Buzz

The Latest Buzz…

Welcome to The Good Life Review Buzz—our hotspot for exciting news, interviews, book reviews, AND new in 2023… Micro Monday featuring brief fiction, cnf, and poetry. It’s like a shot of literary adrenaline to jump start your week.

This Week’s Micro Monday Feature…

The latest news!…

Issue #12 ~ Summer 2023 is Now Live!

“Put another dime in the jukebox, baby…”

It’s August. It’s hot. It’s muggy AF. But the trees are in full sway and today we are thrilled to announce the release of Issue #12 ~ The Honeybee Prize issue.

If you ever wondered what kind of village it takes to raise a little lit mag (or what’s up with that Joan Jett reference), the accompanying editor’s note for this issue does a pretty good job laying it all out…

Keep reading

Other news, Micro Monday features, book reviews, and interviews with our contributors…

Author Q&A with Matt Mason

Matt Mason is the Nebraska State Poet and has run poetry workshops in Botswana, Romania, Nepal, and Belarus for the U.S. State Department. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times and he has received a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Nebraska Arts Council. In this Q&A, Matt shares a little about how he got started teaching workshops, the inspiration behind two of his latest poems, and advice for aspiring writers…

Read

Author Q&A with Blake Kinnett

In this candid and impactful Q&A, Blake Kinnet shares what inspired the writing of “Pretty Women,” and how in doing so part of their desire was “to challenge the idea that pre-transition is just crying in front of a mirror because ‘I’ll never be a real man/woman.’ There can be joy in discovery. There can be joy in the becoming.” Blake’s answers to all of our questions are honest, impactful, and frankly important in the discourse of writing through difficult circumstances…

Read

the come back by Simone Flynn

there’s a moment when you fall into the long way home and you are driving by yourself  your windows are down your child’s takeout  saag paneer and naan  in the back seat  and you go the long way home down southeast street  and then just one street more…

Read

Author Q&A with Rachel Sussman

Rachel Sussman is the winner of the 2023 Honeybee Prize in Nonfiction and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Into the Void, Months to Years, My Chronic Brain, and The Pinch.

In this Q&A, Rachel provides a candid glimpse into writing through her grief over the loss of a good friend and how “nothing quite prepared her for the moment when the story was published.” She also talks about what it is like living and writing with a chronic illness and how writing has impacted her life…

Read

Elvidarium by Kay Sexton

I’d never spoken to Ronita before we covered synesthesia in English class. To start with her name was weird, and she was weird. She always had chewed off nail varnish and how is that possible? There has to be a day when it’s perfect, surely?

I knew, from the moment Miss Perkins defined synaesthesia, which one of us was going to claim to have it. Magdalena Pike.

Magdalena’s instantaneous acquisition of the ability to hear numbers and smell days of the week caused me to eye-roll inadvertently enough to catch Ronita’s attention, so when we…

Read

Author Q&A with Hemmy So

Hemmy So is a Korean American fiction writer from Houston, Texas. Her debut short story appeared this spring in Redivider, and she reads prose for Chestnut Review. In her former life, she worked as a news reporter, tech, and sports attorney.

In this Q&A Hemmy shares a little bit about how her previous careers have helped her as a writer and what inspired her to write “The Language of Family”…

Read

Striving for Better in Jared Harel’s Let Our Bodies Change the Subject, Review by Emily Hockaday

The opening poem to Harél’s Let Our Bodies Change the Subject prepares the reader for what is to come—a meditation on mortality, the passing of the baton, generational knowledge, and existence itself. And somehow Harél faces these existential questions head-on, with care and grace. He casually introduces us to the “Sad Rollercoaster” the speaker’s daughter discovers—and which we all reckon with…

Read

Author Q&A with Oak Morse

This week’s Author Q&A is with educator and writer Oak Morse. Oak lives in Houston, Texas, where he teaches creative writing and theatre and leads a youth poetry troop, the Phoenix Fire-Spitters.

His poem, Ras Tafari Ghazal, is featured in issue #12 and in our interview with him Oak shares the impetus for his research into the “Rastafari” ideology and what ultimately led to the writing of the poem…

Read

Papier-mâché by Rosa Crepax

14.45 My meteorite feet sink deeper in the ground with each conquered breath. It’s 14.45 when plaster starts cracking, vaulting the premature dusk. Some ancient soothsayer must have talked about this. A thunder of void runs atop fields that fear has dried out. No one leaves in a hurry; time is asleep, yet the city’s on fire….

Read

Author Q&A with Tiffany Promise

Tiffany Promise (she/her) is a writer, poet, chronic migraineur, and the mother of two wildlings. She holds an MFA from CalArts and has participated in the Tin House and American Short Fiction workshops. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Okay Donkey, Jarnal, Francesca Lia Block’s new literary magazine, Lit Angels, and elsewhere. Tiffany lives in Austin, Texas and her flash fiction, Bird of Prey, won this year’s Honeybee Literature prize. Read the full Q&A to learn what she shared with us about her writing and what inspired her to write “Birds of…

Read

Obit by Kait Quinn

Strapless dress—died in a hungover heap on a humid July morning in 2010. After I peeled it from my own wet carcass, let it dead bouquet wilt at the bottom of my trash can with the eggshells and coffee grounds, receipt after receipt for antibacterial soap. I did not wear the dress, the dress wore me. The dress ordered the extra cranberry vodkas….

Read

Grocery Store 3 a.m. by Kit Rohrbach

Worst of all is the sadness of fruit tumbled in a cardboard bin remembering Cézanne’s important apples on a sunlit blue table and Gauguin’s sun-browned women, their skin smelling of oranges…

Read

Loading…

Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.

Subscribe to get The Buzz delivered directly to your inbox…