Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter
Please read this section before submitting work.
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By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).
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Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.
Fiction may be submitted in three formats:
very short stories less than 500 words in length
short stories less than 1000 words in length
Short stories that don’t fit the above should be less than 3000 words.
We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.
Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some
interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000
words
Book Reviews should be positive unless the author
is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not
discourage it..
Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that
it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to
publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose
count.
Published works are welcome with proper attribution.
Welcome to the 65th issue (Volume 17, no 1) of the Wilderness
House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a
group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards.
Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 1500 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.
The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have
been presented as PDF files. This is a format that
allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on
the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your
computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading
then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.
Finally, the
copyrights are owned by their respective authors whose opinions are theirs
alone and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or partners.
Just when we thought the Covid-19 pandemic was over, a year after we thought the nightmare of President Donald Trump was surely past, the specter of World War III was suddenly thrust upon us. What is America (and their friends in Europe) to do when a nuclear tipped country like Russia invades a neighbor with murderous abandon, with brute force and no ethical, moral, or political justification.
Ukraine voluntarily gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for having its integrity guaranteed by both the United States and Russia. It should be clear to all that if Ukraine still had its nuclear weapons there would be no war with Russia. In many respects this war is a result of America’s own reluctance to take the moral high ground in either Syria or in the Crimean invasion. We signaled to Russia that our promises were hollow. And because we did nothing when Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula Putin had no compunction to even consider the west in his fantasy of recreating the Russian Empire.
Now, of course, the war between Russia and Ukraine is real. Tens of thousands of people are dead as a result. Had Russia overtaken Ukraine as fast as both Russia and the Western intelligence agencies expected the complacency of the west would have continued. We would have said, “Oh well, it’s a fait accompli, there is nothing we can do about it.” Almost regrettably, the Ukrainian army proved to be a bit more resilient than anyone expected and the Russian army proved to be an incompetent shadow of what western military agencies believed. Thats a problem. The west has been providing arms and military equipment at an astounding rate and the Russian army appears largely defeated in the west of the country. What if it’s defeated everywhere? What if Putin resorts to the nuclear option. Does the west capitulate or find a moral knife grazing our civilized skin. Where do we draw a real line in the sand that risks everything. At some point we have to if we believe what we preach. The consequences would not be a nuclear winter, in all likelihood, but more like the medieval plague that killed over 50 – 70% of the population of Europe in the 14th century. Civilization did survive. We all have a choice to make.
Lastly we’d like to thank Jeffrey Feingold for donating $300 to Wilderness House. We don’t get a lot of donations, and we don’t sell a lot of ads so this donation is special, It allows us to pay to host WHLReview.com for another year. Thank you Jeffrey.
There is, sometimes, a fine line between fiction and non-fiction. We have several essays that muddy that line. I've been assured by the authors that their stories rightly belong here and not in our fiction section. You can be the judge of that.
On Earth as It Is, by Michael Todd Steffen
Cervena Barva Press, 2022 53 pages, $16.00 Review by Denise Provost
No Time For Death By Harris Gardner
Cervena Barva Press
ISBN: 978-1-950063-59-8, 82 Pages, $18.00 Review by Dennis Daly
Good Harbor by Max Heinegg,
Lily Review Books, Whitman, MA, 2022, 55 pages, $1800. Review by Ed Meek
To Govern the Globe, World Orders and Catastrophic Change
Alfred McCoy. Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2021. Review By Ed Meek
Looking Back At Hong Kong
Edited by Nicolette Wong
Cart Noodles Press, Department of English
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
ISBN 978-75646-0-7, Softbound, No Price
Given, 155 pages Review by Zvi A. Sesling
