April 16, 2025
The South Carolina Review has now established regular reading periods instead of rolling submissions! The new submission windows are below:
Submissions are now open! We cannot wait to read your work!
April 15, 2025
Each year, SCR presents the Ronald Moran Prize in Fiction and Poetry for the best fiction and poetry submission of the year. Our fiction winner for Spring 2024 was Matt Lumbard, with his story “Big River, little river,” from SCR 56.2.
One of our assistant editors, Ella Kindt, interviewed Matt Lumbard about all things river, big and little. Read Lumbard’s winning story, “Big River, little river” here.
Ella Kindt: How did you decide on the Giant River Otter in “Big River, little river?” Do you have a particular connection to otters?
Matt Lumbard: The Giant River Otter popped out of nowhere into the story, but I think I was reading about them not too long before writing it, so they were lolling around my subconscious. They’re totally fascinating, endangered, very intelligent, beautiful, but at the same time terrifying with their size. I think at some point I realized that we associate otters as cute and cuddly…we all have that image in our heads of them lounging on their backs, holding hands…but at the same time, if you look into them in more detail, you hear about some pretty vicious behavior. So if you then take the Giant River Otter…we’re talking about an animal that can be six feet long…you have this edge to the story, and it becomes kind of scary…which was a lot of fun to play with. But yes, in general I’ve always loved otters, they’re one of my favorite animals. They’re like these crazy water-dogs to me.
EK: You said this story is about leaving home. Can you tell us about some place you left? Do your own personal experiences with leaving play a role in how the story ends?
ML: I left home a year or so before writing that story, so it was on my mind a lot. Even after only a year, which is not very long, you visit back home, and notice things are different. You’re different for having been away, and home is different because it’s been sort of moving on without you. That should be the most obvious thing in the world, and something everyone anticipates, but I don’t think it really hits you in the gut until you see and feel it for yourself. My own experience with leaving home absolutely played a role in how the story ends. I think to me it’s like, you’re either gonna go home and entrench yourself back into that life, or you’re going to fully accept the changes that are happening—you’re going to dive in headfirst and see where the current takes you, you’re going to become a Giant River Otter.
EK: Along those same lines – although it’s never exactly specified, the story seems to be set in the bayou area of Louisiana. Is that the area that you call home? Are you from there originally? Have you ever piloted a river boat?
ML: I’d say that’s a pretty good guess. And no, I live in D.C. now, but the place I call home is Verona, New York, which is a very rural place in Upstate New York, and a place that I cannot for the life of me stop writing about. Like the narrator, I basically grew up in a creek and the deciduous forest around it. It’s all about fresh water for me—rivers, creeks, lakes—I don’t like salt water at all. Verona is on the Erie Canal, so that’s where the mentions of the canal, aka the “little river,” back home come in. No, I’ve never piloted a motorized boat of any kind, actually! But it’s hard to deny the romance of river boats. Actually, I’ve never even seen the Mississippi River! But that’s the fun of fiction, eh?
EK: There’s a narrative structure to “Big River, little river,” but the linear plot isn’t really at the forefront. The story reads as if the narrator just says whatever’s on his mind at the moment it occurs to him. Tell us more about the writing process for this story. Did you have the narrative in the back of your head while writing it, or did it just come to you as you moved along?
ML: Well, it reads that way because that’s exactly what I was doing myself! Just writing completely from the hip. I haven’t been able to quite do that since. It was really fun…I just woke up with those lines in my head: I am the dumbest man driving a boat on the Mississippi today. I weigh five hundred pounds. I want to talk to you. It wasn’t from a dream I’d just had or anything. I have no idea where those lines came from, but I texted it to a friend who is often subject to all sorts of weird messages…then I realized: wait, I really like that. That’s a story. So, I went over and wrote it in one go. When I made myself the 500-pound river boat captain sort of waxing nostalgic about home, that part fell into place with almost no effort. Then, by the time I wrote the line I see cats and dogs in the stars and I knew I wanted to give those two little leaving-related anecdotes about Catnip the cat and Brittany the dog. That was a lot of fun too, and both of those anecdotes are pretty close to being true stories. I knew I was going to bring the Giant River Otter back into the story after those anecdotes, having mentioned the otters in the beginning, but I didn’t know how or what I was going to do. There wasn’t really a plan in place to have a talking Giant River Otter in the story, much less one that I fall in love with. She kind of stomped into the story much like she stomps uninvited onto the boat. But when I thought back to the bit about the shack people telling legends about people turning into Giant River Otters, it made perfect sense to me. When I saw her in my head I thought, oh…this is perfect…I’m in love with her…I’m 500 pounds, she’s 400 pounds, I love the water, this is it, and it’s my turn to leave now.
EK: What are you up to now? Are you working on anything exciting? Have any upcoming publications?
ML: I’m trying to revise a story now that I thought I’d finished a while ago and was never quite happy with. Things started to kick back into gear for it though, so I’m wrestling with that, sort of hammering away on that bad boy. As always, I’m also shopping around a handful of finished stories that I’m happy with. But my biggest project, which is always always always on my mind, is a novel I’m working on. It’s been in the works for around two years now, and sits in a shoebox, unorganized beyond belief…written on cocktail napkins, Post-its, menus, pages torn out of books, loose leaf scraps, etc…it’s going to be a huge effort to organize it all, but it’ll be fun. The good news is that it’s 65% already written in the shoebox/my head. I haven’t typed even the first sentence at the computer yet, but the house is already built. Now I have to move in, furnish it, decorate, find out where the floors creak…make it into a home. And yes, I have a story coming out very soon in issue #49 of Meridian, University of Virginia’s literary magazine.
April 10, 2025
South Carolina Review Spring 2025 Issue 57.2 is almost ready to be released! Here is a look at this issue’s cover art, Alien Spaghetti by Margaret Smith.
Alien Spaghetti uses color theory to evoke different emotions from its audience. There are four panels, each taking a unique approach, illustrating the wire’s texture and color schemes. Each panel is meant to inspire a different emotion.
“The first panel uses warm colors such as orange, pink, maroon, and primary red to convey the energy of the composition,” says Smith. “The second panel uses analogous colors, meaning they appear beside each other on the color wheel. The two rolls of wire are depicted using green and purple respectively, and the blue background unifies them because it sits between green and purple on the color wheel. The third panel uses cool colors like blue teal, and green to create a calming atmosphere juxtaposed with the warm one above it. The final panel is where the title Alien Spaghetti comes from, as the analogous colors come together to create an otherworldly experience.”
These diverse color schemes create a unique experience for the viewer with each panel. Alien Spaghetti is an exploration of how color affects the emotional experience and alters the perception of a piece of art.
Margaret Smith is a senior in Clemson University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts program with a focus in ceramic arts. She is from Greenville, South Carolina, and graduated from the Fine Arts Center in 2022 after three years of intensive study of the different mediums of visual art. She is drawn to illustrating organic materials and foliage, as well as the emotional connotations that certain objects contain. Her depictions of plants and animals are physical representations of her connection to nature. Growing up in the lower Appalachians, she was surrounded by nature and those motifs are often present in her work.
Check back with us soon for the release of the issue with selected readings and the announcement of the Ronald Moran prize winners in fiction and poetry.
February 5, 2025
ERIKA ECKART Reaper; Into the Woods; On contingency plans when one cannot release one’s young into the wild
SHARON KENNEDY-NOLLE Bad Still Life With Bob Ross; Kopack and KFC
CARSON ELLIOT Murfreesboro: Redux
STELLA WONG sonnet for pan jinlian
G.C. WALDREP Wilderness of Causes
ENEIDA ALCALDE Daughter’s Grief; Ring of Fire
PROSPER C. ÌFÉÁNYÍ The Last Image of Mercy
GRACE EZRA More Than Ever
ROSS WHITE Ode to the Fabulously Wealthy
ALLISON FIELD BELL You Burn Me
SARA BURGE Luck
JO BEAR Family Cross-Section: Mother; Unwilded
WAYNE CHAPMAN The Butterfly Garden
DANIELLE SHORR Ode to the Walmart Claw Machines
STEFANIE KIRBY Coronary; Traffic
BERNADETTE GEYER Explaing Cremation to Our Daughter at the Dinner Table
JOSEPH BYRD Haunting
LANA SPENDL Through the Window
COLLIN KELLEY Ev’ry time we say goodbye
ALEX LEE Lament for the Doe
EBEB E.B. BEIN Mother’s Day
SAM SZANTO The Spider and the Fly
STEVE DENEHAN Dressed to Go Out
KAISA ULLSVIK MILLER Last Summer
ERIK HARPER KLASS The Phenomenology of Leaving
PRACHI KAMBLE The Divers
MAURICE IRVIN Ryan Number Three
BENJAMIN MYERS Wakefield
CYNTHIA NOONEY Sterling Recruit
RYAN LIVINGSTON Mr. Gorski’s Science Club
MATT CASHION Reunions, Atrocious Manners, the Atlanta Airport
MANDIRA PATTNAIK All My Old and New Selves
SUZANNE MANIZZA ROSZAK First Night at Fern’s Spectacular Twenty-Four-Hour Diner
A.M. YANG Something Special
ANNA B. MOORE You Will Never Be Happy Again, 1986
MARY GRIMM Coming Back from the Dark
