Come celebrate the release of Lisa Thornton’s We’ll Be Birds with a reading featuring Sumitra Singam, Nora Maynard, Will Musgrove, Evan Williams, Claudia Wair and Amy Barnes. Sign in to the reading here. Passcode is 477264.

Deftly switching between past and present, the seven stories in Lisa Thornton’s We’ll Be Birds have as much to do with memory as anything. In “All God’s Creatures,” an older man loses track of the dinner conversation with his wife as he recalls an encounter with a desperate stranger the night before. In “Untethered,” a little girl longs for her absent father even as her mother curses his name. “Summer in the Midwest” is more experimental, everything existing all at once—Madonna on the television, an aunt’s funeral in the den, a stepmother sipping hot coffee in the kitchen with a teenage house party unfolding down the hall—as a tornado encircles the house. Lisa Thornton trusts her readers, giving them just enough to let their imaginations run wild. The stories here don’t come straight at you, but sideways, and beam right into your heart.

Lisa Thornton is a writer and nurse. She has stories in SmokeLong Quarterly, Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, and other magazines. She has been shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best Small Fictions. She lives in Illinois and can be found on Bluesky and Instagram @thorntonforreal.

ALSO FEATURING

Sumitra Singam writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). She works in mental health. You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2

Nora Maynard’s recent fiction has appeared in Variant Lit, Moon City Review, hex literary, Gone Lawn, HAD, and is forthcoming in Citron Review. She’s the coeditor of -ette review, a journal of very short fiction. She lives in New York City.

Will Musgrove is a writer and journalist from Northwest Iowa. He received an MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIMBER, Cleaver Magazine, Oyez Review, The Lumiere Review, Tampa Review, The McNeese Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. When he isn’t writing, he’s often wishing life was like a 1990’s Saturday morning cartoon. Follow him on Twitter at @Will_Musgrove

Evan Morgan Williams is the recipient of a 2024 Oregon Literary Fellowship. He is the author of four collections of stories: Thorn (BkMk Press, 2014, winner of the Chandra Prize), Canyons (2018), Stories of the New West (Main Street Rag Press, 2021), and The Divide (forthcoming, Cornerstone Press, 2026). Williams has published over 75 stories in literary journals including Kenyon Review, Witness, Zyzzyva, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana. A proud member of the Deaf/HOH community, he is retired after 29 years of teaching in a public school.

Claudia Wair is a Black American writer whose work is forthcoming or has appeared in Vestal Review, Pithead Chapel, Astrolabe, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. You can read more at claudiawair.com, or find her on Bluesky @CWTellsTales.bsky.social and on Instagram @CWTellsTales.

Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft. She has words at The Rumpus, The New Territory Mag, In Short, Literary Namjooning, MER Literary, Linton Press, The Citron Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Spartan Lit, JMWW Journal, No Contact Mag, Paragraph Planet, Complete Sentence, Gone Lawn, Trampset, The Bureau Dispatch, Stanchion, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, -ette review, Reckon Review, Cease, Cows, and many other sites. Her writing was included in Best Microfiction 2025, Best Small Fictions 2022, and longlisted for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021 through 2025. She’s a Fractured Lit associate editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Narratively Chief Submissions Reader, reads for The MacGuffin, and an instructor for the Narratively Academy and Writing Workshops.