Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Yet another reminder that some of the very best flash fiction in the world is being published as anonymous comments on YouTube videos

Text of YouTube comment pictured: My father was a serial cheater & when my mom was finally done, she packed him up while he was away on a business trip. She sat me down & asked me if I knew what happened to dogs that got the taste of sheep's blood. I looked at her & promptly said, "You shoot them." And she looked around at my father's things so neatly stacked & labeled & she looked back at me & said, "I just pulled the trigger." I never forgot that nor forgot the strength it took to admit someone doesn't love or respect you as much as you thought. Thanks, mom for the life lesson. Good luck Hannah. Stay strong.

November 3, 2025 at 3:03 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

The phrase pseudo-science may very well disagree! As would this 2015 paper that makes this very analogy themselves! pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25514435/

(Note: I am surprisingly conflict averse for someone whose primary love language is debate, so just saying out loud: enjoying this back and forth!)

Quote: The slime mold Physarum polycephalum is a huge single cell that has proved to be a fruitful material for designing novel computing architectures. The slime mold is capable of sensing tactile, chemical, and optical stimuli and converting them to characteristic patterns of its electrical potential oscillations. The electrical responses to stimuli may propagate along protoplasmic tubes for distances exceeding tens of centimeters, as impulses in neural pathways do. A slime mold makes decisions about its propagation direction based on information fusion from thousands of spatially extended protoplasmic loci, similarly to a neuron collecting information from its dendritic tree. The analogy is distant yet inspiring. We speculate on whether alternative-would-be-nervous systems can be developed and practically implemented from the slime mold. We uncover analogies between the slime mold and neurons, and demonstrate that the slime mold can play the roles of primitive mechanoreceptors, photoreceptors, and chemoreceptors; we also show how the Physarum neural pathways develop. The results constituted the first step towards experimental laboratory studies of nervous system implementation in slime molds.

October 30, 2025 at 9:57 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

image of bart simpsons and his dog saying "my own dog bit me!"

September 26, 2025 at 9:50 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

This study is absolutely wild!

xenoparous: giving birth to other species as part of their life cycle

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(Octavia Butler stays prescient, prophetic, and winning, always).

screenshot of abstract from study:
Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring1,2. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species. In this life cycle, females must clone males of another species because they require their sperm to produce the worker caste. As a result, males from the same mother exhibit distinct genomes and morphologies, as they belong to species that diverged over 5 million years ago. The evolutionary history of this system appears as sexual parasitism3 that evolved into a natural case of cross-species cloning4,5, resulting in the maintenance of a male-only lineage cloned through distinct species’ ova. We term females exhibiting this reproductive mode as xenoparous, meaning they give birth to other species as part of their life cycle.

September 5, 2025 at 2:09 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Let’s GOOOO!!!!! Been looking forward to this for like a full calendar year.

Thomas Ha’s debut story collection: Uncertain Sons. Photographed on white marble counter.

August 29, 2025 at 12:09 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

No cheating, last photo of your pet

The handsomest baby wolf (a dog—a lab, husky, ACD mix, black with white flare on chest and little white specks around his nose) ever. Looking with big big big brown eyes up at the camera begging for something (it’s play)

August 20, 2025 at 12:47 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

a sloppily photoshopped poster for the hitchcock movie "The Birds" a blond woman in a blue outside in front of a cloudy blue background with two black silhouettes of birds beside her. The title in the top right corner has been edited to say "The Boids" instead of the usual "the birds"
I'm not a clever man

August 18, 2025 at 6:57 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

July's issue of @lightspeedmagazine.com is out in ebook form (and available for subscribers!) today. There's a bevy of incredible stories inside, including a piece from yours truly: A dead spell-making artist haunts the gallery that hosts his work. www.lightspeedmagazine.com/issues/july-...

the cover of July 2025 issue of Lightspeed Magazine. A dragon flies towards a distant city. Humans (or zombies) march on the ground in the same direction.

A picture of my story title and excerpt taken from the lightspeed website:

Un-Pragmagic: A Tyler Moore Retrospective
by Spencer Nitkey

Tyler Moore’s spells strive to exist in and of themselves. They make no excuse or justification for their existence: no promise to speak to the dead, predict next year’s grain or gold prices, or read the mind of lawyers during a hostile takeover. They are simply beautiful, challenging, and awe-inducing.

Publishes Online on 7/17

July 1, 2025 at 1:15 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Such an honor to be featured on @mynachang.bsky.social 's speculative flash fiction round up! If you want to "find a lot of heart under the mold" give my @hexliterary.bsky.social flash a read! hexliterary.com?p=2708

a screen shot of Myna's description of and pull quote from my story
"a visit from the sentient slime mold"

See those tendrils, that’s what you’re hearing scurrying around in the dark at night, the rattling pipe noises like, what did you call it, a lawnmower running out of gas, yeah. That’s what that means.

This is one of those “WTF did I just read?” stories, and it is delightful! And a little gross. The voice and format work perfectly together, exposing so much about these two characters. You’ll find a lot of heart under the mold.

June 27, 2025 at 12:57 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

@johnchrostek.com is doing really valuable work in pretty much all areas of lit. Opening a physical bookstore to get books into reader's hands! Editing @cold-signal.com and publishing great, weird stories with awesome art. Plus writing some killer work, himself. I'm really enjoy his collection!!

the cover of "Boxcutters: Short Stories by John Chrostek. A collage-like assemblage of images on an orange background (old timey boxers, an eye being opened with fingers, a skull crowned by roses and flowers, a cowboy figuring, a polarbear, a woman with a gold bandana (I think) and a cherubic figure.

June 26, 2025 at 4:33 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

a small screenshot of a bsky post draft that reads "I have a joke about Baudrillard". It nestled in several layers of screenshots of the windows "snipping tool" 4 layers of screenshot deep.

June 13, 2025 at 6:11 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

and I'm also obsessed with this series called "The Physarum Experiments" where British artist Heather Barnett makes all these gorgeous fascinating pieces of bioart with slime mold. (heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-phy...) this might be one of my favorites of hers:

$dark soil with fractal-like strands of yellow slime mold filament. Heather Barnett's "Study No 22: Starvation Fireworks"$

June 3, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Naturally occurring? I'm obsessed with how many Myxogastria varieties look like adorable little (or sometimes quite large) balloons when they fruit! like.... they're so adorable haha.

The slime mold Comatricha nigra (myxogastria) with developing fruiting bodies (sporangia). A dozen or so small red and pink fruiting balls atop thin black stem-like stands.

June 3, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

The two moods of Bodie. 1) must go crazy, preferable outside. 2) Must sleep as if he's the one paying the rent.

April 7, 2025 at 5:55 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

The horrors persist, but so does weird fiction. Happy to be back in the wonderful pages of @undertow.bsky.social 's Weird Horror Magazine.

Buy a copy and have the top of your head taken off and filled with strange and eerie words. www.weirdhorrormagazine.com

March 4, 2025 at 6:09 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Get hyped for the new issue of Weird Horror (#10!) coming out soon! Featuring my story "In the Dream, He is Skinless and Beautiful" along with a bunch of other strange, eerie, and profound pieces of weird horror.

undertowpublications.com/shop/weird-h...

February 28, 2025 at 6:36 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

What a generous intro and description of my story in Phano Magazine. Being mentioned in the same breath as Ted Chiang is about the highest honor I can imagine. Thanks so much to @turnandwork.com for this kind review. Excited to dive into the other stories mentioned here, too.

Screenshot of review from quote tweeted link which reads:

Life on Earth by Spencer Nitkey
This is the first I’ve read from Nitkey (it won’t be the last, he’s published a lot). In ‘Life on Earth’, the narrator’s partner is dying while scientists are discovering life on other planets. I’ve been reading a lot of Ted Chiang recently, and the humanity and emotion in this story remind me of some of his writing. It starts like this:

They discover life on Mars the same day the doctors tell us Willmae is dying. Tiny cryostatic frozen extremophiles that look like microscopic jellyfish are both alive and not-alive deep inside the Martian ice-caps. The doctors still don’t know what’s wrong with her. Their best guess is that it’s some kind of gram-negative antibiotic resistant bacteria.

A nurse joins us in the examination room and adds a medicine we’ve never heard of to her regime. “Did you guys hear the news?” she asks.

“We’re not alone,” Willmae replies with a beaming smile.

It doesn’t feel that way.

February 24, 2025 at 2:40 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Once again (like always...) I must return to Delany....

The "don't make me tap the sign" Simpsons meme, with a bus driver. The second image of the meme has a super-imposed screen shot of a quote from Samuel Delany's essay "About 5,750 words":

Every generation some critic states the frighteningly obvious in the style/content conflict. Most readers are bewildered by it. Most commercial writers (not to say, editors) first become uncomfortable, then blustery; finally, they put the whole business out of their heads and go back to what they were doing all along. And it remains for someone in another generation to repeat:
Put in opposition to "style," there is no such thing as "content."

December 19, 2024 at 5:52 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Can't say just how much it means to be included in a list like this with some of my favorite stories and writers this year. Plus this is such a wildly generous reading of my story, I can't stop smiling! 🐳

A quote about my story, within the dead whale from the linked article:

"This story is about a dead whale and the hole in it, and within that hole the author has somehow packed feelings about dread, and parenting, and what we'll do for our children and at what cost. So creepy and atmospheric and strange, this instantly became a modern classic for me."

December 18, 2024 at 2:13 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Tis the season (to make a poorly but earnestly designed awards eligibility post)! I'm really proud of the work I've published this year, so here they are! Please consider reading them, adding them to any recommended reading lists, and then telling me how wonderful they are! Details and links below!

December 4, 2024 at 8:16 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

New story out today! "Heliopause" in The Ekphrastic Review! Inspired by Arthur Dove’s Sunrise, III:
🎨 Katherine Dreier meditates on art & pain
🐾 Mountain lions surround a ranch
🎼 A musician seeks melody
🌌 Humanity watches the solar system's end

Read it here: www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrast...

November 25, 2024 at 5:24 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

My story in trampset explores Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" a piece, it turns out, I have a lot of feelings about.

Check out this story about a teenage boy's communion with a formaldehyde-preserved shark today!

trampset.org/the-physical...

photograph of Damien Hirst's art piece titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" -- a shark preserved in formaldehyde inside a white tank photographed from the side, the tail on the left, the open mouth on the right.

November 1, 2024 at 3:09 PM

Spencer Nitkey

@spencerwriting.bsky.social

Just came across this very nice review of my story in @flashfictiononline.bsky.social Within the Dead Whale. If you think a "perfectly, utterly, viscerally strange" story sounds like something you'd like to read. Check it out here: www.flashfictiononline.com/article/with...