The Avon Review
An online literary journal of place, ritual, and transformation
About Us
Avon Township, Transformation, and Art
The Avon Review is a Michigan-based, fully online literary journal publishing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, and hybrid work rooted in place, memory, folklore, and transformation. Named for the former Avon Township, now Rochester Hills where our journal is produced, this journal is interested in old names, haunted landscapes, regional identity, the sacred or strange beneath ordinary life, and the unseen forces that shape our transformations. We welcome all work from the Great Lakes, the Midwest, and beyond that is rooted in setting, home, land, weather, family, grief, change, or folklore.
Place is More Than Setting
The Great Lakes hold innumerable stories. They are not a border around our imagination, but a vessel, a reservoir, a mirror. To write from this region is not to write about it, but to write through it.
The lakes carry histories of migration, labor, industry, collapse, renewal, family, weather, grief, and survival. We believe the local is never merely local. A lake can be a memory. A suburb can be a haunting. A field can be an altar. A factory can be a family history. A winter can be a test of faith. The Midwest is not empty or plain. It is layered, strange, and intimate.
The Avon Review seeks work that understands place as more than setting. Place is inheritance. Place is pressure. Place is identity. Place is what forms us, follows us, and sometimes asks to be renamed.
The Ordinary Can Be Uncanny
A parking lot, a lake, a closed factory, a childhood home, a strip mall, a cemetery, a snowstorm, a deer at the edge of a road. The familiar places around us are not neutral. They are full of memories, or pressure, or strange beauty. We believe the strange is not always distant. Sometimes it is waiting in the places we think we already know. The Avon Review values work that finds mystery in familiar landscapes.
Memory and Renaming
What places used to be called, what people used to be, and what survives after transformation
We want essays, poems, fiction, and art with themes of change. This can be centered around home, childhood, family, grief, ancestry, displacement, queer identity, seasonal life, old towns, or changed landscapes. Show us how transformation takes place with a richness in place or setting.
Every place has a former name. Every person does too.