Various Forms of Self-Expression

by John Harrison

Everyone else was asleep. I sat down quietly and draped a bath towel over my head. I was instantly transformed into all the TV monsters that I loved. When I took the towel away, I went back to being the monster I had become. My parents don’t know this yet, but they will. Soon.

6S

John Harrison studied cultural anthropology to PhD level at Oxford University. New to writing, he has had a number of poems and stories published in magazines and books, including Hollow Point Books, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Samizdat.

Before There Was ASMR

by Amy Lerman

I can’t study anymore. Even If I do, I won’t be able to explain ideal marriage in Faulkner when my professor asks during tomorrow’s exam. I walk to campus town, the one department store that still uses the pneumatic tubes from when it was a bank. I find a register’s corner. There, I anticipate patrons depositing their credit cards. A moment of silence until my eyes involuntarily close, each transactional suction like a dusty metronome’s steadying ticks.

6S

Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press) won the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Scapegoat, The Queen's Review, Atticus Review, Solstice, Prime Number, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.

The Raw Human Experience

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Almost everyone suffers from depravity at some point, and a crisis is a good dramatic element in a story. I’m interested in people, in their complications, and I think writing is a way to exert some kind of authority or control over the form that depravity takes. And I not only think it’s valuable to share imaginations of these depraved characters, though I never really use the word "depraved"—I’m not really sure if it’s resonating exactly—but I think it’s important that there’s a frank and honest space in writing where people can acknowledge their humanity in ways different from what is celebrated in mainstream culture. For example, something like trauma is mediated so carefully in Hollywood and online that it sometimes feels fake. I would be more interested in the experience of really understanding what something feels like rather than looking at its moral or social justice implications. Really getting down to the raw human experience is what’s valuable to me, and I think the only thing I’m really capable of doing anyway, so there it is.

6S

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American novelist and screenwriter. Her six sentences are excerpted from an interview in Desperate Literature.