Decades ago, in Orange County, California, Jennifer Hawk and Tania Runyan shared a number of high school classes but traveled in different social circles. Tania was scary-nerdy-awkward—E.T. and Laura Ingalls’ lovechild—and Jen was scary-sexy-cool—black eyeliner, skateboards, and bands Tania couldn’t pronounce. But they’ve developed a deep relationship over the years, sharing their lives and their…

Melissa Kuiper’s short story collection, The Whole Beautiful World, was published in 2017 with Brindle & Glass and reviewed in Image 99 by Samuel Martin. Melissa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Puritan, Ryga, Joyland, The Rusty Toque and Qwerty. She has an MA in Creative Writing from University of Toronto. In addition to…

Continued from yesterday. Catholic imagery appears throughout Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, the posthumous selected stories that has brought her singular fiction out of obscurity. The magnificent “El Tim,” a story about a charismatic adolescent Mexican-American boy who disrupts a Catholic school with his sly behavior, begins: “A nun stood in each classroom…