Reader & Writer
This week as I'm navigating cataract surgery, heat wave, going back to work--I appeared on a local podcast, Written in the Stars, put out by Lansing Community College. I think it went well, except for the coughing fit I succumbed to in the beginning and my phone dinging from notifications. (I'd turned off the ringer... Continue Reading →
Maybe a year ago while out running in the neighborhood, I saw a bus letting students off and a young boy juggling a back pack and instrument case. I kept running. But something stayed with me. I wrote a piece from the perspective of voice messages. I wasn’t sure if it worked and forgot about... Continue Reading →
Intervals (description below*) put out a call for work reflecting places no longer there. Not abandoned, but lost now to time. Erasure. * Intervals is an experiment in call and response—between prompt and reply, between Pictura and its contributors. Each exchange becomes part of a continuing conversation, carried on in the spaces between our regular issues. Hidden Valley... Continue Reading →
So on the way up to Grand Rapids for a writing conference while n the bus, I saw that I got an acceptance. Great! It was for a flash I'd written awhile back and then largely forgot about. Then while out running, I remembered it at exactly the same place in the run that I... Continue Reading →
I've started a new series--you still have time to catch up--at my Freeze Frame Substack based upon my own self-doubts about being a writer. Writer. Gardener. Grandmother. While still working another job. You see, like most of us, writer is just a fraction of my life, while taking up a lot of my time. It's... Continue Reading →
Check out a new piece at Wild Greens Magazine. https://www.wildgreensmagazine.com/archive/april-2026-vi-vi#h.z2znarx3yh0i I'd had the shorty in my portfolio for almost 2 years and it finally found a home in an issue of Wild Greens with a theme of transportation. It's LOOSELY based upon a real persona nd a real incident, none of which happened at the... Continue Reading →
Actually this piece has BEEN out. I just didn’t know it. Someone at work was asking about my new book, Woman of a Certain Age, a story collection, and I said let me show you my website. I googled my name and up popped the piece, published online in Third Wednesday. Okay, that’s a surprise.... Continue Reading →
A creative nonfiction piece, commonly called The Essay—is out now! About a trip I took in 2007 to Albania, I know, no one goes to Albania. Albania is a weird mix of contradictions=cultural progress meets social mores, modernity butts up against resistance to change, hundreds of years of political upheaval. Versus. Versus. Turning towards. Against.... Continue Reading →
A piece that was accepted ages ago and is out now. Hoot Literary Review is a postcard, Sea of Lingerie is their November postcard, which yu can order--this from their website: The idea is: -to have stories and poems on a postcard, so that they can be displayed and shared easily. Stick it on the... Continue Reading →
My piece Circa 1984 has been nominated by Switch for the Best Microfiction 2026. Best Microfiction 2026 will be published by Pelekinesis in the summer of 2026. The Best Microfiction anthology series considers stories of only 400 words or fewer. Co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke, the anthology will have Pulitzer Prize winning poet Diane... Continue Reading →
Jane Hertenstein 