Steve Cushman

In Hinterland Issue 3 we publish, with huge pleasure, the pieces that won the Hinterland Prize 2019: Anna Lachkaya’s beautifully evoked account of immigrant girlhood, Megan Holland’s story of grief and becoming, and Dani Redd’s other-worldly roam across a remote Scandinavian island. Inside a stunning cover, created exclusively for Hinterland by artist Rebecca Pymar, is an outstanding line-up of new creative non-fiction plus all our great regular features, including the award-winning poet George Szirtes in conversation with his daughter Helen Szirtes.

"How Birds Fly" wrestles with fundamental questions of how to adapt to the various roles in which we may find ourselves over the course of a lifetime--that of child, of spouse, of parent. There's nothing coy or hesitating about this collection. Each turn is as unexpected as it is precise, each image as emotionally resonant as it is intellectually complex. "How Birds Fly" is lived, honest, and true. --Charlotte Pense, author of "Many Small Fires""How Birds Fly" is a tender, plain-spoken but impeccably-crafted book of poems that explore honestly what it is to be a father, a son, a husband, an x-ray technician in a hospital where one is daily confronted with pain and mortality. A job that, daily, changes him. Steve Cushman weaves together these themes so skillfully that the poems in the book make a unified whole, each poem flowing into the next. And images of birds, sparrow, hawk, owl, pigeon, sapsucker run like a red thread through the pages holding them further together as if to remind us of the beauty and fragility of those winged creatures. Like life itselfperhaps, as the father tells his small son in one gorgeous poem, "it's like magic, all of it." Each time I read this wonderful book, I loved it more.-Patricia Fargnoli

Fiction. Hope comes as a hopscotch board on the sidewalk entrance of a hospital in Greensboro. Despite efforts to remove the board, it re-appears until physicians, hospital employees, and patients, including Emily, an 8-year-old fighting cancer, and Stan, an Iraqi War veteran, are drawn toward it. In this moving and sensitive gem of a story, Steve Cushman takes us to the grounds and wards of a city hospital, places he knows well, places where hope and despair, death and healing exist side by side. But when a hopscotch board mysteriously keeps reappearing on a sidewalk near the hospital entrance, despite attempts to have it scrubbed away, what occurs is a kind of miracle. This is not the miracle that makes patients well or alters the reality of their conditions. Rather it is the miracle that comes from remembered joys and shared laughter, from choosing to live fully despite disability and the lifespan that's allotted, however short or compromised by pain. Though Cushman's wonderful cast of characters may make you cry, they will also warm your heart, allowing you to believe again in the power of friendship rediscovered over a childhood game.--Miriam Herin