Rough Copy

It’s that time again, and I couldn’t be more excited to announce our latest issue. In it, Royce Clay Slape recounts a harrowing episode from his memoir Are You My Son? and Sandy Tanaka has penned a spellbinding story that’ll have you racing end to start to find out what happens (you’ll see what I […]

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You ask me to recount my death.  Unimportant at this juncture, do you not think?  Yes, well it was, after all, 1945, over fifty years ago. 
It is “for the record”?  How can records and statistics matter here.  How can there be clerical mistakes in the most natural act of crossing over.  Oh, not a […]

Deema Bayrakdar is a mixed media artist and textile/surface designer living in Brooklyn. Her work finds inspiration in both urban and natural landscapes, and Bayrakdar’s keen interest in energy and movement is reflected in her playful collages, prints and textile designs.
JF: First, I’d like to say thanks, Deema, for agreeing to this interview! Your images […]

An excerpt from Are You My Son?, a memoir.
The year I got my hands on a book called “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask),” was the same year my mother was admitted to a mental hospital. In my case the book would have been much more aptly titled, […]

He thinks: it was thoughtful of her
to say yes when nobody’s looking.
Slumped across his plate
is the squelched dreamy yellow
of fake pearls and sunsets.
The tines of his fork trespass,
unbutton, catch the light.

We believe that the floor will hold, will
remain flat, so we can trample it all day.
But every surface tries to shake us off.
The white horses are ferrying the seasons.
The wild roses are wilting away; in a year, we
will learn to love the husks which they have left
behind. Then we imagine forgiveness disappearing
among the sun-scarred children […]

Usually in my fiction writing classes there’s a student with a critical streak who pipes up early on in the semester and says, “What’s the point of fiction?”  And he or she will go into the whole litany we’ve heard ten or fifty thousand times before: most people read non-fiction only, movies and TV have […]

Writers aren’t generally known as the happiest lot. As a recent Guardian survey of some top writers shows, even the best ones don’t particularly enjoy it all that much. And in case you think this is a new development, an 1842 letter from Edgar Allen Poe to his publisher recently surfaced in which he was found apologizing for […]

With all the doom and gloom in the forecast—and on the ground—we here at Rough Copy thought there was never a better time for a touch of whimsy. From Zoe Francesca’s dream poems to Elizabeth McKenzie’s talking cat, there’s something in this issue to tickle everyone’s fancy. But in between the laughter, be sure to […]

A cat could change everything!
Julie began, following this brainstorm, to look in the want ads and watch bulletin boards and visit the pound, that vile-smelling, heart-breaking place. Though she lived in a third floor Russian Hill flat, and was well-aware she would end up with one of those poor housebound creatures that flop around growing […]

Jesse Reno is a self-taught artist living in Portland, Oregon. His mixed-media paintings are a delightful mix of shamanic figures, totemic imagery, forest sprites and creatures of the sea–guideposts for navigating a man-made world increasingly at odds with its natural environment.
Recently, I caught up with Jesse at Opposable Thumb here in Portland, where talk about […]