The book opens in heavy rain. While the rest of the town is securing storm shutters and stockpiling batteries, Norma is mourning the death of her closest friend, Donna, who drove off the road after a …

I inhabit the forest of my belly like an endangered and spotted owl. I hop into a stream, never the same one. I build a fire from the aphorisms from the cherry tree that grows from the loam of it...

I asked Grandpa how he got the silver medal he’s so proud of, and he said he got it for shooting a Northern Viet bastard right in the face. He said the Northern soldier was on top of another …

Tahlequah, OK, has one Wal-Mart, one good regional supermarket, many of the major fast food chains, two operational video stores, and 16,000 residents. It’s where I live, home to the university …

A polar bear travels two hundred miles and arrives in Iceland. It climbs onto the shore with a great lumbering. It is an accident of travel. It is an animal in a country with no animals like him. I …

            Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of thinking about this particular bit of …

I think when I die I want my tombstone to say, / This guy noticed things and took enormous pleasure / in the noticing.

It was a relatively inexpensive truck, and suburban parents could both afford it (or payments on it) and teens, if they were paying for the gas from their allowance, could afford the gas...

I’m not going to lie to you.  I just wrote a novel that disassembles most of what we think of when we say “novel.”  But before you dismiss the idea, consider another:  the entire enterprise …

The Gulf Coast Blog is gearing up for another month-long resident blogger: Help us welcome Lidia Yuknavitch to the GC Blog starting  Monday, July 6th.   Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the novel …

­­The poems of Lost Privilege Company appear under the signature of the Blunt Research Group, an anonymous, contemporary collective of poets, activists, and scholars of diverse origin. The poems …

The snow was a wildcat that night, unpredictable and bright. You sat in the passenger seat, one hand screwed to the handle for safety. You should have been driving, but you called yourself a …

As I become accustomed at last to gray dawn and its labyrinth—             a fine-etched map of running paths, routes crystallized  on dormer glass—but before I’ve decided to …

The Schooner Bar By Ed Bok Lee NOTE: Your screen size may affect line breaks in this poem. Click to read it at its home in Tinderbox Poetry Journal . Farther inside this long bar near Lake and …

Brian Van Reet, winner of the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, talks with  Gulf Coast intern Melissa Dziedzic about his story, “The Window.” Melissa Dziedzic : The setting is incredibly important to …

Tomorrow's blog post marks the end of a month at GC Online with David Mura as guest blogger. Our hope in having David as a guest was to engage in the conversations online, not only about artistic …

        If in the world of our stories, we as authors resemble God, it is because we visit trials and tribulations upon our protagonists, while we sit removed from their world, watching them …

On a friend’s Facebook page today, I found a photo of abandoned row houses, presumably in Baltimore, with the caption: “ Where were all the folks concerned with Baltimore’s private property …

        At what point does the social contract end? If violence can be wreaked upon you without cause? If your life can be taken from you while you are unarmed and your murderer goes …

I thought letting him go quietly would be too much like letting myself get hustled off a cliff. He could kill me with those shrugs. Then there was screaming, a lot of it, and I’m not ashamed to …