CNF: Barn Cat
by Jodi Cressman
Have I told you about the time my mother mentioned that, as a teenager, she trapped the barn cat and drowned it, flayed it, and boiled its bones to study anatomy? It was murder with purpose—to get off the farm and into nursing school, but the story of the murder had no purpose. Not confession, scare tactic, science lesson, just memory unearthed, like somebody’s favorite dinner plate amidst the empty juice bottles and old sofas upturned by a bulldozer. Her voice flat as that plate, her body flat as that bed she lay in, four years after a stroke.
Jodi Cressman teaches writing and literature at Dominican University, just outside of Chicago. She is working on a book-length hybrid memoir about disasters that have taken place in U.S. towns called Centralia.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Barn Cat”? The story inside of “Barn Cat” was told with a flat, quiet voice in a tiny room off the kitchen, where my mother spent ten years after a catastrophic stroke, and then it hibernated in my memory for a half-decade, surfacing nearly whole in the ten minutes before a workshop at Kenyon College.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
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05/25 • Clayton Eccard
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