A Literary Magazine Sponsored by The University of Maine at Farmington
By Meagan Jones
She crosses out a paragraph. It is good writing – she thinks so herself – yet it is unnecessary. It doesn’t fit with the work. It is out of place. It doesn’t sound right.
She peruses over the rest of the manuscript, tapping the pages absentmindedly with her pen. That piece of dialogue on the third page, she realizes, sounds awkward. She writes a note to herself to rewrite it. Then she reads her work out loud.
by Michael Hammerle
That boy’s gonna’ be
a heart taker.
He’s got
our father’s eyes;
by Richard Southard You know, after doing these posts for a few weeks, featuring a different genre each time, I’ve started to think about something: why are there genres to begin … Continue Reading Musical Fridays: Do We Need Genres?
By Z.Z. Boone
Except for the blood pressure, Parisi is a healthy seventy-five-year-old. He swims at the Y four mornings a week, his spine is straight, he maintains the 34-inch waist he carried through college. His mind is sharp; he reads historical novels and sees an occasional play, and he can still knock out the Sunday Times crossword without having to wait a week for the solution.
by Meagan Jones
As a writer, you read. You read a lot. Don’t try to get out of it (yes, you)! It’s impossible. You’ll read good things, bad things, crazy things, and generally, (if you study English or Creative Writing), a mish-mash of words spewed forth by some person long since gone from this world (looking at you, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf).
By Marc Swan
Three in the morning,
AC howling like a banshee dancing
on a wire. I shut it down
with a punch of the button.
by Richard Southard Remember last week when I said I would do a more “topical” and “conversational” post? Well, I was in the process of that, and my saved post … Continue Reading Musical Fridays: Taking It Easy
By M. Stone
Dear stained glass Jesus:
they tucked me between pews
so I could imagine my heart
as a cardboard box, flaps open
to entice you.
By Meagan Jones
Two people walk into a bar.
One says, “I’ll have a glass of H20, please.”
The second says, “I’ll have a glass of H20, too.”
The second person dies.
By Barbara Alsop
The soft paw strokes my face
purr rumbling like a deep earthquake.
by Richard Southard, The River editor Last week, as I was writing the post “Music from WUMF”, I began to think about the great local artists that we have received music from … Continue Reading Musical Fridays: Maine Artists
by Matthew Campbell
“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
By Meagan Jones
I firmly grip the red pen, but my hand’s shaking, and the pen spills drops of red ink on the freshly printed paper. I think vaguely about how there have been studies about red pens – how they negatively affect the human psyche. Red, scribbled all over a paper, is a student’s worst nightmare.
By Elizabeth Kane
[This story is the official winner of the Fall 2017 Flash Fiction contest, “200 in 2 Weeks”]
She would’ve gone anywhere. Her tap shoes scraped the pebbly sidewalk, the tulle on her skirt fluffing in the cool wind. The light from her dance studio blinked out down the street as her teacher locked the door.
by Richard Southard, The River editor Since my first year at UMF, I have been involved with 91.5 WUMF, the campus radio station. Music had remained in my interest out of high-school, … Continue Reading Musical Fridays: Music From WUMF
By M.J. Iuppa
[This story is a runner up in the Fall 2017 flash fiction contest, “200 in 2 Weeks”]
No one suspected that she’s the one who said, so long. Until
someone called—the sudden blast of the cell phone, ringing
like Paul Revere, like Chicken Little fearing the sky’s falling.