Workers Write! and Overtime
Fiction
workerswritejournal.com
"In 2005, we published what we thought would be a one-time anthology, Tales from the Cubicle, a collection of stories from the office worker's point of view.
The book was so well received, we decided to make it an annual event, highlighting stories and poems from a particular workplace.
In 2006, we received a workplace story that didn't fit in our WW! series, but we wanted to publish it. So, we created Overtime, a series of one-story chapbooks that showcase workplace stories.
Nine years later, Workers Write! and Overtime have become important voices in working class literature. We are collecting the stories and poems about jobs that define who we are as individuals and communities."
Available issues (click to explore):
Pages (PDF): 21
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Andrew Plattner lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Tampa Review, Free State Review, New World Writing, Litbreak, and The Literary Review.
Pages (PDF): 33
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The son of a merchant seaman and an artist, Clark Sandford has been a merchant mariner, crab fisher (think Deadliest Catch), bat scientist, warehouseman, truck driver, teacher, school bus driver, longshoreman, stagehand, theatrical carpenter, and union activist. Those jobs were scattered throughout, and in support of his career as an actor. He has performed on stage, screen and radio. Clark came to writing later in life and has seen his work published in North America and Europe. The best gig yet comes when his granddaughter says, “Read me a book.”
Pages (PDF): 23
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Roberts ‘Bobby’ Jekabsons is an American boxer, actor, and writer born in Riga, Latvia. He and his family moved to Chicago in 1989 as political refugees in exile from the Soviet Union, where he took up boxing at an early age. He is a three-time Golden Gloves Champion, 2012 Olympic Trials finalist, and retired professional boxer. Roberts lives in New York City, where he continues to work in theatre, television, and film. He tends the bar at two of the oldest saloons in Manhattan.
Pages (PDF): 24
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Thomas Nicholson is a UX designer from the UK who has spent time living in Spain, Colombia, and Vietnam. His short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines around the world, including publications from Madhouse Books, Sonder Lit, and Scare Street. He has previously been shortlisted for both the ITT Tallaght Short Story Prize and the Crossing The Tees Literary Festival Short Story Competition.
Pages (PDF): 28
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Conor Hogan grew up in Portland, Oregon, and studied Creative Writing and Spanish at the University of Montana Davidson Honors College. After graduating, he spent two years on a Fulbright scholarship teaching English in central Mexico. He works as a smokejumper for the US Forest Service and spends his time off traveling in Latin America. His writing can be found in publications like Dreamers Magazine, The Hamilton Stone Review, and Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies, among others. He currently lives in Washington state.
Pages (PDF): 33
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During the day, Gregg Voss works for a major East Coast marking and public relations agency and covers high school sports throughout the Chicagoland suburbs in the evenings. Fiction writing is merely an interesting sidelight, and his first book, published in 2019, is titled The Valley of American Shadow, a collection of paranormal/dystopian short stories. His next book, Calling Fire From Heaven, debuted May 29, 2023, on U.S. Memorial Day. Both books are available on Amazon. Visit greggvoss.com for more details about him, and interact with him @greggvoss on Twitter.
Pages (PDF): 21
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Karl Lykken writes stories and software in Texas. He has started a few novels but would do better to finish one. His work can be found in Daily Science Fiction, The Big Jewel, and Love Letters to Poe.
Pages (PDF): 15
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June Thompson lives in a small Wisconsin town. She’s a child of blue- collar parents. She has worked in manufacturing—from assembling cell phones to packaging candy and building electric motors. She’s been a teacher, manager, blue-collar worker, and freelance writer.
Pages (PDF): 19
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Paul Cioe taught English, folklore, and journalism at Black Hawk College for twenty-five years. His short stories, essays, and articles have appeared in little magazines and Midwestern newspapers. These days, he makes music as a volunteer guitar picker and singer in nursing homes and schools in and around the Illinois-Iowa Quad-Cities. He and his amazing wife and proofreader, Nancy, live in Rock Island, Illinois.
Pages (PDF): 25
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Michael Snyder lives just outside Nashville, Tennessee, with his amazing family. His three novels were published by Harper Collins, and his stories have appeared in The First Line, Relief, 100 Word Story, Hobart, Toasted Cheese, Foliate Oak, Shotgun Honey, EveryDay Fiction, Cease Cows, and Greater Sum. Check out more stories at michaelsnyderwrites.wordpress.com/stories.
Pages (PDF): 27
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Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Hubbub, Grain, and Third Wednesday, and her newest books are The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), Book of Beasts (Weasel Press), Bound in Ice (Shanti Arts), and Music Composition for Dummies (Wiley).
Pages (PDF): 19
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Pat Detmer is an award-winning humor columnist, copywriter, and speaker who has been published in newspapers, including the Journal American, Seattle Times, and The Whidbey Island Marketplace. She has also appeared in Newsweek and wrote a column for the Newcastle News. She’s won or placed in fiction contests, most of them having to do with speed (24-hour from topic assignment to finished piece), brevity (100-word and 200- word flash fiction), or scenarios where the characters are already established and full-blown (three appearances in Star Trek’s Strange New Worlds short story anthologies).
Pages (PDF): 26
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Ryan S. Lowell is a short story writer and novelist. His work has appeared in Workers Write! and Underwood Press online, and his story “Things Fall Apart” was a Glimmer Train short story award finalist in 2010. He lives in South Portland, Maine, with his wife and son and several rescue pets.
Pages (PDF): 18
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Peter Gregg Slater is a professor emeritus of history whose scholarship in American intellectual and cultural history is often referenced in both academic and popular publications. His poetry, fiction, parody, and essays have appeared in Dash, The Westchester Review, The Satirist, and Twentieth-Century Literature, among other publications.
Pages (PDF): 21
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Angela Belcher Epps lives and writes in North Carolina. Her novella, Salt in the Sugar Bowl, was published in 2014 by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. Short stories have appeared in moonShine Review, When Women Awaken, Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora, Reflections Literary Journal, Pembroke Magazine #39, and others. She is a contributor to two anthologies: Heartspace: Real Life Stories on Death and Dying (heart2heart, 2019) and All the Songs We Sing: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writer’s Collective (Blair, 2020). Other essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, Essence Magazine, and the Ladies Home Journal, among others.
Pages (PDF): 23
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Fred Bubbers was born and raised in Queens, New York, and now lives in western Maryland. He holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and his short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in such journals as the Oregon Literary Review, Ginosko Literary Journal, Lily Poetry Review, The Loch Raven Review, and The Remington Review.
Pages (PDF): 25
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S. Frederic Liss whose first novel will be published in July, 2020, is a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, a nominee for the storySouth Million Writers Award, and a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize sponsored by University of Georgia Press, the St. Lawrence Book Award sponsored by Black Lawrence Press, and the Bakeless Prize sponsored by Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and Middlebury College. He has published more than fifty short stories. He has received numerous awards and other forms of recognition for individual short stories, including The Florida Review Editor’s Award for Fiction; James Still Prize for Short Fiction sponsored by Wind; Midnight Sun Award for Fiction sponsored by Permafrost; Third prize in the Arthur Edelstein Prize for Short Fiction; Finalist for the Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction sponsored by Carve Magazine; and Honorable Mention in the New Letters Literary Award for Fiction, and the Glimmer Train June, 2014 Fiction Open. Liss has also been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, The South Dakota Review, The South Carolina Review, Dogwood, The Worcester Review, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. He earned a BA from Amherst College, Amherst, Mass; a JD from Columbia University School of Law, New York; and an MFA from Emerson College, Boston, Mass. He was the recipient of a Grant-in-Aid in Literature from the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Boston, where he leads a workshop in writing fiction.
Pages (PDF): 23
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Glynda Francis is a Midwest writer of speculative fiction, speculative poetry, and nonfiction essays. Her works have appeared in Pleiades, Tradeswomen, Eastern Iowa Review, and The Tishman Review, among others. Both her speculative short story collection, Leyfarers and Wayfarers, and her fantasy poetry collection, Under Every Moon, were published under the pen name GL Francis by Charlie Dawg Press. She’s also an artist, tinker, machinist, and jane-of-many-trades.
Pages (PDF): 27
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Since the age of fifteen, Paul García’s been self-supporting at diverse occupations described in short stories published by North American Review and SNReview, among other magazines and literary journals.
Pages (PDF): 20
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Laura Wyckoff is a Portland, Oregon, writer whose fiction has been most recently published in The Lowestoft Chronicle, The Gateway Review, The First Line, and Sky Island Journal. Currently, she is developing a group of stories about low-wage workers and another collection set in a community garden rife with odd characters.
Pages (PDF): 35
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Paul Perilli grew up in Massachusetts and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and nonfiction have recently appeared in bioStories, Numéro Cinq, The Blotter, Thema, Taj Mahal Review, Overland, The Transnational, and other places. He’s currently working on a novel about the 2008-2009 financial crash.
Pages (PDF): 28
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Ian Rogers taught English for two years at an eikaiwa in Japan’s Yamanashi prefecture and currently teaches to public school students in Toyama. His other writing about Japanese life and travel has been featured in Eastlit, Seek Japan, Stone Bridge Press Online, and elsewhere. Originally from New Hampshire, he’s also worked as a proofreader, a housepainter, a copywriter, a landscaper, a gatherer of invasive milfoil, and a school secretary. He blogs about the difficulties faced by creative people with day jobs at butialsohaveadayjob.com.
Pages (PDF): 27
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Kyle Bilinski has worked as a painting contractor, delivery driver, flight attendant, plumbing and electrical salesman, and commercial estimator. He lives with his freckled wife and snorting Shih Tzu in Boise, Idaho, where he’s fixing up a sixty-nine-year-old house. His work can be found in places like BULL, The Baltimore Review, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, Slag Glass City, and Hour 22 of Overtime.
Pages (PDF): 19
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Julie McNeely-Kirwan’s stories have recently appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Writer’s Digest’s Show Us Your Shorts, and Sanitarium Magazine.
Pages (PDF): 30
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Joe Cappello has a special interest in the workplace and its bewildered inhabitants who seem reluctant to talk about what they do between the bewitching hours of 9 to 5. Recent work includes an honorable mention in the 2017 George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest for “The Dunbar Overpass,” appearing in the print edition of Third Wednesday, Vol. X, No. 4; “Paperless,” appearing in the online version of PIF Magazine, October 2017; “The Wok-A-Wok Dialogues—Context,” appearing in the online version of Storyscape, May 2015; and “40 Acres and a Mouse,” appearing in the online version of the Oddville Press, January/February 2014.
Pages (PDF): 30
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"Big Julie" is inspired by the electrocution of an elephant, which was filmed by The Edison Company in the early 1900s. In this story, the relationships between trainer, his boss, and the elephant comprise a sort of battered triangle that favors the boss, but whose every branch is corrupted.
Brett Busang does not yet hear voices unless he's writing. He's also in moderately good health, which may or may not include a dizzy feeling that steals over him when he's been goofing around. (In truth, he prefers this feeling to all others.)
Pages (PDF): 17
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Two college kids from the same town spend the summer getting to know each other working on the burr bench at a Wichita aircraft plant.
William Hart is a fiction writer and poet with a doctorate in English whose work has appeared in several hundred literary journals, commercial magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. He has published two novels, Never Fade Away (Daniel & Daniel, 2002) and Operation Supergoose (Timberline, 2007), and ten poetry collections. He also writes and helps produce documentary films for PBS.
Pages (PDF): 27
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Still Wet With Dishwater is a collection of five vignettes that center on kitchen/server work in and around Gainesville, Florida.
Tim Fitts lives and works in Philadelphia. He teaches in the Liberal Arts Department of the Curtis Institute of Music and serves on the editorial staff of Painted Bride Quarterly. He is the author of The Soju Club, published in South Korea as a Korean translation, and his short story collection, Hypothermia, is forthcoming with MadHat Press. His story single, "Sand on Sand Yellow," is available on Amazon, free to Kindle users.
Pages (PDF): 23
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Anna Silverstein’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Gravel, and Afro-Hispanic Review. She has an MFA in fiction from Vanderbilt University and was the Curb Center’s 2015-2016 Creative Writing fellow. She was born in Boston and currently lives in Nashville, where she teaches writing workshops.
Pages (PDF): 26
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Fishing for king salmon on a trawler in Alaska is hard enough. Having a "greeny" at the wheel makes it damn near impossible.
Dave Barrett lives in Missoula, Montana, where he teaches writing at the University of Montana. His fiction has appeared most recently in Midwestern Gothic, Potomac Review, and The MacGuffin. This story is an adaptation from his novel, Gone Alaska.
Pages (PDF): 35
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Alan is a nineteen-year-old chaplin in training, finishing his internship at the North County Jail in Oakland.
Derek Updegraff ’s fiction has appeared in Bayou Magazine, Sierra Nevada Review, Chiron Review, Palooka, and elsewhere. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, and his first book of short stories is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. He lives and teaches in Riverside, California.
Pages (PDF): 27
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The Leaf Blower is a collection of 21 work-related poems.
Thom Schramm's poems have appeared in The American Scholar, New Letters, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Pages (PDF): 23
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Simon is a congressman's aide who joins a pair of consultants on a trip to Louisiana to assess the impact of the BP oil spill on local fishermen.
Daniel Browne's fiction has appeared most recently in 40 Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, Drunken Boat, andWorkers Write! Tales from the Coliseum. He also has written nonfiction for The Oxford American, Salon, and The Believer, among others. Visit him at daniel-browne.tumblr.com.
Pages (PDF): 20
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"Something LA" weaves a copywriter intern's summer trying to become a "hip ad guy" with the current time a year later when he's graduated during a recession and must cope with the perceived embarrassment of under-employment. Along the way he writes some catchy headlines, gets to know the moral compromises of advertising, and mingles with a few famous people when he finds his way into a modeling agency party.
Pages (PDF): 31
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"People get more upset about their water than just about anything else. Makes sense: Without water you can't cook. Can't wash yourself or your clothes. Can't brush your teeth. Can't use the john. City people buy a place out here and never give a thought to water. Water is something that just appears when you open a tap, right? Until one day it doesn't, and they don't have a clue how to get it back."
Tom Wayman's fiction includes a collection of short stories,Boundary Country (2007), and a novel, Woodstock Rising (2009). A new collection of short fiction will be published in October 2015,The Shadows We Mistake for Love. He has edited a number of anthologies of U.S. and Canadian poems by people about their employment. He lives on an acreage in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern British Columbia.
Pages (PDF): 31
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Hanson took the brunt of adolescent abuse, and not much has changed since becoming the night manager of a local grocery store. But thirty years after the torment of high school, Hanson sees a chance to even the score against one of his old tormentors. Will he succeed?
Tom Larsen was a journeyman printer for twenty-five years before giving it up for the writer's life. His work has appeared in Newsday, Best American Mystery Stories, Puerto del Sol, and The Los Angeles Review.
Pages (PDF): 39
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Barry Bonds wanted the home run record. Bill Gates wanted a hundred billion dollars. Napoleon wanted Europe. All Tommy Moretti wanted was a stupid hat.
Michael Pearce's stories have appeared in Epoch, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Witness, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He designed and built exhibits for the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum, for over twenty years. He lives in Oakland, California, and plays saxophone in the Bay Area band Highwater Blues.
Pages (PDF): 30
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Drydock is a collection of 20 work-related poems.
Tim Applegate's poems and essays appear in The Florida Review, the South Dakota Review, and Cloudbank, among others. He is the author of the collection At the End of Day (Traprock Books). He lives in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon.
Pages (PDF): 21
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Graydon works in a tiny kiosk under the streets of Seattle, helping the public purchase transit cards and other permits needed to ride the rails.
Johnny Townsend has published stories and essays in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Glimmer Train, The Massachusetts Review, and in many other publications. His book The Abominable Gayman was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2011. His book Marginal Mormons was named to Kirkus Reviews' Best of 2012.
Pages (PDF): 31
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Timothy Weatherstone is adjusting to his new job as a deputy police office in the small town in which he was raised.
Michael Henson is the author of three books of fiction and four collections of poetry. His most recent work, The True Story of the Resurrection and Other Poems, was released by Wind Publications. He is a semi-retired substance abuse counselor, currently working with homeless alcoholics. He also is co-editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the annual publication of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.
Pages (PDF): 106
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Pages (PDF): 125
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Pages (PDF): 120
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Pages (PDF): 144
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Pages (PDF): 172
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Workers Write! More Tales from the Cubicle is our tenth issue and contains stories from the office drone's point of view.
Pages (PDF): 182
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Workers Write! Tales from the Construction Site contains stories and poems from workers in the construction industry.
Blueprints by Tim Applegate
Nonno's Gift by Edward McDermott
The Connector by Edward J. Scannell
Grunt Work by Z. S. Roe
Connecting by Edward J. Scannell
Rust by JD DeHart
The Brooklyn Bridge and Kinney O'Neill
by Robert Karr
Accident at Work by Adam Hoss
the esoteric syncopation of daily tasks
by Kaz Sussman
Raw Materials by Doc Pruyne
An Estimate by Joe Cottonwood
About Labor by Joe Cottonwood
Ode to a Leather Tool Belt by
Joe Cottonwood
Pallet Manufacturing by
James M. Dourgarian
Plan C by Dave Mulis
The Stone-Breakers' Song by Sunil Sharma
Ocean View by Jim Beane
The Piano Player by Tim Applegate
Marty and Jack by J. Lee Strickland
The Door Man by Lisa Vogel
Pages (PDF): 124
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Workers Write! Tales from the Coliseum contains stories and poems from workers in the sports industry.
Pages (PDF): 134
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Workers Write! More Tales from the Cubicle is our tenth issue and contains stories from the office drone's point of view.
Pages (PDF): 192
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Workers Write! Tales from the Concrete Highway contains stories from the driver's point of view.
Pages (PDF): 186
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Workers Write! Tales from the Combat Zone contains stories from the soldier's point of view.