Category Archives: Print Magazine

Coming of Age issue explores sex, loss, and startling changes

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Readers of the Coming of Age edition will note a discrepancy between the issue date of Autumn/Winter 2024, and the publication date of May 2025. Sadly this was caused by the rapid decline and death of my mother, Anita White, during the early months of 2025. 

Being in midlife myself, I was somewhat prepared for this inevitable though devastating loss. My mother was not terribly old at 77 but, pushing 50 myself, it still felt in the natural course of things.

For those who suffer such a bereavement during childhood, the loss of a parent can trigger the worst, most abrupt transition to adulthood: a severe trauma that jolts them out of carefree innocence, straight into adult responsibilities and painful life lessons. Some of the pieces here grapple with this harshest of coming-of-age experiences, in particular Saturday Mars’ “An Ode to Dewey Dell Bundren”, a literary reflection on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that opens the issue.

Approaching loss from the polar opposite direction, Probert Dean’s short story “A Thing That Presents Itself to the Mind” explores with black humour the demise of a very different sort of mother. Douglas Cole in “A Game of Chicken” and C S Mee in “Amy Sullivan” also tangle with death and the transitional impact it makes in their tales.

Another equally significant coming-of-age theme, sex and sexuality, crops up in much of the issue. “The Sex-Education Fairy” by Monterey Buchanan offers a fantastical method of getting embarrassing questions answered at school, while Paul Hammond’s “An Odd, Odourless Scent” takes a more oblique approach to such matters in rural Ireland. In her memoir “Love in a War Zone”, Alison Watson dissects her youthful recklessness from Budapest to New York City with honesty and verve, showing how using sex to gain love and validation rarely pans out.

The poets largely grapple with sex and death as well. Elizabeth Wilson Davies, Kait Quinn, Brian James Lewis, and Craig Dobson explore some of the thrills and implications of dawning sexuality in their poems, while Alison Tanik and Eugene O’Hare suggest the darker side. Kent Leathem and Emily Cotterill conjure burgeoning homosexuality, from the challenges of feeling like an outsider to the rewards of awakening sexual identity. Kevin Grauke, the only poet to engage with death, does so with poignant simplicity.

A few writers took a more left-field approach to the coming-of-age theme. In his poem “September Cohen”, Bradley Taylor muses on an alternate reality for musician Leonard Cohen. Cat Isidore closes out the issue with her surreal story “Milkteeth”, about a girl forced into a violent confrontation with her mother’s garden flora.

As the winner of the 2024 Shooter Short Story Competition, “The Bunker” by Dilys Lovell also appears in this edition. Competition winners are not bound by the magazine’s themes, but Lovell’s piece could easily fit the category, featuring a girl on a remote island who yearns to be free of parental constraints. Her sheltered existence is shattered by the imposition of the wider world, as well as an interloper who reflects the tension she feels between safety and the call to adventure.

It is apt that, following an edition about major change, the next issue (our twentieth) will mark the end of Shooter’s life as a biannual print magazine. Shooter will evolve, but the final print edition will be themed Sweet Hereafter, both in honour of my mother and to mark the end of Shooter’s print identity. As the Spring/Summer 2025 issue, it will follow hot on the heels of the Coming of Age edition – but as with all things that die, Shooter will not be gone, but simply carry on in a different form.

To order the Coming of Age issue, please visit the Subscriptions page. 

Submit to issue 19: Coming of Age

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General submissions are now open for the Autumn/Winter 2024 issue, themed Coming of Age.

We’re looking for stories, essays, memoir and poetry on anything to do with the transition to adulthood: first love, hormonal angst, Saturday jobs, brushes with the law, experimentation, gaining independence, losing virginity. Literary reflections on books that made an impact during late adolescence would make particularly welcome essays. Tales of college and first steps on the career ladder are also relevant.

Writers should send short stories and non-fiction of 2,000-6,000 words and/or up to three poems by the deadline of October 20, 2024. In addition to thematic relevance, we seek engaging, elegant writing that maintains a high literary standard. Please visit the submissions page for guidelines.

We look forward to reading your work!

Issue #18: Nightlife

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When night falls, new worlds open up. The time after sunset is typically the domain of romance: dinner dates, cocktail flirtations, dancing as a prelude to going home together. Bad things, also, happen more easily under cover of darkness. Criminals prowl and monsters lurk. For Shooter’s Nightlife issue, many writers were drawn to tales of the latter, and so this edition ended up developing a pulsing vein of supernatural horror.

It also turned out to be a particularly strong edition for poetry. Featuring the work of ten poets (including the 2024 Shooter Poetry Competition winner, Maryah Converse, for her political “Web of Resistance”), the issue opens with two poems that capture something of the essence of the night: “as you light up” by Dilys Wyndham Thomas and “Shivering Out” by Paul atten Ash. (The latter takes the form of a “golden shovel”, plucking lines from Sylvia Plath’s “Full Fathom Five” and using each word at the end of each line in his poem: “You float near / As keeled ice-mountains / Of the north, to be steered clear / Of, not fathomed.”)

Partygoing – raves, gigs, midnight celebrations – feature in Miguel Cullen’s “Deep Mourning Dream”, Laurie Eaves’ “Ode to My Favourite Security Guard at Kentish Town Forum” and Warren Woessner’s “New Year’s Eve – Tribeca – 1984”, yet the euphoric antics are frequently laced with sadness, loneliness, or nostalgia. Casey Lawrence’s short story “The Hunt” also stalks this terrain, though with a delicious supernatural twist.

Sleep, of course, forms another obvious element of the nocturnal realm, along with one of slumber’s mortal enemies: offspring. In her poem “nightly rodeo”, Michelle Penn crafts a delightful lyric metaphor for this sort of challenge to sleep. Two prose pieces – the fictional “Acetaminophen” by Charles Cline and non-fiction “Sleepless Nights” by Laura Healy – arrive at the intersection of sleep and children, and take off in very different directions. “Zones”, a poem by Jeff Skinner, plays with the idea of counting sheep in different time zones around the world. In “Little Slices of Death”, another personal memoir, Lisa Simone Kingstone charts the impact of drug-induced insomnia upon her life during cancer treatment.

Two fiction writers, Ross Anderson and Harley Carnell, explore the devastating emotional and physical impacts of night-time shift work in “The Sleep of Reason Begets Monsters” and “Long Night” respectively, about suicide hotline workers and food delivery drivers. Jenny Danes, in “Case History”, and Gillian Fielder in “Standing on the Bridge” evoke similarly resonant, poignant scenes of confusion and distress in their poems.

For the most part, the writing in the Nightlife issue conjures states of fear and menace, loneliness and struggle, but two prose pieces also inject joy and humour. Craig Aitchison shares his fascination with bats in “Small Packages of Delight”, while J D Strunk’s “Clean Kill” depicts a midlife-crisis camping trip gone wrong with comic suspense.

And yet, even there, fear still plays a part – so if you tend to be spooked by the shadowy forces of darkness, perhaps best to enjoy Shooter’s Nightlife issue as part of your sunlit breakfast reading.

To order a copy of the Nightlife issue, or any other edition, please visit the Subscriptions page.

Issue 17: The Unknown

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The theme of our seventeenth issue, “The Unknown”, enticed writers to contemplate strangeness and difference of all kinds: in travel and identity, race and sexuality, religion and history. The broad scope in subject matter yielded a corresponding range of tones in authors’ handling of their themes, from sinister to comic.

Lisa S Lee opens the issue with a punchy short piece, “Not Quite Conversations”, born from her experience as a Korean American in the USA. Two more non-fiction tales punctuate the issue: “Variations on the Murder of my Stepfather”, in which Jessica Hinds takes a playwright’s view of the father figure in her life, and Alex Barr’s “A Nice Trouser”, his humorous memoir about an inscrutable Eastern European translator.

As ever, the edition offers a trove of compelling short fiction, all with diverse takes on the theme. Nathan Pettigrew depicts a Christian pastor in “Pride Month” at odds not only with the local imam in his Louisiana parish, but also with his own daughter. Two authors imagine very different responses to bereavement: in “Blue”, Chelsea Utecht conjures the supernatural consequences of a mother’s grief, while the protagonist of Sarah Turner’s “En Route to Elsewhere” takes off for South America following the death of her best friend. Warren Benedetto satirises a group of frenemies in his New York story “A Perfect Fit”, in which superficial preoccupations lead to a murky outcome. Billy Craven’s traveller in rural Ireland rues a wrong turn in his flash fiction piece, “In the Loop”. 

From geographic to time travel, the Unknown issue also showcases the 2023 Shooter Short Story Competition winner. “The Ones Who Came Before” by Alice Gwynn revolves around a child who strays much farther than usual at a castle playground. Gwynn won the accolade for her evocative descriptions and skilful handling of plot twists in a story with deeper undercurrents of identity and loss. 

The work of six poets (Martha Coats, Jenny Mitchell, Cecile Bol, Alexander Gast, Lawrence Bridges and Ben Groner III) complements the edition’s prose with distinctive perspectives on motherhood and love, emigration and art, other places and times. 

Finally, Nicholas West closes the issue with his debut publication, the formally innovative “GPS” – a timely play on technological concerns with an apocalyptic outcome. Here, in Shooter’s Unknown issue, the end of the world can be synonymous with the beginning of compelling adventures in literature.

To order a copy of the Unknown issue, please visit the Subscriptions page.

Dark Arts issue conjures black magic, painting mastery, suburban sorcery and political manipulation

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When daily news everywhere reeks of self-serving political machinations, it’s enough to make readers wish for a little black magic of their own: What spell could oust a buffoon from Number Ten (though perhaps, frustratingly, simply to be replaced by yet another toad)? What incantation might block an ex-president from the White House forevermore?

Some of the contributors to this winter’s Dark Arts edition have inspiring suggestions, if only in the realm of fantasy. Emma Levin opens the issue with an imaginative reversal of the frog prince myth,  “Moments Recalled in the Seven Minutes Before the Police Arrive”. Capitalists – and anyone who enjoys living on the planet – might do well to take note of the consequences in Judy Birkbeck’s allegorical “The Landowners”. In “Green Beans Are Valid”, Annie Power offers a satirical take on the Orwellian ideology police. Indebted to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Max Marioni follows yearning for belonging through to the bitter end in his tale about a student secret society, “The Laurel Wreath Club”.

Some of the issue’s most compelling work took the theme quite literally, moving away from the realm of enchantment into the world of painterly arts. The artist in Lauren du Plessis’s story, “Entropy”, finds such inspiration in astronomy at her mountaintop fellowship that she becomes her work as much as any painter can. In “The Black Place, 1944”, Robert Herbst channels Georgia O’Keefe’s experience in the New Mexico desert, where she created many of her famous paintings. The title of his story nods to some of O’Keefe’s most mesmerising dark art.

The outcomes of dark arts in war are often less positive, as Greta Hayer shows in her historical fiction “Tusk”, about an elephant handler and his giant charge in battle. Elizabeth Hosang’s malevolent “Fixtures” are much smaller, but no less potent, in the very different setting of a gnome-ridden house in suburban Canada.

To lift the spirits – as well as unsettle them – Lisa Farrell closes the issue with her entertaining piece about a rather too effective magician in her story “The Last Act”. Bewitching verse from Alicia Hilton, Jeff Gallagher, James Hancock, Nina Murray and Ceridwen Hall studs the edition, interspersing the prose with poetry on black magic, feminist revisions, challenging creativity, and the magic of science. The issue’s featured poem, Dominic Baur’s “Status Update” (winner of Shooter’s 2021 Poetry Competition), weaves together layered allusions and linguistic associations to conjure a strong sense of underlying narrative. (Both “Status Update” and runner-up Isabella Mead’s poem “Great Aunt Audrey” are available to read here.)

Also online is a new monthly project, Shooter Flash, for those who enjoy even shorter stories than the ones appearing in the magazine. The competition accepts submissions on a rolling basis, with cash prizes, online publication each month, and an annual anthology of the winning pieces that will go out to all of Shooter’s subscribers at the end of each year. The winning stories have been posted online since the inception of Shooter Flash a few months ago – please enjoy these punchy pieces on the website via the link above and, if you’re a writer of miniature masterpieces, go ahead and send us your work!

To order a copy of the Dark Arts issue or to subscribe to Shooter, please visit the Subscriptions page.