The twelve stories in FROM HERE explore the dislocations and intersections of people searching, running away, staying put. Their physical and emotional landscapes run the gamut, but in the end, they're all searching for a place to call home."From the Chechnyian girl sucked into the drug world, the alcoholic professor who uses his daughter to dodge a rap, from hippie graffiti to the "wet clicking of a bird-like heart," Jen Michalski writes down the beast, and you remember. Strong sentiment, strong stories." - Terese Svoboda, Author of Tin God"Jen Michalski's characters seem to breathe through the pages of this emotionally expansive collection. Each story is a world in which the reader to linger--not to seek refuge but to gain insight, and perhaps, to find a kindred soul." - Dawn Raffel, author of the Year of Long Division"This is short fiction at its moody, character-driven best. The people you meet are so vivid and so sympathetic that their joys and sorrows will quickly become your own. I haven't decided which is my favorite story, but I know my favorite line. "Good luck with your broken things." Fantastic." - Matthew Norman, author of Domestic Violets

From Here

Literature & Fiction

Michalski, Jen

Literary

Aqueous Books

Fiction. It has been twenty years since Sam Pinski, a young novelist, has spent the Fourth of July weekend with her family at their cabin on the Susquehanna River. There, she must confront a chaotic history of mental illness, alcoholism, and physical violence, and struggle to find perspective in the pulse of things familiar and respite from the shame of the taboo relationship that courses through her. As she does, a subplot emerges: Excerpts are included from Sam's metaphoric novel in which a pregnant man tries to solve the mystery of his fertility and absolve himself of his past. Then tragedy strikes the Pinskis and they must draw together, tentatively realizing that they will continue to spin off in their own orbits unless they begin the hard work of forgiveness themselves.

The Summer She Was Under Water

Black Lawrence Press

Founded in 2002, jmww is a weekly online journal of writing-publishing the best in poetry, fiction, flash fiction, essays, and interviews. Stories published in the journal have appeared in Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50, BIFFY, Best of the Net, and the VERA. The journal has also released six print anthologies and three hand-assembled poetry chapbook contest winners. This anthology picks up where the last one left off-with works from 2013 and onward picked and voted on by present and former jmww editors.

jmww (2013-2022): A Modern Times Anthology

Poetry

Modern Times Publishing

After her mother dies of an accidental overdose, Alex takes leave from her job as a writer for a Washington, DC, lifestyle magazine to return home to Maryland's Eastern Shore. There, she joins her brother Owen, a study in failure-to-launch, in sorting out their mother's whimsical and often self-destructive life. Alex has proposed to her editor that while she is home she profile Juliette Sprigg, her former high school fling, owner of a wildly popular local restaurant, and celebrity chef in the making. While working on the story and trying for a second chance with Juliette, Alex meets Carolyn Massey, editor of the town newspaper, and wonders if there's more to life than reheating leftovers. Enter Alex and Owen's Aunt Johanna, who arrives from Seattle to help with arrangements. When Johanna reveals a family secret, Alex may have to accept her family for who they are rather than who she hoped they would be. And just maybe apply the same philosophy to her heart and herself.

You'll Be Fine

Dramas & Plays

NineStar Press

Stanley Polensky and Calvin Johnson serve in Germany during World War II. Calvin, near death after being shelled, is given a bewitched herb by Stanley but then left for dead. Each soldier returns from the war and years pass. Calvin, discovering that he cannot age and cannot die, searches for Stanley to get answers.Michalski's The Tide King is the story of burnette saxifrage, an herb rumored in Polish folklore to provide those who eat it with immortality, and its effects on three generations of a Polish family over two continents beginning in 19th-century Poland and ending in 1976 America.But it is also the story of young men's sacrifice during great wars, of a young child's experiences during the holocaust and being a war orphan, of the curiosities of the American century, such as 1950s country music and smoke jumpers in the Montana mountains and 1970s New York. Just as Viking king Cnut, who was rumored to be so powerful that he controlled the tides at his feet, discovered "how empty and worthless is the power of kings," Calvin Johnson and others cursed by the herb find in The Tide King that the power of youth and immortality is an empty gift, for they will continually witness the death of their families, lovers, dreams, and ideals.

The Tide King

This collection of two novellas showcases Jen Michalski's varying skills as a writer. In "I Can Make It to California Before It's Time for Dinner," Michalski examines the dangers of living in a world while having a compromised reality. In a first-person narrative, the reader follows Jimmy, a mentally challenged fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally kills a neighborhood girl. He winds up running away and hitching a ride with a trucker who is not as trustworthy a companion as Jimmy believes him to be. In "May-September," which won first place in Press 53's Open Awards in 2010, a young writer is hired by a much-older woman over the summer to help blog her memoirs for her grandchildren. An unlikely friendship, and more, follows, as Michalski examines one of the last cultural taboos of our age: May-December romances. .

Could You Be With Her Now

Genre Fiction

Dzanc Books

Features inaugural AWW Fellowship Best-in-Show winner Ashely Adams' short story "What the Water Told Us". Excerpts from the haiku web comic In Search of Basho, created by Ross Findlay & Mark "Fittsy" Fittock. One-act play by A.E. Weisgerber. Art by Daniel Torraca and Alex Duensing. Fiction by Suzzanna Matthews-Amanzio, Michael Seymour Blake, Chris Ames, AJ Atwater, Heather Sager, Tara Campbell, Kate Garklavs, Erika T. Wurth, Babak Lakghomi, Marcus Pactor, Siamak Vossoughi, Claire Hopple, Claire Polders, Hillary Leftwich, and Jen Michalski. Poetry by Amy Ash & Callista Buchen, Mary Flanagan, Ananda Lima, Noah Eli Gordon, Devon Wootten, Matt Muth, Trina Burke, Shannon Hearn, Cary Stough, Brennan Bestwick, Rob Cook, MK Chavez, Peter Longofono, Heikki Huotari, Taneum Bambrick, Jim Warner, Joe Milazzo, C.T. McGaha, Lauren Loftis, Ryan Mills, and A.M. O'Malley. Essays by Isabelle Davis and Kathryn Nuernberger. Hybrid work by Marlin M. Jenkins and Anne Riesenberg.

Heavy Feather Review Vol. 7

Nuernberger, Kathryn

Wurth, Erika T.

Polders, Claire

Gordon, Noah Eli

United States

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

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