Welcome to Barnstorm.

We are a literary journal.
We publish written and visual artwork that is playful, takes risks, and harnesses energy.

Out Now

Volume 16 Issue 5

Featuring writing by:

Marlene Olin, Brandy McKenzie, and Christopher Lloyd

and visual art by:

Sean Ewing, Suzana Stojanović, and Jasper Glen

Featured artwork: “Lakeview” by Sean Ewing

“this desert we travel is vast   stained with beauty

that consumes and then loses     these mothers

weeping their songs at the riverside     the deep

and hidden     banks shadowed too soon

in the curves of the canyon     we drive”


— Brandy McKenzie, “In the Jeep he inherited after his estranged father’s death”
Volume 16, Issue 5

Featured artwork: “The Lakeside” by Jasper Glen

“The air is thick. Parakeets nip through the sky, squalling and playing. Bark from plane trees keeps falling off as you walk by: it makes you jump every time. You wonder if they are shedding because of the heat, or something else. Even the leaves are dying in the sun, and it feels, sometimes, like everything is slowly coming apart.”

— Christopher Lloyd, “Born”
Volume 16, Issue 5

Featured artwork: “Fighters” by Suzana Stojanović

“Looking down, my mother watches her feet. As always, she’s slowing her pace to match my father’s. Everything she does she does for others, slowing her pace, cooking the meals, doing the wash, scrubbing the floors. Once she was a straight A student. Dreamt of going to college. Being a professional. Sitting at a desk in a tailor-made dress. But instead of running toward her dreams, she learned to slow her pace. Looking back, she has no idea how it happened. Life sneaks up on you like that. One step at a time.

Left. Right. Left.“

— Marlene Olin, “The March”
Volume 16, Issue 5

“The patients cling to us. They think we have answers. We think we have answers. But every night I go home and all I have are numbers echoing in my head—oxygen saturation, pulse rate, blood pressure, beeping monitors. I try to sleep and see lines, peaks and valleys, the last rhythms of strangers.”

— Lizzie Benge, “Do Not Linger”
Volume 16, Issue 3