Oct 14, 2025
We breathe in, feeling the cold air shock and settle in our lungs as we rub our hands together to keep warm, as we reach out and turn the key.
Kerry Cullen, from House of Beth
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We breathe in, feeling the cold air shock and settle in our lungs as we rub our hands together to keep warm, as we reach out and turn the key.
Kerry Cullen, from House of Beth
House of Beth
By Kerry Cullen.
Guest Post, Kerry Cullen: On Heroes
Guest Post, Kerry Cullen: On Heroes @kermichele
One particularly boring day in 9th grade Chemistry, I wrote a story about my group of friends defeating our evil teacher. I folded it in a note, and passed it along the back row, where the story’s heroes read it one by one, stifling laughter and sneaking glances at the blissfully unaware teacher. We had recently decided we were all superheroes– vigilantes, to be specific. Everyone got a nickname…
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Many people would say that this unease is where true faith begins. There are so many ways to have faith. There are so many ways to use it—to love people, and to hurt them.
Catapult | Breaking the Horse: evangelical Christianity, queerness, and doubt | Kerry Cullen
“I learned about hell in Sunday school, and I started having nightmares about waking up to a burning house and having to choose who to save: my mom or my brother, my gerbil or my cat. I would lie awake for hours, doing emotional math, trying to figure out how to rescue everyone.”
Read a new essay by Kerry Cullen on growing up in an evangelical Christian household.
(via Catapult | Breaking the Horse: evangelical Christianity, queerness, and doubt | Kerry Cullen)
Episode 49: Kerry Cullen, A. Igoni Barrett, & Sara Majka
Three readings on the moments when our bodies and lives surprise us and betray us, in ways common and seemingly supernatural. Kerry Cullen reads her short story, "Unidentifiable," originally published by Monkeybicycle, A. Igoni Barrett reads from his novel, Blackass (on sale March 1) and Sara Majka reads an excerpt from her collection, Cities I've Never Lived In (on sale now).
This episode also marks two years of this podcast! If you’re in New York, come to Housing Works March 9th to celebrate!
Download this episode from iTunes, subscribe on iTunes, or listen right here:
As always, if you’d leave a rating & review in iTunes, sunset will keep getting later and later until you forget what winter even was.
If you’d like to read more
by Kerry:
“The Rat King” (Fwriction Review)
“Bloodline” (Blunderbuss)
“Tell Me What to Do” (Luna Luna)
by Igoni:
“Be Careless With Your Wishes” (Electric Literature)
“The Worst Thing That Happened” (Guernica)
“Interview: A. Igoni Barrett“ by Ted Hodgkinson (Granta)
by Sara:
“Travelers” (Catapult)
“Saint Andrews Hotel” (Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading)
“Sara Majka on Finding the Distance to Write a Story,” interview by Rebecca Worby (Electric Literature)
About the writers:
Kerry Cullen's work published or is forthcoming in The Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, One Teen Story, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and more. Kerry is an editorial assistant at Henry Holt & Co. and earned her MFA at Columbia University. She is represented by Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company. She is currently writing a novel about sex, god, and Christian rock.
A. Igoni Barrett is the author of Blackass and Love Is Power, Or Something Like That, as well as a winner of the 2005 BBC World Service short story competition, and the recipient of a Chinua Achebe Center Fellowship, a Norman Mailer Center Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. His short stories have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Nigeria.
Sara Majka: When she was young, Sara Majka’s family moved along the New England coast, living in Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, Cuttyhunk, Maine, and even for a time in a lighthouse. She received graduate degrees in writing from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Bennington College and was awarded a fiction fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She now lives in Queens with her young son. Cities I've Never Lived In is her first book out in February 2016 from Graywolf Press and A Public Space.
“Invasion from Planet Z-4000,” by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith (November/December 2015)
“New Routes,” by Jane Liddle (September/October 2015)
“The Rat King,” by Kerry Cullen (August 2015)
“Last Train,” by Paul Crenshaw (July 2015)
“Missed,” by Sergei Burbank (June 2015)
“What World We Build After All That’s Burned Away,” by Justin Lawrence Daugherty (May 2015)