Heather Bartel
Founder & Editor
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creator
editor
writer
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informal Plath scholar
Aries sun; Capricorn moon and rising
the short story
Heather Bartel writes hybrid essays, poetry, fiction, one-act plays, and old-fashioned letters. She holds a BA in English from Webster University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. Beyond writing and editing, her projects include shooting a tarot-inspired Polaroid series, collecting rocks and houseplants, making collages, and practicing yoga and emotive dance aerobics. Heather calls Columbia, MO home.
publications
"STILL LIFE" forthcoming in Leavings
"MURMURATIONS (II): MIRRORS," forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, 2023
"TRAJECTORIES," Birdcoat Quarterly, Issue 13, 2023
"REFLECTION," Fence, Issue 40, 2023
"YET THE PHANTOM WAS PART OF THE FLOWER," Miracle Monocle, Issue 19, 2022
"THE KNIFE SPEAKS," Grimoire, Issue 10, 2022
"MURMURATIONS (I): FIRST MEMORY OF BIRDS," MAYDAY, 2021
"FLOAT," Qu, Issue 12, 2020
projects
EXIT THE BODY
is an essay collection, if a collection of essays can include a tarot reading, a one-act starring dead and dreamed women, conversations with Sylvia Plath in the mirror, letters to a ghost. It is a work about illusion and choice, a meditation on the mind and its place within the body: what escapes, what ruptures, what is created, what echoes. The work considers what to do with an obsession with the mirror when the person in the mirror is either the only person you can trust or the one who is trying to kill you.
This is a completed manuscript and is available for publication.
MURMURATIONS
is an essay collection that considers patterns of birds and of breath; dialogue in dreams; stars; and the ways in which women disappear. Longlisted for the 2019 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.
This is a completed manuscript and is available for publication.
We break mirrors inside of each other/to see again.
--Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Seeing the Body