ISSUE 6.1: Prine Primed, a special tribute issue to John Prine
“If God’s got a favorite songwriter, I think it’s John Prine.”
--Kris Kristofferson
“All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone’ the soldier junky daddy and ‘Donald and Lydia,’ where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.”
--Bob Dylan
Herein
Nonfiction
Back Porch Sound by Jessica Burdg
Prime Prine Liner Notes (1976) by Patrick Dawson
New Reflections on John Prine by Patrick Dawson
Mind Trips and Mind Traps: John Prine and the World Inside by Mark Lucius
Fiction
Foxes and Coyotes by Zach Murphy
He Forgot That It Was Sunday by Brian Beatty
North Dakota ’84 by James Stewart III
Warren Park by Anthony Koranda
Light Bulbs by Jon Sokol
Nonfiction
Fishin’ and Whistlin’ Across the Northernmost Midwest by Sheldon Birnie
Fiction
Beer and Cancer by Con Chapman
Going to the Chapel by Leah Holbrook Sackett
Max and Sherri by Alfred Stifsim
Help Wanted by Amanda Coote
The Sunshine Girl by Mitchell Toews
Flashback Blues by Dan Fields
Nonfiction
Hearing Double by Lance Mason
United, Under John Prine by Belle Brett
Fiction
Song Pull by Robert Morgan Fisher
Special Feature
The Happy Hunting Ground by Sheldon Lee Compton
Book Review & Author Interview: Patrick Trotti’s The Devil All Around Us
Contributors
Brian Beatty is the author of four poetry collections: Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. His next poetry chapbook, Hobo Radio: Magpies and Crows, is due out from Ravenna Press in 2021. Beatty’s stories and other prose efforts have appeared in numerous publications, including Cholla Needles, Cowboy Jamboree, Hobart, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Monkeybicycle, Noir Nation, The Quarterly and Seventeen.
Sheldon Birnie is a writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, who spent the better part of the past two decades playing with punk rock and country bands in basements, barns, and dive bars across Western Canada. A journalist by trade, his creative work has appeared recently in BULL, Rejection Letters, Riot Act, and The Daily Drunk, among others. Find him lurking online @badguybirnie
Belle Brett is an artist and a writer. Her novel, Gina in the Floating World, a gritty coming-of-age story set in 1981 Tokyo, was published by She Writes Press in 2018. When not writing fiction or making art, she can be found sorting through her lifetime collection of treasures and writing a blog about it, "Slow Downsizing."
Jessica Burdg is a writer with a passion for personal narratives, creative nonfiction, and poetry. She is a mother, a once-upon-a-time journalist, an experience-enthusiast, and an advocate for anyone whose voice has been silenced. Jessica is active in the nonprofit community and is the Editorial Chair of the The Brain Possible, a foundation that assists children who are differently-abled. Her first book, More Than A Diagnosis, became a bestseller in 2020, with all proceeds benefitting the foundation. Jessica's words are featured in many magazines and journals, including Entropy Magazine, TulipTree Review, the International Human Rights Arts Festival, and others. Her essay on mental health was a finalist for the 2019 Conger J. Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction. Find her at www.jessicaburdg.com.
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer, author most recently of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges (Oxford University Press), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor and a number of literary magazines. His third novel, Kimiko Chou, Girl Samurai, is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press.
Sheldon Lee Compton is currently at work on his first nonfiction book, The Orchard Is Full of Sound: On Breece D’J Pancake and Appalachia, for West Virginia University Press.
Amanda Coote is a recent graduate at the University of Arizona with a BA in creative writing. Her work focuses on the humanity behind genre styles, especially focusing on how the societal structure of certain time periods and genre worlds would affect day to day life.
Patrick Dawson spent nearly three decades as a journalist, most of it as a national and international correspondent for NBC News, CNN and ABC. He was the recipient of two Emmy awards for Outstanding Writing in News. He also once hosted a radio show in New York. His short story “The Language of Rivers” was the recipient of the 45th New Millennium Writings prize for fiction in 2018. His story “Threesome” was a finalist in Narrative's Fall 2018 contest and also longlisted for the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. His story “Purgatory” was longlisted for the Pulp Literature Press Hummingbird Fiction Prize. He is currently at work on a collection of short fiction and a novel.
Dan Fields has recently published fiction with Harbinger Press, Hellbound Books, Novel Noctule and the Nocturnal Transmissions podcast. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children. See more at www.danfieldswrites.com
Robert Morgan Fisher won the 2018 Chester Himes Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 John Steinbeck Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Upstreet, Pleiades, Storyscape Journal, Teach. Write., The Wild Word, The Arkansas Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, Dime Show Review, 0-Dark-Thirty, Psychopomp, The Seattle Review, The Spry Literary Journal, 34th Parallel, The Journal of Microliterature, Spindrift, The Rumpus, Bluerailroad and many other publications. He’s written for TV, radio and film. Robert holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and is currently on the teaching faculty of Antioch University in several capacities. Since 2016, Robert has led the UCLA Wordcommandos, an acclaimed twice-weekly writing workshop for veterans with PTSD. He often writes companion songs to his short stories. Both his music and fiction have won many awards. Robert also voices audiobooks. (www.robertmorganfisher.com)
In summer 2020, Leah Holbrook Sackett published her debut book of short stories with REaDLips Press. In addition, she is an adjunct lecturer in the English department at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. This is also where she earned her M.F.A. Leah's short stories explore journeys toward autonomy and the boundaries placed on the individual by society, family, and self. Learn about her published fiction at LeahHolbrookSackett.website
Anthony Koranda is a MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Barren Magazine, Hair Trigger, Magnolia Review, and elsewhere.
Mark Lucius is a writer, songwriter and speechwriter who lives in Milwaukee. His long-form memoirs have appeared in the Great River Review and Best American Sports Writing. His work will appear in a forthcoming issue of Fewerthan500. His many songs include “Mama Crazy Mantra” and “Piranha Springs.” He has written more than 1,300 speeches and received five Cicero Awards from Vital Speeches of the Day. He is grateful to John Perry for the introduction to John Prine’s music those many years ago.
Going through school, Lance Mason worked in gas stations, picked lemons, packed lima beans, laid fiberglass, sold hot-dogs, spliced phone cable, and sold boats. Following his BSc (Loyola) and doctorate (UCLA), he has lived, worked, and taught in the US, New Zealand, and Brazil, and roamed around the world half-a-dozen times. His work has appeared in fiction, nonfiction, and professional journals, several anthologies, and won a dozen honors and awards. As he works on his sixth novel, Loan Star, his third, The Killing of Chuy Muro, is in development for a film by Framework Studios in LA. His work, reviews, and bald opinions can be found at www.lance-mason.com.
Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories have appeared in Peculiars Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Emerge Literary Journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Ghost City Review, Lotus-eater, Crêpe & Penn, WINK, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is A Jar, and Yellow Medicine Review. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Jon Sokol is a writer, forester, traveler, and outdoorsman. He lives in Northeast Georgia with his wife, Karen. He mostly writes fiction often drifting toward southern gothic and his fascination with all things peculiar. Jon’s work has appeared in Sanctuary and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and he’s currently working on his MFA at Reinhardt University. He can be reached at www.jonsokol.com and @JonSokolWriter on Twitter.
James Stewart III is a Black writer from Chicago. He earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from North Central College. He is currently finishing a novel about the daily struggles of a multi-racial working-class family and the costs they pay for loving each other. He also co-curates a text-based performance series “The Guild Complex presents Exhibit B” and is a managing editor of the magazine Critics’ Union. Stewart's writing can also be found in Pangyrus and Another Chicago Magazine.
Alfred Stifsim graduated from IUPUI with a bachelor's in American History (2014, Indianapolis). He is currently working on his first novel. You can find him at alfredstifsim.com.
Mitchell Toews lives and writes lakeside in Manitoba. His work appears in print and online, in places near and far. He is working on a novel. You may follow him on the trails or out on the water or ice, or more conveniently at Mitchellaneous.com, Twitter or Facebook.
Patrick Trotti lives in Rochester, New York where he is a freelance writer, editor, and publisher. Born in 1986, his first loves were basketball and baseball. While his work explores various themes and transcends a lone genre, his main focus centers around literary auto fiction. He stylistically fuses the minimalism of dirty realism with the pessimistic self exploration of social realism. He is perpetually at work on another book. https://www.patricktrotti.com/
Adam Van Winkle is the author of Hardway Juice (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019), Abraham Anyhow (Red Dirt Press, 2017) and While They were in the Field (Red Dirt Press, 2019) and his writing has appeared in places like Bull Men’s Fiction, Red Dirt Forum, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Southern Literary Review, Cheap Pop, Pithead Chapel, MonkeyBicycle, and Crack the Spine. He recently published an essay in Gimmick Press’s Obsessed anthology. He has a series of plays, adaptations and originals, forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press (Fall 2020). Find him @gritvanwinkle and www.adamvanwinkle.com.
--Kris Kristofferson
“All that stuff about ‘Sam Stone’ the soldier junky daddy and ‘Donald and Lydia,’ where people make love from ten miles away. Nobody but Prine could write like that.”
--Bob Dylan
Herein
Nonfiction
Back Porch Sound by Jessica Burdg
Prime Prine Liner Notes (1976) by Patrick Dawson
New Reflections on John Prine by Patrick Dawson
Mind Trips and Mind Traps: John Prine and the World Inside by Mark Lucius
Fiction
Foxes and Coyotes by Zach Murphy
He Forgot That It Was Sunday by Brian Beatty
North Dakota ’84 by James Stewart III
Warren Park by Anthony Koranda
Light Bulbs by Jon Sokol
Nonfiction
Fishin’ and Whistlin’ Across the Northernmost Midwest by Sheldon Birnie
Fiction
Beer and Cancer by Con Chapman
Going to the Chapel by Leah Holbrook Sackett
Max and Sherri by Alfred Stifsim
Help Wanted by Amanda Coote
The Sunshine Girl by Mitchell Toews
Flashback Blues by Dan Fields
Nonfiction
Hearing Double by Lance Mason
United, Under John Prine by Belle Brett
Fiction
Song Pull by Robert Morgan Fisher
Special Feature
The Happy Hunting Ground by Sheldon Lee Compton
Book Review & Author Interview: Patrick Trotti’s The Devil All Around Us
Contributors
Brian Beatty is the author of four poetry collections: Borrowed Trouble; Dust and Stars: Miniatures; Brazil, Indiana: A Folk Poem; and Coyotes I Couldn’t See. His next poetry chapbook, Hobo Radio: Magpies and Crows, is due out from Ravenna Press in 2021. Beatty’s stories and other prose efforts have appeared in numerous publications, including Cholla Needles, Cowboy Jamboree, Hobart, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Monkeybicycle, Noir Nation, The Quarterly and Seventeen.
Sheldon Birnie is a writer living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, who spent the better part of the past two decades playing with punk rock and country bands in basements, barns, and dive bars across Western Canada. A journalist by trade, his creative work has appeared recently in BULL, Rejection Letters, Riot Act, and The Daily Drunk, among others. Find him lurking online @badguybirnie
Belle Brett is an artist and a writer. Her novel, Gina in the Floating World, a gritty coming-of-age story set in 1981 Tokyo, was published by She Writes Press in 2018. When not writing fiction or making art, she can be found sorting through her lifetime collection of treasures and writing a blog about it, "Slow Downsizing."
Jessica Burdg is a writer with a passion for personal narratives, creative nonfiction, and poetry. She is a mother, a once-upon-a-time journalist, an experience-enthusiast, and an advocate for anyone whose voice has been silenced. Jessica is active in the nonprofit community and is the Editorial Chair of the The Brain Possible, a foundation that assists children who are differently-abled. Her first book, More Than A Diagnosis, became a bestseller in 2020, with all proceeds benefitting the foundation. Jessica's words are featured in many magazines and journals, including Entropy Magazine, TulipTree Review, the International Human Rights Arts Festival, and others. Her essay on mental health was a finalist for the 2019 Conger J. Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction. Find her at www.jessicaburdg.com.
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer, author most recently of Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges (Oxford University Press), winner of the 2019 Book of the Year Award by Hot Club de France. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor and a number of literary magazines. His third novel, Kimiko Chou, Girl Samurai, is forthcoming from Atmosphere Press.
Sheldon Lee Compton is currently at work on his first nonfiction book, The Orchard Is Full of Sound: On Breece D’J Pancake and Appalachia, for West Virginia University Press.
Amanda Coote is a recent graduate at the University of Arizona with a BA in creative writing. Her work focuses on the humanity behind genre styles, especially focusing on how the societal structure of certain time periods and genre worlds would affect day to day life.
Patrick Dawson spent nearly three decades as a journalist, most of it as a national and international correspondent for NBC News, CNN and ABC. He was the recipient of two Emmy awards for Outstanding Writing in News. He also once hosted a radio show in New York. His short story “The Language of Rivers” was the recipient of the 45th New Millennium Writings prize for fiction in 2018. His story “Threesome” was a finalist in Narrative's Fall 2018 contest and also longlisted for the Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction. His story “Purgatory” was longlisted for the Pulp Literature Press Hummingbird Fiction Prize. He is currently at work on a collection of short fiction and a novel.
Dan Fields has recently published fiction with Harbinger Press, Hellbound Books, Novel Noctule and the Nocturnal Transmissions podcast. He lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife and children. See more at www.danfieldswrites.com
Robert Morgan Fisher won the 2018 Chester Himes Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 John Steinbeck Award. His fiction and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Upstreet, Pleiades, Storyscape Journal, Teach. Write., The Wild Word, The Arkansas Review, Red Wheelbarrow, The Missouri Review Soundbooth Podcast, Dime Show Review, 0-Dark-Thirty, Psychopomp, The Seattle Review, The Spry Literary Journal, 34th Parallel, The Journal of Microliterature, Spindrift, The Rumpus, Bluerailroad and many other publications. He’s written for TV, radio and film. Robert holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and is currently on the teaching faculty of Antioch University in several capacities. Since 2016, Robert has led the UCLA Wordcommandos, an acclaimed twice-weekly writing workshop for veterans with PTSD. He often writes companion songs to his short stories. Both his music and fiction have won many awards. Robert also voices audiobooks. (www.robertmorganfisher.com)
In summer 2020, Leah Holbrook Sackett published her debut book of short stories with REaDLips Press. In addition, she is an adjunct lecturer in the English department at the University of Missouri - St. Louis. This is also where she earned her M.F.A. Leah's short stories explore journeys toward autonomy and the boundaries placed on the individual by society, family, and self. Learn about her published fiction at LeahHolbrookSackett.website
Anthony Koranda is a MFA candidate at Columbia College Chicago. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Barren Magazine, Hair Trigger, Magnolia Review, and elsewhere.
Mark Lucius is a writer, songwriter and speechwriter who lives in Milwaukee. His long-form memoirs have appeared in the Great River Review and Best American Sports Writing. His work will appear in a forthcoming issue of Fewerthan500. His many songs include “Mama Crazy Mantra” and “Piranha Springs.” He has written more than 1,300 speeches and received five Cicero Awards from Vital Speeches of the Day. He is grateful to John Perry for the introduction to John Prine’s music those many years ago.
Going through school, Lance Mason worked in gas stations, picked lemons, packed lima beans, laid fiberglass, sold hot-dogs, spliced phone cable, and sold boats. Following his BSc (Loyola) and doctorate (UCLA), he has lived, worked, and taught in the US, New Zealand, and Brazil, and roamed around the world half-a-dozen times. His work has appeared in fiction, nonfiction, and professional journals, several anthologies, and won a dozen honors and awards. As he works on his sixth novel, Loan Star, his third, The Killing of Chuy Muro, is in development for a film by Framework Studios in LA. His work, reviews, and bald opinions can be found at www.lance-mason.com.
Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories have appeared in Peculiars Magazine, Ellipsis Zine, Emerge Literary Journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Ghost City Review, Lotus-eater, Crêpe & Penn, WINK, Drunk Monkeys, Door Is A Jar, and Yellow Medicine Review. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Jon Sokol is a writer, forester, traveler, and outdoorsman. He lives in Northeast Georgia with his wife, Karen. He mostly writes fiction often drifting toward southern gothic and his fascination with all things peculiar. Jon’s work has appeared in Sanctuary and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and he’s currently working on his MFA at Reinhardt University. He can be reached at www.jonsokol.com and @JonSokolWriter on Twitter.
James Stewart III is a Black writer from Chicago. He earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from North Central College. He is currently finishing a novel about the daily struggles of a multi-racial working-class family and the costs they pay for loving each other. He also co-curates a text-based performance series “The Guild Complex presents Exhibit B” and is a managing editor of the magazine Critics’ Union. Stewart's writing can also be found in Pangyrus and Another Chicago Magazine.
Alfred Stifsim graduated from IUPUI with a bachelor's in American History (2014, Indianapolis). He is currently working on his first novel. You can find him at alfredstifsim.com.
Mitchell Toews lives and writes lakeside in Manitoba. His work appears in print and online, in places near and far. He is working on a novel. You may follow him on the trails or out on the water or ice, or more conveniently at Mitchellaneous.com, Twitter or Facebook.
Patrick Trotti lives in Rochester, New York where he is a freelance writer, editor, and publisher. Born in 1986, his first loves were basketball and baseball. While his work explores various themes and transcends a lone genre, his main focus centers around literary auto fiction. He stylistically fuses the minimalism of dirty realism with the pessimistic self exploration of social realism. He is perpetually at work on another book. https://www.patricktrotti.com/
Adam Van Winkle is the author of Hardway Juice (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2019), Abraham Anyhow (Red Dirt Press, 2017) and While They were in the Field (Red Dirt Press, 2019) and his writing has appeared in places like Bull Men’s Fiction, Red Dirt Forum, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Southern Literary Review, Cheap Pop, Pithead Chapel, MonkeyBicycle, and Crack the Spine. He recently published an essay in Gimmick Press’s Obsessed anthology. He has a series of plays, adaptations and originals, forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press (Fall 2020). Find him @gritvanwinkle and www.adamvanwinkle.com.