Shows | Story Club Magazine

Mozos | Bill Hillman

January 12, 2016 by atatnall

Excerpted from the book Mozos: A Decade Running with the Bulls of Spain I woke at dawn when an officer kicked my foot and walked away laughing. Laborers finished standing and securing the barricades fifty yards away. I wandered to Telefónica, the section of the bull run course near the bull ring. Beautiful young Spanish women swept past by the hundreds. I stood in the center of the street as they passed. I met eyes with them, told them bonita. Some […]

Categories: Bill Hillman, Story Club North Side

Best Love in the World | Arch Jamjun

January 7, 2016 by atatnall

I was eight years old and running for my life. I sped into the men’s bathroom, opened a stall door, and hid. “She isn’t allowed in here,” I thought to myself, “She can’t get me in here.” Four years earlier, my mother first had her way with me. It was a children’s fashion show at our Thai temple. She dressed me up as a young girl from the hill tribes of Northern Thailand. She attacked my four-year-old boy cheeks with blush, applied […]

Categories: Arch Jamjun, Story Club South Side

A Donkey Shit Christmas | Joy Ellison

December 16, 2015 by atatnall

“I cannot believe,” I announce to my mother and father from the back seat of the car, “that there will be a live donkey at church today.” We are driving to the small Quaker meetinghouse my family has attended for nearly two decades. When I was a child, I was a wise man in the pageant for three years running. I wore a maroon choir robe, a paper crown, and a garland of crumbled tinsel, saved and reused like it really […]

Categories: Essay Fiesta, Joy Ellison

Every Single Trumpet | Maggie Andersen

December 9, 2015 by atatnall

The pregnancy was lovely. John and I were more in love than ever. I wore my girlfriends’ hand-me-down maternity clothes, craved apples and apple juice and applesauce. I read Louise Erdrich’s memoir about early motherhood and What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I would be lying propped up in bed reading when John came home, he would tell about his day, and the baby would start to kick at the sound of his father’s voice. Every. Single. Time. We celebrated […]

Categories: Maggie Andersen, Story Club North Side

My Mother, My Daughter, My Self | Diane Kastiel

November 18, 2015 by atatnall

I lost my mother when I was 15. I don’t mean that’s when she died – I mean that’s when she stopped being my mom. My parents’ tortured marriage had finally ended, and my mother wanted my three sisters and I to choose sides. When I refused she chose for me, leaving any parenting I was going to get to my father. For a variety of reasons, I couldn’t live with my dad. So I stayed with my mom, but […]

Categories: Diane Kastiel, Story Club North Side

The Cab Driver | Meryl Williams

November 11, 2015 by atatnall

It’s December. A cab driver picks me up on my way home from a friend’s Christmas party. The driver of Yellow Cab medallion number 4520 spends the next several miles trying to coerce me to sleep with him after his shift ends at midnight, in just 20 minutes. I tell him no and change the subject, again and again. He persists. A sign in front of the passenger seat tells me his cab number and directs passengers to report incidents […]

Categories: Essay Fiesta, Meryl Williams

Hairbrained | Cat Hammond

November 4, 2015 by atatnall

“You’re pretty strong for a girl.” In retrospect, I believe it was those six brief but toxic words that sounded the death knell for the beautiful, flowing locks of sandy brown hair I sported as an eight-year-old. They were uttered to me at the St. Croix Valley YMCA summer day camp after an archery lesson left a blunt-tipped arrow embedded firmly in a hay bale, unyielding as Excalibur to the pre-adolescent grasp of my fellow campers. In an uncharacteristically bold […]

Categories: Cat Hammond, Story Club Minneapolis

The Name You Give Yourself | Ellen Blum Barish

October 28, 2015 by atatnall

So there’s the name you are bestowed at birth, the one on that certificate with the curlicue border that you can never find when you need it for some official purpose. Then there’s the name you get from your mother or your older brother or your cousin that highlights some attribute that only they see, or maybe, their rhyming abilities – like in my case, Ellie Bellie, Ellen Ellen Watermelon or, my personal favorite, Ellen Blum the Sugar Blum For […]

Categories: Ellen Blum Barish, Story Club North Side

Ask | C.A. Aiken

October 21, 2015 by atatnall

I have a friend. I use the word friend because the word fuckbuddy is, as of late, something as ethereal as the beautiful human-unicorn. We’re friends but we’re mostly benefits, so awhile back we did what adult pals do together- we had a play date. He came over. Our friendship at that point was based on the logistics surrounding the benefits, where we gave each other directions, a brief hug of hello, a little bit of chit-chat. (How’s work? Congrats! […]

Categories: C.A. Aiken, Story Club North Side

Story Club Magazine

A magazine for nonfiction performance.

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