Issues
Issue Twenty-One, January 2026
Issue Twenty-One of Haven Spec Magazine is here at last! Subscribers get the issue on January 26th, 2026, and the free-to-read online version goes up on February 2nd. We're calling this one our January Issyou because every story and poem in it has been written in second-person POV. In these pages, you'll find fiction by J.A.W. McCarthy, Elou Carroll, Allison Pottern, Matt Tighe, Cynthia Zhang, Lia Lao, and Diana Dima; poetry by Faith Allington, Olumide Manuel, anaum sajanlal, and P. H. Low; and thoughts on this issyou's fiction by our very own associate editors!
Issue Twenty, July 2025
The last few months have been a wild ride, let me tell you. Long story short, I spent all of May organizing my dad's end-of-life care and then a big chunk of June was taken up handling things after his death. It's a story that boggles the imagination, and I'm torn between wanting to share the absurd details and not wanting to trauma dump, but suffice it to say, it involves my father hitting his head and having a stroke, the owner of his house kicking him out as soon as he got to the hospital, and a missing 10,000 dollar check. It's honestly bananas, and if we ever run into each other at a con, I'll share all the sordid details you'd like.
Issue Nineteen, March 2025
I am so very happy to report that our Kickstarter was a success and we are funded through the rest of 2025 to pay pro rates! I am shy by nature, but please take a moment to hear my ragged voice cheering across time and space in celebration that we managed it. And you know what? It wouldn't have been possible without you, so yes, you should absolutely be cheering as well. Let us join in a roaring chorus of hooping and hollering so loud that we shake the rafters of creation. Who knew I could get so excited about fundraising?
Issue Eighteen, November 2024
It's hard to write in times like these. Hard to speak. But there is something inexplicable in the written word, something ineffable. Fiction and poetry are the canvases on which we paint our hopes and dread. In systems that would silence us, writers scream with the scribbling of pens, the soft clacking of keyboards. "Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists," Toni Morrison once wrote. "The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power." The act of writing is an act of power, the key on the kite string calling down the lightning. It is a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, that we might yet move the world with it. It is a power that can transform us.
Issue Seventeen, September 2024
In this issue, you will find a slew of stories, a plethora of poems, and a host of heartbreaking, hopeful, honest content. (You are instructed to please pronounce the h.) Find the god that lurks in polluted waters in "The God Who Never Sleeps Dwells Under an Inky Sea" by A. W. Prihandita, and weep over the ghosts that you may never find again in "The Coral Tombs" by Eric Raglin. Cure your heartbreak in "Bleeding Hearts" by Suzan Palumbo, and discover your father in unexpected places in "Giant Killer Shark" by Timothy Mudie. In "The Poison You Leave" by Krystle Yanagihara, settler colonialism marks the land, but we have the tools (and righteous monsters) to clear it all away, and in "A Good Catch" by Stacie Turner, make a promise to the sea that will be hard to keep.