Writing — JR FENN

Image credit: Barbara Mahl

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

“All We Remember Will Be Forgotten”

Boston Review, ALLIES

The earliest sighting was in Reykjavík... In chisel-hollowed stumps and backyard boxes, the bees had lived and gathered pollen and spun food and refused to reproduce...

“Athena Dreams of a Hollow Body”

Boston Review, GLOBAL DYSTOPIAS

After the recall the apartment felt empty. No mother removing baklava from the oven. No mother beavering away on her computer. No mother wired into her battery pack at night...

For a long time, I lived in my childhood—first as a child, then for many years after. I sat on the back patio and spit watermelon seeds into the grass…

When I was a child I loved a little matchbox. It was made of cardboard, long and thin, small enough to disappear in a child’s palm…

We moved the cabin from Anchor Point to Homer, thirty miles on winding roads, up Diamond Ridge and down the bluff…

Reasons for the Flood

I. Because Everything Was Removed from Us

Zero. We came to an island with cold shores.

After the Natatorium

The first time they saw the natatorium they changed into their bathing costumes, pulled their rubber caps over their heads, and rushed into the water...

[PANK]

I was born a mother of three children on an island in the north. Every day I put one on my back and two in their stroller and went out to the coffee shop. I felt our bodies move forward; we lifted our faces and breathed cold air as the wheels turned under our weight. She was beautiful and stoic in her white hat with her babies all around her. We never mentioned that we watched her through the window glass…

Central Schools Resolution

from Flash Fiction Magazine

Clown sightings had gotten out of hand, the school board determined…

Where We Went and What We Did There

Winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, selected by Darin Strauss

We arrive from the south. We come to the end of a peninsula on a glacial bay at the edge of the western shore. We come for the open land, for the empty sea…

Green Walls Lit in the Night

At the point when part of me knew our relationship would be over soon….

from Camroc Press Review

You start a fire with old Budweiser boxes and pallet scraps...

…and forthcoming in

Split Lip

Bath Flash Fiction Anthology

Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology

Gigantic Sequins & more

from SmokeLong Quarterly

I open the cedar chest and shake out the first thing that comes to hand…

With work also appearing in

Stone Canoe

Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine

from Eunoia Review

The smell of cologne comes on a burst of wind as the sun beats down and the gulls wing overhead I breathed this smell as a teenager in a pedestrian lane…