How Slowly, How Slow

Mon 20 Oct 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

Howl slowly, howl! Bring on the dogs of war and let them pull us from our couches, harry us to the printer, drop off a print file. Not quite at that stage, but the next issue of LCRW slowly accumulates. It even has a cover, art by Christa Donner.

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Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 51

Thu 16 Oct 2025 - Filed under: LCRW| Posted by: Gavin

December 2025. 56 pages. Ebook ISBN: 9781618732194.

Once upon a time a zine went walking into the woods. The wind was gusting and leaves streamed from the trees like light falling through clouds. They glowed. Reds and scarlets, yellows and oranges, turning and spinning. Then: into the shadows, the colors flat. The world shivered as it turned, the cool of evening dropping. The zine would reach a shelf, a table, but for now the mailbox would be shelter. It would be there soon. Not long now.

Fiction
Claire Hanlon, The Pied Piper of Cats
Brian, Spring Before You Have to Turn the Fans On
Andrei Molotiu, Alida in Pelarto
J. F. Gleeson, Berries for the Dead
Abby Roberts, A Grumble of Goddesses
Perdita Buchan, The Blue Stallion of the Valley Estates
Brian, They Cut the Language Department at the University of Chicago
Felix Kent, The Summer King of Lucy’s Candy

Nonfiction
Gavin J. Grant, Lifecycle of Books
Nicole Kimberling, Warm & Forgiving: Hot Water Pastry
Hereabouts, Thereabouts 1, 2

Poetry
Catherine Rockwood, Two Poems
Neile Graham, The God of Epiphany

Art
Cover illustration, “Homebody” © 2013 Christa Donner.
Dawn Kimberling, Pie

Masthead & colophon

Made by
Gavin J. Grant
& Kelly Link.

Text: New Caledonia LT Std. Titles: Imprint MT Shadow. Every second story printed in white ink.

Any day at all can be the new July fourth or the fifth of November.

LCRW is (usually) published in June & November by Small Beer Press, 150 Pleasant St., #306, Easthampton, MA 01027 | info@smallbeerpress.com | smallbeerpress.com/lcrw.
Printed by Paradise Copies.
Subscriptions: $28/4 issues (more options available). Please make checks to Small Beer Press. Library & institutional subscriptions: EBSCO.

DRM-free ebooks available from the lovely weightlessbooks.com.

Contents © 2025 the authors. All rights reserved.

First issue made with the new version of Affinity—at last I dropped InDesign. I never quite got the hang of the previous iteration of Affinity but my learning curve on the new one has been ok.

Please send fiction and poetry submissions (especially weird and interesting work from women writers and writers of color), guideline requests, &c. to the address above. Thanks authors, artists, readers.

Hereabouts, Thereabouts

Brian is from Alabama, lives in Oregon with his Partner, Toddlers, a Cat, and many Plum Trees. Brian teaches people about the bean family of plants at beanyear.com.

Perdita Buchan was born in England and came to America as a child. She has since lived in England, Italy, and, for many years in New England. She has published four novels and a nonfiction work, Utopia New Jersey, a 2008 New Jersey Council for the Humanities Honor Book. Her short fiction and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Ladies’ Home Journal,  Harvard Magazine, House Beautiful, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. Her recent novel, The Carousel Carver, won a 2020 Independent Publishers award. Another novel, Florilla: A Pinelands Romance came out in 2021. She currently lives in coastal New Jersey.

J. F. Gleeson lives in England. His work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Weird Horror, ergot., Cold Signal, Ligeia, Crow & Cross Keys, Lamplit Underground, Sublunary Review, the NoSleep podcast, the Dark Lane anthology series and other places. (deadlostbeaches.blog)

Neile Graham stepped down from writer wrangling for Clarion West Writers Workshop a few years back and is soon to retire from her university day job. She plans to spend her time taking forest and beach walks, writing more poems, and finally completing revisions of the four novels languishing on her computer. (neilegraham.com)

Claire Hanlon spent her formative years moving frequently between the various islands and nations of Oceania; she’s also lived in California, Montana, and now Texas, where she lives with her husband, son, three cats, dog, and a whisker collection. Her most recent work can be found at HAD and X-R-A-Y, and she has essays forthcoming in Passages North and Image Journal. Find her at clairehanlon.com or on Instagram as @loveyclairey, or at home, where she’s probably yelling at an animal.

Felix Kent’s writing has appeared in Defector and The Toast. She lives in Northern California.

Nicole Kimberling cannot help but get egotistical and start recklessly challenging fate and the gods after even the smallest victory. If she’s still alive and has not been struck by lightning at the time you’re reading this, you can find her working as editor of Blind Eye Books or else writing novels where the characters think about food too much.

Andrei Molotiu teaches art history at Indiana University, Bloomington, where his favorite course to offer focuses on the fantasy trope of magically entering a painting and what it can tell us about our fascination with real-life paintings; he’s planning to write a whole book on the subject. He’s also an artist, who helped kickstart the genre of abstract comics with his Eisner-nominated Abstract Comics: The Anthology. His short stories previously appeared in Exquisite Corpse and Ekphrasis Magazine. Other short pieces, from poems to experimental comics, have appeared in Shenandoah, Seedings, Asemic, and other journals, a good number of which no longer exist.

Abby Roberts is an author and essayist living in Northern Virginia, United States, with her dog, Violet. In addition to her writing, she works a day job at an occupational health nonprofit, is an independent Tolkien researcher, and enjoys medieval history. Her work has also appeared in Speculative Insight and Swords & Sorcery Magazine.

Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives near Boston. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine. Two of Catherine’s poetry chapbooks, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion and And We Are Far From Shore: Poems for Our Flag Means Death, are available from the Ethel Zine Press. Their third chapbook, Dogwitch, is available from Bottlecap Press. They are wrangling a long full-length poetry manuscript—or perhaps two shorter manuscripts—who knows? Up with mystery!

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Light Academia(!)

Wed 15 Oct 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Sarah Rees Brennan| Posted by: Gavin

Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands is tucked comfortably at the end of Jenny Hamilton’s Dark Academia: A Starter Pack (Tart, Awad, Samatar, & more) in the NYTimes answering the subtitled question “Is there such a thing as light academia?”

“In Other Lands” is a hilarious, and moving, sendup of magic school novels where kids learn to fight in an ongoing war against the forces of evil. Its mouthy, obnoxious 13-year-old protagonist, Elliot, resists every step of the way. (“Oh my God,” he says. “We’re child soldiers?”) Elliot’s pacifism never alters, but the world of the book grows deeper and more nuanced as the reader gets further in. Brennan explores gender dynamics, diplomacy in wartime, xenophobia and the ways that deeply damaged people can learn to care for each other — all with a per-page joke rate that puts Douglas Adams to shame.

If you read it and love it, try … the “Giant Days” comic book series, by John Allison, illustrated by Max Sarin and Lissa Treiman; “I Kissed Shara Wheeler,” by Casey McQuiston; or “Year of the Griffin,” by Diana Wynne Jones.

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CC

Tue 7 Oct 2025 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Carol Emshwiller, Consortium, distribution| Posted by: Gavin

I’ve been enjoying the Consortium Corner microinterviews with various Consortium people as they celebrate their 40th anniversary. We signed on with them in 2007, latecomers!, after starting with Pathway Book Service for a couple of years and then SCB Distributors. We’d talked to a few distributors and although not everyone at the company really got what we were up to enough people did that we felt comfortable among the other literary and poetry presses. At some point they were subsumed by Ingram (the other 800 lb gorilla) but they’re still based in the Twin Cities and they still have their own identity. Long may they run!

Julie Schaper, the president who brought us over to Consortium, recently announced that she’d be retiring next year and it was fun to read her interview which includes a shout out to a truly indie indie bookstore and a wedding photo (not the only one in these pages!). She and her hubsand (ahem), Steve Horwitz, are  also “both involved with the Minnesota Prison Writers Project and We Are All Criminals.” Good people.

I’d write more but this is longer than some of the interviews. Each interviewee lists a few books they love and the range is beautiful to see. We all contain multiverses!

In one of the interviews Lise Solomon — always one of the first I used to send ARCs of our upcoming books to — includes Carol Emshwiller’s Carmen Dog in her recommendations along with the amazing reason she first read it:

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