The Distance Between Stars: fiction
After a devastating alien invasion, aspiring journalist Niquish Fromer wrangles a spot on the last fleet to leave Earth. She interviews her shipmates to save their stories for posterity…if anyone survives.
Told in monologues as the first documentary from space, The Distance Between Stars considers what we hold onto when everything crumbles, and how to let go.
Read the Prologue:
By the time the colonists left the solar system, the fleet broadcast television shows and poems and even children’s books about our near-extinction. Creativity is funny that way: it can’t sit still, even on an interstellar ship racing toward uncertain stars.
After Earth, a lot of people wrote histories of the fall. The Und landings and the alien wars. The burning cities and refugee camps. And the UN fleet, 81 colony ships launched toward Alpha Centauri while the ashes settled below.
But in the beginning, as the survivors crowded onto the ships, it was just one journalism student with a busted iPhone and a broken heart, talking to the heroes and victims of the fall.
In the first documentary from space, narrator Niquish Fromer interviews her shipmates to save their stories for posterity…if anyone survives.
Buy The Distance Between Stars now in paperback or Kindle Unlimited.
You can also hear the complete story for free on the Stephen Cavitt Presents podcast, as nine actors bring the documentary to life. Find the show on all your favorite podcast players.
Noctis Terrores: poetry
Bốn mươi lăm
Twist the hand throttle,
and Hoi An blurs.
Redlights like paper lanterns
through rain-streaked glasses.
A pair of snowy egrets glides
over a rice field, then two girls flutter
in ao dai, the long white dress.
I finally found the world.
Rain stings my face.
Noctis Terrores–Latin for night terrors–is the first collection from a working poet who has taught for Duke University, the University of Tennessee, and Florida Gulf Coast University.
Blending persona and prose poems, nature and surrealism, gratitude and a healthy dose of regret, Cavitt reports back from a world where, as he writes in Petroglyphs, “there is not enough time to love this Earth.”
Noctis Terrores carries us around the world, from Cavitt’s childhood Appalachians to the streets of Vietnam, the canyon Southwest, and the cultural and ecological oddities of his adopted Florida home.
Leaving Da Lat
Pine trees. A granite cliff. The taxi stinks
of smoke both old and new. Banana leaves
fan the sunlight, then shadows smooth red dirt.
I almost know what to do with my life.
That boxing ring in Saigon, motorbike
rides in the rain. There’s enough turquoise sky.
Dying, Jim comes to me in a dream.
Books spill from infinite library shelves.
There’s so much to learn! he says.
I remember who I used to be.
Buy Noctis Terrores now in paperback and Kindle Unlimited.
You can also hear Stephen perform each poem on The Poetry Professor podcast, an alternative textbook for creative writing instructors and writers who can’t attend an MFA. Find the show on all your favorite podcast players.
Forthcoming: No Common Water
Now accepting submissions for our collaboration with the tiny journal!
The ultimate realm has one thousand kinds and ten thousand ways. When we think about the meaning of this, it seems that there is water for various beings but there is no original water—there is no water common to all types of beings. –Zen Master Dōgen, Mountains and Rivers Sutra
How can we indulge ourselves in the ecological? What ecological pleasures can we embrace amidst trends of inhibition and moderation? What does indulgence mean to you, and what does it mean to other creatures? What combinations of settings, styles, and subjects seem delicious? What stories do you have that are arranged like three-course meals? What is succulent, intoxicating, sexy, refreshing like sour lemonade, relaxing? Following Zen master Dōgen, how can we embrace the proliferation of perspectives, sensations, and delights of the more-than-human world—of an anglerfish fluorescing in the dark, a pinecone breaking open to seed in the midst of burning, a fire ant biting down?
In No Common Water, a collaborative anthology between Electric Phoenix Press and the tiny journal, we seek stories, essays, and poems that reify one thousand kinds and ten thousand ways of being. We invite writers to abandon restraint and write towards abundance in a time of ecological scarcity. We want to devour flavors, choreographies, flirtations, delicacies, flora and fauna, desire and satiation in the widest and wildest terms. We are interested in what ecological familiarities romance gray whales and house Haleakalā silverswords. Take your time, relish, and tangle with the sublime of speculation.
We welcome works that experiment with form and scale: works that luxuriate, overindulge, or dissolve. We prefer literary works, but are open to stories that are genre-connecting or -bending if it helps engage indulgence. We are not interested in works that have gratuitous violence, sex, or offensive language if it is not serving the purpose of the piece. Write toward pleasure without apology, toward ecological worlds that are imperiled, and also irresistibly alive in the face of it all. Let abundance answer catastrophe.
- Prose: up to 7,500 words (flash and short-shorts especially welcome).
- Poetry: 3-5 poems, totaling no more than 10 pages. Please place each poem on a separate page. We are looking for poems that are around twenty lines.
- Visual Art: up to 3 pieces of visual art. Any form.
- Simultaneous submissions are encouraged, but please let us know as soon as possible if your work has been accepted elsewhere.
- Reprints of published works are allowed if author retains rights for print, e-book, and audio, but original works are preferred.
To submit by the August 10 deadline, visit https://the-tiny-journal.submittable.com/submit/351867/no-common-water