WILL WILLOUGHBY, WRITER AND EDITOR
I'm a writer who makes a reasonable living as an editor. My short stories, populated by characters facing absurd, comically sad situations, have appeared in Epiphany, Pangyrus, and other literary magazines. My flash piece "The Projectionist" was nominated for Best of the Net, and "Downstream Benefits" was a Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2025 Maine Literary Award for short fiction. ​​
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I earned what turned out to be a useful English degree from the University of New Hampshire and now live in southern Maine with my wife and daughter. When I'm not writing, editing, or sleeping, I'm building props for my wife's escape room, Riddlehaven.
Check out the featured stories below. If you like my stuff, please spread the word. You can even buy me a coffee if you want to.
"The author gets in one last vent about overtrimmed captions, inverted sentences, Capitalized Things diminished by an unseemly down style. By the end of the rant, he's sated, almost tranquil. He doesn't say goodbye when he hangs up, but at least it's over. He's blown his wad. He's fine. For now, anyway."
"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."
"Dejected and haunted, our protagonist slouches over the cold, dingy sinkwater and imagines an ocean someplace far from his unremarkable life."
"There's a sleeper down in the theater. I've seen them before, these sleepers, and never know what to do."
"It's a nice slide deck. Ginormous graphs. Crushing overall length. It's the verbiage itself. It's too—what's the word?—too comprehensible.”
"I don't sleep. I rest, or I stay in bed for a long time without moving, but that's not sleep, not really."
Featured Stories
