Category Archives: Authors

horseshoe

The Most exciting Game of Your Life//or Those Weird Wild Years You Would Rather Forget | Morgan McNaught

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1. The most exciting game of your life. You live in a basement apartment. They call it a garden apartment. When it comes down to it, it’s a fucking basement. It feels very Freudian// in a bad way//to be living in a basement. You don’t know this yet//About Freud. About basements. This is not your first garden apartment. Since she’s died – you’ve had three. It is the most lovely garden apartment you’ve had. It has a tub and a […]

Categories: Morgan McNaught, Story Club North Side

afterlife

Redux | Oliver Hoffmann

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I died on the day of my ordination to the ministry. I was in an operating theater, at one of the better hospitals in downtown Phoenix, during the actual ordination ceremony when my heart stopped beating. So you could say I was ordained after the fact. If there was some kind of message in that, I obviously missed it, though the irony was not lost on me. I had studied with an eye toward interfaith chaplaincy and end-of-life care, previously […]

Categories: Do Not Submit, Oliver Hoffman

How the Hibernation of One Led to the Insomnia of Another | KC Esper

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I work as a marketing writer for a financial firm that provides factoring services to small businesses. It doesn’t sound too interesting because it’s not; regardless, I keep convincing myself that my job equips me with a ton of skills that I’m sure will help me with whatever I end up doing in the future. The nice thing about working a very right-brained position in a very left-brained industry is that my coworkers allow me certain liberties during my shifts, […]

Categories: KC Esper, Story Club Cleveland

lion

Lion-Hearted | Joy Ellison

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Editors note: Names have been changed to protect the safety of the people of At-Tuwani. When I returned home after three years working in Palestine, people told me that I was brave. I wished they would stop. In Palestine, I wasn’t brave so much as confused. The Israeli military occupation of Palestine is baffling. Palestinian homes are demolished for not having building permits, even though it is well known that the Israeli army refuses to issue permits. Pregnant Palestinian women […]

Categories: Joy Ellison, Story Club South Side

Story of the Year 2016

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GUYS WE’RE DOING A THING. We’re excited to announce Story Club Magazine’s first annual Story of the Year Contest! Here’s how it works – the editors picked five stories that were our favorites of the year. These are stories that each showcase the visceral, open nature of live lit and demonstrate how the art of performance is pushing creative nonfiction in exciting new directions. So who wins? It’s up to you. You read, you vote, you decide. Voting takes place now through Thursday, 1/5 […]

Categories: Allison Williams, Arch Jamjun, Britt Julious, C. Russell Price, Shay DeGrandis • Tags:

candle

Same and Different: The Never-Ending Story of Chanukah | Sandor Schuman

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Listen to a version of Sandor’s story told live here. I am usually introduced as Sandy, but my given name is Sandor. Sandor is derived from Alexander – I am named after Alexander the Great. You might ask, why was a nice Jewish boy like me named after Alexander the Great? When Alexander the Great conquered Judea, the Jews were anxious. It was typical in those days that the conquering army would insist, “We won because our gods are better […]

Categories: Sandor Schuman, Sharing the Fire: The Northeast Storytelling Conference

girls on curb

Finer Things | Stephanie Douglass

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The doorbell shouldn’t have been ringing. When you are a fat kid, and you have a half-day of school, you go home, you put in Salt’n Pepa’s Blacks’ Magic, and you re-read Danielle Steel’s Fine Things for the fourth time. This is life, and it is glorious. But then the doorbell rings. And your mother rushes back to your room. Through gritted teeth, she tells you to, “Put your hair in a ponytail and go to the door.” Because even […]

Categories: Stephanie Douglass, Story Club South Side

white car

The Trip | Josephine Woodall

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  As cool as I think Jack Kerouac is, there is no way he would have been able to make it across America on that budget, that dream, and those degenerates he called friends in 2010. It’s bullshit but, because of him, I tried it. Between desperately wanting to be part of the beatniks and believing the notion that driving across the country was cheaper than flying, which, SURPRISE, it isn’t, I, along with three of my best friends from […]

Categories: Josephine Woodall, Story Club Cleveland

Postcard from Acapulco | James Sweeney

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I can count on one hand the times I’ve lived, I mean really truly lived, with passion and ferociousness and all that stuff. However, after further consideration, I am forced to admit that four of those times I was drunk. When I am sober, which is fairly often, there is nary a hint of primordial fight in me. Nor flight for that matter. You see, I am evolved from a rare strain of homo sapiens whose particular defense mechanism against […]

Categories: James Sweeney, Story Club South Side