Post

by Alissa Hattman

Love letters as postcards to people, spaces, and objects, POST is an epistolary collection of postcards written by Alissa Hattman during the American Short Fiction Constellation Challenge. This was a month-long writing experiment that took place in November 2020. In the collection, Alissa explores distance from loved ones, spaces, and objects with intense depth and nuance. She offers poignant observations about our relationship to the passage of time, memories, and ideas.

27 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Alissa Hattman is author of the novel Sift (The 3rd Thing, 2023) and the zine POST (zines + things, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Carve, The Rumpus, The Gravity of the Thing, Propeller, Big Other, Shirley Magazine, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction 2020, and she was a longlist honoree for Dzanc’s 2021 Prize for Fiction. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Pacific University and an MA in English Literature from Portland State University. Alissa has taught writing classes and workshops for over 15 years and has worked as a fiction editor, book reviewer, zine librarian, writing group facilitator, and artist-in-residence at several arts centers, most recently Gullkistan Center for Creativity in Iceland. She writes short essays for her monthly newsletter, MURMUR, which also features a small press spotlight with a book give-away and other literary updates. Originally from North Dakota, she now lives and teaches in the Pacific Northwest.

Reviews

[Ja'net · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I can't quite remember how I discovered this tiny book, but when I read that it was the culmination of a postcard-writing challenge, a sucker for all things epistolary, I knew I had to read it. There are postcards to people, objects, places, animals. There were so many that resonated with me, but my favorite of the bunch has to be "Dear Aromobatidae Family": "I wish I had a poison dart father like yours, one who was patient, good at protecting. Who guarded the wet nest of childhood and carried it along the dark stripe of his back. Who found a tiny pool, safe for hatching. Who waited, his white belly settled in mud. Waited, protecting his home with a song. A father who understood the point of his poison."

Be still my poet heart.