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 work has appeared in numerous literary journals; his debut collection, Self-Defense, was published by Cornerstone Press in 2023.

The discussion ranges from narrative structure and long-gestating ideas to the quiet, often unnoticed ways lived experience finds its way into art. Particular attention is given to the use of fragmentation as a deliberate narrative strategy: how a story composed of discrete vignettes can accumulate emotional weight over time, and how meaning emerges not from linear progression but from juxtaposition, recurrence, and omission. Rather than offering a single, authoritative arc, the story invites the reader to assemble coherence from moments; an approach that mirrors the way memory itself operates, unevenly and selectively, across the span of a life.

The conversation also touches on the long temporal dimension of writing; how certain observations, encounters, and impressions may lie dormant for decades before finding their proper form. Notes taken in youth, anecdotes overheard in passing, and experiences that once seemed incidental are revisited not as autobiographical confession but as raw material, reshaped through distance and craft. In this sense, writing is presented less as an act of immediate expression than as a process of delayed recognition, where meaning becomes visible only after time has stripped events of their urgency and left behind their essential contours.

Central to the discussion is the metaphorical framework provided by the doctrine of signatures; an ancient medical theory suggesting that the outward appearance of a natural substance reveals its healing properties. Though long dismissed as pseudoscience, the concept is repurposed here as a literary and psychological lens, offering a way to think about human relationships. The story proposes that people are often drawn, consciously or not, to partners who appear to correspond to their own emotional deficiencies; not as cures in any literal sense, but as figures onto whom the hope of repair is projected. This dynamic, explored across different stages of a relationship, becomes a means of examining intimacy, dependency, and the persistent human desire for wholeness.

Featured in the Winter 2025 issue of The Brussels Review, The Doctrine of Signatures ultimately offers a meditation on relationships, healing, and the patterns individuals repeat without fully understanding their origins. It resists easy conclusions or moral resolutions, instead presenting connection as something provisional, shaped as much by misrecognition as by understanding. In doing so, the story reflects a broader literary concern with how meaning is constructed not through grand gestures, but through accumulation; through the slow sedimentation of moments that, taken together, reveal more than any single scene could contain.

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 in creative practice, cross-disciplinary artistic influences, and Renfro’s current and forthcoming projects in fiction and poetry.

Lydia Renfro holds an MFA from Adelphi University and is the recipient of the Donald Everett Axinn Award for Fiction. She works primarily in short fiction and poetry, with a strong focus on place-based narratives and interior experience. She currently lives in the United States. More of her work can be found at lydiarenfro.com.

Read the interview in text format here.

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 Review, reflecting on its origins, the constraints of short form, and the role of repetition, endurance, and perspective in narrative.

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. The conversation explores personal history and political context, education and cultural production, artistic responsibility, and the discipline required to sustain a writing practice across multiple professional and personal roles.

Use discount code Calltotheeditor to get 25% of the Winter 2025 issue.

Burcu Seyben is an academic, playwright, director, and writer of creative non-fiction from Türkiye. Her play, "The American Letter," was selected for the Pitch-your-play Showcase of the Mid-America Theatre Conference. She won the adjudicator award with "Intro to Greek Theater' in 35th Bryan Harnetiaux Playwrights’ Forum Festival.

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 opera, noir, and classical melodrama. Klavan reflects on his writing process, the transformation of longer works into shorter forms, and the tension between human intimacy and technological abstraction. The interview concludes with a broader discussion of artistic discipline, publishing cultures in Europe and the United States, and the importance of valuing the act of writing itself over commercial outcome.

Get the Winter 2025 issue at shop.thebrusselsreview.com. Use the code CallToTheEditor to get twenty-five percent off until the end of January. I would also like to thank our sponsor, the ACC, the Art and Creativity Consortium, the organization that supports publication of The Brussels Review and its wider cultural initiatives across Europe. If you are a creator, a writer, a small editor, a small publisher, or an organization dedicated to supporting the arts, you can connect with them and visit ArtCreCon.org to learn more and become a part of the cultural network.

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 cultural stigma around tears, the psychological and neurological value of crying, and how fantasy can be used to reframe vulnerability as purpose and care. The conversation also touches on Tjokro’s writing process, her literary influences, and her upcoming projects in both English and Indonesian.

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 challenge of writing for a discerning audience.
He also offers candid reflections on the differences between American and European life, and what it means to belong.
Stay tuned after the interview for an exclusive recording of Philip reading his poetry, featured in the first edition of TBR Blue.

Get TBR Blue here: TBR Blue 5/25 - Special Print Issue – The Brussels ReviewIf you would like to participate in this podcast, please contact info@thebrusselsreview.com.

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) reflects a hybrid terrain of bodily perception and environmental transformation.

Her recent solo exhibition, cardón, carmín y ola, opened at Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens in May 2025, following her 2023 show in Brussels. She has participated in residencies with Fondation Moonens and La Napoule Art Foundation, and was awarded the Laurent Moonens Prize in 2023.

Through richly saturated palettes and embodied forms, Ximena’s practice resists literal depiction in favor of sensorial immersion, offering a contemplative reflection on land, heat, memory, and resilience.