Cagibi

06/10/2025

A recurring once-a-month Memoir Weekend Intensive for writers who need support while finishing or revising the first draft of their memoir.
Begins next month, November 1 & 2!
Still a few spots available, dm us for for info.

12/09/2025

A haunting, powerful essay about race, religion, and roots by Rais Tuluka in Issue 26.
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I told you I like deciphering codes, right? I read the world the way some people read scripture—searching for patterns, tracing the logic beneath the surface. That’s how I learned religion. That’s how I learned racism. Both move like ghosts—impossible to touch until they find a body to inhabit, a moment to anchor them, an act to make them real.

by Rais Tuluka

10/09/2025

Get It Done Memoir Intensive!
Begins this September 27 & 28!
This recurring once-a-month weekend intensive led by Cagibi co-founding editor and memoir instructor Sylvie Bertrand is designed for memoirists who are serious about revising or completing the first draft of their manuscript. Hybrid format of a full day in person in NYC (Financial District, near all trains) and half a day on Zoom. Get your first draft done, one weekend a month at a time.
There are still a few spots left!
DM us for more info, or contact Sylvie directly: https://svbertrand.com/contact/

26/08/2025

“Remember that the goal of emotional abuse is to destabilize someone emotionally and psychologically. Abusers will say it’s all the victim’s fault, and at some point, that message sinks deeply into a victim. My book tells them they’re not crazy, and they’re not wrong, and the choices they’re making make sense in the context in which they’re living.”
From our archives, this interview with Rachel Louise Snyder, conducted by Lavonne Elaine Roberts. As relevant now as it was in 2020….

by Lavonne Elaine Roberts

25/08/2025

Two breathless, riveting flash stories from Linda Drach in Issue 16.
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It disappears in the rear-view mirror, the street where we learned to disappear behind bathroom doors and in basement corners and even in plain sight, by moving so fast we became a blur, the way the K-Mart and the tank arsenal and the poky brick houses nervously perched on grids of grass and concrete are blurring now, becoming bigger and then receding, like our teenage lives...

As My Dodge Dart Heads West // Butterfly Kit

21/08/2025

"Letting go of my material feels a necessary part of my process. I don’t want to know where I’m going—I mean, why go if you know where you are going to be led? Interweaving is part of my ruminating. Drifting. Getting to raw material. After a rough draft, one question is how to maintain that sense of, say, drift, without meaningless babble."
From our Cagibi Express archives, an interview with Kimiko Hahn.
Read the rest here:

Cagibi interviews Kimiko Hahn, whose new collection of poetry is Foreign Bodies

20/08/2025

Emotional yet quirky, "Sorrow Cake" is an unconventional story of a mother's grief.
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She was going to make a chocolate cake with strawberries, sometimes called a Thunder Cake. Except this would be a Sorrow Cake, not a Thunder Cake, even though technically it was a Thunder Cake, too. Ana had never been a mom who bakes. She had baked this cake once, however, when David was little for his first-grade class. While transferring it she dropped it on the floor. With a little bit of ingenuity, and a lot of sticky chocolate frosting, she was able to glue the whole mess back together. David’s class ate floor cake. They probably would’ve enjoyed it less if they knew it was floor cake. Life rarely gives us non-floor cake, Ana thought, we just don’t know it.

by Lin Dumas

19/08/2025

From our archives, this interview with Andre Dubus III, available here:

https://cagibilit.com/interview-with-andre-dubus-iii-gone-so-long/

CAGIBI: When was it in life that you began to be interested in experiencing new places?

Dubus: I’m sure, when I look back, that there are moments of joy. But I don’t remember a lot of those and neither do my siblings because there’s a lot of strife. Tobias Wolff in his wonderful This Boy’s Life has the line, “Memory has its own story.” For me, space… I had two relationships with space. One was fleeing, and one was sanctuary. I would try to stay away from the areas where I was going to get beat up, and I would flee to areas where I felt safe. Look, cagibis—I’ve been trying to create them my whole life.

"Over the years I’ve come to really trust what pulls me even if I don’t want to be pulled by it."

31/07/2025

Two stunning and thematic poems by Jennifer Christgau Aquino in Issue 26, with accompanying art by Rex Southwick:

"I take notes to remember it all. The grass is brushed and inviting frolic. The windows so clear you miss them. The laundry always done. The refrigerator so white-white inside, not a slimy lettuce leaf in sight. The apples are polished, the toilet paper roll full and the soap in the bathroom is a bouquet of bay leaves tied in twine. It smells like cedar. Like musk. Like warm summer. Like nothing is wilting. I walk barefoot, collecting the feeling of cold terrazzo, honed and polished concrete, of zebra wood, which is also found in Prada’s flagship Manhattan store. I touch walls and doorknobs worth more than my wedding ring."

The One Percent Rule // The Architecture of the Living

29/07/2025

A wild personal essay in Issue 26 on what happens when your mother turns into a "Q-Amom," by M.E. Lewis.
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Years after she abandoned her enterprise, when I was a junior in college, she hit menopause. More accurately, menopause hit her so hard she shattered. The timing of her crisis of identity aligned perfectly with that of the United States, and the ascending MAGA-infected corners of the web became her source of meaning. Her Twitter morphed into an engine of egomania and disinformation, and as her following swelled to 30,000 wretched users, everything grotesque and unwell inside her slithered to the surface. Her sense of reality shrank. I was mean and condescending to her. We did not get along.

by M.E. Lewis

23/07/2025

Our brand new summer issue, #26, just went live, with cover art (called "Spontaneous Self Organization" by Ry Fyan) and poems, short stories, flash fiction, and personal essays by thirteen powerhouse writers plus three translators. There's a fire in here, burning bright.

Welcome to Cagibi Issue 26.

03/06/2025

Once, mother and I were blue as a mouth that swallows the sea.
We survived the dearth of bread and light, the ghosts of fathers

and brothers behind every wall panting—the half-dead centaurs.
We bled at the altar of yes. Like prophets, years emerged

with their revelations a humming of the moon,
a throbbing of Gospel—
carry on,
carry on,
carry on.

by Leila Farjami