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Articles by Myna Chang
Kit County Jackrabbit Roundup: A Whopping Success - The Sunlight Press
by Myna Chang April 12, 1936 I press my forehead against the windowpane. Outside, jackrabbits fight in the darkness. Their cries raise the hair on my neck. I knock once on the glass. Hundreds of eyes turn toward me, glowing like scattered embers. Papa pats my shoulder. "Don't fret, Johnnie. You can stay home tomorrow." The newspapers say jackrabbits are a plague, eating everything the drought didn't already kill. Our cattle are withering away with no feed. Chickens are all dead.
Kit County Jackrabbit Roundup: A Whopping Success
by | Jul 28, 2026 | Fiction | by Myna Chang April 12, 1936 I press my forehead against the windowpane. Outside, jackrabbits fight in the darkness. Their cries raise the hair on my neck. I knock once on the glass. Hundreds of eyes turn toward me, glowing like scattered embers. Papa pats my shoulder. “Don’t fret, Johnnie. You can stay home tomorrow.” The newspapers say jackrabbits are a plague, eating everything the drought didn’t already kill. Our cattle are withering away with no feed.
Null empathy
Carys leaned against a pock-marked riot barricade overlooking the city’s outdoor market, analysing the crowd. Concrete grit dug into her back. She shifted her weight in response to the discomfort — just as a human might. She’d once hoped to build a life among these people, to find a sense of connection with them. But that was before the purge, before biomachine hybrids were outlawed. Now, she simply wanted to survive. And to do that, she had to blend in.
Trying to Change the World: An interview with Debbie Urbanski
Debbie Urbanski is an acclaimed author of both fiction and essays. Simon & Schuster published her debut climate novel, After World, in 2023, and will release her new short story collection, Portalmania, in May. I was lucky to read an advance copy of Portalmania and was blown away by the characters and tightly held tension in each piece. The emotions feel both realistic and larger-than-life. Urbanski’s prose is clean, precise, bringing each scene into sharp focus.
Tascadora, Texas, 1935
by Myna Chang The rainmaker drove into town late last night, stirring up whorls of caliche in his wake. Daddy’s afraid the man is a charlatan, doesn’t believe anyone but God can tease water from an unwilling sky. Momma doesn’t say what she thinks. Five years of breathing powdered dirt have left her just enough breath to wheeze, her words like wind across barbed-wire. They say a precise detonation, high in the sky, will shock the water out of the air.
Loose ends
16 August 2090: Temporal Research Dome Access the most recent journalism from Nature's award-winning team Explore the latest features & opinion covering groundbreaking research or
Author Interview * Lyndsie Manusos
Lyndsie Manusos’s work is always surprisingly fresh and creative. Her new novella, From These Dark Abodes, continues her tradition of immersive storytelling. The gothic setup and characters hooked me immediately. Lethe and Petunia are such compelling characters; I felt invested in their plight, and I enjoyed the reveal of the mystery surrounding their identities. The descriptions of the house & the revelries are strong—the scenes came to life as I read.
Quite Unusual: An Interview with Dave Goodman
David Goodman is a novelist and short story writer based in East Lothian, Scotland. His debut novel, A Reluctant Spy, will be released by Headline Books on September 12. I recently heard David speak about his work and was blown away by his surefooted approach to writing and his generosity in sharing craft insights.
Flash Roundup * May 2024
A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count isn’t as important as the emotion, the adventure, the sense of wonder. Including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the spaces in between.
Your Favorite Author's Favorite Author: Brian Evenson on Franz Kafka
This month, I had the pleasure of speaking with an author who’s received acclaim in literary and genre circles, demonstrating that crossover is possible between the worlds without the integrity of one being sacrificed for the other. Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, including most recently the story collection The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell (2021) and the Weird West microcollection Black Bark (2023).
Flash Roundup * April 2024
A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? About one-thousand words for flash; four-hundred words for micro. The word count isn’t as important as the emotion, the adventure, the sense of wonder. Including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the spaces in between. So many fantastic stories to pick from this month! I was especially thrilled with the April issues of Small Wonders and Flash Fiction Online.
Author Interview * Chris Panatier!
Chris is one of my favorite authors. I loved his first two novels, The Phlebotomist and Stringers. His next novel, The Redemption of Morgan Bright, will be released by Angry Robot Books in April. You can find pre-order links on his website. Thanks to Chris for taking time to answer my questions! *** Myna: Tell us about your upcoming novel! When does it come out? What’s it about? Who are your characters? Chris: Contemporary gothic, asylum horror. Morgan Bright’s sister is dead. No one knows why.
Flash Roundup * March 2024
A gathering of recent speculative flash & micro fiction, each presenting a tiny-yet-powerful universe. How tiny? One-thousand words max for flash; four-hundred words max for micro. The word count isn’t as important as the emotion, the adventure, the sense of wonder. Including science fiction, fantasy, horror, and the spaces in between.
Wild Bill’s Last Ride by Myna Chang
Billy Janson likes to tell a story about the night he found a monster in a pothole outside of Cactus Flats, Texas. The first thing Billy’ll tell you is that he used to be known as “Wild Bill,” back in the day. Anyway, Billy says he’d stopped at the Bull-Wash Truck Stop on his way home from the slaughterhouse. His truck didn’t need fuel, but he needed a hamburger steak, and he figured, as long as he was there, he might as well wash the manure out of his cattle trailer.
Suburban Median
By Myna Chang We see the body on the way to drop our kids off at school. It’s in the median at the Parkway stoplight. We don’t recognize what it is, at first. Understanding comes in pieces: leg, arm, slender foot. Naked, of course. We try to look away. But is it someone we know? Nestled there in the ragweed and road debris, snarled hair hiding her face. We gather over coffee. Talk about what we saw, how we tried to protect our children from it. Close your eyes, baby. Blood pounding in our ears.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies - The Four Gifts of Empress Lessa by Myna Chang
A Curse of Blood and Breath I remember the night I became a ghost. My husband, the Emperor, served the tainted tea himself; my punishment for giving him yet another girl-child. I was not the first Empress to drink from this cup. My newborn daughter lay on my bed, wailing. The Emperor would surely execute her next. I tried to crawl to her, to protect her, but the hummingbird beat of my heart drove the poison quickly. Disapproval rang sharp in his voice.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies - Issue #393 by Scott Andrews
At his best, Scrapper is bold and funny and sociable, and he tells great stories and dreams big dreams. But it's hard for Best Scrapper to come out, sometimes, because his earlier dreams are a now a long way from his latest reality, and you feel badly for him.
Hometown Johnnies
It was the night Johnny came back to town, one of those pent-up summer nights when the sky trembled heavy with unshed moisture, weighing us down, the burden of it pressing us into the dust, and we wanted to scream let go! but heaven wouldn’t unleash that water, held it fist-tight, just out of reach, pushing the young people to burst and the old people to beg. Someone said Johnny came in on the bus, he hitchhiked, Johnny cruised into town in a candy-apple Mustang, sweet as punch.
Let Us Dream - Small Wonders
Let us say the airlock safety catch didn’t fail. The scientists didn’t flash freeze, their bodies and the O2 didn’t whoosh out in a frosted cloud, the blood of their eyes didn’t crystallize and sparkle like ruby teardrops scattershot across the void. Let us pretend you and I weren’t a manufacturing error with too much cerebral matter to be legally scrapped. That we weren’t too human for disposal, yet too machine for acceptance. Pretend we’d been worth more than a quarterly blip in shareholder value.
Wish Upon
by Myna Chang She parks at the abandoned Texaco like she did on those long-ago Fridays, laughing with friends and counting the streetlights as they flickered to life against the prairie dusk—four lights on this side, four on that side—enough for the whole street, enough for a lifetime, she’d thought back then, each pool of illumination a possibility, a chance, a Main Street star taking wishes, making promises. She knows better now.
Wish Upon
by Myna Chang She parks at the abandoned Texaco like she did on those long-ago Fridays, laughing with friends and counting the streetlights as they flickered to life against the prairie dusk—four lights on this side, four on that side—enough for the whole street, enough for a lifetime, she’d thought back then, each pool of illumination a possibility, a chance, a Main Street star taking wishes, making promises. She knows better now.
The Great Chickenomachy of Chandler County, Kentucky
Reading Time: 3 minutes Bobby said it was a simple mix-up, but now, I’m pretty sure he’s dead. See, I buy baby chickens from the farm down the road every spring. It’s always fun to hold the fuzzy yellow puffballs. They peep and peck at my fingers as I remove them from their box and place them in the brooding room under the warm heat lamps. But this year, I opened the box to find a dozen featherless creatures, pink-skinned and covered in dimples where pinfeathers should have sprouted.
Come Out, Come Out
by Myna Chang 433 words Nati wanted her mother. She needed her mother’s jellied eyes and flesh-whorled fingers. Her heat. The chill of the ruined space station gnawed at Nati’s biometal bones, leached into her human-tinged processing lobes. She was tired of the cold. She shifted her weight, positioning the copper-laced coils of her spine over the sterile charging pad.
2023 Chapbook Contest Winners — CutBank Literary Magazine
Heart of the Lonesome Galaxy by Kate Lucas “In the human sphere, we are addicted to stories, which is to say to the notion that cause and effect exist and function as expected and somehow make meaning or at least explanation. Kate Lucas’s luminous poems search high and low, but mostly very high indeed, across space and time, for story, explanation, meaning. They apply the rules of one realm to the actions of another in a kind of stubborn hope and persistence.
Slippin’ Away
By Myna Chang Can almost see that double-dare girl now, pullin’ down storms, reaching for trouble. Eyes green as tornado sky. Teased a honeyboy from Eufaula till he started talkin’ love. Stole his daddy’s Caddy right out front the church, raced a flash of summer lightning clear through the other side—Oklahoma to Nashville, splickety-lit, then no more honeyboy, no more preachin’ daddy, just a deluge of smooth songbird nights, and that sweet slow slide into age, luscious as midnight rain.
To My American Daughter-In-Law
by Myna Chang I know the task of sorting my belongings will fall to you. I hope the novelty of this old jacket has enticed you to pluck it from the shipping crate and try it on, to discover this note waiting for you in the pocket. Do you like the embroidered edges and slip-knot closures? My grandmother was an excellent seamstress. I imagine you with my jacket draped over your slim shoulders. I’m sure you look lovely in the plum-colored silk. It was the finest available in my grandmother’s village.
2021 Chapbook Open Winner, Selected by Matt Bell! - The Masters Review
The Masters Review Blog The results are in, and Matt Bell has chosen Lindy Biller Love at the End of the World as the winner of 2021’s Chapbook Open. Biller’s chapbook will be published next spring and will be available to purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, as well as distributed digitally on our mailing list. Congratulations to Lindy Biller, and thank you from the bottom of our hearts to all of our submitters and readers.
An Interview with Chris Panatier, Author of Stringers
Chris Panatier’s second novel, Stringers, releases on April 12. Publisher’s Weekly gave the book a starred review, and the American Library Association called it “a rip-roaring space adventure” and a “touching exploration of what sentient beings owe to one another.” The author himself says Stringers is “a heartfelt sci-fi vehicle for potty jokes.” I’m a huge fan of both space opera and screwball humor, so Stringers has gone to the top of my TBR pile.
The Stubbornness of Bodies
The Stubbornness of Bodies The Stubbornness of Bodies https://i0.wp.com/barrenmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Dead-Deer-02.jpg?fit=1920%2C1440&ssl=1 1920 1440 Myna Chang Myna Chang https://i0.wp.com/barrenmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Myna-Chang.png?fit=96%2C85&ssl=1 03/24/2022 03/29/2022 It was the morning Dickie Joe Cambridge drove his not-yet son-in-law to work with him at the gas plant, listening to the teenager’s first-day jitters, willing him to shut the hell up,...
An Interview with Nick Olson, author of Afterglow
Nick Olson’s newest book, a speculative novel-in-flash titled Afterglow (Alien Buddha Press), will be released in June. Nick is a freelance editor and author of both literary and speculative fiction. His previous novels, Here’s Waldo and The Brother We Share, are available now. He is the editor of lit zine (mac)ro(mic). Nick let me take an early peek at Afterglow and I loved the complex future history he has envisioned. Thanks to Nick for this thoughtful interview.
On Sewing and the Anatomy of Lips
On Sewing and the Anatomy of Lips Cupid’s bow: The contour line of the upper vermilion. I am drawn tight, nocked with pretty words and flattering susurrations, pulled close like the fletch of a hapless arrow trembling in that heartbeat of before—then released, flung afar, the unforgivable distance of a promise unkept. I would disarm his weapon, the clever charm of his mouth, snip his bowstring and thread it sharp through the eye of my needle, Cupid’s falsehoods be damned.
A Practical Guide to Making Rain
June 20, 2021 by The Citron Review by Myna Chang Promise the rain’ll come. Tell ’em about that time in Wichita. The puddles that shimmered wet under the stars, ’cause it was you that lit their dry night bright. Charge ’em extra for your brilliance. It’s the best they’ve ever seen, or at least, the best they’ve seen lately. That’s gotta be worth something. Make a show of preppin’ your explosives. Drought’s withered their souls, made them thirsty for miracles, but don’t let ’em crowd too close.
Solitaire - Fractured
May 18, 1973 Sedan, New Mexico Smoke hugs the flare of Momma’s nostrils. “Why don’t you ever follow the rules?” The last ember of her Virginia Slim glows stubborn, even after she’s ground it into the ashtray. I sit criss-cross on the floor, hold my breath against the menthol sting, crooked rows of cards layered in front of me. I’ve played the six of hearts on the seven of diamonds. “You’re not supposed to play red on red.” She looks away, glares at the clock.
The Posh City
That mangy goat is asleep on top of my car again. I can see him through my kitchen window, lolled out like a hairy sunbather, dribbling slobber on my windshield. Dammit. The oven timer dings. Steam blasts my trifocals as I pull out a pan of Cosmopolitan Brownies. The gourmet cocoa came from a mail order chocolatier in the city. I hope the book club ladies appreciate its complex terroir. Peeking out the window, I see the trespassing goat’s still drooling on my Cadillac.
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