What is Hallaren Literary Magazine?
Hallaren is an online literary magazine committed to elevating the creative voices of the women writers & photographers in our military community. Often, literary spaces dedicated to service members, veterans, et al. are male-dominated. We wanted to carve out a piece of the lit world just for our unique voices.
Why Hallaren?
We are named in honor of Mary A. Hallaren, Colonel, U.S. Army, She was one of the first women selected to attend Officer Candidate School. She served as the director of personnel for the Women's Army Corps, European Theater, and in 1947, became the Director of the WAC.
You can read more about the "Little Colonel" here.
Editor-in-Chief: Erikka
Erikka is a fiction writer, educator, and baseball enthusiast. She is an Air Force veteran. She is a civilian now, following her active duty spouse wherever the Air Force sends him. Erikka is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University’s Mountainview MFA and was the recipient of the program’s Safford Book Prize for best Fiction thesis and the Lynn Safford Memorial Prize. She dabbles in multi-tasking and burning homemade cookies.
The editor with her dad and her husband.
Poetry Editor: Joanna
Joanna holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature, specializing in fictional as well as nonfiction travel narratives of the Middle East. She spent eight years in that region, notably two years in Afghanistan, teaching writing, mythology, and public speaking classes to American soldiers and gathering materials for her own memoir, which she is currently completing as part of an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Southern New Hampshire University under the direction of Mark Sundeen. Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in journals including Guernica and Prairie Schooner.
Photography Reviewer: Nichole
Capt Nichole K. Timmreck, U.S. Air Force, a JAG officer, has served on active duty for four and half years with assignments in Colorado at the United States Air Force Academy and North Carolina. She currently works as a Victims’ Counsel at Seymour Johnson AFB and Pope AAF. She has also been an Army spouse for over 10 years, following her husband from Germany to Hawaii, where she attended law school, to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where she currently lives with her husband and two daughters. Nichole has held the title of official family photographer and historian for the last decade and specializes in landscapes and family vacations. While writing and photography have been personal hobbies since she was a child, she hopes to share more of her creativity thanks to platforms like Hallaren.
Creative Nonfiction Editor: Nancy
Nancy Stroer arrived in Germany as a newly-commissioned Army maintenance officer, two days after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She spent her entire European tour in a series of near misses—supporting the massive movement of equipment to the Middle East in the build up to Operation Desert Storm, but not having to deploy herself. Attending a Haus Rissen seminar on reintegrating East and West, attended by American military leaders as well as West German officers and recently repatriated East German officers—the same week there was a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. Planning, then putting the kibosh on a beach trip to Yugoslavia with her other slacker lieutenant friends because war was shaking the country apart.
Serving in the beer-soaked, post-Cold War trenches was so fascinating Nancy took a European separation from the Army so she could stay overseas. Since then she’s lived and worked in Germany, Turkey, Japan, and the United Kingdom. She’s written for the Stars and Stripes and Soldiers magazine, and is putting the finishing touches on a novel about women working together (or not!) in the peacetime Army. She’s also a certified book coach specializing in helping female veterans write about their experiences in the military.