Samuel Snoek-Brown

A handful of years ago, I was so taken with Hosho McCreesh’s poetry collection, For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly & Carelessly Destroyed…, that I decided to write a story about one line from each of the poems. I eventually conceived a story cycle, each poem-inspired story set in the same ecological apocalypse, and I worked on that project during my writing retreat in 2013. I’m still working on it, still reworking stories to better fit the larger narrative.

But today, I’m proud to announce that the first finished story from that project has been published in the Timberline Review. My story, “Ashfall,” was inspired by the line “Lonely as a weeping trumpet,” from the first poem in McCreesh’s book.

I’m very grateful to the Timberline Review, especially editors Peter Field and Pam Wells, for this publication. The issue is beautiful (my story is immediately preceded by a powerful poem, “Halab (Aleppo),” by Tala Abu Rahmeh) and I’m honored to be counted among such fine writers.