You know that story you’ve been meaning to write? The poem sitting in your notebook? The idea you’ve been carrying around for three weeks while telling yourself you’ll get to it “soon”?
Well, this is your official notice. “Soon” is today.
The Instant Noodles Lit Mag Al Dente Writing Workshop with Robert Fleming takes place today at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific), and we’d love to see you there.
Whether you’re a writer, poet, artist, or creative dabbler who occasionally stares out a window pretending to work, this free online workshop is designed to help spark ideas, answer questions about submissions, and get you thinking about our upcoming Al Dente issue.
No fancy credentials required. No publication history required. No secret literary handshake required.
Just bring yourself, your curiosity, and whatever creative project has been lurking in the back of your mind.
Seats are limited, and once the workshop starts, you’ll have to live with the knowledge that everyone else is talking about writing while you’re reorganizing a drawer or scrolling social media.
Thinking about submitting to the upcoming Instant Noodles Lit Mag issue, Al Dente?
Before you hit “send,” join Editor Robert Fleming for a free online workshop on Saturday, June 13, at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific).
This informal session is designed for writers, poets, and artists who want to learn more about the theme, explore ideas, and discover what kinds of work might be a good fit for the issue.
Literary magazines can sometimes feel intimidating from the outside. This workshop is an opportunity to ask questions, generate new material, and connect with fellow creatives in a welcoming environment.
Whether you already have a submission in progress or are still waiting for inspiration to strike, you’ll leave with fresh ideas and a better understanding of where your work might fit.
Attendance is free, but seating is limited.
Reserve your spot today and help us make the next issue of Instant Noodles Lit Mag something special.
Every issue of Instant Noodles Lit Mag starts somewhere.
A line scribbled in a notebook. A strange image that won’t leave you alone. A poem that refuses to behave. A story that exists everywhere except on the page.
If you’ve been looking for a reason to finally sit down and create something, consider this your invitation.
On Saturday, June 13, at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific), Instant Noodles Lit Mag Editor Robert Fleming will host a free online Al Dente Writing Workshop designed to help writers, poets, and artists generate ideas, get inspired, and learn more about submitting to our upcoming issue, Al Dente.
Whether you’re a seasoned contributor or someone who’s never submitted a piece before, you’re welcome to join us.
The workshop is free, but space is limited.
Bring your imagination. We’ll provide the noodles.
Register today and join us for an evening of creativity and community.
June, the start of summer and the month of graduations and weddings has begun. It’s a month of beginnings and endings.
I’m someone who likes to plan ahead, particularly if gift giving is involved. The holidays this month are Flag Day, Juneteenth, Father’s Day, and Summer Solstice.
This year Father’s Day falls on Sunday June 21st. I’ve been hearing advertisements for barbecue grills, power tools, personalized mugs.
But Father’s Day isn’t a day that has to be just about your father or the father of your children. And it doesn’t have to involve giving expensive items. It can be a good time to recognize the men in your life who have inspired you, as well as male friends and neighbors who have been helpful and caring.
As for gifts, the best gift is often a phone call, a card, the gift of time. From a writer, the best gift can be a story or poem.
Do not wait until the day before Father’s Day. I always find that my best work needs to sit for a while and undergo revisions before it is ready to be shared.
How to start. Everyone has their own technique. If I am writing a poem specifically to laud someone, I usually begin by listing everything about them I admire. We all notice different things. Details are important.
Or you can share an important memory and write it in prose or in verse. It can be serious or funny. Make someone laugh and you are halfway to penning something they’ll treasure.
You are writing your piece for one person. It does not have to be a masterpiece. One poet, who was popular in his time, was widely published in newspapers. His name was Edgar Guest and he was an English poet who lived a long life, 1881-1959. His poems definitely make me laugh. Here are two.
Father
By Edgar Guest
My father knows the proper way The nation should be run; He tells us children every day Just what should now be done. He knows the way to fix the trusts, He has a simple plan; But if the furnace needs repairs, We have to hire a man.
My father, in a day or two Could land big thieves in jail; There's nothing that he cannot do, He knows no word like "fail." "Our confidence" he would restore, Of that there is no doubt; But if there is a chair to mend, We have to send it out.
All public questions that arise, He settles on the spot; He waits not till the tumult dies, But grabs it while it's hot. In matters of finance he can Tell Congress what to do; But, O, he finds it hard to meet His bills as they fall due.
It almost makes him sick to read The things law-makers say; Why, father's just the man they need, He never goes astray. All wars he'd very quickly end, As fast as I can write it; But when a neighbor starts a fuss, 'Tis mother has to fight it.
In conversation father can Do many wondrous things; He's built upon a wiser plan Than presidents or kings. He knows the ins and outs of each And every deep transaction; We look to him for theories, But look to ma for action.
Only a Dad
By Edgar Guest
Only a dad with a tired face, Coming home from the daily race, Bringing little of gold or fame To show how well he has played the game; But glad in his heart that his own rejoice To see him come and to hear his voice.
Only a dad with a brood of four, One of ten million men or more Plodding along in the daily strife, Bearing the whips and the scorns of life, With never a whimper of pain or hate, For the sake of those who at home await.
Only a dad, neither rich nor proud, Merely one of the surging crowd Toiling, striving from day to day, Facing whatever may come his way, Silent whenever the harsh condemn, And bearing it all for the love of them.
Only a dad but he gives his all To smooth the way for his children small, Doing with courage stern and grim, The deeds that his father did for him. This is the line that for him I pen: Only a dad, but the best of men.
The famous English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1806-1861, was encouraged by her father to write poetry, and thus it is no surprise that she wrote poems especially for him. Here is one penned for his birthday.
To My Father on His Birthday
By Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Amidst the days of pleasant mirth, That throw their halo round our earth; Amidst the tender thoughts that rise To call bright tears to happy eyes; Amidst the silken words that move To syllable the names we love; There glides no day of gentle bliss More soothing to the heart than this! No thoughts of fondness e’er appear More fond, than those I write of here! No name can e’er on tablet shine, My father! more beloved than thine! ‘Tis sweet, adown the shady past, A lingering look of love to cast— Back th’ enchanted world to call, That beamed around us first of all; And walk with Memory fondly o’er The paths where Hope had been before— Sweet to receive the sylphic sound That breathes in tenderness around, Repeating to the listening ear The names that made our childhood dear— For parted Joy, like Echo, kind, Will leave her dulcet voice behind, To tell, amidst the magic air, How oft she smiled and lingered there.
Now it is time to write a poem or story of your own, in your style.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning may not be your style. The birthday poem to her dad was written when she was 20 years old. It captures her feelings at the time and was published in her 1826 poetry collection. Eventually she and her father had a falling out. He disowned her when she married the poet, Robert Browning.
Sometimes the memory or experience of something special, can help to inspire you. Remember you are writing for just one person, or maybe in this case two people, yourself and the recipient. Let your ideas flow and don’t start editing until you’ve written down all your thoughts.
If you’d like to create a card and a poem at the same time, here is a prompt on how to create Collage Poems. Whatever you come up with, if you consider it successful in capturing the essence of your dad, check out this opportunity to be published in the upcoming issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine,
INSTANT NOODLES LIT MAG is seeking contributors for our upcoming issue, Al Dente — and we want your work
If you’re an indie writer, poet, or artist, join us Saturday, June 13, at 5 PM Eastern (2 PM Pacific) for a free online workshop to spark your creative energies and learn where to send completed submissions.
Hosted by Robert Fleming of Old Scratch Press, Instant Noodles Lit Mag, and the Rehoboth Beach Wrier’s Guild.
Seats are free, and limited. Three lucky participants will win a signed copied of an Old Scratch Press book!
Don’t forget to visit! Voted one of the “Best Online Literary Magazines of 2024”, miniMAG lets OSP loose on Issue 198
Intense. Short. Weekly.
That’s how miniMAG describes itself. A short, intense, and weekly literary magazine specializing in short-form poetry, flash fiction, and flash non-fiction that you can rely on to offer a giddy mix of unpredictability and variety.
Voted one of the Best Online Literary Magazines of 2024, with each issue miniMAG serves up a potent deployment of text and image, a real seed bomb of words and color. A welcome arrival in my inbox for some time now, I loved the concept right from the start.
There’s something for all tastes in miniMAG, whether it’s punchy, wacky short stories or surrealist poems, intriguing essays or wild flights of fancy, graphic art or pictures drawn with big, thick crayons, delicate line art or great booming splashes of color… miniMAG has it all, set into a slick template that remains reassuringly the same: black pages, white type.
When Alex, miniMAG’s editor, agreed to let Old Scratch Press produce an issue, I was stoked. And it was great fun seeing it all come together. At 30 pages, it’s a little longer than usual, but hopefully just as intense.
And just as multifaceted, seeing as all ten OSP members contributed work:
Robert Fleming supplies much of the art (some of it ICE-themed), including two visual poems. OSP’s newest member, Beatriz Fernandez, contributes two poems and a photo. That most Neapolitan of Californians, Alan Bern, presents two photo-poems, while Virginia Watts provides two poems and a flash-fiction piece titled “War”. Dianne Pearce gives us a taste of what to look forward to from her upcoming poetry collection, “In The Cancer Cafeteria”, with a poem, a short story, and two collages. Gabby Gilliam is also here with a piece called “Reawakening”, while R. David Fulcher turns things spooky with “The Weird of the Water”. Nadja Maril supplies three poems and a photo of the most Napoleonic rooster you’re ever likely to see, while Morgan Golladay brings things to a thoughtful close with her poem “Sky Cast”. As for me, I’ve got two illustrated poems and a piece of flash fiction in there, and a couple of illustrations thrown in to boot.
For a collective work by a short-form collective, I really can’t think of a better vehicle than miniMAG. To read it, visit miniMAG and subscribe, or stop by miniMAG Press While you’re at it, recommend it to some of your friends, or all your friends! And also come visit the OSP members’ Subs too! And if you have a Substack yourself, let us know so we can drop by.
So, a special thank you to Alex at miniMAG for letting us take on Issue 198. It was a real pleasure, and I hope you’ll have us back in the not-so-distant future!
Yes, poetry collections win Pulitzer Prizes too. The 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry has been awarded to Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems. Howe is known for her observations of everyday life. She explores themes of contemporary womanhood, personal loss, human miracles, sorrow and joy. There are 111 poems in the winning collection. Howe’s direct and honest voice is her trademark. She’s a poet of our time who should not be missed. Some of her most well-known poems involve the loss of her brother in 1989 who died of AIDS-related illnesses. This is what drew me personally to her work many years ago, because I lost a brother about the same time in the same way. Here is one of her poems about this terrible sadness.
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there. And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of. It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off. For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it. Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.
I thought it might be fun to revisit the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. That poet’s name was Edwin Arlington Robinson, and he won the prize two more times after being the first winner. He was known for his narrative skill and psychological depth. Here is what is considered by many to be his most famous poem. It seems a long time ago when he was writing poetry, yet when you read this poem in particular, it seems that he could be writing this poem today. This is because all poetry is about one very complicated subject: humanity.
Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany,CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was short listed for 2024 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her.
Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:
Jonah is my first volume of poetry, so it was especially gratifying to look at the list of Category Finalists posted to the Hoffer Award website and see it there in all its glory. Just as parents can instantly spot their own kids in a crowded park full of other children not objectively dissimilar to their own in any real way, my eyes were instantly drawn to that familiar sequence of words: Jonah’s Map of the Whale. Next, of course, I checked my name—you know, just in case there was another Jonah’s Map of the Whale by some not-Anthony—, and then, certified that it was indeed my Jonah, I smiled at the sight of three little words that have come to mean a lot to me: Old Scratch Press.
I am in the process of completing my second volume of poetry, so “Jonah” seems at times like a distant country I once used to live in and hope to return to someday. So I went back to a review poet and critic Billie Mills so kindly wrote about it when it came out last year, just to see it through someone else’s eyes before writing anything about it. The book consists of three sections, each devoted to a different “persona”, which Mills described as “nearer to archetypes than individuals, carrying something of a mythical nature […] narratives, fables, romances, but never anecdotes.” It’s a good description, but that does not mean the book is non- (or im-)personal, because that narrative, mythical, fable-like quality is perhaps the most any of us can aspire to in our best (and worst) moments.
I have a thing about threes, perhaps because three was the last number I can say I ever managed to understand. I get three. I can feel three. Anything from four to the Googolplexian, and I’ll just have to take your word for it. But threes work; threes make sense. So this book, naturally, has three sections.
The first of these is a group of poems about a fictional character named Flounder, sometimes presented as a young man with mental health and addiction issues, other times as a flatfish on the floor of the Irish Sea. So when he’s not a floundering human, he’s a very human flounder, and what tips him one way or the other is how deep he sinks into his overactive, intrusive unconscious self.
The second character, Blundra, is everything Flounder is not. The world likes Blundra, and Blundra knows how to make it give her what she wants. The problem is, what she really, really wants is something this world cannot give. Constantly on the verge of an epiphany that never quite comes, she experiences a frustration that is also a sort of longing. This revelation-in-the-making whispers to her from afar in the form of her dead grandmother’s voice.
The third section of the book, the title poem, is a turn-of-the-21st-century rereading of the Jonah story, and it shares an origin with my speculative novel Hibernaculum (2024 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Science Fiction Category Finalist).
Jonah and Hibernaculum are kindred works, as they were both initially parts of a literary triptych called Three Jonahs. The third panel was the as-yet-unpublished Jestor.
I scrapped the triptych idea when Hibernaculum and Jestor turned into full-length, standalone novels, and “Jonah’s Map of the Whale” found a new home alongside “Blundra” and “Flounder”.
Although the triptych was disbanded in practice, it remains very much together in spirit. There is a Jonah and a whale in each of these works. Jonahs fleeing their own private Ninevehs, whales catching them halfway between one Joppa and another Tarshish. The whale can be a person or entity (Jestor), a process (human hibernation), or it can even be oneself and one’s past, as in “Jonah’s Map of the Whale”.
Personally and collectively, we’re constantly fleeing and being dragged back. It’s part of the cycle of existence. The Jonah tale is pure dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis…repeat), and so is history, so is an individual life.
So what sort of cartography is this “map”? In the book, it’s a two-track reverse chronology: the misadventures of Alex Iden Grey, on one hand, and the turn of the 21st century, on the other. Wrong turns, missed opportunities, and ignored warnings, all seen in retrospect and laid out as cautionary tales. And what is a cautionary tale if not a map in negative, a map that says “the guy who went this way got swallowed by a whale.”
A simple map, really… in hindsight.
That’s what the book is about. It took a long time to write (dewrite, rewrite, repeat…) and now it is what it is, no take-backs, no changes.
Born in Dublin and raised in Wicklow Town, Anthony Doyle holds a joint honours degree in English and Philosophy and a master’s degree in Philosophy from University College Dublin, Ireland.
He moved to São Paulo, Brazil, in 1999, where he works as a translator from Portuguese to English.
He writes poetry and fiction for adults, teens and children.
Wouldn’t I just be lucky enough to get Mother’s Day as my regularly scheduled blog post day. *sigh* I’m not a fan, in general, of prescribed celebration days like this one. However one of the first things my husband and I bonded over was Mother’s Day. We stood in a Ralphs together, a few weeks before the event, looking at cards:
“Mom, you were always there for me.” “Not so much.” “Mom your hugs are the warmest.” “Um, well….” And so on, until we smiled ruefully at each other, looking for the most non-sappy card, and laughing at our shared predicament.
Yes, it’s Mother’s Day, but we also have to be honest that not all mothers are the mother we need. Some are not kind or safe. Some are just cold, like hugging an ironing board instead of a loving mother, or absent, or not interested. In those cases, we learn something important. We mother ourselves. We learn to speak gently where others were harsh. We learn to protect what is still tender. We learn to become the steady presence we once needed. And, even those marginal mothers… I feel like we have to allow that not everyone who becomes a mother wanted to be a mother, and so it seems almost natural that some are not going to be good at it. Until all mothers become mothers solely by choice, there’s something demanded of, and taken from, women that also negates their personhood. So, Mother’s Day is a mixed bag at best, in my opinion and experience.
Mother’s Day does force us to think about our mothers, which I guess is the point, but let’s think beyond our biological mothers to all the ways mothers and mothering show up in our lives. Mothering does not belong to one shape, one role, or one person. We mother children. We mother pets who rely on us for warmth, routine, and the quiet comfort of being known. We mother friends when they are exhausted and cannot hold themselves up for a while. We mother partners, siblings, parents, and sometimes even strangers, offering care that asks for nothing back. Sometimes dads do the mothering better, and men can mother as well as women.
We also mother our homes, our gardens, our work. We tend to them. We notice what is growing and what is struggling. We prune what no longer serves, and we stay present long enough for things to take root.
Mothering is not only about giving birth. It is about giving attention. It is about noticing life and choosing to care for it, again and again, in all its forms.
As authors, we mother each other too. We nurture stories before they are ready to stand on their own. We encourage drafts that are still learning how to breathe. We remind each other to keep going when doubt gets loud. I have been especially grateful for Virginia Watts (who I also think of affectionately as “Dead Wood”because she has a remarkable gift for cutting away everything unnecessary from my writing). There is something deeply maternal in that kind of care. She has helped me shape my forthcoming book, and I am forever grateful because her mothering gave me courage to keep writing.
And, on Mother’s Day, I am always especially grateful for my daughter. I didn’t birth her, but I mother the heck out of her, and she often allows it and even tolerates it pleasantly, for which I am forever full of gratitude. I love being a mother, and I love mothering. It is one of my main joys in life, and on this day I send so much love to my pets, and my wonderful daughter, without whom I would not a mother be.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the variety of mothers, and to those grieving mothers or mother’s love, a hug and a wish for peace for you.
Mother’s Day also means forcing your family to do what you want to do. We’re gonna go eat dim sum now. LOL Sticky rice!
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 