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.


Four Haikus after Garden Meditation by Charisse Baldoria
From the Old Hedonist: “A rose in full bloom reveals pleasure and wisdom age had not foretold.” From the Young Nihilist…
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Introducing Annie Barker
Annie has been with TGLR since day one and has never wavered in her dedication to our mission and vision. Late in 2022, when I asked the team if anyone wanted to volunteer more time to fill gaps in our processes, Annie was among the first to jump in. She’s now doing all the copy editing for our quarterly issues as well as leading an email campaign to connect to other writing programs in the region. I’m grateful she’s been open to assisting as we learn and grow. I’m also grateful Annie took the time to answer…
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Author Q&A with Summer Hammond
This week’s Author Q&A is with Summer Hammond. Summer grew up in rural east Iowa, one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where she served as editor on Chautauqua. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Texas Review, Sonora Review, and StoryQuarterly. She is a 2021 Missouri Review Audio Miller Prize Finalist and a 2022 semi-finalist for Nimrod International Journal’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize. Summer and her kindred spirit, Aly, currently live in Wilmington by the sea. Read the full Q&A to learn what Summer shared with us…
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Author Q&A with T.M. Thomson
This week’s Author Q & A is with T. M. Thomson. Thomson’s work has most recently appeared in Soundings East and Bluebird Word and will appear in Pink Panther Magazine and Evocations in the upcoming months. Three of her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards: Seahorse and Moon in 2005, I Walked Out in January in 2016, and Strum and Lull in 2018. She is the author of Strum and Lull (2019) and The Profusion (2019), which placed in Golden Walkman’s 2017 chapbook competition, and co-author of Frame and Mount the Sky (2017). Her full-length…
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Orange Meets Green by Emma Schmitz
I’m burning rubber on pavement, matching the positive to the negative, trying to get something to spark. The drive from the Northwest Sierra to the Southeast Sierra of California stretches like an octopus with so many routes to go. Manzanita, sinewy pines, bushy firs, and sagebrush lull in and out like a foamy-mouthed ocean on rock and sand. If I take the iconic Tioga Pass, I won’t see the classic Topaz Lake. If I make time for the glossy June Lake Loop, I probably won’t have time to see the chalky Toufas up close. It’s a…
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Woman with a Fan: On Maria Blanchard by Diane Kendig Review by Anne Whitehouse
Woman with a Fan is poet Diane Kendig’s historical inquiry and personal journey into the life and career of turn-of-the-century Spanish painter María Blanchard. Although Blanchard worked in Paris among the modernists, she was little celebrated in her lifetime, nearly forgotten after her death, and only recently rediscovered…
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New Bone Fear by Rhony Bhopla
A chirping, then the beak of a mourning dove stuffed, muted at the first daily police siren. The neighbor’s dog wails crescentic urgency, I hallucinate warning sounds before a voice from a chopper takes the place of flocks. Stephon Clark’s final breath expired some miles away— there, I see my question…
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Issue #10 ~ Winter 2023!
In a perfect world, there would be order and a trustworthy cadence as a well thought through plan unfolds itself in crisp, equally shaped squares—one step at a time. But it’s not a perfect world and the grand universe of literary-ness (and life in general) is chaos more often than not. Like most people, I want to appear as if I have my shit together even when things get crazy so admitting that the cart didn’t just come before the horse but came completely unhitched altogether, is not easy. That, my friends, is kinda what happens…
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Author Q&A with Marc Eichen
This week’s Author Q&A is with Marc Eichen. Eichen has a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University. From 2015 through 2022 he was a Visiting Faculty member at the State University of Zanzibar. His fiction focuses on life in Zanzibar and in red-state America. He has had stories published in Still Points Arts Quarterly, The Adirondack Review and West Trade Review and reprinted in Toyon. He is the winner of the Richard Cortez Day Prize in fiction. A book of short stories in Swahili and English will be published in Nairobi Kenya in…
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Author Q&A with Gargi Mehra
This week’s Author Q&A is with Gargi Mehra. Mehra is a software professional by day, a writer by night and a mother at all times. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines online and in print, including Crannog, The Forge Literary Magazine, The Writer, and others. Her short stories have won prizes and placed in contests. She lives in Pune, India with her husband and two children. You can read more of Mehra’s work on her website or catch her on Twitter: @gargimehra. Mehra’s collection of flash fiction stories, Mothers and Brothers is featured in…
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Dress Code by Kennedy Essmiller
Gather round, girls—preteens, tweens, teens—crowd together. It is time for your annual women’s talk. You each are given two squares of tile with shimmering surfaces to stand, to sit. You can reach out and touch the shoulder of your best friend, the shoulder covered in a wooly sweater despite the Oklahoma heat. The Dress Code is in place for a reason, the administration says, the office ladies tell you, the women who give you Band-Aids and Tylenol, the women who are paid to protect. Pay attention. This year will be no different than last year or…
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Interview with Author Moni Brar
Poet Moni Brar shares pieces of her own personal history as a reflection of a collective history in her poem, Migrant Wish. Through her poem she explores numerous challenges she has faced as a Punjabi immigrant who moved to Canada from India during her formative childhood years. The poem, along with much of her writing, has also helped her examine the themes of identity and belonging within the context of the immigrant experience. Read the full article to learn what she shared with us about her life, the impetus for each section of her poem, and…
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