A smiling man wearing a baseball cap. Behind him is a scenic landscape and clear skies.

WILL WILLOUGHBY, WRITER AND EDITOR

I'm a writer and editor living in southern Maine. My short stories have appeared in various publications, including Epiphany, Pangyrus, and Pithead Chapel. I've been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. In 2025, my story "Downstream Benefits" won the Maine Literary Award for Short Fiction and was listed as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories. My short story collection, Unless There's Anything Else, is on submission. See my bio for more.

Check out the featured stories below. If you like my stuff, please spread the word. And don't hesitate to reach out. You can even buy me a coffee if you want to.

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Downstream Benefits

Pangyrus (August 2024)

Winner of 2025 Maine Literary Award for Short Fiction

"I can't help her. I can't stop what's happening. But I do things. I buy groceries, wash the clothes, pick up her meds. She spends her days in bed while a glacier of blankets builds up, layer by layer, around her."

Crescent-shaped snowbank in sharp sunlight with blue sky and white clouds above it.

Splice

Epiphany (Summer 2023)

"He's not unreasonable, he tells me. But he's genuinely alarmed by the extent of the first-round edits. Entire captions have been rewritten. Much has been cut. Actual names—the town hall—have been lowercased. Passive voice has been used."

Sparse conifer trees silhouetted against a dusky sky. We see the taillights of a car driving away down a dark road.

Zephyr

BULL (October 2025)

"Along that stretch, at this time of night, something marginally catastrophic may have happened, and I don't want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should, ideally, be concerning."

Rocky shoreline at low tide under a partly cloudy sky, with the sun shining through the clouds and a small cluster of evergreen trees on a rocky outcrop in the distance.

Mr. Palm Beach

Pithead Chapel (December 2025)

"Now that he's dead, it's time for my father to go. That's how my mother says it, anyway. She calls me one afternoon in September, six months after he sauntered back into the kitchen despite having just been buried."

Featured Stories

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