Call To The Editor

Why do the weakest sentences so often begin with "he", "she" or "they"? In this episode of Call To The Editor, Dritan Kiçi reads "The Non-Centrality of the Character", an essay first published in The Brussels Review. Its claim sounds like heresy: prose is not about characters, but about what happens to them. A pronoun points at a person without telling the r...

Palestinian-American photographer Najib Joe Hakim, featured artist of the new issue of The Brussels Review, out on 15 October, talks about a life spent between Palestine, Lebanon and the United States. Born in Beirut to refugees of 1948 and raised in New York, he discovered his Palestinian identity only as a young man, and went to Jerusalem to see the country for himself. That journey, and the dec...

Explore a short story by Corey Mertes , built from fragments of a shared life; seven moments, scattered across time, bound by a single idea. Drawing on the ancient medical concept known as the doctrine of signatures, this conversation examines how people seek in others what they lack in themselves, and how fiction transforms memory into meaning. Corey Mertes is an American short-story writer whose...

Filippo Beltrami speaks with Lydia Renfro about her short story Greetings From , featured in The Brussels Review Winter 2025 issue . The conversation explores Renfro’s literary formation, her time living in Turkey, and how place, food, language, and cultural displacement inform her writing. The discussion expands into literature’s role in a globalized world, the importance of walking and landscape...

Jon Filipek is a Brussels-based writer and lawyer who has lived in Belgium for more than twenty-five years. Alongside a career in regulatory law, he has remained active in fiction and screenwriting and is a long-standing member of the Brussels Writers Workshop . In this episode of Call to the Editor , he discusses Here We Go Again , his flash fiction piece in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels...

In this episode of  Call to the Editor , Sofia Topi, Nonfiction Editor at  The Brussels Review , speaks with Burcu Seyben, whose creative nonfiction piece “Private Lessons” appears in the Winter 2025 issue. Seyben reflects on memory, displacement, and motherhood, drawing connections between her teenage years in Türkiye, her family’s forced relocations, and her present life in the United States. Th...

In this episode of Call to the Editor , fiction editor Femke van Son speaks with writer Laurence Klavan about his short story The Sleepwalker , published in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels Review . The conversation explores the story’s dystopian setting, its use of artificial intelligence as a tool of dehumanization, and Klavan’s deliberate engagement with older narrative forms such as soap...

In this episode of Call to the Editor , fiction editor Femke Van Son speaks with writer Lia Tjokro about her short story The Caretaker of Tears , featured in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels Review . Tjokro discusses her journey from cognitive neuroscience to literary fiction, and the personal experiences of grief and emotional expression that shaped the story. Together, they explore the cult...

A poet between worlds— Philip Miller, music professor at Karlstad University , joins us for a conversation that spans continents, cultures, and creative disciplines. We explore his journey from the U.S. to Sweden, the legacy of his poet-minister father, and the intersection of music and poetry in his work. Philip shares his thoughts on tradition versus experimentation, artistic integrity, and the...

Ximena Maldonado Sánchez (b. 1999, Irapuato, Mexico) is a Brussels-based painter whose work explores the sensory interplay between desert and marine ecologies. A graduate of ENSAV La Cambre (2023), she combines abstraction and figuration to evoke the tactile memory of landscapes through color-rich compositions. Her symbolic use of elements like cardón (cactus), carmín (pigment), and ola (wave) ref...