An experienced fixer for journalists covering Haiti, Jean often unexpectedly finds himself on the subject side of stories. After his son was kidnapped and his house taken, Jean decided to move his family out of Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic. In the first of McSweeney’s new Dispatches series, Jean tells us the story of this struggle to relocate, another change of country in his search for a better life.

Dispatches from individual lives, as they happen: in our new Dispatches series, each compact book originates in short confidences recorded by individuals during borrowed moments from their interesting lives. Set amid some of our most pressing contemporary predicaments and edited by award-winning writers Peter Orner and Laura Lampton Scott, these invaluable books seek to document the highs and lows of daily human endurance.

Laura Lampton Scott is an editor and writer. Her work has appeared in Hobart, 68 to '05, and Michigan Quarterly, among other publications. A MacDowell Colony fellow, she teaches fiction at Portland State University. She is co-editor, with Peter Orner, of the Dispatches series published by McSweeney's Books.

Alyssa Ogi is a poet and editor in Portland, Oregon. The recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation grant and an Oregon Literary Fellowship, she received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and now works as an editor at Tin House. 

A cheeky how-to guide, as raunchy as it is heartfelt, from a bright new literary voice.

A bold and vulnerable collection from a new, young voice, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a daring mash-up of pillow book, grimoire, and manifesto by writer Vera Blossom. From hooking up to trans witchcraft, petty crime, capitalism, friendships, divorce, and survival, Blossom brings wit and melancholy, grandeur and smarts, debuting a bright literary voice as raunchy as it is heartfelt. A cheeky how-to guide that earnestly asks if it is possible to fuck oneself into girlhood, How to Fuck Like a Girl is a cult classic in the making.

VERA BLOSSOM is a proud transfemme Filipina. She was born in the Bay Area, forged in Las Vegas, and currently lives in Chicago. Her work explores desire, pleasure, gender, spirituality, art, and death with explicit vulgarity and frank humor. 

Vera’s writing has been supported by TinHouse, PEN America, and the Ann Friedman Weekly. Her work as an audio journalist includes Season 2 of The Anti-Trans Hate Machine which focused on the disinformation ecosystem constructed by the Christian Nationalist movement, as well as Black Mountain Radio, an artist-driven, community-focused audio project published in collaboration with Black Mountain Institute and the Believer magazine. Vera was a producer and co-owner of Your Magic, a mystical podcast that featured celebrity tarot readings and deep-dives into contemporary spiritual practices. 

She is the loser of many other fellowships, accolades, and awards. She does not have a post-secondary education. She is, however, very serious about playing around.

Chelsea Starr is a shining star in Portland and San Francisco's queer communities. Her iconic finery is made by her own hand. In addition to being a highly in-demand DJ, she’s a strong voice of equality and love.

2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Poetry Prize winner

Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter is a story about leaving religion and coming of age in a world of accelerating climate apocalypses and environmental loss. In her debut collection of poems, H. G. Dierdorff interweaves an investigation of wildfires in Eastern Washington with a personal account of growing up in Christian fundamentalism, calling our attention to the violent histories undergirding both.

“I want you to touch the fire / sparking from my lips” the opening sonnet commands, daring the reader to abandon the safety of analytical distance and draw near to the moment of ignition itself. The voice that emerges is incessant, ecstatic, explosive. Fire erupts from every page, multiplying into rage, desire, judgement, responsibility, and renewal. 

A love song to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, a dramatic portrait of a daughter struggling to find her place in her family, and a philosophical exploration of the limits of language and belief, this collection demands the necessity of both pleasure and grief as responses to a world on fire.

H. G. Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of eastern Washington, the ancestral, unceded land of the interior Salish people. She is the author of Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter, which was selected for the 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry and is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2024. Her work has been awarded a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, and Willow Springs. You can currently find them in Oregon, where they volunteer with Write Around Portland and teach poetry through Literary Arts.

A miraculous book envisioned by Allison deFreese at the Oregon Society of Translators & Interpreters, and edited by Allison deFreese and Kim Stafford.

Thanks to Allison’s international network, Kim’s peace poem in English is translated into fifty languages, together with notes on translators and their languages, and QR access to dozens of voiced readings. This book sends a peace proclamation around the world so it may become a new poem in Arabic and Hebrew, Russian and Ukrainian, Tibetan and Mandarin, Tamil, Vietnamese, Polish, Yoruba, Yucatec Maya, and a host of other languages. With its fifty voices speaking gentle words, this book is for the children of the world. The cover image by Michael Nye shows a child holding a poem by Mahmoud Darwish:

I long for my mother’s bread

And my mother’s coffee

And my mother’s touch

And my childhood grows up

One day following days full of patience

And I love my life

Because if I die

My mother’s tears will shame me

Kim Stafford is Emeritus Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He writes, teaches, and travels to raise the human spirit through poetry. In 1986, he founded the Northwest Writing Institute, and he has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection As the Sky Begins to Change (Red Hen Press, 2024). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate for a two-year term.

Surveille’s queer speaker is on the cusp of motherhood, vacillating between attentiveness and paranoia. Exploring drone strikes, scorpion eradication, bird behavior, mating deer, ICE detainees, and family relationships, Caitlin Roach’s poems stare into and through the truth with a blazing intensity. This is a book about control (self-inflicted and external), about watching and being watched (by oneself, by others, by the state), and about the desperate search for meaning in a world that feels increasingly violent and filled with despair.

Caitlin Roach is a poet originally from San Diego, California. Her poems appear in Best New Poets (2023, 2021, and 2017), Narrative Magazine, Tin House, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was the Provost Fellow and a Postgraduate Fellow. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, she lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, the essayist José Orduña, and their two sons. 

Lisa Wells is the author of Believers, a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Her debut collection of poetry, The Fix, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. A new book, The Fire Passage, was selected by Diane Seuss for the Levis Prize in Poetry and will be published by Four Way Books in 2025.

Her essays have been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, N+1, The New York Times, The Best American Science & Nature Writing, and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with the writer Joshua Marie Wilkinson and helps edit the Kuhl House Poets Series.

SEAN ZERO has lived in Tampa, London, and Honolulu. He’s been in Portland for the last 10 years, currently in the Pearl with his partner and cat. He loves art, books, and coffee.

Before founding her band Public Universal Friend (PUF) in 2019, Friend began writing, recording, and performing original work in her mid teens and continued as a (mostly) solo artist for what would become a decade. PUF is known for their multifaceted embrace of punk informed americana adorned in southern gothic grit, attracting audiences rooted primarily in the midwest and Friend’s native south. Their debut album Perennials saw its independent release in March 2021, garnering attention from NPR, Mahogany, New Noise, and Emmy Award winning production Music in Transit. To date, Friend has written and recorded 11 albums of original music, with PUF’s next record Chrysalis expected to release in early 2023.

Friend came out publicly as a gay trans woman in 2021 following many years of genderqueer presentation. Her gender identity has played a major role in her ownership of the spectral nature of outward expression, with work focused mainly on trans representation and queer bodies within the commercial fashion and fine art world.

Friend is also the author of Transangelicism, a memoir recounting a closeted trans daughter’s adolescence in the evangelical South, anchored in the turning point found in young adulthood. The work serves as a touchstone for queer southerners, boldly encountering the vulnerability, visibility, and authenticity required in the narrative of her personal experience of trans reality. In the middle of all of it, Friend also graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Drawing from ETSU in 2015. The portfolio for her visual work can be found here.

cosima bee concordia is a femme leatherdyke based in Portland, Oregon who loves devotion and God. In past lives she’s been a bookseller, an English teacher, a philosophy student, and a limp-wristed sissy, but these days she’s a writer of horror, essays, theory, and weird experimental fragments as well as a co-host for a podcast about religious eroticism, anti-fascism, and queer perversion called Drunk Church. 

Her whole thing is pushing the boundaries of body and self in both her intimacy and art, and since contracting covid she’s been settling into her chronically ill mystic era. She generally can be found around the internet as bimbo theory, and you can keep up with and support her work by subscribing to her Patreon and Substack.

Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier) was born in Louisiana on December 30, 1949. She received her MFA in 1974 from Bowling Green State University.

Barrois/Dixon is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina (Wave Books, 2022); In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017); You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013); Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009); Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books, 2006); Reverse Rapture (Wave Books, 2005), which received the 2006 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award; Hat On a Pond (Wave Books, 2002); Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Our Master Plan (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), which received the Phi Beta Kappa Award; Blue for the Plough (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1992); The Book of Knowledge (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1988); All You Have in Common (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1984); The 8-Step Grapevine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1980); and Blood, Hook & Eye (University of Texas Press, 1977).

About Barrois/Dixon’s work, John Ashbery has said:

It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.

The Harvard Review has published the following about her work:

Recalling at moments the philosophical comedy of Wallace Stevens and Wislawa Szymborska, many of Wier’s colloquial stanzas draw a reader away from a recognizable world into one in which women waltz with bears, houseflies chat with colonels, and the absence of sound makes a material presence.

Barrois/Dixon’s work has been included in recent volumes of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her poetry has been supported by fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and American Poetry Review. In 2005, she held the Rubin Distinguished Chair at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She has been poet in residence at the University of Montana, the University of Texas at Austin, Emory University, and the University of Utah.

Barrois/Dixon lives and works in Factory Hollow in Greenfield, Massachusetts.Description text goes here

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of Lovability (Fonograf Editions, 2021); Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014), winner of the 2015 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; and The Grief Performance (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011).

Frey is a teacher and therapist and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Juleen Eun Sun Johnson is an interdisciplinary BIPOC writer and artist. Johnson was born in Seoul, South Korea. She was adopted at three and taken to Valdez, Alaska. Johnson earned an MFA in Visual Studies from PNCA and an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow and the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Fellowship. Johnson is also a 2023 recipient of the Cannon Beach Art Association Grant for art and writing.

Johnson’s work has been published in: The Rio Grande Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, The Dunes Review, Poetry Northwest and other journals and anthologies. Her poem won the Zone 3 Press Prize for Poetry. Johnson’s poems have been nominated for the Best of Net. She is the founder and editor of Trestle Ties: A Landscape of Emergence.

Her debut chapbook, “Topography of Materials” was published by Bottlecap Press in 2023.

Johnson lives in Astoria, OR with her husband Aaron and two cats (Tobias and Bruce).

John Morrison earned his MFA from the University of Alabama and received the 2003 C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Literary Arts. His book, Heaven of the Moment, won the 2006 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition and was a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous national literary journals, including the Cimarron Review, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. He has taught poetry at the University of Alabama, Washington State University, Vancouver, and the Attic Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon.

Zachary Schomburg’s most recent book of poems is called Fjords v2, and he also wrote a novel called Mammother. He’s a painter, an illustrator, and a publisher of a small independent press, Octopus Books. He lives in PDX, OR with B and Y.

Michael Keefe is the author of the novel All Her Loved Ones, Encoded (Running Wild Press, 2024) and the forthcoming collection Western Terminus: Stories and a Novella (Cornerstone Press, 2025). He is the Events Coordinator and Publicist at Annie Bloom's Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his wife, the author Liz Prato, and their two cats.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS is the author of the national bestselling novel We Were the Universe, a Dakota Johnson Book Club pick the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power.” Parsons’s story collection, Black Light, was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

Ananda Lima is a poet, fiction writer, and translator, the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and the poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in four chapbooks, including Amblyopia (Bull City Press) as well as publications such as The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and currently serves as a Program Curator at StoryStudio Chicago and a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, which described it as “one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry—Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima.

“An astounding new voice.” —ERIC LaROCCA • "I love it so much.” —KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” —JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” —KEVIN WILSON • "Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny." —GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” —JULIA FINE

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true.

Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.

With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”

A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!

"A terrific fiction debut... The stories, and the stories within those stories, connect to some of the cruelest portions of the human experience with uncommon warmth and wit."" —Publishers Weekly, starred review"

"One of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year." —Library Journal, starred review

"Will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world." —Kirkus, starred review

"This collection explores everything from the unique experiences of loss, fear, and disconnection felt by Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. to the frustrating pain of being a writer or photographer in an increasingly corporate, dystopian world." —Booklist

"Here is a collection of stories that not only delights in its ability to subvert the reader’s expectations but also leaves one haunted." —The Kenyon Review

"A perfect balance of humor, heart, and hauntedness.... I expect Craft to immediately put Lima in the company of writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Samanta Schweblin." —Chicago Review of Books (Most Anticipated)

"Formally playful, whimsically supernatural, and darkly witty, poet Lima’s prose debut sucked me in from the first page." —Publisher Weekly (Top 10 Summer Reads)

"A series of surrealist, spooky, sexy tales that are completely unpredictable and utterly fascinating. Using a unique blend of horror and literary weirdness, Lima’s work discusses what it means to belong (or not) in another land, to search for home, and to discover who the devil might really be." —Reactor

“Sexy and absorbing…. Absolutely breathtaking.” —Lightspeed Magazine

"My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.” —Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“Sophisticated and totally engrossing, Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is easily one of the most innovative works I’ve read in quite some time. Interlocked stories form a cohesive and unique vision in this haunting collection from an astounding new voice.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

"I was blown away by Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built, Craft unearths truths about fiction writing, the contemporary immigrant experience, and what it means to live a life of art, all in the clean, marvelous prose of a decorated poet." —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

“Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound, Lima achieves what most writers strive for, taking the reader on unexpected but always satisfying journeys while balancing the speculative and the real. Lima’s stories keep you thinking and reading. A gifted poet as well as a fiction writer, she knows how to create worlds that draw you in and leave you wanting more. By every measure, Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil, marks a wondrous fictional debut.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

"The stories in Ananda Lima's incredible collection do something nearly impossible. They open up surreal and strange worlds that somehow resonate within the private spaces of our own hearts. Lima's writing, like the best works of literature, confronts the fear of putting words on the page and transcends that fear to make something truly wondrous." —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic

"Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a beautiful work of alchemy: strange and familiar, experimental and narrative, topical and timeless, heart wrenching and wickedly funny. No story is without an eye to the larger political world—from Reagan Halloween costumes to Americans dispensed from vending machines—and yet no story forgets the vulnerable human hearts that exist within that world, just trying to survive and care for one another, day after day. These stories weave a world entirely their own and beckon you to stay with the charm of Lima’s devil himself. I would have stayed forever. " —Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw

"Ananda Lima spins us brilliant, resonant tales of people trying to make it through this absurd life. The stories in Craft amuse, entice, and entrap the reader with their devilish intimacy and beautiful prose." —Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made

"Strange, shocking, and downright satisfying. The slim collection hits above its weight class and does more in less than 200 pages than most books do in double the length." —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Debut Books of 2024

“A wild and surrealistic story collection that pays homage to Kafka and Cortázar, Ananda Lima’s Craft seeks to disrupt reductive understandings of both the immigrant experience and the art and craft of writing." —Restless Book

"Devilish, divine, debut." —Ms. Magazine

Michelle Kicherer writes fiction and covers books and music for the San Francisco Chronicle and Willamette Week. Her writing has been published in Forbes, Portland Monthly, The Berkeley Fiction Review, 580 Split, The Deli, The Bay Bridged, SF Station, The Cutaway, Into The Void, Rose City Review and many others. Michelle is a writing instructor for Literary Arts, Litquake, Portland Community College and Writing Workshops. She loves to teach and is always encouraging her students to get a little weirder.

Zaji Cox has been creating stories since she started reading at age three, discovering her passion for writing when she wrote her first short story at nine years old. She started with self-publishing at a young age, completing a fantasy adventure book at age thirteen and a collection of short stories in high school. She quickly realized the value of relating fantastic events - some joyful, some dark - to how we experience the world as we think we know it. She was the winner in the poetry category of Submission PDX’s reading series in 2020, and has been invited to participate in several events including the Portland Book Festival, PDX Poetry Festival, Survival of the Feminist reading series, Moved By Words: New Voices of Color, Corporeal Writing’s LOOP, the 50th annual Northwest Folklife Festival, XRAY FM's Amplify Women teach-in for International Women's Day, and more. She holds a BA in English, and her writing can be found in Pathos Literary Magazine, Entropy Magazine, The Portland Metrozine, Cultural Daily, CARE Covid Art REsource, 2020: The Year of the Asterisk (released October 2021 from University of Hell Press) and others. Her memoir, Plums for Months, was released from Forest Avenue Press in May of 2023.

Matan Gold (he, him, siya) is a Black & Filipino(x) writer from the San Fernando Valley. His essay 'We Real Cool' was selected for the 2020 Best American Essays 'Notable List'. His essay 'Wade in the Water' was a finalist for Black Warrior Review's 2020 Non-Fiction Prize. He's probably walking his dog.

Jessica E. Johnson (she/they) is the author of the book-length poem Metabolics (Acre Poetry Series), the chapbook In Absolutes We Seek Each Other (New Michigan Press), and the memoir Mettlework (Acre Books).

Jessica is a career community college instructor based in Portland, Oregon. They are interested in inclusive learning environments, knowledge production, radical care, and the relationships between art, friendship, community, and social change. They work to make spaces for thinking, feeling, and learning together.

She is a contributor to Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, The New Republic, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Prairie Schooner, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, Annulet Poetics, Dream Pop, Terrain, The Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. She co-hosts the Constellation Reading Series.

Their honors include an Oregon Literary Fellowship, many Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination. “The Ghost Road” (Southeast Review) was a Best American Essays notable. In Absolutes We Seek Each Other was a DIAGRAM chapbook contest winner and In Absolutes and Metabolics were finalists for an Oregon Book Award in poetry.