KATE FINEGAN
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"Lemon Cap" in New South
Picture
Selected Fiction
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Nocturne

word west revue
"I dreamed I had swallowed a tooth and woke up with a sore throat, as if the bone-sharp incisor had fought its way down my esophagus."

Ablaze
the winnow magazine
"Remember when the river ran just beyond our door, when rains replenished this ribbon unfurled blue and raspberries ripened close so we could smell them through our bedroom window. "

American Standard of Perfection
The Puritan
"When Jack built that first hutch, Laurie didn’t stop him. But soon, Jack’s hobby meant that Laurie often woke to find a chicken or two or even three lying beside her on the pillow. Once, she turned on the faucet and unwittingly drenched a hen who’d fallen asleep in the tub."

Keeper
Witness
"You know you’ll get stung at least once. That’s a certainty: you’re covered in a hundred-thousand bees.

Kudzu
SmokeLong Quarterly
"The only place to start is here, to uproot your misplaced hope. It’s easier than killing kudzu."

Going, All Along
Milk Candy Review
"Just the right one swelled and grew; the other turned inward and sank, deeper and deeper, a mole’s nose, pink point digging its way into her chest."

Under These Conditions
Witness
"Tap the brakes on empty stretches to see if you will slide. Drive slowly, not too slowly. Don’t backslide down the hill."

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This Animal's Return
Waxwing
"Last night, after the officer said to stop calling, I took that gallon of ice cream you left — your favorite, maple walnut — and ate a solid third."

A Mosaic in the Making
Prism
"Home goods are built to last and last, but plates can be had for a dollar a dozen. At the store, you’ll see women buying cheap plates by the cartful."

All You Wanted Was the Ocean
Atticus Review
"We’re at the lake and all you want to talk about is sharks."

Forever On the Hips
Firewords
"Fisk watched Inga with wide-open eyes, but he, unlike her mother, wasn’t staring at her hips (too wide), her breasts (too early), or her stomach (big already, have some self-respect). So she loved that fish."

Lion's Tooth
SmokeLong
"JUST MARRIED, tin cans tug loose as we flee the kudzu quarter of this country—home, mine—and head back to roots, yours. Farm boy, big sky. I know so little of Iowa, and so little of you."

Good Guys
CHEAP POP
"Teacher tells us in the event of a nuclear attack, we have to fight our natural urge to run to windows and watch. We’re like that, curious."

Vigil
Cease, Cows
"This year, the beach is gone. I don’t know how else to put it. Waves break into a hole; the ocean disappears within it."

The Mightiest Mammal, Singing
Pidgeonholes
"There’s a whale in your stomach, rolling and calling in the deep-blue hours of velvet-dark morning as I press my heartbeat to your back."
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Botanical Nomenclature
Matchbook
"We are the women who borrow our ladies’ periodicals, who listen when they gather their sewing circles, when one woman in the group reads aloud from a book of poems footnoted with facts that we, good women—like our ladies, the housekeeper next door, the cook down the lane—shouldn’t know and shouldn’t discuss."

When I Was a Fish
Longleaf Review
​"We decide to dig, to go looking for caskets needing oaks and willows to turn them to dust."

Blues Too Bright
The Fiddlehead
​"I’m accustomed to these early-morning bird reports. Mother watches birds like her friends watch soaps and baseball."

Creative Nonfiction

Your Own Two Hands
Stonecrop Review​, April 2019
"Raccoons have five fingers. Watch them open a green compost bin—a new one, designed to be raccoonproof. You’ll swear you’re watching your own two hands turn the nob counter-clockwise."

Foreign Body
Phoebe, May 2018
Nominated for the Pushcart Prize
​"I will trust my memory in this - how my foot (eight or nine years old, calloused from a barefoot summer) accommodated the thin, silver nail; how the skin encircling the small post, rimmed in pink, stretched around it like a mouth, puckered, as I pulled the metal from my flesh."

Meditations on Motherhood
Thresholds, May 2018
"You wouldn’t expect an octopus to break your heart, but that’s because you don’t know octopus mothers."
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Honeymoons
The Sun, February 2017
"Within the first ten minutes of the hike, the weight of my brand-new backpack was digging into my shoulders."

Poetry

MaidenWifeMother Maiden
Minola Review, 2019
"At a certain period in life, you cease to be a girl, and become a woman."

Vague Symptoms
Reclaim: An Anthology of Women's Poetry, May 2019
"Ovaries hard like clementines we didn’t eat,
shriveled, wombs like sacks of shattered ceramic"


Paper Wasps
Juniper, October 2018
"Take a fence and bite it. When your teeth sink in,
scrape wood fibers (a healthy chunk) into your mouth"


Of Magic & Moses
Pithead Chapel, September 2018
"True, I saw him standing in the street, facing the traffic, lifting his hands & when he did, I thought of magic & Moses"

Interviews

Smoke & Mirrors: An Interview with Kate Finegan
By Joel Coltharp for SmokeLong, March 2019
"I think that in relationships, we are often reluctant to look the major ideological conflicts in the face—they’re too big, too overwhelming. So we focus on little things, like different approaches to maintaining the yard, and those little things stand in for the big things."

Mini-Interview with Kate Finegan
By Tommy Dean Writer, November 2018
​"It’s an exercise in choosing the most precise details and chipping away at the draft until it has no jagged edges."

Longleaf News: Welcome to the New Editors
Longleaf Review, October 2018
"That’s what I want—a strong narrative voice and a story that has to be told."

​Backstory: Five Questions with Kate Finegan
FlashBack Fiction, October 2018
"I was in Charleston when I wrote the piece, rewriting and doing research for my novel, which deals with midwifery and women’s knowledge of their own bodies versus the medicalization of women’s health (and health in general)."

An Interview with Kate Finegan
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The Fiddlehead, April 2017
"I was interested in the stories that families pass down from generation to generation, and I wondered what it would be like to find out that the most grandiose, unlikely family legend was actually true. I wondered if, after so many years and in the face of the shocks and struggles of life, it would actually matter."

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