Brendan Stephens

The world needs to know that my partner woke up from anesthesia and complimented a nurse in scrubs on her outfit.

Had my hair in a ponytail, and I became a parent’s teachable moment to explain to their son to not point.

Got acceptances on the last 2 poems from my MFA from 10 years ago. Thought they weren’t good enough after one submission cycle. 9 years later, submitted unrevised on a whim and immediately taken.

Here is the writer crew at @vermontstudioctr.bsky.social. What an unbelievable residency with so many talented folks.

No homosexuality allowed in the core at A&M.

At the Vermont Studio Center to crush pages.

We are still currently accepting submissions for our annual chapbook contest! Follow the link in our bio to enter.

#flreview

This just in, my partner is not thrilled that I have started to refer to finishing a novel as “beating a book.”

Read this one in college, and I still think about it all the time.

Last year, my resolution was to connect with old friends with a goal of calling someone every week. I quickly found that NO ONE wants to be cold-called and that scheduling a chat with people in their 30-40s is like, “I’m busy this day, week, & month, but I’d love to catch up around 2030.”

I’m impressed that you got one song from each artist. My auto playlist has a lot of repeated artists.

Bianca: “I’m not into hunks.”

Me: 👀

Hey, in case you missed it, the new SmokeLong is out! So many excellent flash stories plus a little interview by me.

Sewanee is getting rid of publishing fellowships for needs-based scholarships. Weirdly torn. Stoked for more people to have access, yet a fellowship was a white whale for me. And since I got a stable career and won’t qualify for needs-based, I doubt I’ll ever make it to Sewanee.

My take is that if believability is even an issue (rare), the fix is usually a sentence of foreshadowing or interiority. Like readers can believe in werewolf WW2 fighter pilots, so if a reader doesn’t believe a character would have an affair, a little setup goes a long way.

Ethical question: if a student sends me an AI email, should I give an AI reply? I just spent twenty minutes responding point by point to an AI email, pretending not to notice, and I kind of resent exerting any effort.

My eyes landed on Alaska, and I was like, “Keith’s finally done it. An E!E! gig in Alaska.” This is cool as well though. Haha

Please join us in celebrating The Florida Review contributors Naomi Gordon-Loebl and Jason Brown, whose respective essays were honored as "Notable Essays of 2024" by Best American Essays.

#theflreview

I have a graduating student who is interested in being a reader or intern for a literary magazine or small press. Do any of y’all know of anyone looking for readers?

I recently learned that if I’d been a girl, my parents would’ve named me after a ski company called Kastle, pronouncing it Kass-ley. I have no idea what to do with this information and yet it feels very profound.

Bianca: “This song is about losing your virginity by having sex.”

Me: “Is there another way?”

Backing into a parking spot, I begin singing “What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man.”

It’s me. Really tried to experiment with breaking a rule of fiction with this one. I wanted to try to show an epiphany that ultimately doesn’t provoke a change in the character. Bleak stuff. Enjoy!

I got a story in this issue along with a bunch of my favorite writers. Unreal issue!

Just took some Tylenol so I think this means I’m about to go ASD super Saiyan.

My followers on here skew literary instead of punk/metal, but I feel like it is still worth a little tribute to Tomas Lindberg, the vocalist for At the Gates and Disfear. Slaughter of the Soul was my first death metal listen and Live the Storm is the best dbeat lp ever. What a monster.

In the middle of a classic DND session where an insulted NPC kindly asks the party to leave his house, so the party had no choice but to escalate to a hostage situation which quickly turned to a kidnapping.

Agreed on stop scrolling. What an ongoing nightmare. Anyways, my WIP is a memoir about my parents adopting a 30 year old man that I’d gone to school with that I never really knew. It’s my first long form nonfiction project.

I had a reader point out that I overused “ever” and “just” in my manuscript, so I literally spent 2 hours with ctrl+f searching and changing wording. Can’t decide if this was my most productive or least productive writing session of 2025.

I just found out a picture of me as a child has been sold as a postcard for like 30 years. Where are my residuals?