Let’s get WORKING! The first piece in Fringe’s themed issue – Working – is Someone Else’s Ivy, an essay close to my heart. This is not so simply because I published it, but because I have lived the life she writes about: food service. You needn’t have swirled whipped cream on someone’s mocha before to appreciate the description of the job, though. In fact, you don’t even need to have customer service experience. All you need is to want to be able to do your job the way you know the job should be done. That is, not necessarily how your boss wants it done. Amy Clark’s tale of a worker’s revolt is the stuff dreams are made of.

For a long time, when asked what profession I was in, I would reply by saying that I was a professional milk steamer. I worked behind the counter at a small café in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in the shadow of the most prestigious university in the nation. For some reason, the morning shift was often slow, so the other employees and I would kill time telling stories. Like the one about the store being owned by the mob, which would explain how the company could afford to pay two employees seven... more »

The October 2009 issue of Quick Fiction features our very own fiction editor, Shuchi Saraswat! Her piece is called “The Good Bathroom” and the full story can be read in the print version of the magazine.

Quick Fiction 16 also features “precious little fictions of 500 words (or less)” from past Fringe contributors Amy L. Clark,William Walsh, Matthew Purdy, and Michael K. Meyers.

Dzanc Book’s Best of the Web 2009 Anthology was released today and it features a piece from Fringe contributor Amy L. Clark! From Dzanc’s website:

Guest-edited by Lee K. Abbott, this print anthology compiles the best fiction, poetry, and non-fiction that online literary journals have to offer in an eclectic collection in the manner of other broad-ranging anthologies such as Pushcart, and Best American Non-Required Reading. This is the first substantial attempt at creating an annual print compilation of the best of material published online.

Amy’s piece is from the lit journal Juked and is called “Forearm and Elbow.” She writes about her inspiration for the piece here.

Congratulations, Amy! We’re looking forward to seeing more great work.

Amy L Clark is assistant professor of English composition at Pine Manor College.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Hobart, Quick Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The American Book Review, and her collection Wanting is part of the… more »

I had, I will admit it only to myself, wanted Cassidy to have a different father. I had wanted Cassidy’s mother not to be a mother. But in my defense, I had also wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t think those things, who didn’t judge. And if all that was not a possibility, I had wanted to participate in the formation of a new world where fathers at least would not have to be out of town so much to buy diapers and have health insurance. more »