3QR News
3QR IS LIVE!!!! Tweet your friends! Post it on Facebook! Like it! Text about it! Shout it from the rooftops! Spread the Word in whatever mode you like. Our second annual issue is on cyber stands now! Best, JCS. A few notes from authors: “Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe would have been perfect for a 3QR table […]
CRUSOE’S FOOTPRINT by Mary Jo Salter
At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this made all the signs to me of subjection, servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me so long as […]
EMPATHY LESSON by Richard Peabody
So I had this winter job at a junkyard where I stood around a fire in a barrel and warmed my hands until the boss cussed me out. This was the signal to use my fiber blade saw and trim copper pipe from the ends of scrap car radiators. Two or three of us doing […]
3QR: FREE TO PASS by Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson
LIBERO IL PASSO: FREE TO STEP OR PASS Consider, for a moment, the concept of the Three Quarter True Story: No censorship for writers. No betrayal for readers. No locked doors with mixed messages. When teaching fiction and nonfiction to university students, I’ve found that the question invariably comes up: What is True? We discuss […]
THERE IS A SEASON: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FIVE ROCK SONGS by Dave Housley
Theme from S.W.A.T., by Rhythm Heritage. It is my first record, a 45 single bought at Montgomery Ward with allowance money I’d saved over the course of a month. I am eight years old. I am a huge fan of the television show S.W.A.T., which follows a special tactics police unit as they go about […]
UP THE BROOK by William Loizeaux (excerpt)
In my novel, The Tumble Inn, Mark Finley looks back to when he and his feisty wife, Fran, unable to conceive a child and bored with their high school teaching jobs, followed Fran’s wild plan and left their friends and families in suburban New Jersey to begin new lives as innkeepers of a ramshackle hotel […]
PRINCESS DIARY by Jean Roller
FIRST YEAR OF TEACHING. NORMAL DAY. MY CLASSROOM. “OK,” I began. “Look at the sentences on the board. Can anyone see where we might be able to put a semi-colon? Where do we need more than just a comma? Stan, stop talking, please . . .” Lakita looked up from the desk she was tattooing […]
FIRST WORD IN A TIME OF MOURNING by Elizabeth Hazen
I told myself clouds, but stars confronted me, my cosmic ignorance: speed of light, gravity, the workings of clocks, cell division, fossilization, my skin’s elasticity, and some nights the lunar phase that leaves no moon to find. I carried you in circles, eyes angling for crescent, quarter, halo. You pursed your lips, waited for my […]
GHOSTS by Diane Sward Rapaport (excerpt)
PROLOGUE If you are student of history, as I am, you study ghosts, the people that came before you, that grew up in the house you live in, planted the crab apple and apricot trees you eat from, plundered the mountain where you now walk your dog, and try to figure out what they created […]
DREAM ON by A. K. Small
When I was seventeen and dreamed big ballerina dreams, I also revered Aerosmith. I sat on the window ledge of Pacific Northwest Ballet memorizing Steven Tyler’s lyrics with my friend Jenna Butala. Crystals dangled from our necks. Names of boys like Santo vibrated against our lips, as we threw our buns back. Joe Perry jammed […]
