MADELINE FFITCH
When We Fight, We Have Our Children with Us
By Madeline ffitch
"The idea that political work is for young, idealistic, childless adults is one way to keep such work carefully controlled, to cast it as exceptional, a hobby for the privileged few, when of course it’s neither. It’s ordinary and necessary. So is parenting. In the camps at Standing Rock, children were everywhere."
"Cabin Creek" on Electric Literature
The story of Madeline ffitch's 'Cabin Creek' is thus. A woman, known only as the boss, supervises a crew comprising, inexplicably, a credit card debtor and a pair of punch drunk lovers.
"The Vertical Frontier" on Guernica
Read an early excerpt from my novel Stay and Fight, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in Spring 2019. It was posted on Guernica in March 2017
"Valparaiso, Round the Horn" on Barrelhouse
"For every construction worker who is a man who pees next to the work area of a construction worker who is a woman and when the woman says 'please don’t do that. Instead, why don’t you pee in the porta-pottie?' and the man says 'if you don’t like it don’t work on a fucking construction site,' and the woman complains to her supervisor..."
"The Private Fight" in The Collagist
"Helen Conley loves a man who she caught recently with his jaw slack and a book open in front of him. He snapped both jaw and book shut when he saw Helen coming up the path, but she knew for a fact that the book reads America is the most exciting thing to have happened to anyone in four hundred years..."
"What Wants to be Shot" in Sententia
"Even now, no one knows what it was like for Thomas J. Jefferson and Flip. J. Jones to be best friends. No one knows what it was like for them that summer, though each day, Hayworth watched their long involved preference for each other. They tried to attract the attention of the songbirds in the ash trees, and they used outdated slurs such as 'bulldagger.'"
"Greenhill" in Vol. 1 Brooklyn
"Aboard the hulks, the women convicts all turned to common law wives before our eyes. Greenhill and I tramped four hundred miles North from the harbor, looking for a shepherd on the other end, a poacher, a slave, a skiff, a schooner..."
"Lake of the Ozarks" in Everyday Genius
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"Twenty years ago, my little sister Jenny was three years old, and all the way to the Lake of the Ozarks, she only wanted to hear songs that had her name in them, and she wanted to hear those songs over and over again..."