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Publishing exquisite fiction since 1991.

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Nicole Cooley

Bourbon and Milk: Response Training

by Nicole Cooley | August 7, 2019

Bourbon and Milk: Response Training

I sit at my desk at home in my New Jersey suburb, writing poems about gun violence, and I hear police sirens. My first thought is that there is a shooter at my daughters’ high school three blocks away. Since the Newtown massacre, police presence, sirens, and lockdowns are a feature of my daughters’ lives. Kids accept this new reality. My girls tell me that they are used to being told to “shelter in place”—which means there is no active danger—and they often can decode when a “lockdown drill” … [Read more...] about Bourbon and Milk: Response Training

Filed Under: BOURBON AND MILK, NOTEBOOK Tagged With: active shooter drill, America, bourbon and milk, classrooms, daughters, essays, gun violence, Nicole Cooley, parenting, poems, training, writing

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Issue 81

Guest-edited by Fernando A. Flores, featuring new stories by Yvette DeChavez, Julián Delgado Lopera, Carribean Fragoza, Alejandro Heredia, Carmen Maria Machado, Ruben Reyes Jr., and Gerardo Sámano Córdova.

You can preview the issue here.

NEWS

Read the winners of the 2024 Insider Prize

Read the winners of the 2024 Insider Prize

By ASF Editors

“Memories are a nuisance,” Peter wrote to one of our writers after reading his short story, “but nonetheless they seem to make us who we are, as this story confirms.” This year’s submissions told many stories burdened with memory, but just as many stared bravely into the face of hope, satirized the state of politics, speculated on the future of the world, or else built entirely new worlds to inhabit. In short, the stories written on the inside reflected the stories we wrote this year on the outside. Stories of human toil and dreams and everything in between.
 

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