Literary MagNet

When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls "the oddball occurrences in my oddball family." He says, "I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years." But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had "tight tendons" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an "investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body," says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.

- DANA ISOKAWA

“Perhaps no literary magazine editor has done more to shape the course of Leg than Yi Shun Lai,” says Marshall. In 2017 in Tahoma Literary Review (tahomaliteraryreview .com), Lai published Marshall’s essay “Lies My Mother Told Me,” about the newspaper column his mother wrote from 1997 to 2002; printed in community and business periodicals in the western U.S., the column covered her experience with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, people living with illness, and their family. Lai, who at the time was the journal’s nonfiction editor, urged Marshall to more rigorously research the column and confront familial and cultural narratives around illness and disability that are now central to Leg. The journal is committed to offering constructive feedback and paying for accepted work ($55 for shorter pieces or $135 for longer ones). Published three times a year in print and in e-reader format, the journal will open to submissions of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction via Submittable in August.