by Lettie Carrick Checking In is an interview series where we talk with previous contributors and learn about their writing life since they published with us. Looking back, what do you think of Whorl, the fiction piece you submitted to Subnivean back in our second volume? Do you remember anything in particular about the writing process? I remember wanting to write about an oddly powerful salon I attended at a friend's home located a far drive into the country. This was back i

Rachele Salvini is the winner of the 2026 Subnivean Fiction Award selected by Megan Mayhew Bergman. She is an Italian woman based in the US. She spent most of her life in Italy, and she writes both in English and Italian. Her chapbook "Oklahoma Bestiary" was the runner-up for the 2023 Quarterly West Chapbook Award and came out in early 2025. She is the winner of the Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment Honey Prize 2026, and her work has been published in Prairie Schooner,

Rachel Cascella has been published in Brides, Action, Spectacle, kerning, and Writing Disorder. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. https://www.rachelcascella.com/ PEOPLE PEOPLE Miles’ greatest pride—besides his daughter, Lotus—was being in a special class of folks he liked to call, ‘people people.’ He knew that it wasn’t book smarts or precise calculations that got the world’s most successful people to where they were in life, but rather a sense of knowing exactl

Bruce Crown is from Toronto. He is an alumnus of the University of Toronto and the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of four novels, available wherever books are sold, and has served as the Editor of the Hart House Review. He splits his time between Copenhagen and Toronto. You can find him on Instagram at @wittyoutlaw UNSEEN BY US The regulars at The Noble Poble-Sec, a Catalonia-inspired bistro-bar, are all about ambiance and a desire for flight. I’m the dayman. I’m

Stephen J. Bush was born in Bath, England, and lives in Xi’an, China, where he works as a biologist. His fiction can be found, or is forthcoming, in Bending Genres, Complete Sentence, Five on the Fifth, Lost Balloon, and Oyster River Pages, among others. COMFORT FOOD After the sad smilers and over-stayers, the tupperwares of cassoulet and hands upon the shoulder; after all that, after the “if there’s anything I can do”, in all its variants, it’d be quiet. Life was meant to g

Meg Lubey is a visual artist and writer in Cleveland, Ohio. They are also the author of a chapbook called "About Cutting Limes and the Moon Being in Half". Website: meganlubeyart.com ALL ABOUT WANT Need this beautiful loser to scour me for boyishness like checking a dog for fleas and I need more of it. Eat me, leave the flannel then put it back on. Watch me watch a stranger grieve as a midnight snack. Let me tell you about how the day I got a girlfriend I also wrote my ow

Charles Richard Livesay is a teacher from Knoxville, TN. He has been published in Strange Horizons, Oh Reader, Pictura Journal, Rat’s Ass Review, and oddball magazine, among others. He watches birds, reads books, and sometimes forgets to take out his earbuds before he falls asleep. When that happens, Buck Owens haunts his dreams. Website: charlesrichardlivesay.blogspot.com THE WAY WE WORK The owl in my backyard willow wakes up early, does a goofy dance down a branch. That sh

Anne Barngrover is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Everwhen, which was published with University of Akron Press in 2023 and named the bronze medal winner in poetry for the 2023 Florida Book Awards. She is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she directs their low-residency MA in Creative Writing program, and lives in Tampa, Florida. BLOOD ARK In the tidal ebbing, seashells grow brown fur, noncalcareous mat

Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age. Brittney is the recipient of a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellowship and a former editor with Airlie Press. She was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for over three decades, where she is an event planner at her alma mater, Reed College. Brittney’s recent debut short

R. Kumra is the winner of the 2026 Subnivean Poetry Award selected by Chen Chen. He was the winner of the 2026 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction and 2026 Annie Dillard Non-Fiction Award and Finalist for the 2026 Tobias Wolff Fiction Award. Inhale was first written on receipt paper and napkins in the break room of a New Jersey warehouse, then retyped into a secondhand laptop missing the letter Q. He did not own a website. He did not teach. For years he lived with hi

Ariel Berry is a freelance writer and editor with a PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University and a master’s degree from the University of Maine. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including 3cents, Flash Fiction Magazine, and American Short Fiction. She’s usually nestled deep in the woods on a New Hampshire mountainside with her family, where she writes, reads, and surrounds herself with creatures, both wild and adopted. broken things don't alwa

Julia Li is a second year MSPA candidate at Stanford University School of Medicine. Her work has appeared in R2: Rice Review, the Rice Thresher, and Blood and Thunder Magazine. Julia is a recipient of the 2022 Max Apple Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the 2022 George G Williams Prize in Creative Writing, and she is the recipient of the 2023 Schumann Brother’s Grant for Travel Journalism and 2022 English Minter Summer Scholars Scholarship. She attended Tin House’s Summer Wor

Darren C. Demaree is the author of twenty-five full-length poetry collections, most recently Got There: Poems on Vanishing, (April Gloaming Publishing, April 2026). He is the recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Grant, an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, and the Nancy Dew Taylor Award from Emrys Journal. He is currently working in the Columbus Metropolitan Library system. www.darrencdemaree.com EMILY AS I ST

Eloise Schultz lives in downeast Maine. She is the author of [DUG OUT], a hybrid collection forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. She enjoys playing the flugelhorn. Find her online at www.eloiseschultz.com. HALF A HOLE Lindsay's garden comes up late this year. We haul kelp from the Camry and don’t talk about his daughter’s chemo. My therapist says grief is a hole in the living room floor. You get used to avoiding it, but sometimes you forget. If it takes two men t

Justin Courter’s books include the novel Cadenza. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, American Book Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poetry East, and numerous other publications. More about it can be found at www.justincourter.com. DOMESTIC TERRORIST After dinner, she plunged her steak knife into his heart. He had the temerity to point this out. You’re too sensitive, she said, disgusted, as blood blossomed on his shirtfront. You look pale, she said. You shou

Naa Asheley Ashitey is a Chicago-born writer and MD–PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A first-generation, low-income Ghanaian-American and University of Chicago alumna, she writes at the intersection of race, medicine, and belonging. Her creative and editorial writing examines how policy, media, and academia reproduce structural violence—and what it means to resist with truth. Her creative work appears or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Br

AJ Bergmann is a 2026 Subnivean Poetry Award finalist. They are a writer, educator, and scientist from the San Francisco Bay Area. They hold an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. AJ's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Madison Review, Denver Quarterly, and other publications. PRINCESS CAKE The day before Valentine’s I wear calluses into my heels wearing combat boots to the mundane extreme of walking in the city in which I work but do not live

Barbara Lawhorn is a finalist for the 2026 Subnivean Fiction Award. She teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Western Illinois University. She’s into community literacy work, mindfulness, walking her amazing dog, Banjo, running, eating pie, and finding the wild places, within herself and outside in the world. She lives joyfully in the Midwest with her two sons. Her most recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction can be found at Iron Horse Literary Review, Panorama: The Jour

Abubakar Auwal, TPC VIII, is an award winning teen author of two forthcoming Chapbooks: Portrait Of gods As Metaphors , 1st runner up...

Ace Chu is a writer from Singapore — h is recent work can be found in places like Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Pithead Chapel,...