My story “The Miracle Worker” appears in the new Winter issue of The Missouri Review. It’s the tale of Sally, a Filipina teacher who takes on a disabled student, Aroush, in Bahrain in the 1980s. I’m thrilled that it found a home in Mizzou.

TMR has been around for thirty-four years–publishing the work of so many authors I idolize, as well as putting great new voices in print for the first time. A personal favorite: Cheryl Strayed’s (later Best American) essay on Alice Munro. As a reader, I especially love finding longer stories (rare among literary journals) and global settings (an eternal obsession) in its pages.

Associate Editor Evelyn Somers Rogers worked on the story with me. She is a writer’s dream: smart, kind, supportive and über-professional.

This issue’s theme (and The Missouri Review has had some good ones–“Pick Your Poison” and “Messy Art” among them) is “Weird.” Or, as Editor-in-Chief Speer Morgan puts it, the ways life reminds us that “[t]he strange is just an instant or a membrane away.” Clearly, TMR gets me.