Thea Swanson is a feminist atheist who holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She is the Founding Editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, and her poetry, fiction, essays and reviews are published in places such as World Literature Today, Mid-American Review and Northwest Review.
Greetings, Spring. Here in name and date, yet you still hunker, hail dropping like small, felled birds from my blue sky. But I will greet you anyway, because I love you, and I want you to be here. In Volume 4, Issue 2 of Club Plum, the ones we love are often out of reach.…
Quiet Club Plum publishes reverberating talent, resonating in the minds and hearts of the editors and judges at Sundress Publications once again. THREE pieces were chosen for the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology: one WINNER and two FINALISTS: Nicola Brayan / Linger: Art Winner! Greg MacDonald / dd041720-alt: Art Finalist! Laura Goldin / “You…
Read more Club Plum Best of the Net 2023 Winner and Finalists!
Happy 2023, and thank you for being a part of Club Plum’s fourth year kick-off. We are thrilled to be here and to share some creations with you. 2022 was rough for many of us, but I am not going to list all our trials here. I want to go forward, not in forgetting but…
I wish I could introduce this year’s Literary Horror issue, Volume 3, Issue 4 of Club Plum, with something light, paying homage to breath-stopping make-believe horrors that entertain or instruct, or nodding to wondrous non-horror works, bringing it full circle to this issue. But we are in the midst of real horror that I must…
Above my desk at home hangs a framed poster of a painting by John William Waterhouse, a poster I have kept for almost thirty years. The painting is titled The Lady of Shalott, named after the famous poem of the same name by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I bought this poster in a poster shop on…
Since the first day that Vladimir Putin’s army invaded Ukraine, I’ve stopped reading and writing. I should say, my only reading is news about the invasion (as well as Club Plum submissions). My books and journals sit untouched, and the essays I had thought I would tackle are still undeveloped, hastily voiced notes spoken into…
Congratulations to Club Plum contributor, Ann-Marie Brown, whose dreamy painting, Plums, was chosen as a 2022 Best of the Net Anthology Finalist in the Art category. Over 3,500 entries from many journals in all categories were submitted. So. That is something. Please see Ann-Marie Brown’s chosen piece below and also in Volume 1, Issue 3,…
I’ve been working from home since March 2020. I am one of the lucky ones, able to sit in a comfortable chair and do all my paid tasks with the joining of fingertips and keycaps, sometimes with video and audio, sometimes with time-sensitive texts, but always with communication, cooperation and collaboration of real people. I…
Come December, I will bake many cookies–hundreds, I suppose. I try to call these Holiday Cookies, not Christmas Cookies because I am an atheist, though I wasn’t always. Many years ago, I adopted the yearly cookie-baking to which my mother-in-law introduced me. My own mother had never baked, so I reveled in this new endeavor,…
Congratulations to Club Plum’s 2021 Best of the Net nominees! It looks like this year is the first year Sundress Publications has opened up a category for art, and I am thrilled they did so because our pages are full of wonderful visual offerings. See last year’s Best of the Net winners and finalists in…
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