Snow Revelationby Yuan Changming Every winter we are remindedAll gaps and cracks can be filled upAll dirtiness and ugliness can be buried deep, andAll viewing difference can be harmonized into one single color Muted in white, as the land unfolds itself to show us howTo make a new start in spring
Erick Brucker’s short story, “Dank,” appeared in Backchannels Issue No. 2. 1. Your piece, “Dank,”has an unusual format. It felt like I was climbing the staircase of the story as I read. What role does form play in the piece for you? I think that what’s unusual about it is that the title comes in …
Sandy Coomer’s art was featured in Issue 2 of Backchannels, is the cover for upcoming Issue 4, and can also be found in Issue 5 this summer. How did you become interested in art? I am a very visual and detail-oriented person. I notice things – texture, line, movement, perspective, color. I notice differences between …
Editing is sort of a secret skill. Every book we’ve ever read, every movie we watched, every textbook, description of an art piece, play program… all of them were written, then edited likely over and over again, often by teams of people, until they become the polished work we’re used to. We don’t talk about …
It’s Pride month! Diversity is an important concept in every system from microbiomes to our society. In the U.S., we used to think it meant “not just white,” which was a start. The dialogue in our country progressed from being ethnically- and racially-minded (I’ll use the race concept since it still holds a lot of …
I really hate writing sometimes. Maybe I should back up. I do love writing, those moments when I can’t not write anymore, after the idea’s been going around and around in my head for too long. After I carried it and it scratched at me while I sorted laundry into piles and decided not to …
This is the part I’m not supposed to say in a grad school or writing job application because it’s too cliché: I’ve been writing stories since I graduated from holding a crayon in my fist. It started with spelling words telling twenty-five sentence tales and progressed to diaries, then contest-winning essays, then songs and poems …
I’ve been writing all my life. I remember my very first “published” piece that was proudly hanging on my grandparents’ wall. I had drawn a series of pictures with captions of a bear going to sleep, though it might have been a large dog (my artistic talents weren’t quite developed at age 6)! When in …