost Lake Folk Opera, and Floyd County Moonshine.

Matt Gulley is a poet, playwright and fiction writer. He attended Wayne State University in Detroit and now resides in Brooklyn with his partner Jenna. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Moon City Review, Quarter After Eight, Harpur Palate, The Minnesota Review, and Consequence Forum.

Eric Hadley is a poet when he feels like it and the rest of the time too. He has recently published a number of tiny poems through both Tiny Wren Lit and the Origami Poems Project, and he's quite proud of them.

Brenda Mann Hammack teaches digital storytelling, creative writing, and modern poetry at Fayetteville State University. She is managing editor and website designer for Glint Literary Journal. Other selections in her "Living Dead Woman Sonnets" have appeared or are forthcoming in Mudlark, BlazeVox, The Queen's Review, Collidescope, The Red Ogre Review, and The Closed Eye Open. Her academic writing focuses on the living vampires created by Florence Marryat, Arabella Keneally, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Violet Hunt. She says, "The Living Dead Woman Sonnets explore the uncanny nature of identity in an Age of AI. The titular character exists in a virtual realm where she interacts with anachronistic figures from history and popular culture. She dies repeatedly but reboots, her age and aesthetic shifting across non-linear timelines. The accompanying images are created by copying the original sonnets into text-to-image prompts in Midjourney. Renderings are reworked through multiple rounds of blending, collaging, and inpainting. Additional manipulations involve photography applications such as Picsart, Mextures, iColorama, and Adobe Lightroom."

Thomas J. Hubschman is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and is the author of Look at Me Now, My Bess, Billy Boy, Father Walther's Temptation, Song of the Mockingbird, and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories, as well as three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and he was the founding editor of the pioneering online publication Gowanus. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, which remains his chief inspiration.

Madonna Holden won the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Award. Besides the publication of two previous Eclectica word poems, her poems have appeared in over three dozen literary journals and anthologies, including Verse Daily, the Bitter Oleander, Cold Mountain Review, Equinox Poetry and Prose, the Clackamas Literary Review, Valley Voices, the Christian Science Monitor, and many more. Her collaborations with painter David Wolfersberger have appeared in Puerto del Sol, the Slippery Elm Literary Review, the Chestnut Review, the Santa Clara Review, About Place, and elsewhere. An award-winning film documenting the production of her play in poetic text, The Descent of Inanna, has been aired several times on Oregon Public Broadcasting.

Mary Jo Robinson-Jamison lives in St. Paul, Minnesota where she and her husband, Kent, raised their two children. For 40 years she worked as a music therapist with the severely multiply challenged individuals. Her poems have been published in Eastern Iowa Review, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Driftwood Press, Talking Writing, Talking Stick, Minnesota Voices, among others.

Nancy K. Jentsch has appeared recently in Amethyst Review, Braided Way, and Still: The Journal. In 2020, she received an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has published two chapbooks, Authorized Visitors (Cherry Grove Collections) and Intersecting Orbits (Bottlecap Press) in addition to her collection Between the Rows (Shanti Arts). More information is available on her website.

Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks, most recently, A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Poet Lore, Hunger Mountain, Comstock Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her poem, "Sword Swallowing Lessons," was featured on "The Slowdown." Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She received a Maine Literary Award in 2024. Her book, Landscape With Rocks, Sky, Nails, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press in 2025. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).

Lorette C. Luzajic is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry. Most of her writing is inspired in some way by art history. Two stories have been selected recently for the Best Small Fictions anthologies. Her work has been translated into Urdu and Spanish. She is also an award-winning, internationally collected mixed media artist.

Betsy Lynch is a retired teacher from New York and Florida. She's taught in secondary, college, and other contexts: Dannemora Correctional, Cusco, Peru, Guatemala, plus three powerful summers in Shanghai. She has been writing since she was a child, published poems in NCTE, Sierra, Midwest Press, Quillkeepers, and others... and recently had a collection accepted at Finishing Line Press entitled Ground Effect After Spin Recovery, a metaphor gathered from her small plane piloting experience, recovery, coming home. It's scheduled for October 2025.

Penelope Moffet is the author of the chapbooks Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in Afield, The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Natural Bridge, One by Jacar Press, ONE ART, The Rise Up Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and other literary journals, as well as in several anthologies. She lives in Southern California. She says, "I was house-sitting for Seattle friends one recent May, and sitting in the garden they lovingly put together I felt as though their home began to speak to me, beginning with what became the poem's first words, 'A place where two people have been happy/are happy.' The rest of it flowed from there. The house, the long late-spring days of Northwest light, many neighborhood walks past gorgeous gardens and, frankly, far too many glasses of evening wine allowed me to enter difficult material in a way not previously possible for me."

T.R. Poulson is a University of Nevada alum and proud Wolf Pack fan. She supports her writing habit by delivering for UPS in Woodside, California. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, and Booth. She is seeking a publisher for her first manuscript, tentatively titled At Starvation Falls.

Will Reger has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has published four collections of poetry available through Amazon and served as the inaugural poet laureate for the city of Urbana, Illinois 2019-2020. For the last decade, he has been active in promoting poetry in his community. His work has most recently been or will soon be published in the Young Ravens Literary Review, Spirits Magazine IUNW, Poetry South Review, and Talking River Poetry Review. He says, "I have an old poetry volume, Treasures of... Something, that is old and disintegrating. It did fall apart, and as I picked up the pieces, I realized the book had lost many of the pages I had turned to throughout time."

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire. Recent work appears in Red Eft Review, Wilderness House, Bookends Review, and The Windhover. His latest poetry books, Wooden Nutmegs and Magnificat, are available from Encircle Publications. He is a trail maintainer for the Lakes Region (NH) Conservation Trust.

Rituparna Sahoo is a storyteller, writer, and poet from Bhubaneswar, India. Her work explores her own ever-changing emotional landscape; her neurodivergence; her state of woundedness; and her experience of violence, abuse, and trauma. Her work has appeared in the Peepal Tree Press anthology Oluwale Now, as well as in Litro, Wild court, Ink Sweat & Tears, Eclectica, and Muse India. She is working on a volume of poems.

Jamie Silvonek is a writer, activist, prison abolitionist, and college student at Ohio University. She has written for The Prison Journalism Project, The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, George Washington University's Women in Beyond the Global, and numerous social justice zines. At 14, Jamie was sentenced to 35 years to life in prison, which she is serving at SCI Muncy in Pennsylvania. In her spare time, she enjoys training dogs, tutoring, working out, reading nerdy books, stuffing her face, and challenging misconceptions about incarcerated human beings. Her first book of poetry, Marginal Verse, will be published by Game Over Books in 2025. She says, "When I first discovered the ghazal, I fell in love with the form; the repetition enables a poet to capture the circular violence of the carceral state. For millions of incarcerated people, the trauma of prison repeats every day, continuing upon release and reverberating through communities and generations. By naming this violence, I believe we can eventually change the refrain."

Vic Sizemore is the author of the novel God of River Mud; the essay collection Goodbye, My Tribe: An Evangelical Exodus; and the short story collection I Love You I'm Leaving. His fiction and nonfiction appear in Story Quarterly, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, Portland Review, Reed Magazine, and many other journals. his fiction has won the New Millennium Writings Award and has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best of the Net, and several Pushcart Prizes.

Ann Skea lives in Australia. She is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia) and has been contributing reviews to Eclectica Magazine since our very first issue back in October of 1996.

Nancy Sobanik has had work curated by MacQueen's Quinterly, Synkroniciti, Anti-Heroin Chic, One Art, Triggerfish Critical Review, Sparks of Calliope, Verse-Virtual, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Ekphrastic Review. She was a Best of The Net Nominee 2023 and had a Pushcart Nomination 2024. She was awarded second and third place in the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest 2023 and 2024. She's currently employed as an ER Registered Nurse in Maine, working on a collection of poems exploring the intersection of life, death, and poetry. It includes "It's Three AM In Intensive Care and Someone Is Dying."

Scott Solomon has fiction in Chicago Quarterly Review, North American Review, Antioch Review, New Letters, Redivider, Museum of Americana, Bull, and other literary magazines. In addition to composing stories, Scott is at work on a novel. When not writing, he participates in what's left of our democracy by voluntarily helping seekers prepare for the GED.

Lakshmi Arya Thathachar is the Dean of Research and a professor of history at RV University, Bengaluru, India. Her poetry and prose has appeared several times in Eclectica. Of the poem in this issue, she says, "This was written for an imaginary immigrant Kashmiri taxi driver in Bangalore. 'Imaginary' because I have yet to come across a Kashmiri taxi driver in my hometown, which is Bengaluru. The poem evokes themes of loneliness and exile, and the conflict-ridden, touristy (home) land that is Kashmir.

Ping Yi Yee writes poetry, short fiction and creative nonfiction. After a three-decade detour in public service, he resumed his lifelong interest in speculative, humor and travel writing. His work is published in Eclectica Magazine, Orbis, Litro, London Grip, Meniscus, Harbor Review, Vita Poetica, Litbreak, ONE ART, and The Stony Thursday Book, among others. He lives in Singapore with his spouse and their son.

Ann Yuan has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Gone Lawn, Moonpark Review, BULL, Hawaii Pacific Review, Eclectica Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been included in the Overheard Anthology and Iridescence Anthology. She lives on Long Island, New York.

 

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