Five Minutes explores five minutes of a life in one hundred words. Five minutes is edited by Susanna Baird, with editorial support from managing editor Maria s. picone, newsletter editor kate meen, and founding reader bobbi lerman, plus our rotating team of guest readers, who you can meet in the latest newsletteR. Five Minutes was founded in October 2020, with the Salem (Mass.)-based writing group Carrot Cake Writers supplying the journal’s first pieces. We’d love to read your five. Submit here

Amber Alert!

Every time Chad walks past the conference room he yells to me, “Amber is out to lunch!” Even though she’s been gone—fired—for a year now. Took me twelve weeks and fifty interviews to find and hire her. Took the delivery team a crane and access from the roof to install the conference room wall-sized dry erase board. Chad treated it like the Mona Lisa. I forgot to warn Amber that no one goes out to lunch on weekdays. Ever. Oblivious, she wrote AMBER IS OUT TO LUNCH on the white board before she left. Using the permanent marker.

As a childless cat lady paddling through the DC swamp, Courtney Pounds keeps her oars balanced through a remote sales career and passionately editing edits in her memoir proposal.


Nought