round-up: 3/20
where to submit, what i'm reading, & some quotations <3
Happy Friday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Places I’m submitting this month
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
Here are some things I did this week that sorta cheered me up amid the horrors:
Rewatched Search Party
Watched Light Light Light
Listened to this song on repeat:
Hung out with my kitten
Ate some Lebanese food
Watched Griffin in Summer
Pet dogs
Places I’m submitting this month:
The Bicoastal Review
What: Nonfiction Writing Contest—Any work of nonfiction – critical, creative, experimental, or cross-genre – that fits the vibe of our journal (we often favor writing about literature, art, culture, politics, ecology, love, the body, feminism, and queer identity). We welcome braided essays, reviews, art writing, cultural critique, lyric essays, and everything in between. What we are NOT looking for: short stories, overly academic writing, rants, comedy, purely family-oriented memoirs, anything using AI, or anything too self-absorbed. Your work should be around 1,000 to 3,000 words and can include any art, visuals, and audio you like (as long as we can publish it). If you have further questions, feel free to email us at theeditors@bicoastalreview.com.
Deadline: June 1, 2026
Pay: $250
The Chestnut Review
What: Poetry, Flash, Prose, Art/Photography
Deadline: March 31, 2026
Pay: $120
Terrain
What: Art, fiction, nonfiction
Deadline: April 30, 2026
Pay: $50
What I’m reading:
The Boyhood of Cain, Michael Amherst
Fuck Me Judith, Claire Star Finch
Quotations:
Back home, there is a photo he cherishes from early childhood of him being hoisted onto his father’s shoulders, a grin spread across his face. He recognizes the location as one of the fields behind the back of the school, but he has no recollection of it being taken or what he was doing. What is he smiling at? What is he in anticipation of, or has he received, that should elicit such pure joy? But that, he likes to think, is how he truly looks. That is who he really is. But what happened to that boy? he wonders. Where is he now?
-Michael Amherst
The beach is a curl of sand, like a discarded fingernail.
-Michael Amherst
What he wants to say is: make me good. What it is that I lack, make me good. Make me normal. Make it so that I can be loved.
-Michael Amherst
The state of literature is far more influenced by larger societal factors—fractured media ecosystem, declining reading rates as entertainment options multiply, LLMs, smart phones, the gig economy, etc.—than whatever is taught in an MFA workshop. MFAs do influence literary fiction, but I think we often forget what a small (and sadly shrinking) slice of publishing that is. The trends that dominate contemporary publishing—Romantasy, James Patterson thrillers, LitRPGs, BookTok novels, Harry Potter fan fics getting the serial numbers filed off and sold to for huge advances, etc.—are not the spawns of MFA programs. Nor are the long-standing genres like Romance and Mysteries that make up most of what is published in a given year.
I’ve seen several people claim that big publishing itself is filled with editors, publicists, and marketers who hold MFAs. This is not the case. Exceptions exist, but it is rare for someone working at a Big 5 publisher or a big independent press to have an MFA. There are some pipelines to publishing, including university run publishing programs, but they are disconnected from MFA programs. I don’t believe any editor or agent I’ve worked with on any project has held an MFA. They’re rare in publishing.
MFA programs don’t shape what is published; what is published shapes what MFA (and non-MFA) authors write.
In general, people overestimate the influence of MFA classes on what writers write. A typical MFA program is a couple workshops and a few classes over two years. That will never be as influential as the lifetime of reading and writing before and after those years. I occasionally teach in MFA programs, and I do not see students getting their prose smushed into some imagined MFA mold. They tend to write the kind of work they loved before the program. That’s often literary fiction—MFA applicants are self-selecting after all—but not infrequently it is YA fiction, SFF, or other work rarely taught in MFA programs at all.
MFA programs have proliferated in recent decades and tons of writers go through them. So, they have certainly had an effect on American literary fiction, good or ill. It just isn’t by determining what corporate publishing puts out or what readers buy. I’d suggest it’s closer to the opposite. Their influence is in creating a space for literature without a focus on commercial concerns. A place where writers can spend time with likeminded peers (and ideally receiving a small stipend) to focus on their craft while perhaps editing a small-circulation lit mag or interning at a non-profit press dedicated to translated literature.
I’m trying hard to stop thinking about myself all the time, but then I get the smallest indication that a physical desire might get fulfilled and my life swoons incoherent, my ego surges neon green and oozy into the foreground, I can’t concentrate.
-Claire Star Finch
I want to go past whatever seems possible. I mean, I want to write a book that changes everything. I mean, I want to become more important, more virile, than nihilism.
-Claire Star Finch
My first kiss with the bookseller changed my life, a kiss so ridiculously good that it flung me across the space of the political present. It was that powerful.
-Claire Star Finch
We both know that fame doesn’t change the subjective machinations of the soul.
-Claire Star Finch
This time the kiss is powerful and prestigious, in prerogative justice our mouths suck on one another’s tongues and the quanitty of spit is always perfect.
-Claire Star Finch
He says that he’s probably in love with me. I think he means he’s in love with the way we fuck. I say it’s probably just the endorphins. There’s a lot of endorphins after that split second when you think your lower body will rip open but it doesn’t. Instead it loosens, and everything is potential. Abandonment of the specular. Your hand inside of someone’s body like what all those old philosophers are always claiming about their writing: genderless, and outside of time.
-Claire Star Finch
I look forward to a future time in which my desires are strong and confirmed, the strength of my confirdence is vast and poses no question, in which you witness me holding all of my shit together.
-Claire Star Finch
I, too, used to identify as straight. I became a dyke at 27, meaning I also come from formal privilege, so when I have sex now, I know exactly what formal choices I’m working against.
-Claire Star Finch
I could suck silicone cock forever or at least until the revolution finally arrives.
-Claire Star Finch
The planet of my melancholy blocks the sun of my ambition.
-Claire Star Finch
I am always skeptical of easy beauty: I am a mushroom person.
-Claire Star Finch
Between us, Judith, there are still certain convergences, articulations and parallels; we are not such disparate political formations. This is a contemporary moment in which we are able to analyze modernity’s illusive schemes, after all, so I will not be considering the problematic of politicized identity on a global scale. Instead, I dissolve into the micropolitics of the local. Atomized subjectivity becomes molecular desire. Everything that you have become and all context of the micro-local—the smell of your scalp, the skin that hangs under your biceps, the unerringly specific shape of your earwax—holds, as I peer into the side of your head. I would eat your public hair, all your secretions, if you would let me. I would gorge myself on your deposits, absorbing your difference until the curse of our distinction feels less cryptic, less deathly, and becomes finally bearable.
-Claire Star Finch
The thing about hunger is that it scares people if you have too much of it. You have to disseminate it, defuse it, sublimate it, sublate it.
-Claire Star Finch
My wanting is abject and I will nestle it into my heart, which nestles in my ribcage, which when fully clothed gives me a semblance of normalcy even as my heart is heaving in sadness and sexual need.
-Claire Star Finch
I have become strategic. In order not to freak people out with the voracity of my desire I perform being reserved.
-Claire Star Finch
I am set loose in an economy of need. Sexual possibility is the only currency I care about. Well, maybe that and a good book.
-Claire Star Finch
The light from the window in my writing room lumps onto the hills of my face. Shadows riot in the crannies. My face: one enormous wrinkle.
-Claire Star Finch
Yearning: a ravenous appetite transformed into longing. Unsatisfied hunger. Do I still believe that desire comes from lack, did I ever believe that? If I believe that, then I am doomed to dig holes in holes. Attainment multiply pierced: my heart: a sieve.
-Claire Star Finch
Sometimes the body roars up, a big furry marionette being controlled by who knows what master.
-Claire Star Finch
I would put out my own eyes if you would fuck me one last time. Or at least I would probably give up my social media accounts.
-Claire Star Finch
If I laugh loud eough, do you see how well I’m doing, how well my new eye cream has been working, how when I jump up and down on the dance floor, everyone is transfixed on me, as if wishing to siphon some of my energy, my larval glow, my fun-loving attitude?
-Claire Star Finch
There’s Daddy’s warm body in my bed and some new toy to fuck me with whenever I ask for it. I guess that’s waht they call domestic bliss.
-Claire Star Finch
The sauce was thick and creamy. She spooned it into my mouth with two fingers. I sucked on her fingers, a little lamb. I am her little lamb and we are obviously in love.
-Claire Star Finch
I find myself a stupid needy animal needing to burrow into your back.
-Claire Star Finch
By writing we try to change the world that will outlive our own decay.
-Claire Star Finch
Desire eviscerates me completely.
-Claire Star Finch