Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Believer, Brevity, and
Gay Magazine. Megan has also had stories featured on the
Wigleaf Top 50, an essay honored as notable in the 2019 edition of
The Best American Essays, and a story honored as distinguished in the 2020 edition of
The Best American Short Stories. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky with her two children.
Contributions
Janika Oza
Janika Oza is a writer based in Toronto. She was the winner of the 2019 Malahat Review Open Season Award in Fiction and has received fellowships from VONA,
Tin House,
The Best Small Fictions
Cincinnati Review,
SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her KR Short Fiction Contest-winning story “Fish Stories” can be found here. It appears in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue of the
What was your original impetus for writing “Fish Stories”?
I think often about hauntings: how we can be haunted by a memory, a place, an action we did or didn’t take. I think these hauntings can manifest in very physical ways, like how we sleep or dream or digest. I wanted to take it one step further and consider what it might mean if that haunting walked through the front door. For the mother in the story, this is absolutely real, and I was interested in how the daughter would respond to something she doesn’t perceive, but maybe wishes she could.
Megan Pillow is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other places, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, The Believer, Brevity, and Gay Magazine. Megan has also had stories featured on the Wigleaf Top 50, an essay honored as