Mary Ann Cain’s fiction, nonfiction essays and blurred genre publications (here, Out of the Blue) have appeared in
literary journals ranging from venerable standards such as The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas and The North American
Review to experimental venues such as First Intensity and LIT since 1979. Her critical work on creative writing theory
and praxis includes a monograph on writing workshops, Revisioning Writers’ Talk (SUNY Press 1995) as well as
numerous articles and book chapters about writing and writing instruction. She has received grants from the Indiana
Arts Commission and Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne for her fiction, as well as residency fellowships
at Hill House Writers’ retreat in Nashville, Tennessee and the Mary Hambidge Center for the Arts (two years) in Rabun
Gap, Georgia. She received Special Merit for Abiko Quarterly’s International Fiction award (Japan), was nominated for
General Electric’s Award for Younger Writers, and was a finalist for the Schweitzer Fellowship (under the direction of
Toni Morrison) at SUNY Albany, where she earned a Doctor of Arts in English in 1990. She is currently Professor of
English at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne where she has taught fiction writing, rhetoric, and women’
s studies since 1995. Her outside interests include West African drumming, movement, meditation, cooking, and
hiking. She lives with her husband, poet George Kalamaras, and their beagle, Barney, in a 1929 English Tudor-style
house in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Elizabeth Crockett (Mary Beth's Decision) has a diploma in Addiction Education from McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, as well as certificates in Counselling Studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages. Her greatest accomplishments by far are the people who her grown children turned out to be.
Darren de Frain (Snake) gives sincere thanks to Editor Joel Deutsch for his enormous patience with his story.
DeFrain received his degrees from Utah, Kansas State, Texas State and Western Michigan. He is author of the cult
novel, The Salt Palace, and numerous stories, essays, and poems. He currently lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife,
author Melinda DeFrain, and their two daughters. He directs the MFA Program at Wichita State University. You can
read more of his work at www.darrendefrain.com or at www.wichita.edu/creativewriting.
Benjamin Arda Doty (Max is Dead) is a first-year MFA student at the University of Minnesota . He has won
scholarships to various summer workshops and has made his living as a financial analyst. His fiction has appeared in
Paradigm and is forthcoming in Whistling Shade."
Lance Feyh (Chickens) lives and writes in the Ozarks where he enjoys the benefits of indoor plumbing.
Wade H. Fox (Yellow Dog) is a writer, editor and teacher. He lives with his wife and son in Lakewood, Colorado. A
former editor for Ten Speed Press and Lonely Planet Publications, he currently teaches writing at Red Rocks and
Arapahoe Community Colleges, outside Denver.
Bart Galle (Closing the Cabin One Year Later and Walking by the Aikido Center) spent most of his professional
life in medical education, a field in which he now works part-time for the Heart Failure Society of America. He is a
gallery owner and artist specializing in pastel painting, the book arts, and installation pieces combining the two. His
interest in poetry grew out of the death of his youngest son in 2002, when it provided a means for expression and
learning. In 2004 he self-published Continuing Presence, a fine art letterpress book that combined his paintings and
poetry. He was a finalist for the 2007 Loft Literary Center's Poetry Mentorship. His poems have been published
recently in White Pelican Review, Main Channel Voices, and Coe Review. He and his wife live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Alex Galper (The Ché guevara Diet) escaped to the West after being drafted into the Russian army at the age of
19. He studied poetry under Allan Ginsburg at Brooklyn College, worked his way across the USA as a computer
consultant, and has performed his poetry in Russian and English all over the world. Galper's poetry is a combination of
the mysterious Russian soul, Jewish "laughter through tears" humor, and American admiration for open-forms and
Beat counter-culture protest. He has been published in over 50 Russian and English language magazines, and is the
subject of a forthcoming UK documentary “Brooklyn Siberia,”(to be released in the Fall of 2008). Galper is scheduled
to read before Russian-American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq later this year. Currently, he splits his time between
New York and Moscow.
Clifford Garstang (Leviathan, this issue and The Clattering of Bones, Summer '06) has published in Confluence
and the Ledge. His story "Nanking Mansion" won the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize and will be published shortly. He
also has work forthcoming in Potomac Review, The Hub and Elsewhere. Leviathan originally appeared in North Dakota
Quarterly. Garstang blogs at Perpetual Folly.
Carolyn Harris (Graveyard Shift) lives in the Cascade Mountains with her husband, Dave, and too many cats. She
is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She blogs at Wednesday’s Woman. Her articles have
appeared in travel and sailing magazines, and her book RV in NZ: How to Spend Your Winters South–Way South in
New Zealand can be seen at www.rvinnz.com. Wednesday’s Child, a novel set in a northern California logging camp,
is looking for a home.
Aaron Hellem (Libby) lives with his wife in Leverett, Massachusetts and attends the MFA Program for Poets and
Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His short stories have recently appeared in Fourth River, Xavier
Review, Ellipsis, Phantasmagoria, Amoskeag, Quay Journal, Menda City Review, Mississippi Crow, 13th Warrior, and Beloit
Fiction Journal; also, works of his are forthcoming in Lake Effect, Oklahoma Review, Parting Gifts, Crate, Cause and
Effect Magazine, and Confluence.
When Sandra Hunter (Hunger and Thirst) isn’t teaching at Moorpark College in Ventura, she toils up hills in Malibu
where it is still possible to fly, by bike, above the clouds, she dances with her daughter on the beach and isn’t
arrested, and she doubles the garlic in most non-dessert recipes. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming
in New York Stories, the New Delta Review, Zyzzyva, Talking River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Glimmer Train, the
South Dakota Review, and others. “Hunger and Thirst” is part of a sectional novel with a working title of “Waiting to
be Filled.”
Sandra Jensen (Sixty-Nine Dollars) was born in South Africa but left as a child. She has lived in England, Canada,
Greece and Ireland. She is presently based in Berlin, Germany. She has written for the theatre; short non-fiction
works have appeared in Utne Reader and Whole Earth Magazine; creative non-fiction on-line at Verbsap; a story will
appear on-line in the next issue of the Dublin Quarterly. Jensen has been short-listed for the Canadian literary journal
Event's creative non-fiction contest. She is a cultivator of the on-line writer's group at Zaadz.com called Diving Deeper:
A Writing Workshop. She leads Diving Deeper writing retreats in Europe and North America. She is currently working
on a short story collection and a novel set in Sri Lanka during the "Black July" of 1983.
Dan Masterson (Final Approach) was elected to membership in Pen International in 1986. He is the recipient of
two Pushcart Prizes, the Bullis, Borestone, and Fels awards, and is an AWP Award Series honoree, as well as the
founding editor of The Enskyment Poetry Anthology. His New and Selected, All Things, Seen and Unseen, was
released by The University of Arkansas Press in 1997. His work has appeared in an eclectic array of publications
including The New Yorker, Esquire, Poetry, Shenandoah, and The London Magazine, as well as The Ontario, Sewanee, Paris,
Hudson, Gettysburg, Massachusetts, Yale, New Orleans, and Georgia Reviews. Final Approach first appeared in Hotel
Amerika. This is Dan's second appearance in r.kv.r.y. His hilarious poem To My Patients appeared in the Winter 2006
issue and his haunting Tunnel of Cloistered Refuge in our Winter/Spring 2007 issue.
Robyn Parnell (Nathan Keeps Track) recently published her story "Coeur d' Evelyn" in Peculiar Pilgrims
(anthology, Hourglass Books). Her works of fiction, essays, poetry and drama have been published in over seventy
books and journals, including Satire and Seattle Review. A collection of the author's short fiction, This Here and Now,
was published by Scrivenery Press. Sterling Publishers published her children's book My Closet Threw a Party.
Coming attractions include stories in the literary journals Panamowa and The Externalist.
Victoria Pynchon, author of The Poetry Cure, is the founder and editor-in-chief of this journal. Her poetry has
been published in Poet Lore, The Ledge, and, Transformation and her short fiction and literary non-fiction in the
Southern New Hampshire Literary Journal and Kudzu. She shamelessly self-publishes here from time to time but has
turned 99.9% of her writing energy over to her new neutral practice. She blogs obsessively about anything that
crosses her mind at the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.
Rosa Salazar (Purple Peruvian Potatoes) completed an MFA in poetry at Colorado State University in 2005. She
grew up in the San Luis Valley of rural southern Colorado. She currently lives with her husband in Monte Vista and has
taught English at Adams State College. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Limestone, Matter, Apple Valley
Review, Redactions, Punto de partida, and Puerto del Sol. Purple Peruvian Potatoes has previously been published online
in Culture, Society, and Praxis, a journal of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Major at California State University at
Monterrey Bay.
Cathy Strasser (Circle the Wagons) is an Occupational Therapist and freelance writer. She has had short stories
published in the Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, The Literary Bone, Silverthought Press Women’s Anthology, Touched By
Wonder Anthology, The Chrysalis Reader, and is a finalist in the “Family Matters” competition of Glimmer Train Magazine;
as well as a two article series in Cabin Life Magazine. She is currently working on her first book, Autism: A Therapist’s
Journey Toward Enlightenment, describing her experiences in working with children with autism and will be
published by AAPC in late 2007. Cathy is a member of The New Hampshire Writer’s Project and co-founder of the New
England Chapter of the National Association of Women Writers. She lives in Sugar Hill , New Hampshire with her
husband and two children.
Richard Wirick (Devil in My Beehive) will be writing a book review for each issue of r.kv.r.y. Wirick's fiction, essays
and journalism have appeared here in r.kv.r.y. as well as in Fiction, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Playboy, Another
Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review and elsewhere. Telegram Press recently published his haunting set of prose poems
One Hundred Siberian Postcards to great critical praise. He is completing a collection of short stories, Fables of
Rescue, and is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. One Hundred Siberian Postcards grew out of his
assignments in Ukraine and Siberia in 2003-5, and his adoption of a Siberian daughter. He practices law in Los
Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
literary journals ranging from venerable standards such as The Sun: A Magazine of Ideas and The North American
Review to experimental venues such as First Intensity and LIT since 1979. Her critical work on creative writing theory
and praxis includes a monograph on writing workshops, Revisioning Writers’ Talk (SUNY Press 1995) as well as
numerous articles and book chapters about writing and writing instruction. She has received grants from the Indiana
Arts Commission and Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne for her fiction, as well as residency fellowships
at Hill House Writers’ retreat in Nashville, Tennessee and the Mary Hambidge Center for the Arts (two years) in Rabun
Gap, Georgia. She received Special Merit for Abiko Quarterly’s International Fiction award (Japan), was nominated for
General Electric’s Award for Younger Writers, and was a finalist for the Schweitzer Fellowship (under the direction of
Toni Morrison) at SUNY Albany, where she earned a Doctor of Arts in English in 1990. She is currently Professor of
English at Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne where she has taught fiction writing, rhetoric, and women’
s studies since 1995. Her outside interests include West African drumming, movement, meditation, cooking, and
hiking. She lives with her husband, poet George Kalamaras, and their beagle, Barney, in a 1929 English Tudor-style
house in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Elizabeth Crockett (Mary Beth's Decision) has a diploma in Addiction Education from McMaster University in
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, as well as certificates in Counselling Studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other
Languages. Her greatest accomplishments by far are the people who her grown children turned out to be.
Darren de Frain (Snake) gives sincere thanks to Editor Joel Deutsch for his enormous patience with his story.
DeFrain received his degrees from Utah, Kansas State, Texas State and Western Michigan. He is author of the cult
novel, The Salt Palace, and numerous stories, essays, and poems. He currently lives in Wichita, Kansas with his wife,
author Melinda DeFrain, and their two daughters. He directs the MFA Program at Wichita State University. You can
read more of his work at www.darrendefrain.com or at www.wichita.edu/creativewriting.
Benjamin Arda Doty (Max is Dead) is a first-year MFA student at the University of Minnesota . He has won
scholarships to various summer workshops and has made his living as a financial analyst. His fiction has appeared in
Paradigm and is forthcoming in Whistling Shade."
Lance Feyh (Chickens) lives and writes in the Ozarks where he enjoys the benefits of indoor plumbing.
Wade H. Fox (Yellow Dog) is a writer, editor and teacher. He lives with his wife and son in Lakewood, Colorado. A
former editor for Ten Speed Press and Lonely Planet Publications, he currently teaches writing at Red Rocks and
Arapahoe Community Colleges, outside Denver.
Bart Galle (Closing the Cabin One Year Later and Walking by the Aikido Center) spent most of his professional
life in medical education, a field in which he now works part-time for the Heart Failure Society of America. He is a
gallery owner and artist specializing in pastel painting, the book arts, and installation pieces combining the two. His
interest in poetry grew out of the death of his youngest son in 2002, when it provided a means for expression and
learning. In 2004 he self-published Continuing Presence, a fine art letterpress book that combined his paintings and
poetry. He was a finalist for the 2007 Loft Literary Center's Poetry Mentorship. His poems have been published
recently in White Pelican Review, Main Channel Voices, and Coe Review. He and his wife live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Alex Galper (The Ché guevara Diet) escaped to the West after being drafted into the Russian army at the age of
19. He studied poetry under Allan Ginsburg at Brooklyn College, worked his way across the USA as a computer
consultant, and has performed his poetry in Russian and English all over the world. Galper's poetry is a combination of
the mysterious Russian soul, Jewish "laughter through tears" humor, and American admiration for open-forms and
Beat counter-culture protest. He has been published in over 50 Russian and English language magazines, and is the
subject of a forthcoming UK documentary “Brooklyn Siberia,”(to be released in the Fall of 2008). Galper is scheduled
to read before Russian-American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq later this year. Currently, he splits his time between
New York and Moscow.
Clifford Garstang (Leviathan, this issue and The Clattering of Bones, Summer '06) has published in Confluence
and the Ledge. His story "Nanking Mansion" won the 2007 GSU Review Fiction Prize and will be published shortly. He
also has work forthcoming in Potomac Review, The Hub and Elsewhere. Leviathan originally appeared in North Dakota
Quarterly. Garstang blogs at Perpetual Folly.
Carolyn Harris (Graveyard Shift) lives in the Cascade Mountains with her husband, Dave, and too many cats. She
is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She blogs at Wednesday’s Woman. Her articles have
appeared in travel and sailing magazines, and her book RV in NZ: How to Spend Your Winters South–Way South in
New Zealand can be seen at www.rvinnz.com. Wednesday’s Child, a novel set in a northern California logging camp,
is looking for a home.
Aaron Hellem (Libby) lives with his wife in Leverett, Massachusetts and attends the MFA Program for Poets and
Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His short stories have recently appeared in Fourth River, Xavier
Review, Ellipsis, Phantasmagoria, Amoskeag, Quay Journal, Menda City Review, Mississippi Crow, 13th Warrior, and Beloit
Fiction Journal; also, works of his are forthcoming in Lake Effect, Oklahoma Review, Parting Gifts, Crate, Cause and
Effect Magazine, and Confluence.
When Sandra Hunter (Hunger and Thirst) isn’t teaching at Moorpark College in Ventura, she toils up hills in Malibu
where it is still possible to fly, by bike, above the clouds, she dances with her daughter on the beach and isn’t
arrested, and she doubles the garlic in most non-dessert recipes. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming
in New York Stories, the New Delta Review, Zyzzyva, Talking River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Glimmer Train, the
South Dakota Review, and others. “Hunger and Thirst” is part of a sectional novel with a working title of “Waiting to
be Filled.”
Sandra Jensen (Sixty-Nine Dollars) was born in South Africa but left as a child. She has lived in England, Canada,
Greece and Ireland. She is presently based in Berlin, Germany. She has written for the theatre; short non-fiction
works have appeared in Utne Reader and Whole Earth Magazine; creative non-fiction on-line at Verbsap; a story will
appear on-line in the next issue of the Dublin Quarterly. Jensen has been short-listed for the Canadian literary journal
Event's creative non-fiction contest. She is a cultivator of the on-line writer's group at Zaadz.com called Diving Deeper:
A Writing Workshop. She leads Diving Deeper writing retreats in Europe and North America. She is currently working
on a short story collection and a novel set in Sri Lanka during the "Black July" of 1983.
Dan Masterson (Final Approach) was elected to membership in Pen International in 1986. He is the recipient of
two Pushcart Prizes, the Bullis, Borestone, and Fels awards, and is an AWP Award Series honoree, as well as the
founding editor of The Enskyment Poetry Anthology. His New and Selected, All Things, Seen and Unseen, was
released by The University of Arkansas Press in 1997. His work has appeared in an eclectic array of publications
including The New Yorker, Esquire, Poetry, Shenandoah, and The London Magazine, as well as The Ontario, Sewanee, Paris,
Hudson, Gettysburg, Massachusetts, Yale, New Orleans, and Georgia Reviews. Final Approach first appeared in Hotel
Amerika. This is Dan's second appearance in r.kv.r.y. His hilarious poem To My Patients appeared in the Winter 2006
issue and his haunting Tunnel of Cloistered Refuge in our Winter/Spring 2007 issue.
Robyn Parnell (Nathan Keeps Track) recently published her story "Coeur d' Evelyn" in Peculiar Pilgrims
(anthology, Hourglass Books). Her works of fiction, essays, poetry and drama have been published in over seventy
books and journals, including Satire and Seattle Review. A collection of the author's short fiction, This Here and Now,
was published by Scrivenery Press. Sterling Publishers published her children's book My Closet Threw a Party.
Coming attractions include stories in the literary journals Panamowa and The Externalist.
Victoria Pynchon, author of The Poetry Cure, is the founder and editor-in-chief of this journal. Her poetry has
been published in Poet Lore, The Ledge, and, Transformation and her short fiction and literary non-fiction in the
Southern New Hampshire Literary Journal and Kudzu. She shamelessly self-publishes here from time to time but has
turned 99.9% of her writing energy over to her new neutral practice. She blogs obsessively about anything that
crosses her mind at the Settle It Now Negotiation Blog.
Rosa Salazar (Purple Peruvian Potatoes) completed an MFA in poetry at Colorado State University in 2005. She
grew up in the San Luis Valley of rural southern Colorado. She currently lives with her husband in Monte Vista and has
taught English at Adams State College. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Limestone, Matter, Apple Valley
Review, Redactions, Punto de partida, and Puerto del Sol. Purple Peruvian Potatoes has previously been published online
in Culture, Society, and Praxis, a journal of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Major at California State University at
Monterrey Bay.
Cathy Strasser (Circle the Wagons) is an Occupational Therapist and freelance writer. She has had short stories
published in the Mom Writer’s Literary Magazine, The Literary Bone, Silverthought Press Women’s Anthology, Touched By
Wonder Anthology, The Chrysalis Reader, and is a finalist in the “Family Matters” competition of Glimmer Train Magazine;
as well as a two article series in Cabin Life Magazine. She is currently working on her first book, Autism: A Therapist’s
Journey Toward Enlightenment, describing her experiences in working with children with autism and will be
published by AAPC in late 2007. Cathy is a member of The New Hampshire Writer’s Project and co-founder of the New
England Chapter of the National Association of Women Writers. She lives in Sugar Hill , New Hampshire with her
husband and two children.
Richard Wirick (Devil in My Beehive) will be writing a book review for each issue of r.kv.r.y. Wirick's fiction, essays
and journalism have appeared here in r.kv.r.y. as well as in Fiction, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Playboy, Another
Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review and elsewhere. Telegram Press recently published his haunting set of prose poems
One Hundred Siberian Postcards to great critical praise. He is completing a collection of short stories, Fables of
Rescue, and is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. One Hundred Siberian Postcards grew out of his
assignments in Ukraine and Siberia in 2003-5, and his adoption of a Siberian daughter. He practices law in Los
Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.
