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To Marie Antoinette, from a New Mother Who Didn’t Get to Stay in Bed 18 Days after Giving Birth
And there were stairs and they were steep and had to be climbed to soak in the tub, to lie down. Snow to be shoveled between feedings. I stood in

Announcing our 2021 Virtual Reading!
So to Speak is thrilled to announce that on Sunday, April 18, 2021, at 8:00 PM EST, we’ll be holding a virtual reading featuring contributors in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and

Bi Joy as Resistance
“LGBTQIA+ folx are not a monolith. We deserve to hear more stories than we have been told. We deserve narrative plentitude—so many stories that no single story or person has

We Come Together
like a tapestry of worn threads. Our feet carry us here: a pilgrimage of shared suffering. Greetings are made, voices break their weary silence, arms open, plates are accepted; We

Strange Fruit, 2020
content warning: lynching, police brutality A man was lynched today And like Strange Fruit He swung in the breeze But in the distance A low baritone voice, Strains I can’t

Fast
Maple, skin, girl I hope your insides Tastes as sweet as the syrup I imagine. You were a symbol of lust, not love, Since the day you came into form.

On “Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl”: A Conversation with Jeannie Vanasco
Content warning: mentions of sexual assault I first met Jeannie Vanasco in the fall of 2016, about a year before the #MeToo movement surfaced on social media with the allegations

From the Archives: “Endlessly”
“Endlessly” originally appeared in the 2019 contest issue of So to Speak. Content warning: mentions of abuse. Endlessly He isn’t going to answer, but I knock and swallow the

Leaving My Abuser: My Adoptive Father
The police are not coming. My birth mother severely punished, Holt Korea protects my birth father still and shames me, “Your birth mother never called to ask about you.” The

Conversation & Creation: Four Fiction Authors on their COVID-Era Writing Process
On a Sunday afternoon in September, I find myself with a precious thing: several hours of uninterrupted time to write. I sit down, Word document open in front of me,

The Independent Bookstore as a Community: A Conversation with Old Town Books’ Jen Cheng
image via @oldtownbooks on Instagram Even before the global pandemic—a phrase that still sounds almost unreal to utter—supporting independent bookstores was paramount to the literary and small-business community. It’s not just that, if

Announcing our 2020 Virtual Reading!
So to Speak is thrilled to announce that on Friday, November 6, 2020, at 7:30 PM EST, we’ll be holding a virtual reading with some of our amazing 2020 contributors