Winter Wheat 2024: Registration is Open

Image of snow on wheat in the forest. This is promotional material for Winter Wheat writing festival.

The 2024 Winter Wheat Festival of Writing is open for registration! You can register for free by filling out the form on our website here.

Winter Wheat is a writing festival organized by Mid-American Review that features generative writing workshops, open mic night events, and a book fair on Saturday. This year’s festival will take place November 7-9th, in the Education Building at Bowling Green State University. The festival is completely free to register and attend and provides an excellent opportunity to connect with submitters and readers.

We have an amazing lineup of workshops in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and beyond that you can check out at our website. We hope to see you there!

Submissions Call: Workshop Proposals for Winter Wheat 2024

Snowy wheat closeup
Photo of Winter Wheat banner, snow crystallizing on wheat grass

The Winter Wheat organizing team would like to invite you to submit workshop proposals for the 2024 Winter Wheat Festival of Writing! 

Winter Wheat is a writing festival organized by Mid-American Review. The three day event features generative writing workshops, readings, and opportunities to interact with fellow writers. This year’s festival will take place November 7-9 2024, at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. The festival is free and open to the public, and provides an excellent opportunity to connect with submitters and readers. 

If you’d like to organize and lead a workshop at the festival, please fill out the form on our Winter Wheat Website to submit your proposal. For more information on past workshops, visit this page. We would like to receive proposals by September 24th.  

In the meantime, as the schedule develops, you can check the website for the latest news on Winter Wheat 2024. We cannot wait to see you there!

Winter Wheat Flash Fiction Battle to the Death Winner

Mid-American Review is thrilled to congratulate Gretchen Troxell as the winner of the 2023 Flash Fiction Battle to the Death! Contest participants were given the prompt “ominous” and only forty minutes to write 750 words or less. Three finalists were chosen to read their flash aloud at the final open mic event of the Winter Wheat Festival of Writing, where the audience chose “Toby” as the winner by overwhelming applause.

“Toby” by Gretchen Troxell

     Toby didn’t believe in spiders. He had never seen one. Never heard one scurrying across the walls. Never felt the satisfying pluck of a daddy long leg’s limp snapping off.

     His therapist wanted to stop wasting their sessions on this. 

     “Does it really matter?” She would ask, unprofessionally.

     “It matters to me,” he would respond, and she would say: “okay, Toby” or “fine, Toby” or “you’re paying for this session, Toby.”

       But Toby could tell even she didn’t believe him. No one did. Or, worse, if they did, they’d call him lucky.

      “It’s like a superpower,” his best friend, Adam said. 

      “Yeah, I’d give anything to never see a spider again,” his former girlfriend, Juliet said. They had broken up from a spider-based argument. Juliet, like his therapist, had grown old and tired of hearing the same old story. “You know what, Toby,” she finally said, “why don’t you just try a little fucking harder to find one then.”

       So, he did. He tried harder.

       Toby went out to his mother’s garden at night and scraped through the soil, burying hard rocks into his rotting nail beds. He slurped through worms and maggots, ants and beetles. His knees became hard-pressed and misshapen. His face darkened by the time the morning sun came up, and still no spiders.

      Toby had taken up five one-hour sessions up with his therapist with this spider talk. On the sixth session, she outlawed the discussion.

       Toby broke into the vents at his old church. He had heard rumors of spiders existing in attics and other dark spaces. He broke his left index finger from pounding the metal too hard, and he put a permanent crick in his back from bending over inside them. Rusty nails scraped across his jeans, creating new gashes of venomous blood. Some bugs came to it. Some reveled in it, cleaning his wounds with microscopic tongues. 

       He tried the cemetery. He cut himself open across the tongue with an old razor he found in the medicine cabinet. A grown man disguised as a vampire came along and called the police, but they didn’t bring any spiders with them. 

      “Why do you want to hurt yourself, Toby?” His therapist asked.

      “I thought the spiders would come.” His therapist shushed him and pointed at a sign over her right shoulder. It said no spider talk allowed. 

       The next night his dad printed out pictures of spiders from Google. “See, they’re real. Now stop this nonsense, now,” he commanded. 

      This pattern will continue until twenty years from now when Toby will get a girlfriend named Sarah. Sarah will be a nice girl whose seen spiders herself and has never known anyone to not believe in them, so Toby will never bring up his problem until Sarah finds him digging once again in the yard. His mouth will be covered in maggots, and ants will rest on his upper eyelids, and Sarah will scream so loudly, the neighbors wake up, but Toby will take her inside and try to explain. 

      “Why didn’t you say anything before?” Sarah will ask, and Toby will not answer.

       But they will talk about the problem for a few hours that night and the next and the next.

       Something very strange will happen with Sarah. She will listen, and she will follow Toby out to the garden and watch him slit his tongue and cry to the ground, and she will not leave, and one day, they will get married.

       Toby will never wake up and see a spider.

       Sarah believes this to be true.

       And weirdly, one day, it just won’t matter anymore. 

About the author: Gretchen Troxell is a third-year undergraduate student studying creative writing at Bowling Green State University. She is the fiction editor and treasurer for their undergraduate literary journal, Prairie Margins, and an intern at their graduate journal, Mid-American Review. She has been published in Fleas on the Dog and Quirk and is forthcoming in The Bookends Review, Allegheny Review, and Euphony Journal.

Winter Wheat Writing Festival Is Back to BGSU!

We’re thrilled to announce that Mid-American Review’s twenty-third Winter Wheat Writing Festival is back to BGSU from November 9th to November 11th. This year’s festival boasts an exciting lineup of over 45 in-person and online workshops covering fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and more. The full workshop schedule can be found here.

We’re honored to introduce our distinguished keynote speaker, Faylita Hicks, renowned for their critically acclaimed poetry collection, HoodWitch. Additionally, we’re excited to feature one of BGSU’s faculty members, Sharona Muir, the author of the story collection Animal Truth and the novel Invisible Beasts.

Winter Wheat is also featuring not one, but two exciting open mic nights on Friday and Saturday evenings. Friday’s open mic will take place at Howard’s Club in Downtown Bowling Green, and will be followed by a music performance by Zack Fletcher + The Toro Quartet, By the Willow, Chloe and the Strings. The event is co-hosted by Pella Felton and Bea Fields (THEYDAR). Our second open mic night will take place in Prout Chapel at the BGSU campus. Attendees are encouraged to attend both events and to share their own work with the audience! 

More information on our website

Winter Wheat is open to the public and free of charge. To register, visit our website: www.bgsu.edu/winterwheat.

To individuals with disabilities, please indicate if you need special services, assistance or appropriate modifications to fully participate in this event by contacting Accessibility Services at access@bgsu.edu or 419-372-8495. Please notify us prior to the event.

––Mays Kuhail, Winter Wheat Coordinator

Featured Writers: Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia

Distinguished alumni Remi Recchia and Roseanna Alice Recchia will read their poetry as features of Bowling Green State University’s Winter Wheat Festival of 2022 from November 10th– 12th

Remi Recchia

Remi Recchia writes with an unflinchingly graceful and poignant voice that resounds in every line of his poetry. Poems like, “Waking Up from Top Surgery in a Sparse Airbnb Living Room”describe a singular experience with breathtaking emotion: “The hardwood floor/reflects my new watch, large/face swallowing wrist:/a reminder that I am a man.” In other poems, Recchia conveys beautiful intimacy in carefully crafted words, like his poem “Fire Eater, Premolar, Bones,”: “Sometimes when we kiss, I feel your teeth/clink against mine: the quietest champagne/toast. We are not embarrassed anymore when this happens.” His book, Quicksand/Stargazing, a must-read, questions what it means to be a human/animal. 

Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. candidate in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review and Reviews Editor for Gasher Journal. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Best New Poets 2021Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi is the author of Quicksand/Stargazing (Cooper Dillon Books, 2021). His chapbook, Sober, is forthcoming with Red Bird Chapbooks. He lives in Stillwater with his wife.

(biographical information courtesy of https://winningwriters.com/people/remi-recchia)

Roseanna Alice Recchia

Roseanna Alice Recchia’s work rings with voice and power. She has a mastery of image that pervades in every line. In “Bones I Get From My Mother,” Recchia describes: “I know my tongue/is a rounded wasp’s nest/with an egg’s gold finish./Everything inside is humming.” Delicate imagery overlaps with powerful messages, while messages can also be found in every well-crafted line. In another poem, “On Being Fat-Shamed While Out with Your Conventionally Attractive Boyfriend,” Recchia delivers a powerful voice by using a simple situation of ordering food at a restaurant. She writes: “This is just one way of practicing grace,/my mother says—people mostly/mean well and are doing their best/and don’t realize how they sound./I try to play that game too.” Recchia work resounds with a vast array of readers. Check out her poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, and her chapbook, Imitating Light.

Roseanna Alice Boswell is a queer poet and educator from Upstate New York. She earned her MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University and is currently working toward her Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her debut poetry collection, Hiding in a Thimble, was released with Haverthorn Press in 2021 and she was the winner of Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2021 Chapbook Competition for her manuscript Imitating Light. Roseanna’s research interests include feminist theory, fat studies, and how these two fields speak to femininity and domesticity. She currently lives, writes, and teaches in Stillwater, OK, with her husband and their two cats, Bean and Blossom.

(biographical information courtesy of https://roseannaaliceboswe.wixsite.com/poet/home)

– Caitlyn Mlodzik, MAR