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WILL WILLOUGHBY

WRITER | EDITOR

Portfolio

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."

A woman in a johnny sits by herself on a hospital bed looking out the window

Ask Your Doctor If a Medically Induced Coma Is Right for You

Points in Case (May 2026)

"Whatever your intolerable situation is, you’ve rightly decided to take a nice long coma until it all blows over. That’s where we come in—the Coma-Doze Clinic and Spa, where you can check in just to check out."

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."

A professional but somehow sinister man in suit sits at desk with his hands steepled annoyingly.

For the Record, I'm the One Who Said
That Legendarily Funny Thing, Not Chad

Points in Case (August 2025)

"I've recently learned that the joke you've all been giddily repeating since it was told at last year's company picnic—the one about the wiener car—is once again being attributed to Chad. It was not Chad. It was me."

A line of trees in silouhette against a deep blue twilight sky with thin noctilucent clouds. The corner of a house can be seen to the right with one window lit up.

The Bedroom Tenant

Cleaver Magazine (Forthcoming)

"The lease, which Kathy's husband had drafted himself, seemed ironclad. Even Kathy thought so. A tenant, it said, would be permitted to occupy the corner of their bedroom each night from sundown to sunrise, provided certain conditions were met."

Line drawing of a laptop with a cup of coffee beside it

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