Thea Swanson holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She is the Founding Editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, and her fiction, poetry, essays and reviews are published in places such as Cutbank, Mid-American Review and Northwest Review.
January 2025 has been hard for many of us. I won’t talk about my personal loss in detail because it is too large for this space. But I will mention that it is a loss that is blanketed with regret, which creates a lump from my throat to my heart. I’m angry at one person,…
Congratulations to all 2024 Club Plum contributors. We were honored to share your work with the world. Special congratulations to our Pushcart Prize Nominees! In May 2025, the Pushcart Press will notify journals whose submissions were chosen for inclusion in the 2026 Pushcart Prize Best of the Small Presses anthology. The anthology will be published…
Read more Pushcart Prize Nominations for 2024 Work (2026 Anthology)
Where I live, the aurora borealis painted the skies last week, a few days in a row, so I am told. I very much want to see them one day, and even though I had a second chance, and a third, I did not stay up late to watch; no, I did not say to…
Hurrah! Let’s congratulate Artist Carolyn Schlam, whose oil-on-canvas artwork, Little Sister, was chosen as an Art Winner by the Sundress art judge for this year’s Best of the Net publication. See Little Sister below and also at the BOTN page here. This makes three consecutive years that Club Plum contributors’ work has been chosen by…
Mid-May, my husband and I flew across the country from Western Washington to Western New York to visit our parents: one father and one mother. They are eighty years old. A day will come, not so far from today–one year? Two? Tomorrow?–when I will not have the opportunity to hear another word from my mother’s…
I’ve been buying tablecloths. We have one table only in our small home, and it is a new table, purchased after twenty years of using a secondhand table, a crack in the base zip-tied ten years into the using. Our new table extends to fit family on days when we all come together, and we…
I go for walks these days. I walk with intentionality, cracking the day’s time, suspending the tasks I absolutely must do with the insertion of departures–out the door I go. I heighten my awareness during these thirty-to-sixty-minute outings. Here, to the right, rounding the bend, roots of thick-trunked evergreens buckle the narrow path, and up…
Thank you, wonderful contributors, for your wondrous work in 2023–congratulations!
Friday, October 13th: the perfect day to launch our annual literary horror issue. Something wonderful happens–a switch, a one eighty, a backwards drive on a roundabout–when I give myself over to the season of horror. To throw a party in spite of the darkness. To claim and reclaim. To lay it out: Here is the…
