Hippocampus Magazine and Books

14/10/2025

HAPPY BOOK FESTIVAL EVE! 🥳

13/10/2025

Explore the Archives! Since 2011, Hippocampus Magazine has published more than 140 issues full of essays, articles, and more. Like a good rerun, there's lots to enjoy again or enjoy for the first time. Browse all back issues here at the link in the comments.

An Issue-by-Issue Directory & Archive of Hippocampus Magazine Content This Hippocampus archive page has been a work in progress; we decided to make it go live in its raw form so that folks could still navigate to past issues and see a list of all stories and contributors. Previously, you had to navi...

08/10/2025

"Pushing themself was, as Selby describes, more akin to self-penalization in the wake of childhood trauma, shame, and hardship. Selby's inclination to challenge themself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, however, came at enormous cost.

From hiking to clearing brush to hauling gear up mountains to extinguishing embers buried beneath the ground, Selby's narrator may be tender towards nature, but far less tender towards themself."

– from Sarah Rosenthal's review of Hotshot: A Life on Fire by River Selby. Link to full review in the comments.

07/10/2025

"Floating on the musicality of songwriting starts as a way for Lisicky to analyze, understand, and appreciate Mitchell's greatest hits and deep cuts, but it quickly evolves into a life raft, guiding his understanding of his own writings and journey as a writer, musician, educator, and editor."

– from Sara Pisak's review of Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell by Paul Lisicky.

Link to full review in the comments.

07/10/2025

"The fine metal sweat-stink of thirteen. On the rubble track, some of us sinew and muscle, others soft dough. Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. We slap our hands palm side back side with silver buttons, buttons, buttons, all down her back, back, back. There are no adults. We know what to do."

– from "Double Dutch" by Margaret Luongo. Link to full story in the comments.

07/10/2025

Congratulations to our friend Tom McAllister! The essay he published with Hippocampus, When We Used to Glow, appears in this 2025's Best American Science and Nature Writing, edited by Susan Orlean! Check out the book here: http://bit.ly/4o3HPb1

"When we say there used to be more lightning bugs, I’m afraid we’re really talking about how our parents used to be alive." -- Tom McAllister in "When We Used to Glow"

06/10/2025

"The son of a Black father and white mother, Morris is often seen by others to be white, leading to a persistent disconnect between the ways in which he self-identifies, and how others perceive him. This discrepancy between the expectations of others — some seeking for him to "turn up" parts of himself — and his own, fosters a pervasive feeling not being perceived in his totality."

– from Anri Wheeler's review of The Tilling by Matthew Morris. Link to full review in the comments.

06/10/2025

"imagine this: you're driving in nowhere north texas, norteños on the radio, your aging father in the passenger seat, still as a wrinkle. he just had a stroke. the nearest hospital is 40 miles ahead of you."

– from "Grief always has a future" by JJ Peña. Link to full story in the comments.

05/10/2025

"Nothing about writing is tidy. Not when you're following deep lines of inquiry. Or your familial lines, for example. I am trying to understand not just the 'who beget whom,' genealogy, but the stories behind the tombstones.

I yearn to follow my ancestors into trouble and joy, perch on the rail of their front porch, and peer into their living rooms. Am I writing historical fiction? Memoir? Poetry? That's one of the 'research questions' The Lab asks."

– from Leslie Lindsay's review of The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre by Matthew Clark Davison and Alice LaPlante.

Link to full review in the comments.

05/10/2025

"I've found my passion and I've poured everything into it. The question I always get asked is, how do I manage it all? The short answer is that it changes. The long answer is more complicated."

– from the writing life column "Balancing Passions as an Author and College" by McKenna Graf.

Link to full column in the comments!

05/10/2025

"Today, Mama is the kind of happy I don't trust.

I know the drill, the way this game unfolds, the losing for us both, and I'm not down. But what choice do I have?

The taximeter reads $6.25 in bold red dashes and Mama hands the driver a ten. She is giving when she has the means."

– from "Lost" by Shoshana Ray. Link to full story in the comments.

04/10/2025

"One of my friends referred to it as 'accidental memoir.' Accidental because the essays were written separately, over many years. And in a book like this, you're absolutely right, the order is crucial. At various times over the years I've thought I'd like to put together a collection of my essays, but that's not enough for an essay collection.

There has to be something that it all hangs on, and besides my family, what it hangs on is this erasure of history, the things we choose to remember and choose to forget in our imaginations, and all in relation to our personal and cultural histories."

– Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project, interviewed by Hillary Moses Mohaupt.

Link to full interview in the comments.