Current
Issue
Fall 2026 / Volume 13.1
Rena J. Mosteirin
—
She Had an Intuition
A woman came into my bookstore and told me she’s going to row the Atlantic. She showed me a picture of the boat. I was surprised it was made of wood. My husband builds boats out of wood. The boats on this lakeshore beach were knocking against each other in the wind. They wanted to be in the water. Have I sat on this beach before? If I sit up straight you won’t see me. If I am quiet, it’s the next best thing to being invisible. I don’t know what it would mean to want to row the entire Atlantic Ocean. Alone. In a wooden box, more or less. What is the difference between a small wooden boat and a casket? Why does the ocean call to her and not to me? What is intuition?
Rena J. Mosteirin is the author of Disaster Tourism (BOA Editions, 2025), Experiment 116 (counterpath Press, 2021), and the chapbooks half-fabulous whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and nick trail’s thumb (Kore Press), a novella that won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Mosteirin is co-author, with James E. Dobson, of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) and Perceptron (punctum books, 2025). She is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine and holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been published in The New England Review, The Poetry Society of America, The Common, The Rumpus, New York Magazine, Meetinghouse, The Southampton Review, no tokens, The Puritan and Elsewhere, a Journal of Place. Mosteirin teaches at Dartmouth College, and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.
