Author: Shyla Shehan

Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon) in Kenyon, Threepenny, Cincinnati, RHINO, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, Plume Poetry, Poetry Wales, Rattle, Best Microfiction 2026, and other venues. His debut poetry chapbook is due to drop from Bull City Press in 2027. He writes from Northern California. 

His poem, Ode to the Guest Star, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

Originally trained as a theoretical physicist, I’ve delved into fields ranging from math and physics to law and business, trying on more hats than I’ll list here. One of my favorite hats is poet, which I put on during the work-from-home COVID years with no formal training. I’ve been writing ever since. Like Ode to the Guest Star, many of my poems have science allusions, but my aims in poetry are always artistic, not didactic or scientific.

What was the inspiration behind Ode to the Guest Star?

Memories of Caltech’s Millikan Library, my interest in astronomy, the long history of the Guest Star from its original sighting in China to its subsequent rediscovery centuries later in England—a reminder that humanity is just a blink of an eye in cosmic time.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?

I’m an obsessive, compulsive reviser. The more I like a poem, the more I keep tweaking it. I’ve been tweaking this poem for almost three years. The most noticeable recent change is the addition of two words, “Ode to,” to the original title. 

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

What I learned is that life and everything in it—especially poetry—is a journey, not an end-goal or trophy, so one had better enjoy the journey, which means one has to pay attention. With each poem, I learned to pay closer attention, attention to every pattern, turn, break, word, comma, and surprise.

What do you hope readers take from it?

I want to pique readers and leave them curious about my work. Beyond this, I don’t have any message or meaning. I want a poem to be a “thing-in-itself and the thing-for-you,” to quote Rae Armantrout out of context.

At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on poetry?

When I began working from home in 2020 during COVID. I had participated in online writing and poetry courses off and on beginning in 2012, but never took writing seriously until I had the time to do it during COVID.

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

When I took up writing in 2012, it was to write my great American novel. But it was too hard to get the kind of handholding and feedback I needed as a novice to get far. I found poetry writing much easier to get into than longer-form writing. A few lines drafted every morning accumulated quickly into short poems, which I used to get feedback (mostly rejections) from literary journals, but this practice drew me in, made me feel like I was making progress.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

I guess I’m addicted now to the serotonin kick of an occasional acceptance. Also, since there’s no money, career, love, or friendship at stake, poetry submission is the closest approximation to a stress-free game I can play. And working on a poem for a couple of hours is a helluva lot more gratifying than playing video games or TV, which invariably leaves me feeling hollow.

When or why did you decide to start publishing your work?

Besides the serotonin kick I get from an occasional acceptance, I need the motivation and discipline that submission due dates provide to sit and finish poems. Without submission deadlines, my poems would all languish in revision purgatory. And without acceptances, I’d keep revising a poem forever. In short, the submission-acceptance process helps me pace myself.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I’m primarily influenced by specific poems, not bodies of work. That said, several poems of Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Stanley Kunitz, Larry Levis, and Rae Armantrout spring to mind. This is an incomplete list.  

Are there any special projects, other pieces, or books you’d like to promote? Feel free to include links.

My debut chapbook, “Making the Best of It,” will drop from Bull City Press in August 2027. It’s a series of poems that metaphorically and playfully tracks my circuitous journey from a blue-collar immigrant family to academic math and physics, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and (perhaps not so finally) art and poetry. I like to think of “Making” as my bungling attempt at Joyce’s “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.”

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

I think of a lit journal that curates art that sees the uplifting side of a situation, e.g., finds a burst of light in an otherwise dark sky. 

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Thank you, Kenton, for sharing your poetry with us and for the time you spent on this Q&A. We wish a peaceful and prosperous summer, and also the best with your writing endeavors!

Ayoung Kim is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The ManifestStation, Khora, Defenestration Humor Magazine, and Best Travelers’ Tales, among others. She is originally from San Francisco, and her teeth are still crooked.

Her flash CNF, Speaking in Tongues, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

When I was nine and ten years old, I used to sneak out of my house in the middle of the night. The sight of the black night, the willow tree’s branch scraping my window saying, Come out and play! —the urge was irresistible. I’d pull on my elastic waist skirt, tear a piece of notebook paper and roll it up. I roamed the sidewalks pretending to speak Spanish, gesticulating with my notebook-paper-cigarette between my fingers, pointing emphatically at my man who needed a strong talking to, as I’d watched on Mexican telenovas. I sashayed, causing my skirt to swirl around my knees. Although a child of Korean immigrants, I was smitten with Mexican culture. I turned onto the main road, walking straight into the beam of headlights. It was my moment. I stuck my cigarette in my mouth and took a long drag.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?

As I worked several versions, I wondered about how to end the story, if there was a way to reference the beginning with the Dentist’s quasi-sexual probings. I saw how the narrator and the Dentist were alike in expressing their lust.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it?

Although this essay came from a memory, the danger is transcribing it instead of allowing space for other images and narratives to come through. I first wrote this three years ago, and have periodically returned to it with fresh eyes. Each time, a bit more would reveal itself. Also, there is the part of me that retains visceral emotions as the child, but as the adult, benefits from distance, and I worked to include both perspectives. I’ve learned to not rush the revision process.

What do you hope readers take from it?

Insist your dentist wear gloves!

Do you write in other genres, and if so, what?

I started out by writing travel essays, but have branched to writing lyric and flash essays and prose poems. Also, recently, a couple of my humor stories have been published.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

Louise Glück, poet, said: Anyone who writes is a seeker. You look at a blank page and you’re seeking. The role is assigned to us and never removed. I think this is an unbelievable blessing. The blank page represents my struggle to connect dots and land in a place of clarity. I find it exposing, terrifying, exhilarating, and humbling. Writing is the only activity that brings this out of me, and as such, ceased to be an option a long time ago. I must write. This is my blessing.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I’ll point to hypocrisy and absurdity, and how as a child I was able to spot these and see the tragedy and comedy. These two themes regularly feature in my work.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

If I don’t get in any writing, I’ll draw something, my thumb, fingers. So many disembodied fingers.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

La Dolce Vita: me in Rome in 1959, splashing in the Trevi Fountain in a cleavage-bearing gown eating a giant espresso gelato in a waffle cone.

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Thank you, Ayoung, for sharing a slice of your life with us and for being a part of our growing community. We appreciate you and the time you spent on this Q&A. Cheers to giant waffle cones and swirling skirts! We wish a peaceful and prosperous summer, and also the best with your writing endeavors!

Shayna Brown is based in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her husband and seventeen-year-old son. Her writing explores themes of family, vulnerability, and emotional complexity, drawing inspiration from small, individual moments that blur the line between the surreal and the deeply personal. Writing has always been the way she experiences and makes sense of the world.

Her short fiction, Until it Ends, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I’m a Texan, born in raised deep in the heart in Austin. I’ve been writing fiction since I was a kid, but only in the past few years have I started treating it with more care and intention. Most of what I write circles the same terrain – family, memory, mismanaged emotions, a deep human ache. It’s such a pleasure for me to play with words.

What was the inspiration behind “Until it Ends?”

This piece started with a piece of dialogue, some casual words thrown out that stuck to me long past the conversation. I tend to spend a lot of my real life worrying, and this piece of fiction was a chance to play with a “what-if” situation, which is grounded in a lot of non-fiction love.

What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process, and/or the final version of it?

Most of the revision was subtraction for me. I had characters flipping on light switches and over-explaining house layouts and unnecessarily walking around just so they’d have movement with their dialogue. I don’t even remember writing those things, but the piece was much better once I took them out and let the piece breathe. I prefer the softer, more trusting final piece.

What did you learn (about yourself, craft, or life in general) through writing and revising it, and what do you hope readers take from it?

That I overexplain. This piece got so much better when I trusted the reader to feel through it, and took out a lot of the over-explaining. I also learned that I want my made-up stories to show real-life emotion, but that right when the emotion starts to burn super bright, my instinct is to turn away. I like using fiction to get close to it.

And I hope readers experience the feeling of having just peeked into a sweet moment of humans striving to be better versions of themselves.

At what point in your life did you begin writing and working on fiction?

I wrote my first pieces of fiction when I was about ten. I was homeschooled and obsessed with becoming a novelist. That continued until college, when life got too busy for written exploration. In my early adulthood I focused more on creative non-fiction, but not in a serious way. When Covid hit, I started writing short stories again. I made a schedule and took classes and started working on pieces I wanted to release out into the world for the first time. And that led me here.

When or why did you decide to start publishing your work?

I started trying to get published about two years ago. It’s a very difficult and discouraging process. I’m so grateful to The Good Life Review for believing in my piece.

What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)?

I think it’s how I make sense of the world. It feels necessary to have some creative outlet to process being an adult in the world. I am often confused by internal contradictions (like wanting to run away but desperately wanting to stay, like being angry but also being so full of love) and writing helps me understand myself, too.

What have been the biggest influences in your writing?

I was homeschooled, along with two siblings, by my father. He taught me my foundation of everything. He didn’t have a curriculum or traditional structure for us, and our main schoolwork was to read The New Yorker Magazine cover to cover each week and discuss it. Sometimes he’d give us writing assignments like “Re-write the ending of this week’s short story.” I think that influenced how I write, and also how I read.

How do you make expression a part of your daily life, or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?

This is a struggle for me. The more regularly I’m able to have creative space, the better everything in my life feels. I put writing time on my calendar daily, but it’s not unusual for that to get pushed aside for a pressing life issue. I do find that I stay mentally connected to my work, whether the pages are in front of me or not. These are little worlds I carry around and think about always.

What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?

I love this question. For me “the good life” is presence and appreciation of small, specific moments. It’s bringing in the groceries with my kiddo and then making a sandwich and lemonade for lunch. It’s sitting outside with a pen and paper, word-doodling some ideas. It’s noticing a new freckle on my husband’s arm. Smiling at my dog’s early morning tail wags. Hearing the birds outside my bedroom window, greeting

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Thank you, Shayna, for being a part of our growing community and for sharing your work. We appreciate you and the time you spent on this Q&A with us. Cheers to those small moments of peace and joy. We wish you many, many of those and also the best with your writing endeavors!

Annie Rachele Lanzillotto is an American memoirist, poet, and performance artist whose stage presence has been called riveting and volcanic. She was born in the Bronx. Her books include: Dyke Rubicons (Quelle Press chapbooks), Whaddyacall the Wind? (Bordighera Press), Hard Candy: Caregiving, Mourning, and Stage Light; and Pitch Roll Yaw, (Guernica World Editions), L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir (SUNY Press; finalist for LAMBDA Literary Award), and Schistsong (Bordighera Press).

Her short creative nonfiction essay, A Baby Named Freedom, appears in Issue #23.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

There’s a me/you ness in language that divides us. I / you and on and on.  These boundaries dissolve in altered states — I’ve had a lot of deep illness, and have been on post-operative medications that blur the distinctions of you/I. I have ushered loved ones through these altered states. In post-op recovery, we hit milestones of coming back into focus, into the stride of the world, into the distinctions of me/you/they.

It’s springtime. Pink season. Peach blossoms just outside the window. Grandma Rose tossed peach pits out the window, spit onto the earth, after she ate a peach. She wouldn’t throw a pit away in the trash. That didn’t make sense to her. She grew up in peasant culture, peasant wisdom, working the land as a child in the heel of the boot, Italy. Her literacy was of the earth and leaves and the cycle of life. It was strange for her to see me reading and writing all my hour and playing softball. These endeavors didn’t make sense to her; you couldn’t eat them. I wasn’t helping the family survive.  All children worked in her day. More children were more hands to work the land. 

Her first peach tree sprouted up after she died in 2001, at 100 1/2 years old. Now the third generation of peach trees are here, right outside the window. I call these peach trees my grandmother. Hello Grandma Rose, thank you for the pink blossoms.

I hope I become a tree after I die and bring someone blossoms then sweet fruit to bite into to remember how delicious life is.

An incredible story. The essence of her lives on in the trees and her lived experiece persists through rememberance and shring. Thank you!

Turning to your essay, A Baby Named Freedom… What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the revision process or the final version of your essay?

In revising this essay, I went back to describe the physicality of the moment where the man confronted me in the café. That moment could have gone in many directions. I could have gotten defensive and cursed him out. I asked Shyla, the editor of The Good Life Review, how she read that moment. We decided I could add a moment of physicality. I examine at these public interactions where strangers argue, fight, cast microaggressions on one another.  Every day walking the streets of Manhattan I experience many of these moments. My superpower is to immediately peel back all the layers between the you/I ness of these encounters and laser in to connect, cross the vast oceans of space between us.

The circumstances around different parts of the essay are compelling and timely, with gun control and the general tension in the US, but you wove in other details, for example, the feeling of not being in control of your own body as a child. How did you decide what other details or aspects of your life to include?

In terms of the U.S.A. and gun violence, and this moment we are in culturally, I think if everyone recognized the rage within and if we created cultural ways to let the air out of the pressure cooker… Think primal screams at Cornell U, balcony singing during the pandemic on Italian balconies, banging pots and pans at 7pm in NYC during the pandemic, dancing around the fire, group singing, protesting, stomping, crying… I admire two-year-olds who throw tantrums. We all have that inside us. If we bring back tarantella dance trance, maybe we’d stop machine gunning in public…

We love learning something new! Tarantella, for those not familiar, is Southern Italian folk dance characterized by whirling movements, quick steps, and flirtatious gestures between two people set in time to music with a upbeat tempo played with a mandolin, a guitar, an accordion, and tambourines. And yes, if there were more dancing and singing going on, there would most certainly be less rage.

Are there any special projects, favorite pieces, or books you’d like to promote?

• Audio of my new chapbook of sonnets: DYKE RUBICONS
• Audio of story after story, all true: ANNIE’S STORY CAVE
• L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir

What do you think when you hear, “the good life?”

When I saw the title “The Good Life” many points of light sparkled up at me. Dante’s “the delectable mountain” in Canto 1 of the Inferno. La vita bella. Gioia di vivere.  What is the good life for me as a writer? Is it strange to spend so many hours alone inside the cathedral of thought? I don’t know other ways to live. For me, life is work, and I am always on a mission. Reading has given me my best understanding of my inner life. I hope my writing expands readers sense of their inner life. I go back to reading James Joyce’s “Araby” in Dubliners. The echo of the soul in that vast space of the bazaar. The quest for connection, for love to land.

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Thank you, Annie, for trusting us with a slice of your life and for sharing your voice with us, through your story and your actual voice, which we love-love! We appreciate your time and willingness to participate in this Q&A. Whatever distant shore you find yourself on, we hope you always have time to sing a song, be outside, do something kind for someone less fortunate, and ruminate about the past. Cheers to the joys of living!

Bonus audio of Annie reading A Baby Named Freedom…