Three recent MFA alums—Jessika Bouvier, Kara Crawford, and Connor Harding, all class of ’25—have recently debuted an online literary journal, Chatterbox!, dedicated to short fiction on the longer side. Each month, Chatterbox! presents one short story or novel excerpt between 4,000 and 10,000 words, along with an interview with the author. The debut story, “Pegged,” appeared in late August and was co-written by Jaime Goh, also Mason MFA ’25, and Henry Sussman; the co-authors are interviewed here. “The Frog Parade” by Aurora Huiza appeared in late September, and October brings “Get Back On, If You Fall,” by fellow MFA grad Bodie Fox; bookmark the website’s “Read” section to find that story soon—and more ahead.
Here during the journal’s first months, we talked with the founding editors about the publication’s genesis, how Mason brought them together, and their shared editorial values—which, conveniently, they’ve also charted in a clever Venn diagram on their Masthead. In a testament to their collaborative approach, Bouvier, Crawford, and Harding answered each question collectively—and in keeping with the mission of Chatterbox!, the answers are appropriately long and winding, but always with a clear destination in mind.
At what point did you realize your shared interest in “maximalism, pertinent rambling, and stories that build to a crescendo, even if they take a while to get there,” to quote the “About” section of your website? Did that evolve out of your style and approach in the fiction each of you were writing at Mason? And how did the idea for Chatterbox evolve from there?
Back in our very first semester, Connor reached out in our fiction cohort group chat to ask if anyone wanted to continue doing workshops/sharing work over winter break. Only Jess and Kara agreed, so that cemented us as a sub-cohort of people who perhaps took ourselves a little too seriously—but, like, in an enthusiastic way. We continued swapping work outside of the classroom all throughout our time at Mason and went so far as to give ourselves fun (?!) writing challenges targeting our personal strengths/weaknesses.
The idea for Chatterbox! actually came from our groupchat, where we often commiserate over acceptances and rejections (the latter far more frequently), as well as general trends and complaints about the literary journal scene. Specifically, we complained about how few outlets consider and publish longform fiction, paired with the double-whammy that journals who do consider longform can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to get back to submitters with an answer. Almost always, they charge submission fees to boot. We just thought that was bananas!
As our time at Mason came to an end, we all had mixed feelings about leaving So to Speak and phoebe (where we’d had editorial roles for several years) and no longer having a space to champion pieces by other writers. Over time, we got to talking and decided we wanted to continue working together and had several conversations about what that project would look like. We didn’t want to add another journal to the milieu that would disintegrate within a matter of months. Chatterbox! was born from there.
Mason’s MFA program brought the three of you together—and your stories this fall feature work by two fellow alumni. How has your time at Mason influenced your editorial goals and your approach? And was there an explicit goal to celebrate the work of your peers? Give back to the Mason community somehow?
It wasn’t so much that we wanted to give back to the Mason community specifically (though that’s a nice secondary result), but that Mason gave us the opportunity to meet writers we genuinely admired and whose work we wanted to help bring into the world. In the case of “Pegged” by Jaime Goh, all three of us encountered the piece in an MFA workshop and loved it, but knew that it would struggle to find a home in most literary journals because of its length and content. We’ve seen firsthand how the publishing landscape, at both the journal level and otherwise, can push aside experimental, challenging fiction to make way for more commercial stories with “universal appeal.” Which is a shame!
Fun fact, Bodie and Jaime weren’t the only Mason MFA writers we solicited as we were thinking about the launch, which is a testament to our belief in the talent in the writers that are molded by the program, ourselves notwithstanding. Anytime we get a chance to uplift writers we love—regardless of whether or not we consider them friends—we’ll take that chance. Chatterbox! is just a platform that allows us to do so.
The intersection of longer fiction and digital publication strikes me as a potentially bold move—but you’re upfront about Chatterbox! being “a rebellion against the shortening attention span of readers, as well as the current pacing trends of popular short fiction.” Why do readers—and writers too— need a journal like Chatterbox!?
There are so, so many literary journals in the world, but—IN OUR OPINION!!!!!—not all of them begin with the goal of filling a gap in the landscape. In a majority of literary magazines, there isn’t an intensive focus on both the craft of longform fiction and the focus of the reader who is engaging with these narratives. The difference between Chatterbox! and other contemporary journals is that we lend our focus to each individual story and author we platform, then provide readers craft-level insights into the author's process through extensive, complementary interviews. At Chatterbox!, we believe that we need readers to read with intention just as much as we need writers to write with intention.
Not to sound like boomers (or inadvertently provoke the wrath of a generation), but it does feel true that people’s attention spans are getting shorter across the board. You can see this in the trend toward flash prose generally. This isn’t to say that it’s not a worthy craft—we write plenty of it ourselves—but we definitely noticed the lack of stories being published digitally that were anything more than bite-sized.
People talk a lot about “risk-taking” in fiction, but then the risk is just a woman thinking about cheating on her husband while she does something quirky. This is not risk! Not for us, anyway. The point is to be bold and unflinching in concept and approach—and we’re not sure what’s more audacious than asking readers to meet the story where it lives, to give it the breadth it demands, even if that requires more than 10 minutes of your time. A writer spent probably cumulative days working on this piece, if not weeks; so read it, damn it!
Just to add–we’re not asking readers to do anything we haven’t done. We read every piece sent to us, which sometimes means we’re each reviewing upwards of 50,000 words a week just of submission materials. More than that, we like to believe the time spent engaging closely with the work of others is what creates a caring and reciprocal ecosystem for everyone involved in the writing and publishing of fiction, and that’s something absolutely worth reading for.
October 05, 2025