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Volume 55, Issue 1 | Spring 2025

In this issue: the livelong sidelong, Nick Hoult, compression socks, a note from Pam, MAMILS (Middle-Aged Men in Lycra), a small cuss, Chichu Bijutsukan, two different kinds of reckonings, and more.\

POETRY

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Mixdown

We all know that writers are solitary folk. Hermetic. Reclusive. Misanthropic? However positively or negatively you want to spin it, or however far you want to tax your thesaurus, it can’t be denied that writers need a lot of alone time to gather their thoughts and wrestle them onto paper. I imagine myself a Romantic hero tramping over the moor and scowling, even if I’m typing on my laptop at Press Coffee.

But what happens when writers collaborate? A group of them found out last year, as Sarah Minor describes in her introduction to a special section in this issue on A Studio on the Atlantic, a project spanning universities, media, and an ocean. I’ll leave the details to her, but one of my favorite moments of this collab was a WhatsApp exchange in which Sarah asked a group of visiting French authors and students if they’d like to convene at the Deadwood to watch Caitlin Clark in the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four. “Yes I am in!”—“I’m also in!”—“Yes I’m thrilled!”—“Oh I am down too!!” came the immediate replies. Who knows what fodder that evening’s unlikely gathering provided for future French literature?

A literary magazine like TIR is also a collaboration. It’s more than one person could ever do alone, nor would we want one person to do it alone. The multiple voices not only in the writing, but in the editorial choices made, create something larger but still human, gestalt-y, the combined brainwaves of people living and thinking in a particular moment.

When digital editor Richard Frailing sent me the audio file of the roundtable discussion that you’ll find on page TK, he titled it the “Paris Mixdown.” I was charmed by the word “mixdown,” which I hadn’t heard before. In the world of music and recording, it’s the process of combining multiple tracks into one.

I started thinking of this issue as a mixdown. Our usual genres of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, plus an example of visual literature (you may have noticed a new category for it in our submissions portal), plus the winners of our biennial veterans’ contest, plus the podcasts and cultural exchange of the Studio on the Atlantic. All packaged beneath a cover painting, “Home School,” by Nora Riggs, which is itself a mix of objects that together create a portrait of an education.

When I told managing editor Alicia Wright about my mixdown metaphor, she came up with another for the issue, involving a different one of the senses: “a tasting menu.” I like that one too.

Collaboration, that underappreciated skill of writers—it puts fried pickles and PBR in front of Parisians at an Iowa pub; it lays dozens of tracks into a final song; it typesets and prints and binds it, and in the last bit of collaboration, a reader sits down and reads. Which leads to writers who are not only secluded, grumpy, a bunch of cats refusing to be herded, etc., but also connected, communicating, mutual, cooperative, accompanied.

—Lynne Nugent

Contributors’ Notes

Céline Bagault is a former journalist. She is currently a writer and lives in Paris. Her first novel, Ici commence mon père, has been recently published by L’Olivier.

Caelainn Barr is an Irish writer, teacher, and journalist. She has an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University. She has worked as a journalist and editor at The Guardian and was a Nieman Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

M.C. Benner Dixon lives, writes, and grows things in Pittsburgh, PA. She is quick to make a pun and slow to cut her grass. Her books include The Height of Land (Orison Fiction Prize Winner) and Millions of Suns.

Anthony Cardellini is a writer from Phoenix. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Montana and his work can be found in Columbia Journal, The Foundationalist, and Silk Road Review.

MICHAEL CHANG (they/them) is the author of many volumes of poetry, including SYNTHETIC JUNGLE (Northwestern University Press, 2023), TOY SOLDIERS (Action, Spectacle, 2024), and THINGS A BRIGHT BOY CAN DO (Coach House Books, 2025). They won the Poetry Project’s Brannan Prize and edited Lambda Literary’s Emerge anthology. They live in Manhattan.

Katie Dunnahoo is a graduate of the University of Iowa Translation MFA program.

Michael Farwig is an Afghanistan war veteran, Purple Heart recipient, and an MFA candidate at Western Michigan University exploring his experience through his art. He is in the process of querying his debut novel.

Joshua C. Gaines is a former Air Force Captain who earned his writing MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Driftwood, and Hobart.

Nicholas Matos Itxaso was born in 1982 in Sainte Étienne, where he lives. He initially worked as a warehouse handler and trained in manual trades. He then obtained a Master’s degree in anthropology and turned to documentary filmmaking and literary writing. His documentary work has been selected for various international festivals. In parallel with his artistic activities, Nicolas works as a stagehand for the performing arts and cinema.

Mitchell Jacobs is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and serves as Managing Editor of Ricochet Editions.

Sarah Khatry is a writer currently based out of Colorado, where she is a student in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, and DIAGRAM, among others, as well as in the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a recipient of the Peter Taylor Fellowship from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Aspen Words Emerging Writers Fellowship. She is a graduate of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

Reed Kuehn was a general surgeon in the US Army, spending seven years in the special operations community. He earned his MD from the Uniformed Services University and completed and general surgery residency at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He recently graduated from the MFA program at Fairfield University. His work has appeared in So It Goes, The First Line, Proud to Be, and Consequence.

Bronson Lemer is the author of The Lonely Veteran’s Guide to Companionship. His work has appeared in Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Paul.

Caite McNeil is a writer, teacher, and comic artist from midcoast Maine. She is at work on a book of nonfiction comics about her running habit. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Tahoma Review, Mutha Mag, and elsewhere.

Jackson Melnick is a psychotherapist and emergency department social worker. He has made two country music albums: Yonder Come Jerusalem and Abilene. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Sarah Minor is a writer and interdisciplinary artist and the author of Carousel (Yale University Press 2026) along with Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press 2021) and Bright Archive (Rescue Press 2020). She teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa and serves as the Video Essay and Cinepoetry editor at Brink Literary Journal.

Devin Thomas O’Shea is the author of The Veiled Prophet, publishing with Haymarket Books. His writing is in The Nation, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boulevard, and elsewhere. Represented by Erik Hane, Headwater Literary.

Walid Hajar Rachedi is a French writer born in 1981. His debut novel Qu’est-ce que j’irais faire au paradis? was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in 2022. He is also the co-founder of Frictions Media.

Nora Riggs, born in 1972, is an artist living and working in western Massachusetts. Her work investigates memory, intimacy, and the passage of time through the use of personal imagery distilled in geometric form and pattern.

Lionel Ruffel is a French author, publisher, and academic. Professor of Comparative Literature at Paris 8 University, he is the founder and director of the master’s program in creative writing. He is the author of five books between literary essays and personal writing, two of which have appeared in English: Brouhaha, Worlds of the Contemporary (Minnesota University Press, 2018), and I Can’t Sleep (Sternberg Press, 2021). He runs the chaoïd series at Verdier Editions.

Zach Savich’s latest books are the poetry collection Momently (Black Ocean, 2024) and the hybrid critical-memoir-for-performance A Field of Telephones (53rd State, 2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Vicky Smith is a translator of French and German living in Naarm, Australia. She is particularly interested in experimental fiction and French literature from outside the hexagon.

Eleanor Tennyson is a writer from London. She is the author of The Submissive (Drunk Muse Press, 2025).

Marisa Tirado is a Latina writer from Chicago. In 2022 she published Selena Didn’t Know Spanish Either with Texas Review Press. Marisa studied poetry and literary translation at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems are featured in The Rumpus, Colorado Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other journals.

Jess Turner received her MFA from Colorado State University, where she worked as the Managing Editor for the Colorado Review. Jess currently studies Archiving & Library Science at Simmons University in Boston.

J. Villanueva is a Chicano writer/poet and Marine veteran from deep south Texas. He earned his MFA from The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he served as a Graduate Assistant Instructor of creative writing.

Wyatt Williams is the author of Springer Mountain: Meditations on Killing and Eating (UNC Press, 2021). His essays have been published by The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Believer, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review, and others.

Carolyn Williams-Noren makes the free, biweekly recipe comic “This is good.” She is seeking a publisher for “Oil Courses,” a book-length collection that draws on her childhood close to Alaska’s oil industry.

Alastair Wong was shortlisted for the Penguin Random House Merky Books New Writer’s Prize. He was the Truman Capote Fellow at Brooklyn College for a fiction MFA. His writing appears in Dazed and Electric Literature, among others.

Stella Wong is the author of Stem, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith.

Kion You was born in Seoul and raised in San Diego. He’s received degrees from Brown University and the Michener Center for Writers. His fiction has been published in the Santa Monica Review, and his nonfiction has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently at work on a novel.

Masthead

Editor
Lynne Nugent

Managing Editor
Alicia Wright

Nonfiction Editor
Aaron Pang

Poetry Editor
Victoria Sanchez

Fiction Editors
Natalia Zdaniuk
Sofia Kwon

Digital Editor
Richard Frailing

Composition
Julie Leonard

Editorial Interns
Ellie Heeren, Kathryn Schultz, Stella Shipman, Sydney Smithgall

Fulfillment Manager
Sharon Yost

Governing Board
Charles D’Ambrosio, Meenakshi Gigi Durham, Melissa Febos, Lois Geist, Loren Glass, Christopher Merrill, Susan Hill Newton, D. K. Nnuro, Roland Racevskis, Jan Weissmiller

Editor Emeritus
David Hamilton

Editorial Assistants
Jacqui Alpine, Hilary Bell, Jacquelyn Bengfort, James Braun, Emmett Buckley, Prince Bush, Christine Byrne, Kristen Campbell, Emily Dauer, Moriana Delgado, Camila De Urioste, Samantha Dion, Terri Draper, Joseph Daniel Duffy, Zea Eanet, Sidney Eberly, Georgie Fehringer, Wren Fleming, Anthony Flesher, Caroline Froh, Jake Goldwasser, Joi Haskins, Michaeljulius Idani, Kirsten Ihns, Dabin Jeong, Kelsey Kerin, Devanshi Khetarpal, Hajrije Kolimja, Rachel Lapides, Yegene Lee, Yangfan Lin, Hannah Loeb, Christina Montilla, Thomas Nath, H. Thao Nguyen, Allana Noyes, Kami Nzeribe, Anna Polonyi, Jack Rockwell, Brayan Salinas, E. Clayton Scofield, Car Simione, Jenee Skinner, Kate Soulliere, Kyra Spence, Micah Stack, Maya Stahler, Othuke Umukoro, Glen Waters, Lesley Wheeler, Harris Wheless, Jeffrey Xiong, Lara Zeng, Xiadi Zhai, James Zhu

Volume 55, Issue 1 | Spring 2025

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