Editors: Mary Lynn Reed & Lesley C. Weston
Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Illinois. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Colorado Review, Mississippi Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Free State Review, Potomac Review, The MacGuffin, Outlook Springs, and South Dakota Review, among other places. Her fiction has been honored with the University of Maryland’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction (2013), the Per Contra Prize for Short Fiction (2009), and selected as one of the WigLeaf Top 50 Very Short Stories (of 2008). Her short stories have been finalists in Fiction Contests at The Chattahoochee Review (2014), Mississippi Review (2016), and Yemassee (2017). Her flash fiction was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2017, and appeared in the 2017 UK National Flash Fiction Day Anthology: Sleep is a Beautiful Colour. Her debut short story collection, “Phantom Advances” was published by Split/Lip Press in 2023. More info can also be found at marylynnreed.com.
Lesley C. Weston used to live on a steep city street where in one afternoon a garden was decimated to widen a parking lot. While there, in the world of corporate, non-profit art, she worked herself hard and insane. She now lives, with her beloved wife and their recalcitrant dog, at the center of MoonPark, on a sweet, wild meadow surrounded by beautiful, surly trees. Though she was once honored with a Pushcart Prize nomination and her stories were finalists in contests at Narrative Magazine, Per Contra, and Glimmer Train, she prefers reading stories others wrote and spends most of every day making and studying the visual arts and illustrating short prose. She served on the editorial staff of Pisgah Review for two years and has been a beta reader for several published novels. Her art can be found on the pages of MoonPark Review and at MoonPark Studio.
MoonPark is a sacred place, a fostering meadow, home to wild flowers, toads, black turtles, crows, wild black raspberry, red lizards, deer, turkey, coyote and healing dreams, a wild woods full of surprise beginnings and endings, where new and old growth entwine, magnificent oaks, scrub pines, briar rose and wild grape vines struggle for supremacy and light, a natural forest where past, present and future tangle under leafy canopies and stub toes over the imagined ownership of a wringer from an old wash tub, a strew of ancient bottles, and nest of baby rabbits; it is a collection place of the broken, unfinished, and abandoned, where on a bed of ferns a school bus filled with window glass and glazier tools rusts beside a collapsed dome, where following a mossy trail the hidden remains of a cobblestone drive sleeps and imagines itself a grand road to a palace, where a pet cemetery is overgrown with ivy and an empty swing with a rotted canvas creaks in the breeze and weeps iron tears for its lost children, while the unstrung harp of a grand piano mistakes the whir of mockingbird wings for its own music, and where from the center of the meadow in the deep blackness of a mid-summer night the constellations can be seen jeweling the full, laughing moon’s pajamas. MoonPark is a place where stories live and breathe and the editors lie in a hammock, or sit by a fire, reading.
MoonPark Review 