When you hear the word “improv,” what do you think of? Does it conjure an image of a black box theater where you once bought a ticket to see a late night show with topical sketches and Saturday Night Live-esque characters? A team-building game that you painfully had to perform with coworkers at an annual retreat? Or, perhaps the word strikes you with fear — the idea that you’ll have to stand up in front of an audience and make something up on the spot to fill the time … only to be met with crickets. Improv, or the performance art of unplanned invention, can be a magical art form when done well ..read more

Review by Christy Moore More than once in his book, The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting: How a Bunch of Rabble-Rousers, Outsiders, and Ne’er-do-wells Concocted Creative Nonfiction, Lee Gutkind protests that he is not and never has been a scholar. His goal is to track creative nonfiction’s evolution from bastard child of journalism to a full-fledged literary genre; as a major advocate for the genre he’s in a good position to tell the tale. I’d argue, though, that a foundational strength of the book is in the scholarly work Gutkind does in the opening chapters which review the roots of, early ..read more

Interview by Amy Fish Penny Guisinger was not always attracted to women. In Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions she recounts formative relationships with women and men, including the marriage that produced her two children and ultimately ended in part due to her affair with her now-wife. Beginning her story as straight and ending as queer, she struggles to make sense of how her identity changed so profoundly while leaving her feeling like the same person she’s always been. While covering pivotal periods of her life, including previous relationships and raising her children across t ..read more

Interview by Leslie Lindsay “How do you not measure your live in a before and after? Does anyone not do this?” writes Suzanne Scanlon in the first part of Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen . These words immediately resonated and haunted me for days. I have often thought the same about my own life, when my mother had a psychotic break when I was halfway between my tenth year, resulting in a type of mother-loss, not unlike Scanlon, whose own mother died from breast cancer when she was nine-years-old. Having grown up the daughter of a physician father and nurse mother, in west suburban Chicago ..read more

Interview by Kristen Paulson-Nguyen When the opportunity arose to interview Steve Almond, I jumped at it. He’s a fellow Bostonian and GrubStreet instructor, but I’ve been too shy to approach him until I had the excuse of this new craft book, Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories. I read every word. I appreciated Almond’s honesty about his screw-ups and his humor. I have written, but have not yet published, one book. Almond has published 12 but written several more that were never published. We have two things in common: We both make mistakes. We bot ..read more

Interview by Lara Lillibridge Every time I do a reading, there’s always at least one person who comes up to me that says, “I have this story I’m going to write, and tell me how to get published or give me the name of your publisher or agent.” And it’s not that easy, right? But I like to give them some recommendations to get started. And there’s one book that’s become a go-to for situations like these: Writing That Gets Noticed by Estelle Erasmus. In this book, released in June 2023, Estelle takes readers through the process, from writing to querying to contracts — and this level of detail is s ..read more

We’re always pleased to share updates from our family of contributor-alumni and HippoCamp presenters. Here’s what we’ve collected between our last update now; most of these were submitted via our form, but we also try to keep an eye for exciting news you share on social and your own newsletters. But we can’t catch everything, and we’d really LOVE to grow this feature, so please submit your news here for inclusion in a future update. [To browse our past essays and other content by contributor name, visit this page.] Nicole Breit has an essay, “Bulls Eye and Black Pants” in the forthcoming antho ..read more

Winner - The 2024 We Love Short Shorts Contest As he walks into the classroom, no one takes notice. They’re deep in conversation or dozing in their seats, plugged into ’70s rock on Walkmans. I’m new here, a transfer student, friend of nobody. I’ve staked out a seat in the back corner, far right. My safe zone. He’s at the lectern now, shuffling papers. “Welcome to Spanish-American Lit, folks. Hopefully you’re in the right place. Let’s run through the roster and see.” When he calls my name, I raise my hand. He looks up, his gaze locking on me for a moment longer than necessary. He smiles. Somet ..read more

Runner Up - The 2024 We Love Short Shorts Contest You’re on your knees, breathing hard, heel of one hand against the center of his chest, gripped by the other hand. The voice on your phone says, You’re going to push hard two beats per second. You flash to The Office, when they learn CPR to the tune of Stayin’ Alive, Michael Scott asking, How many is that per hour? Jim asking, How’s that gonna help you? Michael saying, I will divide and then count to it. On Grey’s, compressions are violent, ribs get cracked, you may need to crack some eggs to make this omelet. You yell, Count with me ..read more

Hippocampus Magazine’s inaugural We Love Short Shorts Contest for Flash Creative Nonfiction/Micro CNF is now complete, and what an incredible experience it was! Over the month of February, nearly 300 short pieces were entered into the contest, and our team of 13 reviewers did an amazing job reading every single one! It’s remarkable how much emotion, history, and raw human truth can be communicated in just 250 words. These pieces covered nearly every kind of true story there is — stories of love, loss, grief, joy, and everything in between. In the end, we selected three pieces as our contest f ..read more