BOA Blog

“I was too scared to abandon him altogether, of course. Without him, what was I?” (PLUCK, page 31) The journey from being a believer to questioning is a messy one, and Adam Hughes bares his personal walk through doubt with vulnerability and grace throughout this remarkable collection of poems and prose. Religion and doctrine have a way of latching themselves on to our identity, and when we begin to question, to seek answers, it can feel like the end of the world, the end of us. Who are we without our gods?  I personally have gone through my own story...

Rena J. Mosteirin teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire. She is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA, 2025), Experiment 116 (Counterpath Press, 2021) and co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) and Perceptron (punctum books, 2024). Her novella Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. BOA: How did you get started as a writer? Mosteirin: As a kid I was always reading and writing. I filled up notebooks with poems...

What happens when we outgrow the doctrine that forged us, and was once our lifeforce, as crucial to our survival as the air we breathe? When we must lift the pure white vestment from our shoulders and pack it away in a forgotten place, because the weight of an imperfect faith is too much to bear, but all we can offer in this chaotic modern world? Pluck, by Adam Hughes, is a tether through the darkness to those of us who have shared in sleepless nights spent kneeling on the hard floor of a dark room, beseeching a god with ever-watchful...

If someone told you loving something, or someone, was a mistake, would you still let yourself feel it? Or would the suggestion eat you and your relationship alive? How far would you go to keep the one you love close? What if you were falling, falling, falling with no end in sight?  Boa author James R. Gapinski (they/them) takes us on a macabre and witty journey into exploring these questions and more in his short fiction collection, The Museum of Future Mistakes.  Haunted fingernails, egg-laying cats, and magicians sawing themselves in half are just a few of the twisted and...

Click to listen to the interview on Minnesota Public Radio The Write Question-Interview with Keetje Kuipers