What’s Your Real?
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K. P. F. Holmes is a fiction writer and English teacher. She has completed two summer fiction workshops at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently earning her MFA in Fiction at Emerson College. Her favorite writers include Sylvia Plath, Jeanette Winterson, Toni Morrison, and of course Shakespeare. She lives in Boston with her seashell collection and slowly dying succulents.
The Stillness on West 144th Street
The way home from Sally’s reeks with garbage, piss, and sweet rot pushing up through the sidewalk. I’m not much better. Hair stringy with grease,…
Two Friends Paint the Living Room Pool-Bottom Blue
He knows—of course he knows—that we’re breaking the lease agreement. He pretends to be stupid and I pretend to be innocent and our rollers suck…
The Shoe Store
If you can help a man of sixty-plus years shop for Dockers, do. If you can help a suburban mom in athleisure, Windex the mirrors.…
A Cheerleader Orders a Burger
She wants her uniform to catalyze her potential and not be the summation.
The meek shall inherit the earth
A woman dies in Palermo. Thofania has poisoned her husband, and others, but her name gathers flies. It is her goddaughter’s that drips cold, colorless,…
How Many Snouts
an adaptation of Hecuba & Hecate If I had been weaving when the ghost came for my daughter, I might have tangled him in my…
Bites, Jan.
The news was doing animal videos, so Jan decided to make pancakes. They came off golden-brown, and the humidity was low enough to open the…
Wakers
edited from “The Prophet Before” (Jan 2021) LUCIFER God was alone in His knowledge. He carved the spheres of the universe and deserved something all…
The Academic
Medieval medicine take up a whole shelf. Splendid. Not one, single book can give you a comprehensive rundown. Twenty will tell you the same…
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What’s Your Real?
I like to think that writing is more than passive aggressive action, or expression of the God Complex, or a receptacle for lived experiences, as in the dreaded advice, ‘Write What You Know.’ Writing is indulgence. It permits the thoughts, instincts, and selves that you won’t show in public: the stickler and the harlequin, the maiden and the monster, the real that bends backward into the unreal.
Your fictions may not exist concretely, presently, or in any sense of actual possibility. But they are undeniable. They are real.
Don’t write what you know. Write your real.
– K. P. F. Holmes
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What's Your Real 