May’s Table of Contents

editorial by Camille Gooderham Campbell

From the Editors

We hope you’ve all survived unscathed the rains and tax season stresses of April and are looking forward to May’s proverbial flowers.

Last month, we featured the winning story of Flash Fiction Chronicles’ String-of-10 SIX, “Snowman Suicide” by Caroline Hall. Did you go on over to FFC to read the interviews and the other stories that placed in the competition? If not, you might be interested to know that J.C. Towler, one of our editors, took second place with his story “Private Lessons” — congratulations! Our longtime readers will remember that we published several of his stories here before he joined our editorial team.

Are you reading What Came Before by Gay Degani with us? We’re now on chapter 44, but you can still read it from the beginning online or get the book in print if you prefer. Readers are calling it “humorous and heartfelt”, “a page turner”, and “an exciting debut not to be missed”. Come join us!

In other news, our sister site Every Day Poets will be on temporary hiatus as of June 1st for a general overhaul. We encourage you to stop by this month to read some of the great poetry over there and wish the outgoing editors well — and don’t worry, the poetry archives will remain available for your reading pleasure while the site’s interior is being reupholstered.

For Readers

Everything ebbs and flows, one way or another, and fiction submissions are no exception; for some reason, we’re featuring more than our usual number of fantasy stories this month (we just got so many good ones and couldn’t say no), and really not as many literary pieces as we’d have liked. There’s a temptation to assume that this means something about the direction EDF is taking, but actually it’s just serendipity (if you like fantasy) or an odd quirk of random chance (if you don’t).

For Mother’s Day on May 11th, we will be offering you “Dandelion Girl” by Elizabeth Beechwood.

For Writers

Please welcome our newest slush reader, Jadah McCoy, who joined us this past month.

In terms of stories needed, we’re pretty sure we have our Father’s Day piece for June (though you’re always welcome to try to convince us you can do one better), but we could still use some graduation and prom and leaving school stories (deadline May 27th, please). We’re also ready to start looking at Independence Day and Canada Day stories for July, and there’s also Bastille Day if that interests you. Finally, summer seasonal pieces would be nice too over the next few months… or winter, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere — we can roll with that too.

And now, onto the stories you’ll be enjoying over the coming days…

May’s Table of Contents