THE KEEPING ROOM
The Keeping Room is an online magazine for all women writers, poets, and artists.
We are looking to publish your short stories, essays, free writing, poetry, and photo essays that touch on topics related to Women’s Wisdom, Lessons Learned, Self-care, Bodies, Relationships, and Community.
Writers selected for publication will be paid $25 via PayPal. Submit via Submittable.
***Simultaneous submissions are accepted, but please notify us immediately if accepted elsewhere.
***All material must be original and unpublished.
I Was Supposed to Stay Out When the Bedroom Door Was Closed by Holly Fine
Cigarette burn holes in my cardigan meant Mom kept me close. I counted them in her comforter, seared edges lined up like Orion’s Belt. Ashes into wormholes into news anchors swirling fears of Grand...
FICTION
SEX & SPATULAS by Pat Ryan
Betty never thought food would be important. She never thought about food at all, certainly not about cooking it. Since leaving home, she ate most meals in the way she liked best: with a book or magazine on the table, her eyes on the page, not the plate. Now Betty...
Notes from Camp Chaparral By Hillary Tiefer
Date entry: Sunday, July 12, 1970 I’m coping by writing these notes. I got the idea from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground that was assigned in my AP English class during my last semester of high school. I purchased a notebook and a pen and here I am...
Catch and Release by Stacey C. Johnson
It’s easy to get used to certain things, like aching shoulders and a sense of floating outside your life, looking down. A person who isn't prepared to lose what's gone will do whatever they can to hang on until the line breaks. When we used to go to the aquarium, Pa...
A TALL GLASS OF LEMONADE ON A HOT DAY By Cindy Knoebel
The burly sheriff, pressed uniform the color of gravy, knocks on the frame of the tattered screen door. “Mrs. Ordwell?” Cups a hand around his eyes, squints into the interior gloom. A basket of laundry on the floor next to a sofa covered with a flowered sheet. A...
Another Bride in Porto by Jennifer Sears
“When I desire you a part of me is gone…” Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet In Porto, everything shimmers with white. Churches with white towers line the city’s white hills. Women wearing flowing white pants and white high heels hobble up and down the city’s...
CREATIVE NONFICTION
Why Motherhood by Shay Galloway
My mother did not want seven children. She birthed me at the age of seventeen, her high school diploma incomplete, her own mother slowly dying. I imagine the discovery of my conception was not one of joy and wonder, but rather of fear, desperation, exasperation, and...
The Turquoise Mountains by Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
My first canvas hangs on the wall of my art studio in Waltham, MA. It is an abstract landscape of blues, browns, and purples, evoking mountains, lakes, and volcanoes. Throughout the first part of my life, shrinks and others including my mother have pointed out my...
Country Mouse and City Mouse by Katherine Riegel
For Carolyn1. One of us thinks too little about weight. One of us thinks too much. She is all angles, like the drawings of women in pattern catalogs at the fabric store. I am all rounded: my chin, my stomach, my upper arms like still life paintings of plump, ripe...
We Are Doing Our Best by Eileen Cunniffe
We are everywhere, the middle-aged, aging daughters and sons. Watch us folding walkers and wheelchairs into trunks, and then unfolding them again in handicapped spaces or next to sidewalk cutouts. Watch us as we fold and unfold fragile parents in and out of cars that...
Chicken Feet by Andreea Ceplinschi
Alexandru & Andreea ca. 1987, photo from author’s family archivesI could only love you the same way our mother loved chicken feet. We weren’t rich, but our grandparents raised chickens and mother could make one bird go a long way for a family of four. She’d...
POETRY
Watercolor Study, Incarnate by Alison Lubar
Watercolor Study, Incarnate I. ----- PM when the suburban navy blue becomes--------------------matte-black mid-------------------------------night chill, streetlight curfew--------------------stars recede----------to silver beads i want to blend these moonscape...
Poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz
Masterpiece In the painting, he is about to getwhat each time is his heart’s desire: access, the surge, the insecurity turninginto affirmation, fulfillment, release. Her face shows she feels it too. She is thefruit bowl on the table, and he is hungry, knows touching...
The Women I Remember by Sarah Cooke
The Women I Remember I awoke to shoutingand shadows cast by a small fireat the far end of the room.They say memory is a temple to a past best seenwith technicolor eyes. But I remember the storiesabout fires at night and the smell of wet metalpressed unforgivingly...
Eye for an Eye by Elaine Sorrentino
Eye for an Eye-----------post radiation After I silently counted the last “six Mississippi”under the linear accelerator,lowered my armsand rolled off the table,the technician tosseda fistful of confetti in the airand handed me a certificateof completion. In private...
WHITE BOYS THINK THEY OWN ALL THE CREEKS
by Leah Jones
WHITE BOYS THINK THEY OWN ALL THE CREEKS But not the mud in the bend of the road creekIt’s the field feedin’ creek--------------------------------life creekfull of crawdads beneath current-worn rock creek--------Growin’ up we all played wildamong ice covered...