WELL READ Magazine DECEMBER 2024

Little Pearl by Melanie Sue Bowles

In this soulful sequel to the crowd favorite Liberty Biscuit, a young teenager learns that no dream ever came true without believing it would.

Katherine Pearl Baker—“Kip” for short—has just gone from being the only child on her family’s rural peach farm to becoming a big sister.As her world and the people in it change in order to welcome a tiny new family member, Kip finds herself afloat, wondering if the place she’s carved out in life is the right one for her, after all.

While wandering one day in the woods she loves, Kip finds an old fence post bearing odd marks that appear to be symbols from a time long ago. Her discovery leads her to once again uncover a family secret and stories as yet untold about the ones she loves. What she learns tests her cherished relationship with her grandfather, as she recognizes a certain kind of loneliness within him for the first time and then must face what the resolution of that loneliness might mean.

Adding a starving horse named “Pearl” to her herd of rescued horses and beloved donkey Liberty Biscuit provides Kip a needed purpose, and the barn becomes her refuge as she struggles with her own uncomfortable secret. Desperate to tell her parents but embarrassed and unsure of how, it takes the return of a boy she trusts for her to finally admit that her path might be different than others planned it would be. The trouble is, Kip isn’t sure she can be brave enough to put her voice to her thoughts and share them.

As the sweet-natured Little Pearl gradually regains her strength and beauty through Kip’s thoughtful care, and the wary and distant Raven begins to trust Kip’s presence and her touch, Kip feels the flame of a new dream flicker to life. With the birth of this dream, a level of understanding grows, not only of her horses, but of her grandfather, and eventually, of herself.

Author Melanie Sue Bowles was born and raised in Sylvan Lake, Michigan, a small village near Pontiac. She moved to Florida in her early twenties where she earned her living as a professional firefighter/medic; it's where she met her husband Jim.After acquiring her first horse and becoming immersed in the equestrian community, Melanie discovered a disturbing amount of mistreatment endured by too many horses and vowed to make a difference. While continuing to work at the fire department, Melanie and Jim set out to create a sanctuary for abused, elderly and unwanted horses.

In 1991 Proud Spirit Horse Sanctuary was established, and readers were introduced to Melanie's graceful heart when she chronicled the start-up of this award winning facility in her inspiring debut book, The Horses of Proud Spirit.

Melanie's writing is powerful and filled with emotion. Her books are not just for horse lovers or dog lovers; they are for anyone who wants to be uplifted and inspired. These heartwarming stories speak of living beyond ourselves, living a life of purpose and finding ways to give back to the world around us. The Proud Spirit books were the inspiration for an EmmyAward winning PBS Documentary which is currently airing nationwide.

Did you miss last month’s issue? No worries, click here to find it as well as all the past issues.

Love Between Times by Beth Ford

WhenAshley’s conventional 21st century life falls apart, she returns to England to write the book she shelved years ago, determined to take control of her life.

Meanwhile, in 1377 Wiltshire, Thomas fights his family’s desire that he become a priest and plots to chase his dream of knighthood instead. WhileAshley and Thomas search for answers, Thomas suddenly appears in the modern day.

Unable to communicate, his first encounter withAshley ends with the police demanding his immigration papers. All Thomas wants is to return to the world he understands, but he andAshley are drawn together again and again. How will they find the answers Thomas needs before the authorities close in without losing each other forever?

Say Hello to My Little Friend:A Novel by Jennine Capó Crucet

Scarface meets Moby Dick in Say Hello to My Little Friend—“a masterclass in pace and precision … brilliant” (Nana KwameAdjeiBrenyah, National BookAward Finalist of Chain Gang All Stars) about a young man’s attempt to capitalize on his mother’s murky legacy—a story steeped in Miami’s marvelous and sinister magic.

“Blistering, hilarious, [and] tragic” (The Miami Herald), Say Hello to My Little Friend is Jennine Capó Crucet’s most daring, heartbreaking, and fearless book yet.

Soaked by Toby LeBlanc

One word describes Louisiana fifty years from now after climate change intensifies: Soaked.A nearly silent Cajun man is the last speaker of Louisiana French but doesn’t know what he is saying.AVietnamese woman recovering from the trauma of war looks for home in a hurricane.A farmer gambles his inherited land on the best marijuana Louisiana has ever known. Laughing in the face of oblivion, lending a hand to the hopeless, adapting in spite of tragedy, and enduring when everything else is gone, is what the people of Louisiana, Toby LeBlanc’s people, do best.

“A fully imagined and always surprising take on life along the Gulf of Mexico fifty years and many disasters from now. Yet people—and the old spirit of Louisiana— endure.” —Mike Tidwell, author of Bayou Farewell

Petrochemical Nocturne

byAmos Jasper Wright

The Mississippi River. HAZMAT. Boxing. Suicide by cop. New Orleans Saints football. Chemical explosions. TheAngola prison rodeo. Chlorine gas ghost ships. Through these symbols and themes we learn about Toussaint, (anAfricanAmerican named after the Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture) and his formative experiences in the Standard Heights neighborhood of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Petrochemical Nocturne is an indictment of what Toussaint describes as "that dystopian haunted carnival cruise line calledAmerica." as Standard Heights and the ExxonMobil refinery which has destroyed it supply the energy and refined petroleum products which enable contemporary consumerism.

Adiscursive exploration of environmental racism, southern history, the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, intergenerational trauma, and climate change, Petrochemical Nocturne is both paean and eulogy for the former enslaved communities of CancerAlley, the erasure of an entire people from a poisoned landscape.

Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore explores ourhybridnatureasbodyandsomethingelse––mind,soul,spirit––throughpoemsspokenby and about the persona Amanda. Haunted by her vanished twin, Gloria, who died in utero and some of whose DNA she absorbed, Amanda views herself as hybrid and thus as a monster, a carrier of the dead. Grounded in nature’s grace and variety, domestic life, and family dynamics, poems on art and myth focus on hybrid creatures, parallelingAmanda and Gloria. The sisters’ relationship is as varied as the poems’ tones: as Amanda says, she “likes a mixed diction.” Sometimes loving or sorrowful, sometimes witty and wry, the work revels in image and word music.

Patricia Clark’s latest poetry collection O Lucky Day explores her concerns about family and mortality, silence and loneliness, widening to includelossesinthenaturalworld.Thesesorrows often emerge along with an exuberance found in the sensual pleasures of taste and touch. Clark trains herself “to disappear, into the shagbark / hickory, the scarred maple, / the viburnum just about to flower.” She knows that whatever upheaval we bring to the world, and ourselves, “something was broken, then healed, then / transformed.” She advises us to “loaf and ponder,” but also to rise with the rustling grasses in lament of environmental degradation, voicing our insistence for reverence of what remains. These lyric poems of intensity and acute detail render the physical world in its tattered glory.

“Whateverlifehandsme—love,land,orloss— a way to acceptance means embracing earthly cycles, authentic connections to others, and the comforting puzzle of words,” says Catherine Hamrick. Processing depression and the loss of her parents, she explores the therapeutic value of nature and poetry in The Tears of Things. This collection charts her movement through changing relationships, landscapes, and gardens in the Midwest and Deep South. Seamus Heaney’s interpretation of The Aeneid’s famous line sunt lacrimae rerum— “there are tears at the heart of things”— underpins Hamrick’s sensibility. Observing seasonal flourishes and decay reminds us that love, joy, longing, sorrow, and gratitude arise from life’s imperfection and brevity.

MADVILLE PUBLISHING seeks out and encourages literary writers with unique voices. We look for writers who express complex ideas in simple terms. We look for critical thinkers with a twang, a lilt, or a click in their voices.And patois! We love a good patois. We want to hear those regionalisms in our writers’voices. We want to preserve the sound of our histories through our voices complete and honest, dialectal features and all. We want to highlight those features that make our cultures special in ways that do not focus on division, but rather shine an appreciative light on our diversity.

In the Bluegrass world of oak-cured bourbon, antebellum mansions, and Thoroughbred horse farms are secrets—deadly secrets!

Josiah Reynolds knows that and with good reason. She’s solved many a murder, but Josiah prays that she does not stumble across another body. The stress is too much.

She is happy to be invited to a winter sledding party at Haze Corbyn’s home. Corbyn is a former syndicated movie critic for newspapers and magazines, who retired to the Bluegrass, dabbling in his love of horses.

The party is a kickoff for theAngela Weathers retrospective at a local theater. MissAngela is even coming for the showing of her first movie and Corbyn’s event.

Josiah is excited to meet her movie idol, so it comes as a big surprise when Haze Corbyn turns up dead at his own party.

Kentucky is not called “the dark and bloody ground” for nothing!

Death

By Trauma:AJosiah Reynolds Mystery

Abigail Keam

The Best of the Shortest: ASouthern Writers

Reading Reunion by Suzanne Hudson (Author, Editor), Mandy Haynes (Editor), Joe Formichella (Author, Editor)

Contributors:

Marlin Barton + Rick Bragg + Sonny Brewer + Doug

Crandell + Pia Z. Ehrhardt + David Wright Faladé + Beth

Ann Fennelly + Joe

Formichella + Patricia Foster + Tom Franklin + Robert

Gatewood + Jason Headley + Jim Gilbert + Frank Turner

Hollon + Suzanne Hudson + Joshilyn Jackson + Bret

Anthony Johnston +Abbott Kahler + Doug Kelley + Cassandra King + Suzanne Kingsbury + Dawn Major + Bev Marshall + Michael Morris + Janet Nodar + Jennifer

Paddock + Theodore Pitsios + Lynn Pruett + Ron Rash + Michelle Richmond + R. P. Safire + Dayne Sherman + George Singleton + Robert St. John + Sidney Thompson + Daniel Wallace + Daren Wang + James Whorton, Jr. + Mac Walcott + Karen Spears Zacharias

“Some of the happiest moments of my writing life have been spent in the company of writers whose work is included in these pages. They all brought their A-game to this fabulous collection, and at our house it is going on a shelf next to its honored predecessors. The only thing that saddens me is that the largehearted William Gay is not around to absorb some of the love that shines through every word.” ―Steve Yarbrough

“The Best of the Shortest takes the reader on a fast-paced adventure from familiar back roads to the jungles of Viet Nam; from muddy southern creek banks to the other side of the world, touching on themes as beautiful as love and as harsh as racism. However dark or uplifting, you are guaranteed to enjoy the ride.” ―Bob Zellner

“I had some of the best times of my life meeting, drinking and chatting with the writers in this book, times matched only by the hours I spent reading their books. This collection showcases a slice of Southern literature in all its complicated, glorious genius. Anyone who likes good writing will love it.” ―Clay Risen

Suzanne Hudson is the author of two literary novels, In a Temple of Trees and In the Dark of the Moon. Her short fiction has been anthologized in almost a dozen books, including Stories from the Blue Moon Café and The Shoe Burnin': Stories of Southern Soul. Her short story collection Opposable Thumbs was a finalist for a John Gardner Fiction BookAward. Suzanne Hudson has been named the 2025 Truman Capote Prize winner for excellence in short fiction. She lives with her husband, author Joe Formichella, near Fairhope,Alabama.

The Green Mage is a tale in the finest of sword and sorcery tradition—a hero’s journey told through the eyes of the mage.

Norbert Oldfoot is a simple mage who makes his living traveling the Bekla River Road, selling trade goods, performing healing magic, and singing traditional songs of heroes. He becomes friends with Kerttu, a coppersmith who has developed a new alloy which is perfect for manufacturing swords. When Kerttu is kidnappedby theevilWizardLudek,Kerttu’s teenage daughterTessia, a skilled hunter, recruits three friends, including Norbert, and sets out on a quest to find a legendary dragon who lives in the mountains. With the help of the dragon, Tessia plans to save her father. Little do they know that in order to save Kerttu, they will first have to save the kingdom.

Long ago, Milon Redshield, the first warrior-king of Windkeep Castle, brought down a curse on the kingdom for his cruel treatment of dragons, the Goddess Nilene’s chosen guardians of nature. Thousands of years later, Windkeep is still burdened with the curse, and Queen Tessia is having to defend her kingdom from repeated assaults by the weather witches and their allies. She turns to her friends and advisors Norbert the Green Mage and Tyrmiss the Last Dragon, to accompany her and a band of heroes in a quest to travel to the far land of Sheonad in order to parley with the witches, and if they refuse to negotiate, thentodestroytheircity.TessiaurgesNorberttousehis powers to fight the witches and protect Windkeep, but Norbert is reluctant to do so because he understands that the world exists in delicate balance, and grave and unforeseen consequences result if the balance is disrupted. After fighting a number of battles and suffering bizarre magical transformations, Tessia and Norbert at last come to understand the kingdom of Windkeep can be saved only through the ancient wisdom of dragons.

When the dragon Tyrmiss returns to thekingdomtoaskTessiaandNorbert to help save the Western Dragons from extermination, the two heroes begin the greatest adventure of their lives, one that will take them into the underworld to plead with Mnuurluth, Lord Death himself, whom they have unknowingly been serving all along.

MADVILLE PUBLISHING seeks out and encourages literary writers with unique voices. We look for writers who express complex ideas in simple terms. We look for critical thinkers with a twang, a lilt, or a click in their voices.And patois! We love a good patois. We want to hear those regionalisms in our writers’voices. We want to preserve the sound of our histories through our voices complete and honest, dialectal features and all. We want to highlight those features that make our cultures special in ways that do not focus on division, but rather shine an appreciative light on our diversity.

In Volume One, you’ll find thirty-eight submissions written by a fantastic mix of award-winning authors and poets plus new ones to the scene. Three submissions in this volume were nominated for a Pushcart Prize: Miller’s Cafe by Mike Hilbig, Sleeping on Paul’s Mattress by Brenda Sutton Rose, andAHard Dog by Will Maguire. The cover art is by artist, Lindsay Carraway, who had several pieces published in February’s issue.

Contributors: Jeffrey Dale Lofton, Phyllis Gobbell,

Brenda Sutton Rose, T. K. Thorne, Claire Hamner Matturro, Penny Koepsel, Mike Hilbig, Jon Sokol, Rita Welty Bourke, Suzanne Kamata,Annie McDonnell, Will Maguire, Joy Ross Davis, Robb Grindstaff, Tom Shachtman, Micah Ward, Mike Turner, James D. Brewer, Eileen Coe, Susan Cornford,Ana Doina, J. B. Hogan, Carrie Welch,Ashley Holloway, Rebecca Klassen, Robin Prince Monroe, Ellen Notbohm, Scott Thomas Outlar, Fiorella Ruas, Jonathan Pett, DeLane Phillips, Larry F. Sommers, Macy Spevacek, and Richard Stimac

In Volume Two, you’ll find forty-three submissions written by a fantastic mix of award-winning authors and poets plus new ones to the scene. Three submissions in this volume were nominated for a Pushcart Prize:A Bleeding Heart byAnn Hite, AFew Hours in the Life of a Five-Year-Old Pool Player by Francine Rodriguez, and There Were Red Flags by Mike Turner. The cover art for Volume Two is by artist, DeWitt Lobrano, who had several pieces published in November’s issue. Enjoy!

Contributors:Ann Hite, Malcolm Glass, Dawn Major, John M. Williams, Mandy Haynes, Francine Rodriguez, Mike Turner, Mickey Dubrow, William Walsh, Robb Grindstaff, Deborah ZenhaAdams, Mark Braught, B.A. Brittingham, Ramey Channell, Eileen Coe, Marion Cohen, Lorraine Cregar, John Grey, J. B. Hogan, Yana Kane, Philip Kobylarz, Diane Lefer, Will Maguire, David Malone, Ashley Tunnell, Tania Nyman, Jacob Parker, LaVern Spencer McCarthy, K. G. Munro,Angela Patera, Micheal Spake, George Pallas, Marisa Keller, Ken Gosse, and Orlando DeVito

Walking The Wrong Way Home by

Mandy Haynes

Spanning nearly twenty decades, the struggles and victories these characters face are timeless as they all work towards the same goal.

Aplace to feel safe, a place to call home.

Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth: Eva and other stories by Mandy Haynes

Each story features a female protagonist, ranging from ten to ninety-five years of age. Set in the south, you’ll follow these young women and girls as they learn that they’re stronger than they ever thought possible.

Oliver

by

Mandy Haynes

“Dear God…and Jesus and Mary…”

Even though eleven-year old Olivia is raised Southern Baptist, she likes to cover her bases when asking for a favor. Unlike her brother Oliver, she struggles with keeping her temper in check and staying out of trouble. But Oliver is different, and in the summer of ’72 he proves to Olivia there’s magic in everything - it’s up to us to see it.

Mandy Haynes spent hours on barstools and riding in vans listening to great stories from some of the best songwriters and storytellers in Nashville, Tennessee. After her son graduated college, she traded a stressful life as a pediatric cardiac sonographer for a happy one and now spends her time writing and enjoying life as much as she can. She is the author of two short story collections, Walking the Wrong Way Home, Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth Eva and Other Stories, and a novella, Oliver. She is a co-editor of the Southern Writers Reading reunion anthology, The Best of the Shortest. Mandy is also the editor-in-chief of WELL READ Magazine, an online literary journal created to give authors affordable advertising options that supports and promotes authors of all genres and writing backgrounds. Like the characters in some of her stories, she never misses a chance to jump in a creek to catch crawdads, stand up for the underdog, or the opportunity to make someone laugh.

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INSIDE VOICES

“Beauty reminds us of the characters’ complexities and keeps us from viewing them only as functions of their struggles.”

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Jody Hobbs Hesler

Jody Hobbs Hesler is the author of the story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better and her debut novel, Without You Here. Her words also appear in Necessary Fiction, Gargoyle, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Writer’s Digest, Electric Literature, CRAFT, Arts & Letters, and many other journals. She teaches at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia; writes and copy edits for Charlottesville Family Magazine; and serves as assistant fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: The opening images of a story always interest me. I wonder why an author chooses IT for their story. Why did you begin Nonie's story in the imaginary world she created for herself?

Jody: In the opening scene, Nonie is a child, lost in her imagination. She pictures herself on a highwire, mastering this very difficult thing, but disruptions from the real world keep knocking her down. This makes an apt metaphor for her character—even as an adult, she’s happier in imaginative, whimsical spaces, and the real world doesn’t like her to stay there. Family is part of that real world, and this scene brings the whole of her family dynamics into view, showing how her personality challenges her family and how they respond by quashing her spirit rather than connecting with her.

Inside Voices/Robert: “Without you here, I’d think this was someone else’s family,” Nonie says, tapping Noreen’s nose. “Without you here” takes on much deeper meaning than that. How did you decide on this as the title?

Jody: For the longest time the title was Little Angel, which is Nonie’s nickname for her niece, and that title communicated their fondness for each other, the purity of that affection despite the obstacles in their story. But it also accidentally made me think of those Hallmark Precious Moments angel figurines, which, pardon to anyone who likes those, felt a little cute. This isn’t a cute story.

When a later revision generated that comment from Nonie, it resonated right away. Without You Here. The whole novel is about a broken connection, about the absence that Nonie leaves behind. The scene the lines come from finds Nonie and Noreen off to themselves during a family gathering, which is what they both prefer. That they feel such affinity for each other is beautiful, but Nonie’s sense of being unmoored without her niece weighs on that relationship too. That one line of dialog holds all those layers.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: I'm interested in how the impact of one struggling person can have such a strong and devastating effect on a family or community.And also how the disappearance of that person has an equally profound

impact. So this is about suicide, but it’s also about the struggle of life and how we navigate it so differently— especially on the surface. Will you talk about that?

Jody: In Without You Here, I’m exploring the complications of loving someone, and being loved by someone, whose emotional and mental struggles interfere with their day-to-day functioning. Noreen has some similar, but less all-encompassing issues, and an uncle/great-uncle in the family died by suicide decades earlier, a story that’s never spoken of directly. The secrecy perpetuates Nonie’s shame and stokes the family worry that shrouds both her and Noreen. That puts three generations of worry on Noreen’s shoulders. Quite a heavy burden. I was especially interested in showing the power love can wield, despite challenges like these. Some unhealthy patterns in Noreen’s life can trace back to how her relationship with her aunt worked, but so can her joys and celebrations. No matter how troubled Nonie was, she was also a vivid, loving, whimsical person, and she left behind a love strong enough to energize the most positive and joyful parts of Noreen’s life for decades after she’s gone.

Inside Voices/Robert: Prophetic: “It’s always good to have your own way out,” Nonie says. “Out of what?” “Whatever you need to get away from.” Will you talk about the very caged and trapped feeling that Nonie and Noreen,

and even people like Ted struggle with? Maybe talk about the resources you list in the book to help get through rough times.

Jody: Feeling trapped is a great way to put it. Nonie felt trapped by her mental illness. Panic attacks overtook her without warning. Depression fogged her senses and made her feel alone, lost, and futile. And she felt trapped by her family’s sense that something essential was wrong with her, that she required fixing.And she felt trapped in a world that expected her to conform to expectations that didn’t suit her. She loved intensely and lived passionately, but those traps would sneak up on her and she couldn’t figure out how to get away from them.

Noreen’s almost literally trapped in her marriage, as an at-home parent, way out in the country without a car of her own. Each condition of her trapped-ness is something she agreed to, so she feels complicit, which makes it harder for her to reckon directly with failures in her marriage. Beyond that, she feels trapped by her family’s persistent worry that she’ll turn out like Nonie, which sets her up to doubt herself.

And Ted, Noreen’s father, feels trapped by the grief that overtakes his wife, Nonie’s sister/Noreen’s mother, after Nonie dies. Ruth had loved and worried over Nonie since childhood, had been deputized to help her when her mother was too tapped out or didn’t feel like it. She felt responsible

and sad and angry. Her grief gets messy, and Ted gives up trying to figure it out. He flees, via divorce, remarriage, relocation, all at the expense of a more genuine, enduring connection to Noreen. Even Noreen’s husband feels trapped – by his father’s outsized demands on his time and the stifling purse strings George can’t quite do without. Despite all this trapped-ness, I hope the biggest takeaway for this story is that love has value, even when we’re broken inside.

You also asked about resources. For anyone who reaches my book while in crisis themselves, the front pages include national helpline numbers and websites for those considering suicide, or grieving a loss to suicide, or trying to survive an abusive relationship. There’s also a Q & A at the back of the book that a licensed counselor/writer friend of mine helped me generate. The questions could be used for a typical book club, but they could also apply in a therapeutic setting, for caregivers, family members, or people coping with the same conditions my characters had. For any setting, the questions are geared toward empathy and discovering connections between our experiences and the characters’ experiences. I hope the book helps people talk about hard things.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: There are so many beautiful turns of phrase.

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton

"remembering is different from feeling." So lyrical and mournful.

“Joy doesn’t cancel grief as much as it complicates it."

“Clouds don’t have anywhere to go…Yet they’re always leaving.”

This is a hallmark of your writing. Your short story collection is similar. Wistful, heart-heavy. Why do you write what you write?

Jody: Thank you so much for saying that. Every minute I spent writing Without You Here I was aware of a need to do my best to make it beautiful. It’s all about people suffering, grieving, losing hope. Luckily there’s hope leftover too, but I didn’t want the overriding flavor to be sadness as much as I wanted it to be beauty. The beauty of what was life affirming in their stories, for the hope Nonie and Noreen both live on. Beauty reminds us of the characters’ complexities and keeps us from viewing them only as functions of their struggles.

Inside Voices/Robert: Let’s talk about structure for a moment.Your debut short story collection What Makes You Think You're Supposed To Feel Better came to mind as I read Without You Here, because so many of the chapters

read like standalone short stories. I wonder if that was intentional and which you prefer to write more, short or longform fiction.

Jody: Getting the structure right for Without You Here was the hardest part. It is equally about Noreen, who’s 8 years old when her aunt dies from suicide, AND about that aunt. But how do I maintain the story’s tension if one of the main characters is absent for a significant portion of the timeline?

I knew from early on I had to try something different, something I didn’t know how to do yet. Jane Alison’s craft book Meander, Spiral, Explode was a big help. It offers plot shape alternatives to the more typical Freitag triangle that’s been pushed on me since high school – the old inciting incident, rising action, crisis, resolution model. Jane Alison’s plot shapes mimic shapes you find in nature, like the meander of a river or the spiral of a leaf falling to the ground.

The spiral made sense to me. I could switch back and forth in time, circling around the tragedy of Nonie’s death, showing how that loss rippled out and out and out into Noreen’s life. I got really excited about it, then it was like my whole mind erased itself. If I throw chronology out the window, then what comes first? What after that?

That’s when my kids stepped in. They’d read several drafts of Without You Here over the years and really

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton

believed in it. My youngest input every chapter description I’d sketched onto index cards into a spreadsheet, and my oldest studied the spreadsheet and reasoned out a possible nonlinear sequence to follow.

I used that sequence as a jumping off point and ended up with the final draft that splits between Nonie and Noreen’s voices and spirals around the defining fact of Nonie’s loss over the course of decades, while the present arc of the story marches through the last months of 1999. The chapters are connected by mood and theme, emphasizing the characteristics Noreen and her aunt share, the ones that make the whole family worry Noreen will follow in her footsteps, and highlighting ways the loss stays with Noreen and affects her friendships and major decisions.

For the chapters to make sense spliced together this way, each had to be at least somewhat self-sufficient, so they did behave a little like short stories. But they don’t stand alone the way a short story does. I think the sequence and spiraling heighten their meanings and push the reader forward in the larger story.

As for which I like better, the long or short form, I like both. They’re totally unlike each other, but I think of them as cross-training for each other. Short stories are exercises in what to leave out. Novels are exercises in how to curate what you leave in.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: "Some nights Noreen shouts herself awake from bad dreams that play out different ways she might..." be responsible for something an adult did.You address the tendency of children to take the responsibility onto themselves for things outside of their control. Why was that important to do?

Jody: The beauty of Nonie and Noreen’s relationship was as important for me to get right as the precarity of it. Nonie’s wonderful in a thousand ways, but she leans some of her adult needs against her favorite person, who’s still very much a child, way too young to be able to manage what’s asked of her. Noreen becomes a caretaker, and that tendency to sublimate her needs and wants, and sometimes safety, to benefit someone she loves plagues other relationships in her life, sets her up for her marriage. She has to learn to give the same level of priority to caring about herself.

Inside Voices/Robert: I've either read something you said or heard you talk about grace and forgiveness.Will you elaborate on that, especially where Nonie's mother is concerned?

Jody: I believe in redemption and hope, people learning to be better than they are. My characters almost always embody this yearning combination. When readers connect

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton

with that struggle, it feels like I’ve helped something important to happen. Like that’s one of the most important things I’m writing toward.

Suicide is an especially complicated tragedy to heal from. There’s grief, fear we missed a chance to help, anger that the person succumbed instead of reaching out. Every character in Without You Here would benefit from forgiving themselves and Nonie, from finding some grace, but not everyone knows how to do it.

Martha, the matriarch of the family in Without You Here, doesn’t know how to do it. We meet her as a relatively young mother in the first chapter, and even there she’s bitter and demanding. But right beside her front door is a framed photo of her brother and herself, laughing in the front seat of a convertible. This is a picture Martha sees every time she leaves the house.Apicture every member of her family sees. A picture her children grow up with. That her grandchildren grow up with. This hard evidence that the emotionally straight-jacketed mother/grandmother they know is capable of hilarity and joy. And fondness. Her bitterness is a direct result of a grief whose cause she’s never forgiven – her brother’s death by suicide. When Nonie dies the same way, Martha’s anger helps her survive the loss. She doesn’t learn a new, better way around her grief. Though Martha extends zero grace to herself, zero grace to Nonie and later to Noreen, I think the reader

extends grace to Martha. Not a lack of accountability, but grace. Here’s a person so broken by her own sadness she’s become a liability to people she loves. That’s really sad. It’s hard to fully blame her.

Inside Voices/Jeffrey: What’s next for you?

Jody: I’m meeting with you today while I’m at a writing residency at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, so right now I’m finalizing a few short stories, hoping to inch toward the next collection. I also recently sent my next novel manuscript to my agent, and I’m mulling her notes on it before jumping into the next round of revisions there.

The new book is called Watchdog, and it’s another family story. In the smallest nutshell, it’s about how ignorant we are about where danger comes from and about our power to keep anyone safe. In a larger nutshell, it’s about a family at oddsaboutwhat’shappeningwiththeiroldestdaughter.The mother senses something off. The father sees nothing concrete and brushes off all the worries and flags. This difference between them breeds tension and drives them farther apart, distracting everyone from the real problem while it grows more dangerous under their noses.

The plot here is linear, but we have two voices again. The mother and the oldest teen daughter.Through the daughter’s sections, the reader discovers the source of the threat right away, while the parents blunder forward, wasting time.

“Exquisitely

written, this is a debut with precise maturity, a necessary and timely

story.”—Louise Marburg, author

of You Have Reached Your Destination WithoutYou Here

Jody Hobbs Hesler

Santa’s Mistake

I’ve been wondering lately if anyone even believes in mountain magic anymore. It sure doesn’t seem that way. Back when I was a little girl, everyone was open to the mystery without examining the why. Now magic could slap us in the face, and we wouldn’t notice.You see I get caught up in the nonsense of everyday living like others. Most folks that know me, know I had a very eccentric mother.You never knew what she might do next.That made life somewhat hard on a young girl, but the one time you could count on Mom was at Christmas. Each year something miraculous happened and my real mother was whisked away and a shiny new Christmas mom replaced her. The transformation always happened right after Thanksgiving.

Mom began the holiday season with a fresh cut tree and a decoration party for my younger brother, Jeff, and me. She baked—the woman didn’t do this any other time of year—banana bread, cut out sugar cookies, and lemon pound cake. The tree had a million lights on it and just as

many ornaments.

Even the year my dad abandoned us at Granny’s house, Mom put on her best smile and gave us a Christmas to remember, knowing full well her kids needed a joyous season as much as she did. I believed in all the Christmas magic the mountains could offer. And I still do this time of year.

The year I turned nine, I was so rooted in this magic, I could burst. I gave Mom my list for Santa. On it was every new Barbie that had emerged since the year before. Jeff was three-years-old and had to be helped with his letter. He wanted a GI Joe and Matchbox cars. Mom took the envelopes and promised to mail them to the North Pole from her work.

The days ticked by slowly. Each one seemed like four. Nine days into the month of December was my birthday, which was celebrated with a coconut cake and small Santas riding sleighs across the frothy icing. What I loved most about this birthday was the fact that only fourteen days were left before Christmas.

When Christmas Eve finally arrived, I woke up at six in the morning too excited to sleep. I shared a bedroom with Mom and Jeff because Granny’s little house only had two. Mom and Jeff shared a double bed, and I had a twin right under a window that allowed me to watch the night sky fade and turn to the gray dawn. Honestly the best Christmas

Eves had fat fluffy gray clouds threatening snow. None of that bright sunshine and warm temperatures.

Mom kept us busy that day. We went to see whatever Christmas movie that came out at the local theater. As the day wore on, I kept a watch on the time. Before long we could go to bed, and Santa would come. And on that Christmas Day my dreams would come true. I didn’t think about how Mom would turn back into her old self, worried and sad. I thought of the wonderful gifts.

As Granny’s old coo-coo clock struck six that evening, I begged to eat supper and go to bed. After all, it was dark out.

“You can’t go to bed this early. You won’t sleep through the night.” Mom laughed. “Remember if you’re not asleep Santa won’t leave toys.”

And that was the greatest fear of all. The second fear was Santa would see Granny wasn’t asleep. She liked to stay up and read. Her bedroom was right beside the living room. Her whole house was connected with no hall, one big Lshape. I always wanted a hall almost as much as I loved Christmas morning.

“You two can stay up until 9:30 tonight since it is a special night.” Mom smiled as she served us supper. Now this was a woman who was a stickler for bedtimes.

“No. We can’t stay up that late, Mom. Santa might skip our house.”

Granny gave me one of her looks. “Annie, it will be fine. He won’t come until you are asleep.”

“Granny, you got to promise to go to sleep early too,” I said to her.

She shook her head, hiding a smile. Christmas magic was at work.

Finally, I was allowed to go to bed. I crawled between the covers as the floor furnace near my bed clicked off and on. I put my pillow on the windowsill and watched the stars twinkling in the now clear skies. Santa would find us. Wouldn’t he? I promised myself I would only pretend to sleep. Part of me wanted to hear Santa so I could tell my friends, who didn’t believe in his existence. Silly little fools thought their parents put toys out. That couldn’t be because Mom didn’t make enough money to buy us the kind of toys Santa brought. Somewhere along the way of trying to stay awake, I dropped off into a deep dreamless sleep. When I woke up, the house was dark and silent. Mom breathed hard in the bed next to mine. The furnace clicked on and off. What time was it? Had Santa come? I tried to count to one hundred but lost track. Maybe I would just slide out of bed and check the time in the living room. If Santa had come, I could glance at the toys he left. The trick was I had to get past Granny who was like a bloodhound on the scent of a rabbit when it came to kids roaming around the house at night. I inched out of bed, holding my breath.

Mom had a new routine of taking a pill before bed to help her sleep. This gave me an advantage to make a clean getaway.

The problem with an old house—and this house was built at the beginning of World War II—was they creaked and moaned with each step a person took, even a young girl of nine.

I had two choices, I could crawl through the bathroom or Mom’s sewing room, formally called the back porch even though it was completely enclosed and heated. Either route I took, I had to crawl through Granny’s room to reach the living room where the clock hung on the wall and of course Santa would have left the toys. I chose the shortest, direct route, through Mom’s sewing room. The floors here were the creakiest, but I managed to make it out of the bedroom with Mom quietly snoring and around the floor furnace without sounding any alarms.

The threshold of Granny’s room yawned in front of me. Only the weakest of light came through the window from a streetlight. I had to crawl a short distance to make it to the living room. But Granny was as alert as Mom was out of it. I figured she slept with one eye open. I eased into Granny’s bedroom, making sure I stayed low to the ground so she couldn’t see me from her high four poster bed. One, two, three, four movements—I couldn’t call them steps because I was on my hands and knees—and the living room door

was within reach. I paused and listened. Of course I couldn’t hear Granny breathing because I didn’t believe that woman took a breath after dark.

One, two, and I reached the door to the living room. Home free.

“Annie Mae, get yourself in bed right now. What do you think you’re doing crawling through the house.” I stayed quiet hoping she would think she was dreaming. “Now.” I stood. What was the point of crawling anymore. “What time is it?”

“Too early for you to be going into the living room.” Granny said this in her no-nonsense voice. I walked back the way I came.

“Don’t get out of bed again until your mama wakes up.”

You see, the problem with Granny’s order was a woman who has taken a pill to help her sleep might not wake up until noon the next day. I slid between the chilly sheets on my bed and watched out the window. Granny had to sleep sometime. So, I waited and waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

One thing about nine-year-old me, I didn’t give up easily. Again I took the same route on my hands and knees.Again I paused beside Granny’s bed. This time I could hear breathing. Hurrah! I crawled into the dark living room and eased the door closed. Instead of switching on a light, I

went to the kitchen that connected to the living room at the front of the house. I turned on the light. This allowed me to see two distinct plies, and I’m talking about piles of toys, one on the sofa and one in Mom’s chair. I went for the big pile on the sofa, hoping it was mine. I picked up a box and went to the kitchen so I could view it in the light. The Barbie I wanted. I took this back and carefully placed it back on the pile. Next I chose a smaller box and repeated my kitchen visit. Barbie’s baby sister! Just what I wanted! I repeated this several more times until I got worried that I would mess up the way Santa arranged all the toys. Plus, I needed to save some surprises for when Mom was awake. One would have thought I would have gone back to bed but nope. I decided to do the same with Jeff’s toys just to see if he got what he wanted. The first box I took to the kitchen was Astronaut GI Joe. Boy was he going to love that. Then I took a smaller box into the kitchen.

Oh no. Santa had made a terrible mistake. He had left Barbie’s little brother in Jeff’s pile of toys. Now everyone knew that a boy who liked GI Joe wasn’t going to want a girl toy, even if it was the little brother that happened to go with my little sister. Surely Santa meant for me to have this and got mixed up. So, I placed it beside the box that held Barbie’s little sister in my toy pile. I turned off the kitchen light and worked my way back to my bed without anyone even noticing.

I was right proud of myself for finding Santa’s Mistake. Who could blame him? The man flew around the world in no time breaking into houses to leave toys. He was bound to get confused. I fell asleep thinking about the toys I had to play with when everyone got up.

Jeff woke up at dawn. “Time to get up. I know Santa’s been here.”

Mom yawned. “Wait right there, Buster.” I have neglected to say Mom loved to take photos and wanted to get into the living room first to capture our surprised looks.

“I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

We waited. Jeff had the wiggles and kept peeking around the door. Me, I was as cool as a cucumber. Until…

“Something is wrong in here,” Mom said to Granny. “Ann, come here.”

I swallowed. “Yes ma’am.” It always helped to be as polite as possible when Mom used that tone. When I entered the living room, Mom gave me the evil eye. “Did you get up during the night and mess with these toys?”

What I thought had to be an innocent look spread across my face. “Why would I do that?”

“Jeff’s doll is in your toys. It should be over in his toys.”

How in the world did Mom know such a thing? She always told me she had eyes in the back of her head but xray vision was something new.

“Santa wouldn’t give Jeff a girl doll.” I smiled.

“Put that doll back on your brother’s toys.”

“I don’t want that dumb doll.” Jeff whined.

“You will want that doll or you won’t get your toys from Santa.”

“Okay. I like it.”

And that was the end of that. It would take me years to figure out how close Mom was to Santa Claus.

All was forgiven and we had a fine dinner and played with our toys all day.

Dear readers:

Have a wonderful holiday and look for mountain magic this season. Believe in the mystery and don’t ask why.

(Ann’s husband, Jerry Hite, drew the picture to go with column)

AChristmas Purchase

Celia Miles

We were young, silly, and naïve beyond belief; had new jobs as teacher and Christian Education director, and Christmas was coming. My husband and Jackie’s boyfriend were out of town. We had a couple of days to ourselves. We would celebrate.

We decided on spaghetti for supper and hot buttered rum to go with it. Spaghetti we had, but neither of us had ever bought liquor. Our parents didn’t have it in the house; our colleges allowed no alcohol on campus. In fact, our counties were “dry:” no beer or wine in grocery stores and no retail liquor outlets. To find hard liquor, off we went, some thirty miles to Asheville, with Jackie driving her first (badly used) car and me holding on to the dashboard as she tried to control the vehicle.

At a brick-faced structure with lots of glass, we stuttered to a triumphant stop. I waited for Jackie to get out. She was typically the leader, the one who sang loudest and best, who flirted easily and laughed sweetly.

“Well,” I said. “Go on in.”

“I’m not going in there,” she replied. “What if I see somebody from home? Or heaven forbid, some church member.”

In the almost deserted parking lot, two men walked to their car, not a glance in our direction. We looked at the store. No customers visible.

“Go on,” I urged.

“I drove,” she declared. “You go.”

I knew that determined tone. I’d go in or we’d drink Pepsi with our spaghetti. I squirmed a bit as she laid her hands on the steering wheel and waited.

“Okay, okay, I’m going. What kind?”

“Huh?”

“What, uh, brand do you want?”

“Do I want? You said we’d have hot buttered rum if I made spaghetti.” She sounded antsy, probably thinking about driving back. But she was right. In some magazine for new wives, I’d read about the joys of hot buttered rum on wintery nights. My suggestion. My turn.

She handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “We’ll split it.”

“I’m gone.” I hopped out.

Pushing the “Enter” door, looking neither to the right nor left, I went straight toward the rows and rows of bottles of all colors, prices, and sizes, clear, dark, amber, even green. I saw signs for Bourbon, Gin, Scotch, Vodka. Hmm. I was

a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities. Maybe I’d get something else. I knew Hemingway drank…what was it? My mind went blank. Rum it would be.

After I’d gazed, entranced by all the options, the clerk, an older man, drawled, “Help you find something, young lady?”

Oh no. Would he ask for identification? I’d left my purse in the car, having been warned by Jackie’s dad that purse snatchers loved parking lots and single females. I glanced at him; he looked vaguely familiar. But not my kin. Maybe he was one of Jakie’s cousins and uncles. But he didn’t identify himself.

“Rum,” I managed. “I’m looking for rum.”

“Third aisle.” He waved toward the back of the store. “Not a big selection, not much demand.”

Being absolutely ignorant of quality, taste, or country of origin, I grabbed a bottle that the twenty would cover with some left over. Whew.

I set the bottle on the counter and said, as if the clerk cared, “Found it.” Almost proudly, I handed over the twenty. It seemed to take forever for him to place the rum in one brown bag and then into another.

“Don’t want to risk breaking it.” He handed me my change: a five, four ones and some coins. My hands felt a little clammy but I smiled and thanked him.

“Hope you like it,” he said. “My wife uses it in some

fancy cakes she bakes.”

Baking? This was not for baking or wifely stuff! I had a sudden surge of confidence. We were going to drink this— not make muffins. I stood straighter and turned toward the door.

There, perched on a high stool, just outside the turnstile, sat a girl-child in a Salvation Army uniform. Pretty, pale, and smiling at me, she was the perfect picture of innocence—and I was surely the opposite. I felt myself shrinking. Could I just slip by the Madonna in prim blouse and longish blue skirt? Could I ignore the fact that I was spending “good money” on something trivial, frivolous, downright sinful, that I expected an adult evening of sipping hot buttered rum on this Christmas break, eating spaghetti without a thought of calories or essays to grade? Could I ignore the difference between my selfish self and Miss Salvation Army’s selfless giving of her time for the benefit of others? Could I possibly return the rum?

Not exactly an option. I was stuck between the arms of the exit turnstile.

“Hi,” the perfect girl murmured gently, a beatific smile on her no-lipstick face.

“Merry Christmas,” I muttered, hastily dropping the handful of dollars into her little red bucket. I heard a soft, “Thank you” and “God bless,” as I headed for the car. Breathing deeply, I thought, okay, the worst is over.

Jackie lied with aplomb after a siren pulled us over and a uniformed trooper approached. I dropped my Christmas scarf over the bottle at my feet as he pointed out a broken tail light and a muffler barely hanging on. Jackie charmed him with her patter about being late for the church’s children’s program. He tipped his hat. “Just a warning, ladies, but get those things attended to.” He grinned. “You don’t want to spend any time in the slammer.” We thanked him, and he gave us a cheerful wave. We seemed quietly guilt-ridden on the way back to her apartment. When I placed the double-bagged bottle on the kitchen table, she said, “Any change?”

“Gone to the SalvationArmy.” I busily warmed a couple of cupfuls of rum on the stove. At my tale of remorse, she shrugged and put on the pot for spaghetti. With a cup of rum, a pat of butter on each, we sipped and wondered what the heck was so good about it. The spaghetti was boiling as we sipped and sighed, sipped again. No use. I emptied my cup into the sink and poured a small glass straight from the bottle. Much better.

“I read somewhere,” Jackie stirred the pot and kept sipping her warm drink, “that you know spaghetti’s done when it sticks to the wall when you throw it.”

She took another gulp and then with a great “splat” a glob of spaghetti hit the wall above my head.

“Sorry about that.” Jackie giggled. “Don’t worry. Darn. I

meant to throw just a strand or two.”

I stared at the strings of spaghetti sliding down the wall, white on blue. She giggled again. “Guess it’s not done yet.” She finished her cup, pointed to the bottle. “I’ll have what you’re having.” She pursed her lips, slurred her words. “Did Spencer Tracy say that in Northwest Passage or Casablanca?”

Ultimately, we enjoyed all the spaghetti but not all the rum. Weeks later, I asked Jackie what happened to it when her mother visited. “Heck, she said, “I knew she’d rummage around here while I was at work. So I poured it down the toilet and put the bottle in Mr. Ramsey’s trash can.

“Next time,” I told her, “you’re buying,” and I vowed, “but no more rum for me.”

“Next time I’ll get Scotch. That’s what my pastor drinks.”

Long time retired community college instructor, Celia Miles has some twelve novels to her credit, a textbook, two short story collections. Her favorite topics are old grist mills and the neolithic sites in the British Isles. She lives and writes from Asheville.

The Christmas Well

J. L. Oakley

When the city pipes broke at four above zero, the water spread out across our road like the thick roots of a crystal Banyan tree and froze. We all came out to stare, our boots slipping on the remains of last week's snow. It was three days before Christmas. Our trees and lights were up, our cookies in the canisters, and stockings on the mantle, but we had no water.

"Not until the twenty-eight," the Forest Hills Water Department said and would have left it at that until someone got the brilliant idea of hauling up a water tank and putting it at the top of the hill.

"At least it's something," a neighbor said and went to organize her pots.

Others weren't so sure and said that the season was ruined.

Our community well arrived that afternoon. An old World War II water tankard bristling with spigots, its camouflage shell looked odd against the neat pre-war brick

homes lined with hedges and crusted with old snow. Curious children and their parents watched a brief demonstration, and then were left to their imaginations how they would actually do it.

I heard about the tankard after I came home from junior high school. Mom, Dad, and my brothers, John and Bruce, had already carried enough pots of water into the kitchen to make it look like a battlefield after a major roof leak. (There was a leak of some sort, a family member later recalled. A pipe had snapped from the cold.)We had water in stew pots, canning pots, sauce pans, and even a few tin cans for the powder room. A large boiler was on the stove for doing dishes and washing hands.

In the living room behind the swinging kitchen doors, Handel played on the radio. The windows were painted with angels and snowflakes. The tree was ready to trim. Christmas was not going to be delayed.

Winters are cold and often snowy in Pittsburgh. Except for the hordes of children with whom I sledded in the open field below the alley, neighbors only glimpsed and waved at one another as they communally scrapped ice or snow off windshields on the way to work or to shop. Snowmanworthy snow might bring out a few townspeople for a moment's divertissement, but that was usually reserved for the younger crowd. Most folks kept to their calendar of baking, Christmas card writing, and package sending-off.

Visiting applied only to a few close friends and often it was by telephone to catch up on the day's news. In winter we just stayed inside.

The Christmas well changed that.

From morning to night we bundled up in our bright wool coats and scarves and rubber over-boots and trudged up the hill to the tankard with our pails and pots in hand, like ants making lines to a picnic. Neighbors that we hadn't seen since summer or hardly knew at all tiptoed down their steep stairs or off their brick porches to go to the well. As we gathered at the spigots, conversations blossomed in the frigid air, puffing out like little smoke signals.

"What's news, Mrs. Hanna? Did you get your tree?"

"My car didn't start again."

"My grandkids are coming for Christmas Eve."

The pots and pans were filled, but so were the spaces between neighbors. Older times were recalled and strategies on hauling water offered.

"When I was growing up on the farm we had a pump. Had to prime it every time. Mother always kept a can of water next to it just for that."

"We had a well in Italy. The whole village used it."

We stopped and listened to the stories. We filled and hauled and laughed at our communal inconvenience. Our own village was born right there in our neighborhood. Anything with a handle was employed. My family

preferred our aluminum camping equipment, pots with wire handles that nestled together in the cellar when they weren't in use. But neighbors ran the gambit of tin and copper pails to saucepans. Someone arrived with a wagon full of number five cans.

Techniques on catching water varied. Some hung the handle on the spigot and let the container fill until it looked too heavy to lift. Sometimes it was. Others held the handle of their pots until they began to tilt. All day and night we came, the water spilling on our boots and onto the bare pavement of the road. It was so cold that the water froze, leaving icy blobs around the tankard. At night under the street light, they gleamed like diamond cow pies.

On Christmas Eve day, the morning broke clear and cold, but by noon the sky had begun to grow flat. The wind stung our cheeks like a sharp wet kiss.We scurried for last-minute presents and lingered over the evening meal wondering if it would snow. Would we get to church? Or would we have to stay home? Service at eleven o'clock in the evening was always an adventure.

Dark fell at four o'clock. We turned on the lights on our tree and in the windows. Outside, it began to snow. Invisible first to the eye, the flakes grew from pinpoint to apple blossom size, sashaying down to the frozen ground. Bit by bit, snow crystal by show crystal, the snow covered the street, the cars, the knobby roots of the oak tree in front

of our house with a tenuous mesh of white velvet fuzz.

Then as gently as it started, the snowfall suddenly exploded, throwing out snowflakes like the contents of a huge featherbed. In a silent rush, it covered everything and piled up, mutating the street into a close, distant world. By 5:30, it rose four inches deep with more to come.

"Janie, girl, will you go out and get water for dinner?"

I pulled back from the window and smiled at my mother, who stood at the swinging door leading from the long living room to the kitchen. She wore a Christmas apron with ruffles and her hands were covered in flour. Behind her wafted the smell of cinnamon.

"Sure."

I went into the kitchen and down to the side door landing where coats and boots collected. My mother handed me some pails. I opened the door and stepped out onto virgin snow.

In my life there are scenes that have stayed with me always. They are hallowed memories, forever magical in my mind.

Going to get water from the community well that Christmas Eve is one of them.

The world beyond was still and silent, and a strange pale blue light reflected off hillocks of snow that looked for all their worth like confectioner's sugar.

My neighborhood had undergone a remarkable change.

It not longer seemed an average residential street in a big city, but rather, a country lane in a long-ago time. The streets and yards had become one vast empty field, its hedges hidden somewhere under the snow. Candles flickered in windows. The trees overhead formed a tunnel whose roof was made of mist and falling snow. Far off, a street lamp beckoned like a muted star.

I tightened my mittened grip around the handles of the pails, and like a character from "A Christmas Carol," went out to get water from the well.

When I reached the top of the street I stopped. Under a street lamp, the Christmas well stood, its cylinder shape topped off with several inches of snow, its tongue and wheels hidden. The bright yellow light of the lamp played over it and gave it a curious glow-like the manger in the Nativity scene under the star. It was impossible to see into the gloom around it. There was only the well and the snow rushing down from the sky. I felt utterly alone and at peace.

I put down my pails.

"Merry Christmas," a neighbor said as she peered around the other side of the well.

"And a Happy New Year," said another. "What a beautiful night."

From beyond the well, a line of scarves, hats, and coats dusted with downy snowflakes stepped forward with their pots and pails to say hello.

My neighbors' faces were red with cold but each had that particular smile of good will and humor that had brought us to the well.

Christmas had come. A broken water pipe had not delayed it.We would gather our water and carry on with our lives as if nothing had happened. Except that something had. With each pot and pail of water we carried away, we also took a new sense of community and resourcefulnessand perhaps the true meaning of Christmas.

I live in the Northwest now where we rarely get snow at Christmas. But each Christmas Eve, I think of that snowy night when I went to gather water at the Christmas well.As I turn on the lights in my windows and on the Christmas tree, I look outside at my tree-lined street to where a city light stands guard above the hedges. I don't even have to close my eyes to see the Christmas well glowing there under its light, the snow falling down on its cylindrical shape and the neighbors gathered around.

It is etched forever in my mind.

Let us always be neighbors to one another, not only during the holiday season, but throughout the year.

Award-winning author, J.L. Oakley, writes historical fiction that spans the mid-19th century to WW II with characters standing up for something in their own time and place. She also writes the occasional personal essay. Dry Wall in the Time of Grief won the 2016 grand prize at Surrey Writers.Recent awards have been the 2020 Hemingway Grand Prize award for 20th century war time fiction and an Honorable Mention Writer Digest Selfpubbed Ebooks for The Quisling Factor.

Plain Girl From Mazeppa

Hubert Blair Bonds

Funny how a whole world can wash away, and life goes on. My world changed—forever—one hotAugustmorning, in the year of our Lord, 1858. I was only fourteen.

Mama and I were picking cucumbers. It was one of those mornings where you can see the heat before you feel it.

“You’re slower today, Mama.”

“I can’t get going today. Don’t know why.”

“Go sit in the shade for a bit and get some water. I’ll finish up this row.”

“I believe I will,Addy. Maybe get some water.”

I finished the row, filling the bushel basket almost to the rim. I expected to see Mama at the well house, but she wasn’t there.

I climbed the back steps, “Mama? You inside?”

The spring on the old screen door squawked as it opened. I came around the corner, and Mama was there, lying in the middle of the kitchen floor. Her skin was blue, and cold to

the touch.

I ran to the back porch and rang the bell that Mama used to called Papa for dinner. Clang. Clang. CLANG.

Time stopped until Papa grabbed my wrist to stop the ringing. “What’s wrong? Where’s your Mama?”

I cut my stare toward the kitchen. Papa rushed by me. “Oh my God. Naomi. NAOMI!”

Afterwards, I took over the work of the house and looking after Papa. It was expected and I had no choice. I started to understand how Mama must have felt about being a slave to a house and a man.

“These biscuits are as hard as a rock.”

“I had to get the wash pot started this morning, Papa. I ran out of time. These are from supper.”

I could see the fire in Papa’s eyes. “I don’t expect a lot. But I do expect three fresh-cooked meals a day.Your mama used to do it. Why can’t you?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better. I’ll start getting up earlier.”

“See that you do.”

Too soon after Mama’s death, Papa started keeping company with Sallyann Parson. Her father was a wealthy landowner, including the farm we rented. He had the only cotton gin in this part of eastern Iredell County, and that alone gave him a lot of clout with folks.

I had first seen Papa and Sallyann talking at the Talbert’s barn raising. At noon, all the womenfolk were getting the dinner ready. But not Sallyann. She sat under the scuppernong arbor, doing her embroidery. All the neighbor ladies also saw.

Mrs. Talbert’s sister was the first to say something, “Look at her. Hasn’t lifted a finger to do a thing, except hold that needle.”

Amanda Peacock tried to shush her. “Josephine Allred –you know better than to criticize a Parson. Your husband’s cotton won’t get ginned.”

“Well, it’s the truth and you all know it.”

I watched Sallyann, all fancy and smelling faintly like the lavender powder Mama used to wear.

That evening, I said to Papa, “I saw you talking with Sallyann under the shade tree.”

“Yes. Why?”

“The other women were talking about her not helping to get dinner.”

“Old peahens. They don’t know everything. She’s sickly. She can’t do work like that. And it ain’t no business of yours. What you need to know, I’ll tell you.”

“Yes, Papa.” I was angry, but I didn’t cry. But, that anger settled on my soul.

One morning not so long after the barn raising, Papa said “You may as well know that I’m fixin’ to ask Sallyann to

marry me. Her father is going to make me his farm foreman. We’ll all be living over there. Mr. Parson has offered to let you work in their kitchen, provided you know how to cook. I’m inviting them to dinner soon so you can show them. With your food. If you can’t impress them with your cooking, you can be a housemaid.”

His words stung, worse than any slap would have. I knew right then that I would be the one deciding my own fate. Not Papa. Not Sallyann. Not Mr. Parson. Mama had raised me to be proud, even though we were poor.

After supper on Saturday night, I pulled the hot water and filled the bathtub. “I’m going to take a bath. I want to go to church tomorrow.”

“Why are you going to church?” Papa asked. “I’m not going, so you will be walking.”

“I can walk.”

The next morning, I used some of Mama’s lavender powder, braided my plain brown hair and put it up. In my best dress and Mama’s hat, I headed to the front door.

“You look more like your Mama every day.” It was the nicest thing Papa had said to me in months.

“There’s food in the warming oven, if you get hungry before I get home.”

“I’ll probably wait on you and hear what the preacher sermonized about.”

I had barely set foot onto the road when I heard a wagon.

I turned and saw that it was William and Amanda Peacock and their family, headed to church. Mr. Peacock stopped and tipped his hat, “Howdy do MissAddy?”

“Good morning Mr. and Mrs. Peacock.”

Amanda smiled. “Ain’t no need for you to walk to church and muss up your dress and straw hat. You can ride with us.”

“Don’t want to be a bother.”

“Not a bit.” Turning her head toward the rear of the wagon, she spoke to her son. “Will – get down and help Addy in.”

With his typical goofy grin on his face,Will did as he was told. “How are you this fine Sabbath?”

He reached for my hand. I didn’t use much effort to get in the wagon because Will’s strength propelled me up. The warmth of his fingers in mine shot all the way up my arm and straight to my chest.

I had barely noticedWill’s little sister. “Hey Maudie.You look pretty. I like your dress.”

“I like yours too,Addy. Will thinks that you’re pretty.”

His face turned three shades. “Stop that Maudie. I’ll tell Addy that she’s pretty on my own. Don’t need your help with it.”

The Peacocks insisted that I sit with them during the service. Will and I shared a hymnal, and our hands touched as we sang ‘Fairest Lord Jesus’. It was my turn to blush

three shades of crimson, embarrassed that somebody else would see.

That evening, Papa was loading up a biscuit with molasses. “It’s set. Sallyann and her folks are coming for dinner on Saturday.”

“I’ve been thinking about what to cook.”

Papa nodded, “Fix chicken and dumplings. That’s the best thing you make.”

“Yes Papa.”

Saturday morning, I was up before daylight. I had enough of Mama’s good china for everyone and I had worked all week polishing the silver. Mama would have been proud of the table.

“It looks good. I’m proud of you.” Two nice things from Papa was unheard of. I barely had time to say thank you before there was a knock at the front door.

Papa hurried to answer it. As I was checking on the dumplings, he yelled out my name. I moved the pot to the side and took off my apron. I checked myself in the mirror, between the kitchen windows, as I had seen Mama do hundreds of times.

I exchanged pleasantries with the Parsons and then excused myself back to the kitchen. Mrs. Parson said, “If you need any help, come and get me.”

“It would be best for her not to ask me. I don’t know about kitchen work,” Sallyann giggled.

Papa chuckled. “You don’t need to be there in that hot kitchen. She can handle it.”

My head spun. It’s all well and good with Papa that I’m slaving away in the heat. But poor Sallyann can’t be expected to do that. Was this going to be my life? My hands shook too bad to touch the stove. I ran out the back door, planning to run until I couldn’t run no more. But I had no place to go. My father controlled me until I was married. They would bring me right back if I left. My temples began to pound. I wet my handkerchief at the well and wrapped it around the back of my neck to relieve that awful throbbing. The screen door opened. “What the hellfire are you doing? Don’t you know you’ve got a house full of hungry people to feed?” Papa’s face was red.

If a tongue could be bit in two to keep it from saying what it wanted to say, mine would have been in pieces. “I’m coming. Get everybody ready. Show them where the washstand is. The water is fresh. I put new soap and towels out. I’ll be right there.”

Walking to church the next day, I once again heard the Peacock’s wagon behind me. They picked me up and carried me to church. Papa created a stir in the congregation by showing up for services with all of the Parsons in tow. His hand was entwined with Sallyann’s. Sometimes, he moved it to the small of her back, guiding her along like she was Queen Victoria. The whole congregation noticed. Mrs.

Peacock noticed. After church let out, she took me by the arm, and practically drug me over to where Papa and Sallyann were standing. “Howdy do, Mr. McNeely. Sallyann. I just wanted you to know that we’ve invited Addy home with us for dinner. We’ll get her home before dark.”

“Well, thank you so much, Mrs. Peacock. That will be like a tonic forAddy. She needs a restful day.”

Sallyann was smiling at me. “Addy, I’ve been telling everybody what a fine meal you had for us yesterday. Everyone at home is excited about you coming to work with them in the kitchen.”

What a thing for the Peacocks to hear that my own father thought so little of me. “Thank you Sallyann. I do appreciate your kind words, but I only know what Mama taught me. I’m just a plain girl from Mazeppa. Never been places like you have; nothing like your schooling at the Normal School in Salisbury.”

She reached out and touched my arm. “I think you’re a whole lot more than a plain girl from Mazeppa. I have a lot to learn from you after your Papa and I are married.”

Mrs. Peacock interrupted. “We best be getting along before my dinner is ruined. Don’t worry about her Mr. McNeely.”

Amanda Peacock asked me to sit on the front seat on the ride from church.About fifteen minutes in, she said “Addy,

dear, this isn’t any of my business, but your Papa expects you to work in the Parson’s kitchen?”

“Yes’m. I cooked dinner for them yesterday to show them that I know how.”

She looked toward her husband. “That’s about the most God-awful thing I’ve heard in many a day. Expecting his daughter to be a servant for his new wife’s family. It’s bad enough to be keeping company so soon, and with a girl

Sallyann’s age…”

Mr. Peacock interrupted and shook his head, “Mandy, it’s not for us to judge.”

“I still think it’s awful.”

After Mrs. Peacock’s wonderful dinner, I read Bible stories aloud from their family Bible. Maudie got scared with the Jonah and the whale story. Will didn’t make it any easier, teasing, “You know there’s a great big fish out there in our pond. I’ve only seen it at night, but it’s big as a whale. You’d best be careful out there, Maudie.”

About half past three, Mr. Peacock said it was time to be getting me home. “Will, you take Maudie along and get Addy back home. The night air will be setting in soon.”

Maudie sat in between Will and me. He put his right arm around her, but I could still feel the warmth from his hand when it came near my shoulder. “Yessiree, I want my own farm someday. I want to work it, and watch things grow. Maybe my own cotton gin and make my own cottonseed

oil.”

I looked over the top of Maudie’s head and caught Will’s eye. “Sounds wonderful. I want to be a farm wife, I think. Like my Mama was. Maybe have some children.”

“That sounds like a female version of my own story. I like the sound of it. We’re sayin’ the same thing, aren’t we?”

“I think we are.”

Will turned the team onto the familiar ruts of the road down to our place. I said, “You know, this farm will be for rent when Papa marries Sallyann.”

Will’s grin returned. “Is he renting this farm from Mr. Parson?”

“Yes. Who else?”

Maudie had been watching us, her eyes going from my face to Will’s. “You two should get married and rent this place yourselves. Addy knows the garden, the orchard and the animals. Mama always says this has the best springhouse in the county.”

“What do you thinkAddy?” Will’s face was that shade of crimson again.

“Maudie said what I was thinking. You get your farm. I get to be the farm wife I’m hankering to be. We’re young and strong and can do it.”

As Will stopped the wagon, I could see the tenderness in his eyes. “We have a plan. I’ll tell my folks tonight and

Papa and I can go see Mr. Parson in the morning. And I’ll ask your father for your hand.”

I could only smile back at him.

He got down off the buckboard and beckoned me down. His hands on my waist lingered a bit longer. His smile was a bit broader. His eyes sparkled a bit more. He said, “Maudie, take the horse to the trough for water while I take Addy the rest of the way to our front door.” Will took my hand in his and we walked to the front door. I stood on the second step to be face-to-face with him.

“I don’t have a ring or nothin’right now. But no man has ever wanted a girl to say yes more than I do.Will you marry me?”

“Yes, Will.And you don’t have to worry about a ring.”

Will said, “Oh, you’ll have a ring, Addy McNeely. You can bank on that,” smiling that wonderful goofy grin.

Hubert Blair Bonds, a native of Kannapolis, NC, has lived in Atlanta, GA for more than 30 years. He is retired from the federal government with 34 years of service. Currently acting Treasurer at the East Point Historical Society, his hobbies include gardening, film history, and writing.

Inheritance

Ellen Birkett Morris

Some people are born to sin; others inherit it. I didn’t know which of these I was until I crossed paths with the Cabots.

The room smelled of lemons and vinegar. Alma Cabot lay stiff across her cherry Duncan Phyfe table. A tall woman, her legs almost reached the end of the table. Her face was slack where it was usually stern, but still, there was no trace of softness.

The table had a high shine. We didn’t own a mirror. When I looked down, my reflection startled me. My hair hung in wild tendrils around my face. My eyes were hard. I’d been sitting with the dead woman for fifteen minutes according to the grandfather clock in the corner.

Mrs. Cabot wore her best dress, purple brocade with pearl buttons and matching earrings. I was sure her son Daniel would relieve her of these before her body went into the ground. I heard pearls came from a grain of sand that

irritated the oyster. I wasn’t surprised that this was Mrs. Cabot’s jewelry of choice.

Though she had absented her body, I half expected Mrs. Cabot to pop up and start talking about the fine wood finish, turned edges, and four-legged base of the table. She loved ownership and often spoke about the “fine pieces” her grandmother had brought over from England. She told these stories to anyone who would listen, including my Mama, who spent years mopping the Cabot’s floors and cooking their dinner—and then went home to a bed of straw ticking. If I had been my mother, I would have spit in the Cabot’s food—or worse, but my mother played by the rules, ones that were set and broken by the Cabots. Because the Cabots had money, nobody said a thing. Mama believed in God’s final judgment, but I wasn’t sure it was wise to leave it up to Him, what with his reputation for mercy and all.

Mrs. Cabot would have squirmed at the thought of being laid out on her elegant table, though that was the custom around these parts. I wouldn’t be seated at this table if she hadn’t passed.

I was here for one reason, to take away her sins. My granny had been a sin eater, as her granny was before her, a custom from England that came with her across the ocean along with the family’s meager belongings. Part of me thought the ritual was foolishness, though I never said so.

The other part of me feared it was real and wondered about the weight of my granny’s soul.

Before she died, Granny wrapped up her black cloak and left instructions with Mamma that it was to be passed on to me. I liked to believe she thought I was tough enough to handle the job and smart enough not to take it too seriously. Either way, I’d been bearing the sins of the Cabots for a while now.

I was born on the wrong side of the river, in the elbow, a patch of land by the bend, prone to flooding. It was the kind of place people with no sense, or no money, lived. It took my family several generations before Daddy finally built the house up off the ground. So then, when it rained, we were on a dirtier version of Noah’s Ark, one with nearly as many inhabitants (Mama, Daddy, me, the twins, four feral cats, three dogs, a chicken and two songbirds). With less food, of course.

Daniel Cabot had crossed the creek to fetch me that morning. It wasn’t his first visit. That was shortly after I turned 16, the summer that it flooded and our crops washed out. We almost starved that summer. Daddy let Daniel in and sent him to my room. I didn’t know what was happening, but Daddy stood in my doorway and told me to make Daniel welcome; then he closed the door. Daniel stood still, looking at me. I saw his lust, but also a look like he was judging cattle. For all his looking, I don’t think he

saw me at all. Then he lifted my gown over my head and carried me to the bed.

He was his mother’s son, greedy and prideful. He panted as he took me from behind. I stared at the water stain on the wall. It was big and yellowed with ragged brown edges in the shape of a dog. When I was little, I pretended it was real and called it Yeller, which always made my Mama laugh. While Daniel labored, I imagined running through a wide field with Yeller, someplace far away from the elbow.

Daniel pressed his finger against my teeth until I figured I was meant to suck on it, which I did, though I fantasized about biting it off and feeding it to Yeller.At first, I gagged, but then I pretended it was a piece of ice melting in my mouth until it disappeared into nothing.

The Cabots owned the coal mine, but Daniel’s finger was as soft as a baby’s, unstained by labor. The nail was clean, though raggedy from his chewing it. He smelled of expensive soap, a sharp citrus smell that would come to signal danger to me. I said nothing while he spent his energy on me. I barely moved, hoping he’d get bored and move on. That night, and every visit after, he left fifty cents on my dresser. I never touched the money, but it always disappeared.

I was proud of myself for not crying out that night—or the many nights after. He would have wanted me to whimper and moan. But I didn’t want to wake the little ones

and stain their first memories with sounds of suffering. When he left, I rinsed my mouth at the washbasin and ran wet rags across my thighs. The rags came back bloody. The next morning Ma washed the stains from my sheets without a word.

This morning, Daniel had stood in the doorway and said, “Mama’s dead. The corpse cakes are in the oven, and we need you down at the house.”

I dressed quickly in my cloak and took a fine linen handkerchief from Ma’s drawer. When we got to the house, I placed the handkerchief on the doorstep. I would retrieve it and the money when my work was done.

Daniel had pushed me roughly in the direction of the dining room and left me alone with her, while he went to fetch his brother. I knew Abraham by reputation only. He had been away at school and then opened a law practice in Charleston.

I walked around the room, running my finger across the scrolls and leaves of the carved sideboard. I slid open a drawer to find linens embroidered with sprigs of lavender. A small sachet of lavender was in the corner of the drawer. I held it to my nose; the sharp, fresh scent reminded me that just outside these walls, the fields were bursting with life. I went back to the table and sat across from Mrs. Cabot, where I could see her face as it slowly turned to stone.

I had been a sin eater before, but that family was

strangers to me, folks who had come into the mining camps from Pittsburgh and lost their daughter to the flu. I wondered how much sin she could have accumulated in her five years, not much I would reckon, but the family was superstitious and wanted to send her off to the afterlife with a clean slate. The girl had taken up only a small portion of the table. A corpse cake had laid on her small chest. I said the words, and the mother handed me the cake. The cake had raisins and currants inside and crumbled in my mouth. The family watched as I ate every crumb. When I got outside, two dollars sat on my handkerchief.

I waited until I got into the woods to stick my finger down my throat. A volcano of sweet cake and fruit left a mess in the grass. It was no time at all before the bees came buzzing around it. I figured I’d only taken in a little of the sin, nothing mortal, nothing that would keep me from heaven.

I was jumpy today, my stomach a strange mix of nausea and hunger. I was used to hunger, but the nausea was a more recent development. I had been waking up with my stomach roiling around. I kept a few peppermint leaves inside my pillow and chewed on them when things got bad. I ran my hand around the smooth edge of the table. I could do anything now—carve my initials into the underside with my pocket knife, slide the silver sugar shell into my pocket, take a piece of the old woman’s hair for

some kind of hex. But instead, I touched my stomach and whispered in the dead woman’s ear, “I’m carrying your grandchild.”

Nobody could tell yet. The small swell in my belly was hidden by my dress. But my state would reveal itself soon—and there would be hell to pay. I looked out the window at the tall oak standing in front of the house. It was a huge old tree with a gnarled trunk. The thick branches came out like tentacles spreading toward the sun, taking up space against the sky. I saw a strong, low branch, a perfect place to perch and watch the world, and I took in the sturdy branches just beyond, footholds to the sky. My son would never play there.

I heard the back door close, and I sat back quickly and raised the hood of my cloak to cover my face. Daniel pushed the door open, a plate of cakes in his hand, and he held it for another man. Abraham was tall and resembled Daniel around the nose and forehead, but he had much kinder eyes.

He reached his hand out toward me.

“Don’t bother,” said Daniel.

The man raised his eyebrows. I held back a smile.

Abraham looked at his mother. “She’s not here. There is no trace of her,” he said, quietly.

“Only death could still the likes of her,” said Daniel. “What is this?” askedAbraham, nodding at me.

“A local burial custom of the rabble, some malarkey about eating the sins of the deceased. Mother insisted we do it if she should die.”

If she should die! Did the Cabots think immortality was theirs for a price, like everything else?

Daniel laid the plate of cakes on his mother’s still chest. The cakes were round and small and black around the edges.

The brothers looked at me expectantly.

I picked up a cake and held it to my mouth. When my teeth bit down, I felt like a vulture feasting on the entrails of some small, soft animal that had gotten in the way, but I knew I was that small, soft animal and Daniel wouldn’t quit visiting me at night until nothing was left of me but a crimson stain on the floor. I chewed and swallowed, felt the hard cake scrape down my throat.

I heard myself speak, though in my mind, I was far above the house, circling, waiting for my chance to pounce. My voice was loud and strong.

“I pledge my soul for your sins and ask that God Almighty remove those sins from you and place them up on me, and I eat this food to show that I have taken your sins upon me. If I lie, may God strike me dead.”

I looked at the brothers, whose eyes were closed. It was done. I walked to the door. I could see the coins shining on my handkerchief. I bent down to scoop them up. I felt a

presence behind me.Abraham stepped forward and pressed five dollars into my hands. I looked him in the face, wondering if my son would look like him.

It was enough money for the train east. I could be alone with my sins. I’d find a place somewhere, get a dog, and take in sewing. I would be free. My son would live unencumbered by legacy, free in a way I could only imagine. I walked quickly through the woods, stopping only to put my finger down my throat.

I rushed home and began to pack. I took my two dresses, crochet hook, and knitting needles and the skein of yarn I had been saving to make mittens for the twins. I stopped to touch the stain on the wall, which, in the light of day, looked like nothing but a dirty spot.

Mama stood in my doorway. “Don’t,” she said.

“I’ve got to.” My hand wandered to the five dollars folded in my pockets. I looked into her face and noticed the lines worn into its surface, the hollows of her checks.

“We’ll starve.”

If I stayed, I would become her, more indebted to the Cabots with each passing day, for whatever table scraps they decided to throw my way, like a dog—worse than a dog, since I was more than my appetites.

I pushed past her and ran out the door. I ran all the way to town and bought a ticket to Richmond. I barely had time to sit down before the train pulled up. It was my first time

on a train. The seats were covered in leather, and the interior was trimmed in wood. I knew I stood out in my simple dress and mended shawl. I took a seat near the door. It wasn’t long before the rocking of the cars lulled me to sleep. It was a dreamless sleep, not like my dreams at home, where I was forever trying to escape from some unknown pursuer.

I woke up as a man made his way down the aisle with a trolley that carried a teakettle and cake. “Refreshment, Miss?”

I had a cup of tea with cream and sugar. I sipped it slowly. When I got settled, this would be my new ritual—a cup of tea in the quiet of the afternoon while the baby slept. Prince, West Virginia, its hunger and fear, would be far behind me. I got off in Charleston, searching for the way to my connecting train. I had only taken a few steps when I felt a hand grab my arm and smelled the citrus scent of Daniel’s soap.

I pulled my arm away, and he reached forward and held me tight. I struggled to break free and stomped on his foot. He pushed my face close to his and spoke through gritted teeth. “I’ll tell them you robbed me. They’ll find the rest of Abe’s money on you, and you will go to jail.”

I stopped struggling and looked beyond Daniel to see my train pulling out of the station. “How did you find me?”

“Your mother told me you were running away. I knew

you wouldn’t get far on foot. I sawAbe hand you the money and figured you’d go to the train station.”

My mother was foolish enough to see the Cabots as benefactors.

***

I was silent on the train ride home. Daniel stared at me, his mouth twisted into a smirk. “You’re hardly worth the trouble. Your bloom is fading, and you’re getting fat.”

He was ignorant as well as mean. I had nothing now, no family, no allies, just the hint of possibility in my womb that I was sure Daniel would take from me the minute he was born.

When I got home, I hugged Mama and smiled at Daddy. Let them think I was content to stay. I waited until the middle of the night to leave my bed and put on my black cloak. I touched the wall to say goodbye to Yeller.

***

The rope hung on a nail on the wall of the barn. It wasn’t heavy. I made it to the oak before the moon had emerged from the clouds.

I climbed to a high branch. The face of the Cabot’s house was silent. How surprised Daniel would be in the morning. How quickly word would spread among the neighbors. I’d

seen my father hang pigs upside down to drain the blood plenty of times. I secured the rope, fashioned a noose, and placed it around my neck.

I imagined my body swaying in the wind, a spectral figure in my dark cloak. The bees would still buzz, the river would flood, girls would get visited in the night, and the Cabots would sit counting their money, polishing their silver, with no idea of what had been taken from them. I let myself fall.

*From Lost Girls: Short Stories

Ellen Birkett Morris’s debut novel Beware the Tall Grass won the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, judged by Lan Samantha Chang. She is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the Pencraft Award. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South Carolina Review, among other journals. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship for her fiction from the Kentucky Arts Council.

The Victorian Dandenongs

Margaret Pearce

The Victorian Dandenongs, a unique and hilly area shaped by an upheaval of ancient volcanoes, is both impressive and inspirational in its beauty.

A lot of its unique character and environment has been much changed by settlement and clearances. Daniel Defoe who wrote Robinson Crusoe said that the first thing man did on settling an alien environment was to attempt to change it into a copy of his home environment.

This is a proven fact. New inhabitants import their culture, patterns of thinking and flora and fauna. They surround themselves with familiar things, build homes that are familiar, and plant their familiar gardens around them. Only then, homesickness eased, they settle in to the business of putting down roots.

In the Dandenongs, as everywhere else in Australia this custom of changing the environment through flora and fauna is well in evidence. There are cleared paddocks for grazing, food and flower crops that make the countryside

look like a direct transplant from other countries.

The camellias, rhododendrons, magnolias, cedrillas, and other blossoming trees, azaleas, bulbs and other alien flowers decorate, enhance and enrich the Dandenongs both aesthetically and economically. However these change the basic timeless and primeval character of the hills as little as lace curtains around flying saucer portholes.

The less decorative flora was often brought in or sneaked in uninvited to ease the newcomer’s homesickness. With its successful invasion now well entrenched it turned feral. Buttercups,onionweed,blackberries,jasmine,honeysuckle, foxes, rabbits, cats, dogs and deer are now equally well in evidence. Only the feelings they arouse in local inhabitants are no longer homesickness. These invaders and intruders are now recognised and discouraged through the changing views of the inhabitants as to what they are, unwanted, ugly and destructive aliens.

Dedicated friends and lovers of the Dandenong’s clear waterways and bushland from the alien weeds choking them, replant the native vegetation and pursue the feral flora and fauna with unflagging and deadly enthusiasm. This is not a recent or late-come attitude to conservation. Since the beginning of settlement in the hills, the original greenies have argued and fought for conservation of the unique fern clad beauty of the gullies and tree covered hills to be preserved.

It is very much against Daniel Defoe’s view, but in an interesting reversal, it is the environment that is causing subtle but far reaching changes to the culture, character and nature of its inhabitants.

The survivors of the waves of settlers who moved into the Dandenong’s and coped with the harsh natural rhythms of flood, fire, drought, landslip, and other less natural disasters have been shaped by their experiences. To survive they had to adaptto thelong series of hardship years and the occasional productive year. They have had to evolve a tenacity as deep rooted as the tap roots of the trees, a cheerful optimism as green as the new growth after fires and an endless patience and acceptance of life in the hills. Charles Darwin wrote learnedly of flora and fauna in isolated places developing along its own unique lines. The Dandenong’s, shouldering itself above the tamed suburbs still gives that impression of isolation, as if it is some Robinson Crusoe type of island. Visitors and other pilgrims sense the difference between the Dandenongs and its encroaching suburbs as eons in time and in distance rather than a twenty minute drive.

The isolation, more imaginary than real in these days of good roads and tamed bushland, still subtly works and changes the attitudes and characters of the inhabitants. First there is acceptance, as the hills become home and no longer an alien world and then the fanatic growth of the

loyalty and love that the remaining corners of original environment inspire. Returning the bush environment and its inhabitants to at least a portion of its original self has become and continues to become an absorbing, satisfying and continuing crusade.

Secondly there is the growth of what might be called the cult of individualism. The Dandenongs could become one of the last bastions of that oddity in conventional society, the eccentric. This is often as marked as the architecture as it is in some of the dwellers.

Thirdly, the Dandenong’s also nurtures another facet of its inhabitants. Does the isolation and dreamtime primeval timelessness present in the hills and gullies encourage the growth of creativity in the crafts? Or are painters, writers, potters, sculptors and other craft workers attracted to the hills for their inspiration?

There is something about the atmosphere and character of the Dandenongs that makes the protective up swell in green and conservation movements seen as a natural progression. Things happen and keep on happening in the Dandenong’s. If you stand apart and look at it objectively it is oddly puzzling.

Community protests and other movements to protect and restore native environments rise and fall with apathy and disinterest. In the hills you only have to walk through the natural parks and their beauty spots to be aware of the long

term and continuing determination to protect, preserve and restore.

Theculminationofalldreamsistherestorationoforiginal floraandfauna.Itislikeatantalisingholygrailtorestorethe once-upon-a-time paradise of the Dandenongs before mining, logging settlement, clearances, land developers, even some businesses and the criminally careless mistakes tainted it.

Daniel Defoe’s statement doesn’t fit all situations. Although it is natural that the first desire of a new inhabitant is to alter an alien environment into a home environment, in the Dandenongs it is the other way around. It is the environment that works on the inhabitants. Their character, their attitudes, their culture and their definition of a home environment all subtly but permanently change to one which fits the hills themselves more comfortably.

And all benefit from the Dandenong’s loyal inhabitants and their definition of progress, to continue conserving and restoring the Dandenongs to as much of its original dreamtime self as it is possible.

Note from the author: I spent my teenage years belonging to a walking club and walked through it every week. The mountains rearing up outside Melbourne started off as a volcano. Have been settled here for the past thirty years.

Launched on an unsuspecting commercial world, Margaret Pearce, ended up copywriting in an advertising department and took to writing instead of drink when raising children. Margaret completed an Arts Degree at Monash University as a mature age student, and has primary and teenage novels published as listed on Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle and writers-exchange.com

LifeAfter Death by Thesaurus:ABug’s Legacy

Ellen Notbohm

My day began as many do, with a writing prompt: Describe the last creature you killed.

Unless we’re a stockyard worker, a hunter or fisher, or a euthanistic veterinarian, perhaps the only thing some of us ever kill is a bug. Or a garden slug. Or the occasional guttwisting road kill, the Darwinian squirrel who ran toward our car rather than away.

The bug who crossed my path was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the moment, I couldn’t understand why I killed him. (How do I know it was a him?) He wasn’t eating my crops or plants, wasn’t threatening to sting or otherwise poison me or my food. He was just there. In the hindsight that came within seconds, I knew I’d killed him out of instinct. The primal, perfectly irrational strain of fear, the elephant-and-mouse kind, the sense of being ambushed by an alien.

I don’t know what kind of bug he was, and it happened so fast that I don’t remember much of what he looked like.

Ellen Notbohm

He was dark, perhaps charcoal gray, his body perhaps threeeighths of an inch, diaphanous wings above it, filament legs below. While I strung beautiful words together in a writer’s cottage in the woods, he came in through an unscreened window and landed near the top of a page of my Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, splayed open to where I was searching out synonyms for something starting with g. Good? Great? Gross?

He landed near the binding, the cleft where two pages meet. He never knew what hit him. I snapped the book shut, sniper-decisive. He took the full weight of 700 pages of the Oxford Writer’s Thesaurus, with the force of an overreactive full-grown human author behind it. Not a particle of time elapsed between the slamming of the tome and the wondering why.Why hadn’t I gently lifted the book to the window over the desk and with a gentle puff of breath, shown him the way out? I couldn’t deflect the bald truth, that I was a guest in his environment. An invasive species. The cottage was one of six nestled in forty-eight acres of farm and woods on an island in Puget Sound. Having critters for neighbors was part of living in those woods. Every day I met up with bunnies and frogs and owls. At the beach I meandered among live sand dollars, crabs, gulls, herons, and an array of crustaceans. Never would I have dreamed of harming any of them. Why did I subject this insect to such a brutal judgment? I could

not justify it, could not write it off to some deeply embedded generic ick factor.

The days tumbled by, each one slipping in the east window of the cottage and casting its beam on the thesaurus calmly poised to assist with the next sentence, paragraph, chapter. I knew my gossamer-winged victim was in my book somewhere, squashed flat as the proverbial bug. It was a large book, yes, but I couldn’t avoid him forever. A faint dread, guilt-tinged, tingled in my fingers when I turned the pages, looking for better words for pretty, large, simple. When my time in the cottage came to an end, he traveled home with me, snug in his wordy tomb, where the same sun slipped into a different east window. And still I didn’t allow myself to lookup for words starting with g.

The first time I saw him, months later, two-dimensional, almost mistaken for an illustration on the page of all those g words, I flicked on by as if my hands were on fire. The second time, after yet more months of avoiding g words, I did what I should have done the first time—lifted the book, took it to the door, and brushed him gently back into his world.

That bug haunted me for eight years, until a moment of secondhand clemency came to me through my son. Working in the back room of a large thrift store, he spotted a butterfly that had somehow made its way into the building and now perched unmoving atop a bin of donated goods.A

Ellen Notbohm

white butterfly, perhaps tan, hard to tell in the dusty light. He also couldn’t tell if the butterfly was alive, but he knew it couldn’t survive indoors, so he slid his hand underneath it and gently cupped it, still motionless, while he walked quietly to the swinging back doors. Outside, he slowly unfurled his fingers to the summer sky. The butterfly flexed its wings and soared majestically into the breeze. “Bryce!” a nearby co-worker exclaimed in his melodic Kenyan cadence. “You saved a life!”

Afew more years went by, our family welcomed the next generation, and finally I found some peace in my atonement.

Everything about the day was classically autumn, the vivid crimson, amber, and auburn of the trees against a dazzling sky in sparkling air just cool enough to require jackets. The woods offered up a wonderland of a walk through bucolic childhood pleasures with our sons and granddaughter. Barely two, she talked in single words and short phrases but she knew how to lead a nature walk. We followed her runs through the leaves, meticulously stacked fir cones into artful sculptures, sorted pebbles by size and color, tossed sticks in the creek from a footbridge, called to the ducks. It never entered my thoughts that anything might mar such perfect joie de vivre, this joy of discovery for a toddler and the joy of reliving it for the adults.

Afew yards short of our outing’s end, a ladybug crawled

across the sidewalk in front of us. We all bent to admire it, the red shell, the delicate spots. Our grandie knew it was a ladybug and cooed over it endearingly until suddenly and inexplicably, she raised her boot and stomped it flat.

My son the butterfly rescuer and I gasped in horror. My husband shrugged it off with “Kids step on bugs.” We glared at him while our granddaughter’s father gently explained to her why this wasn’t okay. We straggled back to our cars, our exuberant fall mood injected with a note of melancholy.

We’d said our goodbyes and see-you-soons when our subdued toddler abruptly climbed into our car, into my lap, and uttered the first full sentence she’d ever spoken to me.

“I’m sad about the ladybug.”

Her eyes were steady and brave. She wanted an honest conversation.

“I’m sad about the ladybug too,” I said, without drama or accusation.

“She broke.”

“Yes. Sometimes when things are broken they can be fixed, but not this time.All she wanted was to fly home and now she can never do that again.”

“I’m sad.”

“I’m glad that you’re sad. It shows what a kind heart you have. You’ll never step on a ladybug again, will you?”

“No.”

LIFE AFTER DEATH BY THESAURUS: A BUG'S LEGACY by

Ellen Notbohm

Later I’d open my old thesaurus, dusty with disuse since being nudged aside by speedier online searches. There, in the section of g words, I would at long last find peace in the many synonyms for grace [noun]: a reprieve, an absolution, a kindness, a blessing.

*Death by Thesarus originally published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, May 2023

Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew. Her short fiction and creative nonfiction appears in many literary journals including Eclectica, Brevity, Halfway Down the Stairs, Fabula Argentea, Eunoia Review, Bookends Review, Does It Have Pockets?, and in anthologies in the US and abroad. Her books and short prose have won more than 40 awards.

LIFE AFTER DEATH BY THESAURUS: A BUG'S LEGACY by Ellen Notbohm

Sleeping Sickness

Kimberly Parish Davis

1971—It’s difficult to say precisely where I was in 1971. It was a bleak time. My mother was driving back and forth to Wyoming marrying and divorcing an asshole who abused my dog. Superdog was only 12 pounds, but every ounce of him was fighting fit. Even when the bad man put him in the freezer, or on top of the china cabinet to see if he’d try to jump off and break his little neck. I think Mom and that guy married each other twice—each time only for about six months. Superdog and I just got dragged along for the ride. I had no choice but to change schools 5 times between fourth and sixth grades.

It’sinterestingwhenIrememberthatthetwohorsesMom kept when she and Dad divorced didn’t have any trouble traveling out of the state of Texas, at least, not that I recall. There was thatVenezuelan Equine Encephalomyalitis going on in Texas, and for a time, 24 states actually banned Texas horses from entering their borders. (Like you can stop mosquitos at man made borders.) It made sense at the time,

though, because it could infect humans too. I have vague recollections of people being afraid to go to the barn. My mind shows me the barn on Brittmoore Road, so I know that for at least part of that time I was in Texas, but the regime had changed. I was a stranger in that place I’d roamed as my own when I was younger. My new step brother and sister rode their bikes to the barn to feed horses and clean stalls. That terrified me—crossing the Katy freeway on a bicycle.

My other grandmother was a great hypochondriac, and I know I stayed with her part of the time I was in Texas, and I know she talked to me about sleeping sickness. No doubt her fears colored my view of that place I’d once loved.That summer, 1971, more than 1500 equines died in South Texas. There were no human deaths, but 110 cases were reported.1 So, yeah, people were afraid, just like they were afraid of the Corona Virus coming from China in 2020. I was inTexas on summer vacation, since Mom and I had gone toWyoming towing four horses behind her lilac Sedan deVille. Not King Like Star, Mom’s special favorite. Daddy kept him out of spite, and it broke her heart because Daddy had King Like gelded almost immediately. In the divorce settlement, Daddy’d made Mom choose Triple Hope or King Like, and she’d kept the filly, who was worth more money. It had been an impossible choice. She loved them both. There’d been no contest over me or the house. As soon as Mom found another man with a barn to put her

1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/235212

horses in, we headed out. And me? Daddy already had a new woman with a ready-made family to slot right into the space we’d just vacated. But the horses? They fought bitterly over the horses, both crystal clear about where their priorities lay.

I can’t remember the name of that colt of Bo’s that we took with us, but he set the tone with theWyoming husband immediately. It happened the day we arrived when they went to unload the horses at their new barn. Mom’s horses never responded well to manhandling, and when the jerk tried to force the colt to do something, it went wrong in a hurry. Mr. Wyoming wore a scar on his face for the rest of his days.

Texans weren’t very popular in Wyoming. I can recall my first day in the fourth-grade classroom of my new elementary school. The building was old with dusty wooden floors that creaked and radiators that hissed. It smelled of damp, and I was cold. I didn’t yet have the right clothes for the frigid playground. The second semester was already underway, and since I had been having some difficulty in school back in Houston, it seemed like changing schools would be a good thing. Then I sat down in that cold classroom in Cheyenne. During the Wyoming

History section the day I arrived, there was a lesson about Wyoming’scattleboom,Ithink,becausethetopicsomehow turned to Texas, where for twenty or thirty years immediately following the CivilWar,Texas had a surplus of cattle, and men being men, always on the lookout for a way to make a buck, started moving massive herds north. When the “cattle bubble” burst, the cattle ranchers got nasty and started attacking sheep camps.2 Don’t quote me, but I think this is what was known as the Range Wars. So, as the teacher, a shriveled up old prune of a thing with cat-eye glasses and grey smoker’s teeth and skin and a phlemy cough, glared at me, she said, “We know someone from Texas, don’t we, boys and girls?”All thirty of those children turned in their seats to glare with the same contempt on their faces that their teacher wore. So, right off I didn’t feel welcome in Wyoming.

Our short lived home in Wyoming, though, was sublime. The sky and the land were so big, so open, so blue.The notnice husband had 1500 acres with a house and barns set way back off the highway. A railroad ran through it, and I was scared when he and Mom went out at night. I’d bring the big dogs in from outside to keep me and Superdog company, and I imagined hobos jumping off the train and coming to slit my throat.

We must have barely missed the ban on Texas equines

2 https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/spring-creek-raid-last-murderoussheep-raid-big-horn-basin

moving across borders. We’d never have gotten them through Colorado, but we had no trouble bringing them back to Texas.

*initially published in TellUsAStory 2/13/20

Kimberly Parish Davis is the director and founder of Madville Publishing. She sometimes teaches English Composition, Creative Writing, and Technical writing. She spent five years on the editorial staff of Texas Review Press. She has a new short story collection forthcoming with Cornerstone Press, fall 2025. The title is Trust Issues. Find her on the web at kpdavis.com.

The Last Time

J. B. Hogan

I saw the night sky with no light pollution was long ago in the mountains from the front porch of a small cabin tucked away beside a small lake in late November and the air was crisp, clean, and clear and there were no clouds and no moon and the stars came down to the horizon and there were so many stars you could barely make out constellations and the stars were so bright it was overwhelming, it felt like a celestial

wind was passing through me and I was becoming smaller and smaller and yet at the same time part of some enormous magnificent, awe-inspiring, even terrifying existence that I did not understand but gave me immense joy to be the tiniest part of.

J. B. Hogan has been published in a number of journals including the Blue Lake Review, Crack the Spine, Copperfield Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Well Read Magazine, and Aphelion. His eleven books include Bar Harbor, Mexican Skies, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, and The Apostate. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Visitation

Royal Rhodes

You told me you were an angel, the first night I met you on the balcony overlooking the city's carpet of lights.

Later in my room you shyly revealed the elliptical scars marking your back where once were wings in rainbow hues. Their absence caused me much wonder like the Y-shaped scar on your torso -- but there were things we never mentioned.

You kept changing -- the green like jade in your eyes, and your crown of dark hair cut short to look like a boy's at times.

When you were angry your fingers felt as cold as the frozen lake deep in hell as you said: Cross your heart and hope to die.

You said the smell of blood repelled you. When you took me into the silent wards you stopped outside several doors and wept.

The last night you stayed, you blindfolded me as we fluffed the sheets like snow angels with your cold hand set on my colder heart.

Royal Rhodes is a poet and essayist who lives in a small village in central Ohio. His poems have appeared in a number of literary journals in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. He especially loves to read the works of the ancient Greek and Roman authors.

AWynter’s Tail

Patricia Feinberg Stoner

Crispin de Beaufort Wynter flounced through the outer office, muttering under his breath.Angelica looked up from her keyboard in surprise. This wasn't the Crispin they all knew and loved at the agency. The Crispin who always rolled up with a fresh green carnation in his immaculate sports coat, the Crispin who always had a kind word and a suggestive wink for the bedraggled troupe of actors waiting to see Cynthia March, the formidable head casting agent.

'What's the matter, Cris?'Angelicaaskedsympathetically.

'Nothing!Absolutely nothing! That's what La March told me. I know for a fact that they're casting the Dream for the Barbican this week, and everyone knows I am famous for my Bottom.'

Angelica bit her lip, but the waiting group were less tactful. Titters, some stifled, some not, ran round the room and someone was heard to remark, sotto voce, that Crispin's bottom was, indeed, well known to some.

'But oh, no,' the indignant actor went on, 'La March says

she has nothing for me.'

Three days later, it was a transformed Crispin who bounced into the waiting room.

'I've had a call-back,' he crowed. 'From La March herself. A most intriguing phone call. She wanted to know if I'm any good with horses. It's got to be that new historical epic of Spielberg's. I'd heard they were casting for the battle scenes. Better brush up my equestrian skills.'

At that moment a discreet light lit up byAngelica's desk, and she said,

'You can go in now; Cynthia is ready to see you.'

Crispin emerged some ten minutes later, looking bewildered.

'Well, that was very mysterious,' he said. 'Apparently it's all very hush hush and Cynthia couldn't tell me very much. She said when she heard horses were involved, she thought of me immediately. I've got riding listed as one of my skills in Spotlight, you know – an actor has to have quite a few strings to his bow, especially nowadays when there are so many reality TV stars and soap actors competing for parts with real actors.' He cast a contemptuous glance round the waiting room.

'Oh, and she did say, Cynthia that is, that my comedic skills would come in handy. Don't say they're considering me for Falstaff? Anyway, they're doing the final casting in

Brighton – Cynthia said I've to go down there on Wednesday and meet up with 'Steve' in the Pavilion.' He tapped the side of his nose and winked knowingly.

'Well, we all know who Steve is, don't we?' Well, if she wants to be all cloak and dagger about it, who am I to say neigghhhh?'

And with that he tapped himself vigorously on the celebrated bottom with an imaginary riding crop and cantered out of the office.

Crispin de Beaufort Wynter was not good with horses. In fact, they terrified him. It was, coincidentally, in Brighton that an eight-year-old Crispin had had his first encounter with the equine species. A thrilling entry in the Donkey Derby had come to an inglorious end when the donkey he was riding suddenly stopped dead. Crispin did not. His howls and wails drew anxious glances from nearby families, who suspected murder at the very least, and he had to be consoled with several ice cream cones.

Still, steady the Buffs, Crispin told himself sternly. He made an appointment at a local riding stables, where a kindly groom and the gentlest of trots on the smallest of ponies reassured him that he could handle anything Spielberg asked of him. It was, after all, mainly CGI these days, he reasoned.

Come Wednesday, Crispin reported to the Brighton Pavilion at the appointed time. He had chosen his attire carefully: a tweed jacket and fawn trousers with just a hint of fullness at the thigh, a whisper of tightness at the calf which, when worn over well-shined brown boots, suggested—but did not shout—jodhpurs.

His experienced eye took in the familiar scene of the casting call: the tables askew, strewn with dog-eared scripts and abandoned paper cups half full of cold coffee, the production assistant bustling about with her inevitable clipboard, the producer sitting apart, scribbling in a dogeared notebook. No sign of Steven Spielberg, but that was only to be expected at this stage of the game.

'Crispin!' The shout rang out across the room, and a small, energetic person threw himself into the startled actor's arms.

'Crispin, it's so good to see you! When I heard we were getting you, I couldn't believe our luck!You'll be the star of the show, just see if you're not! I'm Steve, by the way, but of course you knew that.'

'Er…' Crispin began, but the small person steamrollered on.

'Naughty, naughty Cynthia, expecting you to come and audition! Of course the part is yours, it was practically written for you. Now trot along and see Marcie, she's got some wardrobe questions to go over with you.'

At the far end of the room a space was screened off. This, Crispin assumed, was the wardrobe department. Marcie, the wardrobe mistress, was tall and angular with a pronounced mustache and a no-nonsense manner.

'Hello, there, Crispin,' she said. 'Oh good, you're not too tall. You'll match well with Derek. We have to get this business sorted quick sharp, or there'll be no end of ructions. Let's see if this will suit.'

She was holding up one half of a pantomime horse's costume. It wasn't the head.

Patricia Feinberg Stoner is an award-winning British writer, a former journalist, copywriter and publicist. She is the author of three humorous books set in the Languedoc, in the south of France, At Home in the Pays d’Oc, Tales from the Pays d’Oc and Murder in the Pays d’Oc, and also three books of comic verse: Paw Prints in the Butter, Pelicans Can’t Read and The Little Book of Rude Limericks. A Londoner to her fingertips, she now lives in West Sussex, on the south coast of the UK. You will find her on Facebook (Paw Prints in the Butter and Arun Scribes) and on Twitter (X) @pawprints66.

HELLO

WRITERS &ARTISTS

CALLFOR SUBMISSIONS IS OPEN!

*No prompts or themes - no boundaries*

WELL READ is looking for submissions from writers and artists who have stories to tell –through words and art. We combine new and established voices from diverse backgrounds and celebrate different perspectives. We want people who aren’t afraid to shake things up, speak their mind, and share their humanity.

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Please follow the guidelines - all submissions must be sent as attachments and include an author photo and short bio.

Say Hello to My Little Friend by

Jennine Capo Crucet

Books of Note: “Say Hello to My Little Friend” by

Jennine Capo Crucet

Reviewed by Claire Hamner Matturro

Readers might never want to visit attractions featuring trained, captive orca whales after reading Say Hello to My Little Friend (Simon & Schuster 2024) by Jennine Capo Crucet, and this intense, haunting novel establishes why that would be a good thing. Which is to say, though the book focuses also on Cuban youths Ismael Reyes, known also as Izzy, and his sidekick Rudy, the real star is a captive orca improbably named Lolita. In some ways, this is a devastating read, but also surely a fascinatingly original one.

The book begins with a chapter called “Etymology,” in which Lolita is brutally captured and ripped from her family, including her mother and her aunts. The use of explosives to separate the orcas and the death of five in the family—drowned by the nets used—are heart-breaking in revealing the cruelty involved in the capture done for profit and entertainment. The author’s remarkable ability to get inside the captured Lolita’s mind, emotions, and memories to give her a voice makes this book special and

gives the story much of its strength, impact, and power. In a soon-to-merge storyline, restless Izzy, having only recently turned twenty and having failed at being an impersonator, recruits a high school acquaintance named Rudy on a quest to become a modern-day Tony Montana of “Scarface” movie fame. Neither particularly wants the violence or drugs involved with Montana’s “Scarface” life, but they want to be someone important and that’s what came into Izzy’s confused head. He explains: “What we want—what we need is to move up in the world in an aggressive way. That’s all we’re trying to do.”

Lolita, though held captive at the Miami Seaquarium in a concrete tank far too small for her and mourning for years the loss of her family, nonetheless proves she has a certain mystical power—at least over Izzy. But before readers see that power, they first see the suffering of these captive orcas.As the omniscient voice narrating the novel observes about Lolita’s tank mate, Hugo was “a whale not much older than her, captured three years earlier, who would, in time, devote an entire afternoon to bashing his own head against the concrete walls of their tank in order to kill himself.”

While Lolita dominates the story, Izzy has his moments and the author creates an absorbing, complicated character in this young man as he sets out on a bewildering path toward Lolita and their mingled fate. Orphaned when his mother dies escaping Cuba, Izzy lives in his aunt’s garage as he sets out on his misadventures.

Izzy's character is further enhanced by his sidekick,

Rudy. The omniscient narrator observes Izzy and Rudy are "in many ways, the same man--both young, both treading the water rising around them, both as yet unaware of how lost they are in the version of Miami that leaves them longing for little more than a life prominently featuring nightclub bottle service and a girlfriend with an impressive set of augmented breasts.”

With more than a touch of magical realism, the author expertly and engagingly weaves Lolita’s tale together with Izzy’s almost as if they are star-crossed lovers. In some ways, they are. From the moment that Lolita first hears “the water lapping its way up Izzy’s driveway” and “shares and knows his bone-deep loneliness” she understands she might be the “catalyst for all he is truly after.” Thus, the two have a joint destiny, that’s clear from the onset, but the journey—oh, the journey—to the unsettling and surprising ending will captivate readers.

All in all, this is a rare and marvelous book, full of charm, social commentary, excellent writing, believable magic, mesmerizing plotlines, wry and sometimes bitter observations—and the amazing Lolita the orca whale. Say Hello to My Little Friend is distinctive and bold and showcases an amazing talent in its author, Jennine Capó Crucet. Don’t miss this one.

CLAIRE CONSIDERS Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capo Crucet

JennineCapoCrucetisanovelist,essayist,andscreenwriter.

Born and raised in Miami of Cuban parents, Crucet is the author of four award-winning books, and has contributed to the PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio, and TheAtlantic, Condé Nast Traveler, and others. Her novel Your Home Among Strangers won the International Latino Book Award and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, and others. Her story collection How to Leave Hialeah, won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and the John Gardner BookAward. She’s worked as a professor of ethnic studies and of creative writing, as a college access counselor for the One Voice Scholars Program, and lives in North Carolina with her family.

CLAIRE

CONSIDERS Say Hello to My Little Friend by Jennine Capo Crucet

“Be prepared.”

Annie McDonnell asks Lisa Braxton

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Passive aggressiveness. If you have something you want to say to me, come out and say it. Please don’t say something in a riddle or a roundabout way and expect me to get your point. Please don’t “ghost” me instead of telling me directly if you have a problem with me.

Which living person do you most admire?

Michelle Obama. She had a great career, has been supportive of her husband’s political aspirations and found a way to tap into one of the biggest problems in this country during her husband’s terms in office—childhood obesity— and make that her project, inspiring people all over the country to make more sensible eating decisions.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Books. I purchase at least two a month. I borrow at least two or three a month from the library. There is rarely a time when I am not reading two or three books at a time.

What is your current state of mind?

I fluctuate from happy to sad to something in between. My

mother and father died within the past four years and within two years of each other. I was blessed to spend quality times with them and take care of them toward the end and was with them as they took their last breaths. But I think about them every day and miss them greatly.

What do you most dislike about your appearance?

I wish my stomach was flatter.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I would go back to my earlier life, when I was in my teens and 20s and I wouldn’t be so insecure. I would also be more focused on a career that paid well and that I’d want to stay in for the duration of my working life.

Where would you most like to live?

The Washington, D.C. area.

What is your most treasured possession?

My mother’s engagement ring and wedding band. I took them off her finger a few days before she passed away.They were loose on her because she’d lost so much weight because she was ill. I wear her band on my ring finger along with my wedding band and I wear her engagement ring on the opposite finger on my right hand.

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Being alone and having absolutely no one in your life.

Who are your favorite writers?

Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurtson, Louise Penny.

What is your greatest regret?

That I wasted so much time disliking myself when I was younger.

How would you like to die?

I’d like to have decent health up until the end and then in an

instant drop dead.

What is your motto?

Be prepared.That’s the Girl Scout motto. I was a Girl Scout and I have sought to fulfill that motto in my life since I joined the Girl Scouts in the 4th grade.

Lisa Braxton is the author of the memoir in essays, Dancing Between the Raindrops: A Daughter's Reflections on Love and Loss and the novel, The Talking Drum, winner of a 2021 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards Gold Medal, overall winner of Shelf Unbound book review magazine’s 2020 Independently Published BookAward, and winner of a 2020 Outstanding Literary Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Finalist for the International BookAwards. She is also an Emmy-nominated former television journalist, an essayist, and short story writer.

She is on the executive board of the Writers Room of Boston and a writing instructor at Grub Street Boston, and currently serves as President of the Greater Boston Section oftheNationalCouncilofNegroWomenandisamemberof the Psi Omega Chapter ofAlpha KappaAlpha Sorority, Inc. She lives in the Boston, Massachusetts area.

“Dancing Between the Raindrops is a heartfelt homage to Braxton's parents in the wake of their passing. She touches the soul of every adult child's mourning in ways poignant, nostalgic, aching, and funny with a clever patchwork of writing styles. A must read!” -E. Dolores Johnson, author of Say I'm Dead, A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets and Love

Dancing

Between The

Raindrops:A Daughter's Reflections On LoveAnd Loss

Lisa Braxton

TripLit

with D. Major A Little Women Christmas

A Little Women Christmas

Christmas, 1981: Shannon, All my love for a sweet and beautiful girl who is rapidly changing into one of the “Little Women” in our home. Merry Christmas, Mom

Several years ago, while pilfering through stacks of books at a used bookstore, I found a 1981 Grosset & Dunlap, Illustrated Junior Library edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. If you’re not getting a visual of the edition, don’t fret. When I recognized the book, I didn’t think to myself, “Why, that’s a 1981 Grosset & Dunlap, Illustrated Junior Library edition of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Lajos “Louis” Jambor illustrated two of Alcott’s books, Little Women (1947) and Jo’s Boys (1949); the 1981 edition I now own was a reprint. I later acquired Jo’s Boys. To be honest, I had to look up all these details in order to write this piece. If you’re a Little Women enthusiast and have seen this edition firsthand you will absolutely recognize the cover. Finding it at the bookstore—Marmee at the piano encircled by her four daughters, Meg, Jo, Beth,

and Amy March with their eyes looking upward to the heavens singing to the angels above—instantly transported to one of my favorite Christmas memories—my sister, Julia, reading Little Women to me over the days leading up to Christmas.

Most people equate Charles Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, as the “go-to” Christmas story. It has certainly stood the test time.And no, Dickens did not invent Christmas. I do wonder how many people are like me, though, and view Little Women as a Christmas book? It begins and ends with Christmas; even the second chapter is titled “Merry Christmas.” But the tradition of Julia reading Alcott’s most famous novel to me at Christmastime began when my family moved from California to rural Missouri in the early 1980s. Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons were popular TV shows. Julia and I thought (and often pretended) to be the characters in those shows to the extent (and the annoyance of my older sister, Aleea) that at night we would repeat over and over: “Goodnight Johnboy,” “Goodnight Mary Ellen” or in the case of Melissa Gilbert who played the character of Laura Ingalls Wilder, “Goodnight Ma. Goodnight, Pa.” Julia and I shared a room. Moving to Missouri was like traveling back in time. At Silver Dollar City in the Ozarks, I even entered a bullfrog racing contest and that’s where my parents bought me a blue cornflower bonnet very similar to the one Melissa

Gilbert a/k/a Laura wore in the show. In the opening scene, Laura runs down the hill to the TV show’s soundtrack. I used to run down our dirt road, wearing my bonnet, and humming that same music. I’m willing to bet there are some readers of a certain vintage (I’m circa 1972 myself) who once ran down hills pretending to be the TV version of Laura Ingalls or did the whole “Goodnight Johnboy” routine themselves.The Ingalls, theWaltons, but even more so, theAlcott’s lives resembled our lives. In truth, our lives were more matched to the sitcom, One Day at a Time, which was about a divorced mom raising two daughters on her own. But, if I was going to live inside a novel, I was definitely picking the more romantic version the Alcotts seemed to live.

I identified with the Alcott sisters. We, also, were an allgirl cast living a meager existence with our mom and waiting for dad to come back home—my dad had been laid off at his job in Missouri and had returned to California for work. With only a cast iron potbelly stove to heat our entire house, like the Alcotts, we were often cold in the winter. My mom was studying to become a nurse. Marmee served as a nurse in the Civil War. Like Beth, I played the piano and like Jo, I had early dreams of becoming a writer. We even cut down our own Christmas tree! That was a test for you, dear readers. The March sisters didn’t cut down their Christmas tree! I’ve always felt that scene was missing

from Alcott’s novel and would have worked well for the introduction of the male character, Lauri, the March’s very curious neighbor. But who am I to comment on Alcott’s masterpiece? Aleea, Julia, and I searching our property for the perfect tree, chopping it down, and hauling it (we first tried to get our horse, Favel, to pull it…nope, not having that) home in the snow is also a favorite Christmas memory. The scene from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation where Chevy Chase takes his family to the middle of nowhere to hunt down the perfect Christmas tree is a more fitting picture of that day. First, Julia wanted to climb up the tree and cut off the top. Aleea nixed that idea. If it weren’t for older sisters, most of us would have died earlier. That classic Clark Griswold line from the movie— “Looks great. Little full, lotta sap”—about sums up our experience. The whole point I remember this as an innocent time.There was a wholesomeness to our lives reminiscent of Alcott’s characters in Little Women.

We almost lost Julia last summer. Sorry I didn’t work in a better transition here, but is there a good way of transitioning into this topic? When things turned for the worse I went to see her in the hospital thinking this might be the last time we would spend together. She always wants me to read the latest chapters from the novel I’m working on. I don’t typically share in those early stages, but I brought my laptop and I read a couple chapters. I also

brought my copy of Little Women. It’s hard for Julia to read now because she’s had multiple head injuries. When she saw the book she said, “That’s mine.” It’s a sister thing. I get accused of stealing stuff all the time, but listen, I’m the youngest of three girls…doesn’t that mean everything belongs to me? She was right, though. Little Women will forever be hers. I didn’t end up reading it to her that day. I’m glad. It would have marked an end to our chapter and it’s not time for that. Julia has a long road ahead, but she’s home now.

This brings me to the part of the story that isn’t quite as innocent and ties into the concept of writing a column about literary destinations. I’ve discovered in writing these micro-memoirs that they share the same narrative elements of fiction, so there are humorous parts, sad parts, and in this case, naughty parts. Oh my! I couldn’t resist the chance at a double entendre. This is a different type of memory, but is still associated with Little Women and Lousia MayAlcott.

A few years ago, my husband, Nick, my son, Harry, and I traveled to Concord, MA to visit The Orchard House where Lousia May Alcott wrote Little Women. The house was the inspiration for the novel’s setting and had been on my bucket list for years.We weren’t familiar with the lay of the land, hit some traffic, and by the time we arrived it was five minutes until closing time and a lady was locking the door. I begged and pleaded my case: “Please, please can I

just dip in for five minutes?Alcott changed the direction of my life. We flew from Atlanta and are leaving tomorrow.” There’s a reason “Southern” often modifies hospitality. When have you ever seen “Northern” before “hospitality?” Needless to say, I was not permitted to soak in the aura of one of our literary greats. I would not be allowed to reimagine the Alcott’s Christmas which was essentially (in my mind) the March sisters’ Christmas, and ultimately a reimagining of one of my fondest Christmas memories Major girls’ Christmas. My consolation prize was being a “Peeping Tom,” gazing through windows, and snapping photos that didn’t turn out because of the glare coming off the glass. I guess I could spin it and pretend I was like Alcott’s character, Lauri, who often spied on the Marchs. Perhaps it was that rejection that led to reckless behavior. No, I didn’t smash windows or graffiti The Orchard House. It’s not that dark.Anyway, that would be sacrilegious.

So…right across from The Orchard House is another famous historical home, The Wayside. It hadn’t been converted into a museum at the time of our visit. It officially opened to the public in 2024. Nathanial Hawthorne was The Wayside’s most famous resident, but Lousia May Alcott resided there at one time as did Harriet Lothrop. Lothrop, whose pen name was Margaret Sidney, wrote a children’s series called Five Little Peppers. I was aware of the house’s connection to Hawthorne and Alcott, but later

learned about Lothrop and the role The Wayside played during the Revolution. But this is not a history lesson, so I’ll move on to the good part.

Let’s just say the door was unlocked this time. Upon entering The Wayside, we were hit with the strong smell of oil-based paint. Drop cloths littered the floors. We heard a shuffling sound coming from upstairs and then a man yelling out, “hello, hello,” to which we didn’t extend a greeting. Why not have a quick peek? And so, we traveled through the first floor, up to the second floor, the third floor, all the way to the attic accompanied by a distant, “Hello, is someone there?” Today, I wonder if that man renovating The Wayside went home and told his family the house is haunted. Just a teeny bit naughty, but we had come from so far away, and we deserved it. Plus, I have a new memory. (Memories are fickle so maybe this never really happened. Deny, deny, deny.)

Like Louisa MayAlcott did in Little Women, I will begin with Christmas and I will end with Christmas. The quote at the start of this piece, the inscription—Christmas, 1981: Shannon, All my love for a sweet and beautiful girl who is rapidly changing into one of the “Little Women” in our home. Merry Christmas, Mom—was written on the title page of the used copy I found. It was written by a mother to her daughter. Could it be more perfect?

I’ve pondered who Shannon is and how serendipitous it

seemed that Shannon is also the name of my main character in my novel, The Bystanders. Some additional serendipity is that I never noticed the inscription until I opened the book at the hospital last summer during my visit with Julia. Is Shannon still alive? Surely not, because she never would never have parted with such a meaningful gift from her mother. But for whatever reason, this version of Little Women somehow found its way into my hands with a stranger’s Christmas memory forever secreted within its pages. It made me recall the Christmases of my youth, of a mom and her three daughters. It made me remember the spirit of Christmas. I hope it does the same for you: Merry Christmas WELL READ readers and a Happy New Year!

The Orchard House, home of Louisa May Alcott

Toby LeBlanc and Amos Jasper Wright

Toby LeBlanc andAmos Jasper Wright

Amos Jasper Wright kicks off the questions in this interesting Authors Interviewing Authors edition. They discuss the craft of writing, talk about their writing process, and delve into why writing is more than getting words on a page. Enjoy!

Wright: Eccentricity seems to be the ocean that creatives swim in. Do you have any quirks or rituals? They do not necessarily have to be associated with your writing.

Leblanc: My wife could probably answer this better than I can. As far as writing quirks, I don’t believe I have that many. Maybe the fact that I do not have a codified writing practice is a quirk. But I have several non-writing eccentricities. I have a very sensitive sense of smell so there are certain fragrances banished from my presence. I park in the exact same spot at places I frequent so I never have to think about where I parked my car. I have “tiers” of T-shirts which move from work/public-worthy to pajama class, to lawn duty, to car wash/winter pipe wrap.

Wright: What are the themes you are focusing on in your current work?

Leblanc: I’m revising a novella that I started up this past spring. It focuses on a post-climate change world (similar to my upcoming story collection Soaked), but considers parenting, relationships with grief and nostalgia, as well as colonization. This one has been hard, I think because it's about fears I'm struggling to face. I'm also contemplating a follow-up to my previous novel, Dark Roux. Themes I'd like to address in this one would be the commodification of a culture and the negotiation of cultural change across generations.

Wright: How do you handle unpublished work?

Leblanc: This question assumes that I would have some method or approach I’ve codified over time. That could not be further from the truth. In one instance I tried to get a novel out there and it had no traction. This was for the best because there was so much that just wasn’t there. However, I ended up distilling it down to a single short story which became published almost ten years later. That publication launched my writing career. Often my unpublished work is fragments for which I haven’t found a home. Eventually I find a way to work a scene that’s been sitting dormant for years into a new piece. But maybe my favorite thing that

has happened with unpublished work is with my most recent novel (currently on submission). I wrote a version of it almost twenty years ago, right after Hurricane Katrina. I stopped writing right as the family in the novel was waiting for the buses to pick them up at the Convention Center in New Orleans. In my mind they’d been waiting there ever since I stopped writing and had grown angry with me for it. When I was given permission to write this novel again (long story, I’ll have to tell you another time), the family had morphed, and the story was about something much deeper. I understand now I wasn’t ready to write that novel back then. That could be the real reason the family in my head was angry with me.

Wright: How do you approach editing? Do you consider yourself a “slow writer” or a “fast writer?”

Leblanc: Slow writer seems to describe me better. Although, that depends on some factors. Sometimes I know exactly what I need to happen in a scene. And I’ll know exactly what that means for my character. In those instances, I will be able to bang out content in no time. But most of the time I am learning about the character, or the impact of the setting, or even about myself, in real, slow time. I take time to process what is happening and often get confused. I will walk away and come back hours, or even days, later. This slows things down substantially. In editing,

too, it’s a similar process. If my plot isn't fully fleshed out, I have to dig deep to find what the story is really about. Without a fully fleshed concept, I am working in editing to find the meaning of the work so that I can then make it cohesive. Then it is a matter of reading for character consistency, pacing, language cohesion…you know…all the traditional edity stuff.

Wright: Writing is a solitary endeavor with few immediate rewards and an uncertain outcome. Why do it? How do you balance W-2 work that pays the bills, family life, and other obligations with a writing schedule?

Leblanc: The best advice I’d ever read on becoming a writer is that I should first try to do everything else. If I keep coming back to writing, I know it’s meant to be. If I look back, I was a writer before I was anything else. I’ll likely be a writer after everything as well. I write because it’s where I teach myself. It’s where I sort out my thoughts and feelings. My hopes and dreams get to live there. Why do it?

Because it’s always where I come back to and where the real work happens.

Although, keeping a writing schedule is something completely different. Despite writing feeling like a calling or vocation, bills need to be paid, children need to be raised, and retirement plans need to be tended. There are times when I have a little more space in my life and I can

regiment some time to devote to the craft. But most writing happens as thievery. I steal a moment here and there, and begin to cobble something together, in hopes that I will have more space in the future to make it into something cohesive. On my best days I can string together two thousand words. But in truth, my writing happens in a series of moments.

Wright: How do you define or practice the relation between reading and writing?

Leblanc: Another quote that has stuck with me is that if you read enough, you will eventually become a writer. I wholeheartedly believe this. The division between reading and writing is like the thin horizon separating the ocean and the sky. They may be made of different things, but they mirror each other to the point where it’s hard to tell them apart. I don’t think a writer can truly develop their voice, their ideas, or their characters, without reading someone else’s words. In that shared space while we read, that mindmeld between writer and reader that is fused along sentences, we step out of our version of being and into a bigger one. There’s an old parable about three blind men and the elephant: one touches the tail and says it’s a brush, one touches the trunk and says it’s a snake, and the last touches the leg and says it’s a tree. None see the elephant. Each book I read helps me see more of the elephant that is

reality and informs what I am able to write. This is, of course, not to mention the way I learn how to write as I read. Someone’s brilliant analogy or artistic wording will inevitably spark something in me to create.

Wright: Has the widespread use of social media, and the accompanying documented erosion of attention span affected your writing?

Leblanc: I’m afraid so. It impresses me how well social media and cell phone companies have figured us out. I will catch myself looking at my phone or pulling up social media when I don’t even want to. Last I looked, this is the definition of addiction. In fact, I’ve caught myself navigating over to my phone while writing responses to these questions. Writing is often something I do in combat with distraction. However, I will say social media has made it easier to connect with people who might share my ideas or like my writing. In fact, the connection aspect of it is almost as nice as meeting people at fairs and festivals. In that thought, social media is useful to me, and to my writing, when I use it for its most core purpose.

Wright: If not writing, what else might you have done?

Leblanc: I’ve been doing this mental health therapy gig for nearly twenty years now and it has suited me well. However, I think the next thing for me will be to own my

bookstore and/or restaurant/bar. My wife and I have pie-inthe-sky dreams about what our place would be like. So far, we have made it to: regional reading and knickknacks, coffee in the morning/wine in the afternoon, coffee/wine pairings with books, and gumbo Thursdays. I don’t honestly know why Thursday. Gumbo on a Thursday feels right. However, if we aren’t talking about the tangible possibilities… I think I might have been a farmer. There is something about digging in the earth, helping things grow, while still connecting to a bigger system that syncs with my old Cajun agrarian genes.

Wright: Writers are regular people with flaws, like everyone else. Do a writer’s shortcomings as a person undermine their artistic accomplishments?

Leblanc: One thing being a therapist has taught me is that a shortcoming is a strength in the wrong context. Sometimes I have to cope with the context. Other times I need to reconfigure the strength so that it can do its job correctly. I can get too didactic as both a therapist and a writer (I think I am man-splaining my man-splaining). But that shortcoming is born out of my excitement for sharing ideas and experiences. If I can reconfigure my writing or feedback to someone in the therapy room that way, it comes across the way it should (hopefully). In the case where I cope with the context (e.g. baring my soul with words

Toby LeBlanc and Amos Jasper Wright

which could potentially last after I am gone but only capture my current understanding and feeling), I always try to treat the experience as a learning moment and growth edge. As I mentioned earlier, I often write to teach myself something. Therefore, whoever comes out at the end of me writing a piece hopefully has fewer shortcomings than the person that went in, and that hopefully shows up in the writing. In this way, I like to think that my shortcomings lead to my growth.

Wright: We’re both from a land of religion and sports. How have these cultural phenomena impacted your writing, if at all?

Leblanc: Religion, more than sports, always finds its way into my writing. My Cajun family is very Catholic. In fact, my father was a monk for a time before leaving the Benedictine order. He remains an oblate monk. I was an altar boy and active in the church community throughout my youth. That life and way of living is not easily exorcised. I find trinities, parables, and even dogma buried in almost every story I write. Themes such as forgiveness and redemption, performing sacred rites, or even the appreciation of an external all -powerful force, populate the worlds I create.Although, I’ve recently been thinking more about the latter, especially when it comes to topics like toxic masculinity, racism, and sexism. A movie that had a

huge impact on me wasAva DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. This was one of the most cherished books of my youth, and I had very high hopes for the movie. Her vision of the book did not disappoint. But what stuck with me the most was how the father, in seeking loving transcendence that would ultimately lead him to be imprisoned by what equates to the devil, is not forgiven at the end of the movie. His hubris, his unchecked ego, and his focus on work, resulted in him endangering his family, and the entire universe. He is saved by his daughter, who is singular in her vision to protect those around her, and who does not let him off the hook. He did not earn it, at least not yet. It honestly helped me redefine the concept of forgiveness, all the way down to my religious upbringing, and shifted everything I’ve written since. Even religion has become a fluid thing in my writing.

Wright: The world has changed significantly since the pandemic. Have these macro-level changes influenced you or your writing?

Leblanc: The pandemic impacted me and my writing in both positive and negative ways. I do not mean this as if there are good or bad aspects. It’s more about what was added and what was taken away. The experience of continuity was altered during the pandemic. And I don’t just mean going to the forty-hour slog every week. It was how wisdom seemed to be interrupted. In all other

difficulties in the past there would be some thread of experience to look to. But no one knew what to do during the pandemic. Precedents were non-existent. I realized we had slipped out of the known path. That was what was lost. But what was gained, and positive, was my understanding of our capability to adapt. Overnight the planet changed the way it worked, interacted, spent, healed, and felt. We forge a new path out of nearly nothing. Because of that my writing now considers our adaptability in a bigger sense. I’m constantly wondering how we can change, quickly, to meet demands and threats that aren’t backing down from our indifference. In doing so, it means I have had to lose my affinity for nostalgia (more difficult for a Southerner than I would have ever imagined).

Wright: Enough about writing. What about the other arts –do you have music or the visual arts?

Leblanc: Music will always be the best friend I can pick up at any point and it is like no time has passed. Music is wonderful because it finds those non-verbal corners of my soul. Giving sound to a feeling goes farther than the words. I recently read that music helps release opioids in all mammals. It truly soothes the savage beast, including this beastly writer. I don’t think I could be a writer without music.And in case you are wondering what I’m listening to – it’s mostly blues and Americana. I’m partial to Howlin’

Wolf and Nathanial Rateliffe. But some Lake Street Dive never hurt anybody. When it comes to visual arts, the cinema is my happy place. I’m addicted to story, through and through. Pairing that with fantastic acting and visuals is just a plus.When I’ve had a long week, you’ll often find me in a cold, dark theater.

Leblanc: How do you decide where to begin a story? How do you decide where to end it?

Wright: I guess there’s the old adage about in medias res, in the middle of the action. “Now begin in the middle, and later learn the beginning; the end will take care of itself,” Harlan Ellison said. Except I seldom begin anywhere near the middle. With a few exceptions, such as short stories, in novels I generally preamble until, blowing by the ab initio, I finally arrive in the vicinity of in medias res, much to the exasperation of the reader, I’m sure.An editor would likely tell me to axe the preambling, that all this preliminary palaver is an exercise in discovering what the story is about, not the story itself, but I’m rather fond of preambling. One part temperament, one part strategic, I confess to enjoying a little (but not too much) schadenfreude – I’m only human! Even preamblers! – frustrating our expectations for instantaneous gratification, and other such incorrigible

Americanisms that pall the preambler. Cutting the preamble gives the illusion of authorial control, that the author started the story right where he meant to and stopped it when he was finished with it, not when it was finished with him. But the truth is, I don’t always know myself what the story is about, much less where it begins and ends. At some level, this mode of literary editing has probably been influenced by Hollywood movie production. Preambling and the longeur simply don’t work in cinematic form in the same way they do (or can; or did, especially in 18th century prose) in literary narrative, and the economics of film would prohibit it anyway. Nobody would finance a film with thirty minutes of visual preamble, and even if produced independently no one would watch it. I might not even watch it, and I am a chronic preambler.

Where does the story end? Let’s distinguish between the story and the printed narrative. The printed narrative ends, it has to for purely practical and commercial reasons, sometimes the ending deferred too much for popular taste, or when the internal mechanics of the storyline have been exhausted. But this is only an approximate ending. A literary narrative contributes to the illusion of finality, bookending a story at the beginning and the ending, but these are mostly arbitrary milestones in the grand scheme, chosen for narrative convenience, practical limits, satisfying word counts, or because a tidy beginning and

ending makes us feel good. But the story never ends; it doesn’t even begin. Only human time begins and ends, and we project this temporal structure onto the universe and call it alpha and omega. Maybe this mania for beginnings and endings is a cultural artefact of Christendom. We’ve been here before, with Genesis and the Book of Revelation, which I am still waiting for to come true and give us all a day off work.After the printed narrative ends, events go on, as they always have. After War & Peace, both war and peace continue their dialectical dance; at the end of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth and Darcy marry and go happily off to Pemberley, but presumably there is the rest of their married lives to write about: the honeymoon, the firstborn, the mortgage, the eating of the rich, the midlife crisis, the divorce, the volte-face, the reconciliation, the end. Once the sun runs out of gas, puffing itself up into a ridiculous harlequinesque red giant, and incinerates the earth, and we are finally spared from preambling and Americanisms, the universe will, one assumes, still go about its cosmic business without us and not much troubled by the absence. But this is to get lost in grand cosmic schemes. Literature, if it is to be at all relatable and human, has to jettison grand schemes lest it become systems thinking or stargazing. In other words, it has to begin and end somewhere, however arbitrarily. And yet, at the other end of the narrative, back at the beginning, the story never began, never begins, never

will begin, because before omega there was alpha and before alpha there was some other omega.

Leblanc: Eccentricity seems to be the ocean that creatives swim in. Do you have any quirks or rituals? They do not necessarily have to be associated with your writing.

Wright: Human societies run on ritual, which structures time and experience in comprehensive units that are collectively shared.The rise of secularization and the brutal flatness of technology, transforming every interaction into an anesthetizing surface, have largely left our lives devoid of meaningful ritual. In the absence of ritual, we’ve even invented corporatized holidays like Amazon Prime Day. The closest we might have to a mass ritual these days is the seasonal cycle of sports and the collective madness that is our political campaign season. Anyway, you were asking about rituals. I have routines, which I think of as private or individualistic, but few true rituals, which are communal. I guess rituals can be performed on an island, but their original meaning derives from a social context. Flexibility within structure keeps me productive. Rituals are mostly fixed operations, often inherited from past tradition; routines can be flexible. If I am constantly waiting for the perfect conditions of my ritual to be fulfilled, whenever that ritual is interrupted by the profane demands of a ramshackle finitude, as it inevitably will, then writing

becomes an oracular activity requiring the perfect alignment of the stars before it can be fulfilled, which in practice means it never will.

Leblanc:You've written about experiences that transcend a monolithic concept of the South. At the risk of oversimplifying this complex region, with its complex identities, what do you think is the future of literature in the South?

Wright: Let’s talk about the future of the South itself, as a place and a region, first. As goes the region, there goes its literature, although not as deterministically as the phrase suggests. Perhaps this reflects my own authorial preoccupations and interests, but I would forecast that climate change will be a dark cloud over Southern fiction. Even for future Southern authors less preoccupied than me with climate change, the changing environment will work its way into their fiction whether they like it or not. Narrative landscape descriptions will evolve to accommodate the changing climate. More flood stories, perhaps, more thunder and lightning. The old fire and brimstone will be realized as an intolerable and infernal heat. Characters will sweat more, and they will go broke paying higher home insurance rates. If the power grid no longer works, maybe the humming of gas-powered generators is heard on the edge of a climate refugee

settlement. Characters will start paying attention to the Atlantic hurricane season. Due to these disruptions, net migration patterns may change: those who can will migrate, and those who cannot will be left behind, since we are determined to modelAmerican society on a reprise of Lord of the Flies.As you said, it’s hard to predict how a complex region will evolve, but even harder to predict how a complex event like climate change will impact a complex region. If the climate outcome is bad enough, there may not be much left in the way of Southern literature at all.

Leblanc: What are the themes you are focusing on in your current work?

Wright: Insofar as they’re separable, and I am not suggesting otherwise than that any separation is artificial or for the sake of analytical convenience, I have moved away from race, and focused more on class, economics, work/ labor, and financial issues. Beyond that, I have left behind my home planet of traditional literary fiction and ventured into science fiction, hard and soft, weird and speculative, on-planet and off-planet, brainstorming some projects about SETI, Mars settlement, the future of the universe (it doesn’t look good, stay short on the cosmos), technology and the neo-Luddite movement.

Although you wouldn’t know it from the published material, I’ve become less interested in writing fiction that

is bound by known historical constraints and chronological series. Writing a Katrina story, if it is to be at all believable, which is not necessarily a prerequisite of literature, I have to, or feel compelled to do some basic fact checking. Katrina was a traumatic watershed in the history of the Gulf Coast, and the history of the country; there is a clearly delineated before and after, a pre-Katrina world and postKatrina world. Especially for those in Louisiana, these are not the same world. When did the levees break? Where did it happen? When did the New Orleans Saints evacuate and where did they play their early Katrina season games? When was evacuation ordered? When did Bush make his infamous Air Force One flyover? When was the National Guard deployed and where? When did Ray Nagin make his Chocolate City speech? When did Lieutenant General Honoré mobilize relief efforts? What exactly can be known about the events at Danziger Bridge? This could go on forever. These are all historical markers, embedded within a larger event called “Katrina,” that are verifiable by living people or readers with an internet connection. For reasons that would require more preambling, I have started to experience these historical constraints as, well, constraining. In science fiction, one is bound more by the limits of science and physical constants, and sometimes not even that, more than the verifiable record of historical events.

Leblanc: How do you handle unpublished work?

Wright: Much of it is juvenilia, the kind of journeyman work that should probably never see the light of the day, or at least not without significant editing and overhauling, if not total rewriting. In many cases, those early writings may have some interesting concepts, themes, or storylines in them, I just don’t have the time to revisit them and resurrect them. In other cases, I focused entirely too much on literary pyrotechnics, wowing myself with cleverness, and probably producing a lot of unreadable bilge. Not going through an MFA program, which I suspect may accelerate some of the literary maturation process, I had a much slower process of working through my own style. More recent unpublished projects are probably publishable in some possible world, I just haven’t found the time to edit them.

Leblanc: How do you approach editing? Do you consider yourself a “slow writer” or a “fast writer?”

Wright: Fast writer, slow editor, I think. Editing is a necessary evil, painful but curative, like amputating a gangrenous limb. After first completing the draft of a new narrative, utterly intoxicated in the gluey glow of the honeymoon phase, I am utterly convinced that I’ve finally done it, I’ve found the philosopher’s stone of literary

production, having written something so immaculate it will need little to no editing, in fact editing would only sully its impeccable inspiration, perhaps the lightest touch of proofreading – even Shakespeare must have made a typo here and there, confused a homophone – and nothing more; only to return to it months or years later, sobered up from the intoxication of creation and the honeymoon glow having worn off, and only to find it barely worthy of the few megabytes it takes up on my hard drive.

Leblanc: How do you define or practice the relation between reading and writing?

Wright: I think of it as a continuum, a co-generative process, the reading informing the writing, and the writing leading me back to reading.Amusician who didn’t listen to music would be an impoverished musician. A professional architect who had never looked at other designs, the masterpieces of tradition, would barely be capable of drafting designs for distribution warehouses and lifestyle centers and municipal jails and fast food franchises.

A quarterback who never studied game film isn’t going to be on the roster very long.

Leblanc: If not writing, what else might you have done?

Wright: Now we’re in the universe of counterfactuals.This

is where it gets fun. Astronaut. Financier. Action painter. Admiral of the Alabama Navy. Professional athlete. Hal 9000. Movie stuntman. Theologian. Robinhood. Bo Jackson. Academic. He-Man. Yeggman. Stockjobber. Che Guevara. Chimneysweep. Voyager 1. Drew Brees. Peter Pan. Van Gogh’s ear. Et al.

Because I had a childhood dream of making myself as unemployable as possible, I started college as a physics major. Thanks to a heavy dose of Carl Sagan and likeminded science writers, I switched majors to English/ philosophy when I realized I’d prefer to think about the implications of physics rather than solving physics problems. Admittedly, there was that romantic part of me deeply disappointed that modern physics, having been dragooned by the division of labor and the rat race of chasing scientific funding, no longer consisted of weird homemade experiments like Newton splitting light into a rainbow with a prism, or Galileo dropping weights and things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I had a scintillating proposal to drop the Leaning Tower of Pisa from the moon to see what would happen, to be followed up by an interplanetary project to send billionaires on a one-way ride to Mars, but never could get funding. Science has been wandering in a second dark age ever since.

In terms of employment, the only thing that matters to our time-is-money culture, changing majors from the sciences

to the humanities was a wash. The job market has about as much use for a theoretical or experimental physicist – the guy who drops weights, rotten eggs, water balloons, raw hamburger meat, prosthetic limbs, banana phones, and a variety of Americanisms from a tower – or observational astronomer as it does for a twenty-two year old who can correctly identify examples of poetic meter or write a themed essay that would be THE LAST WORD on Joyce’s Ulysses. If not for writing, I would have afflicted society with my preamblings as a visual artist, painting or sculpture. One of the best decisions I ever made was to drop out of art school.Aside from the financial implications, this allowed me the time to focus on writing, which is fancy pants for bloviating, scribbling, ranting, and general navel gazing. Too old to be a professional athlete and too unprofessional to be a financier, the family history haunted with black and white photos of the ancestors who had fought in foreign wars and tales of derring-do, I contemplated joining the military at various intervals. It is hard to say for sure how serious I was about this, probably as serious as I was about being theAdmiral of theAlabama Navy, but when I discovered that this too would almost certainly result in a desk job, like any other office gig, and it was nothing like the movie Wargames or a Hitchcockian spy thriller, nor the swashbuckling adventurism I had read about in T.E. Lawrence or Homer – it was not even A

Farewell to Arms – having thus totally confused Jasper Johns’ flag paintings with the actual American flag, I became what every Millennial dreams of – a knowledge worker!

Leblanc: We’re both from a land of religion and sports. How have these cultural phenomena impacted your writing, if at all?

Wright: In the South, football is a religion. Since the New Orleans Saints had no use on the roster for preambling or poetic meter, I have decided to one day, when I grow up, write a football novel instead. It will, of course, be THE LAST WORD on football. I can name several baseball novels, but where is the Great American Football novel? This is a great tragic omission that must be remedied at once. The reading public demands it.

Being from the Bible Belt, baptized in the church, and regularly attending services, when we weren’t worshipping the football gods, I was getting churched. Religion, and that special brand of brimstone that runs hot in the Deep South, was the language that structured my formative experiences. The Bible was the first book that I seriously studied, and I do not mean casual reading, but studied. The history of the book’s construction, exegesis of the prophetic books, the early Christian sects. I credit an adolescent exposure to the Left Behind series, practically radioactive with gaudy

apocalypse, with an early interest in reading. Unable to smoke enough opium of the masses to successfully walk across water or see how a mustard seed could move a mountain, and fully convinced that Moses must have set that burning bush alight himself, I had to leave behind Left Behind to fraternize with the likes of Joseph Campbell and Nietzsche and other pagans, so I’m not sure the series had the effect Tim LaHaye intended, but it and the Bible taught me close reading through which I internalized the Bible’s rich stock of metaphors and images. The Pauline epistles. Ecclesiastes and Psalms. The Book of Revelation. Even the non-canonical apocryphal texts. From there, it was the Church Fathers, and theologians, Aquinas and St. Augustine. Like many other Southern writers for whom brimstone was mother’s milk, reliance on Biblical metaphor to convey shared meaning was really second nature. Much later, wishing to do a little bush burning of my own, I prescribed myself an antidote to all this gaudy apocalypse and Christ-haunting by reading other religious and mythological traditions, probably with limited success because it will never be second nature.

Leblanc: The world has changed significantly since the pandemic. Have these macrolevel changes influenced you or your writing?

Wright: While I haven’t attempted a true pandemic novel,

I was working on a novel, one about our country’s toxic work culture and high finance, during the pandemic. Although unplanned, over time the pandemic infected the plot. The isolation of the pandemic dovetailed nicely with the isolation induced by our culture’s obsession with work. I was recently editing some work that was written and set in 2016 and, while pondering the fates of the characters, I kept thinking, “These poor bastards have no idea what kind of world of hurt is going to hit them in just four years!”

Toby LeBlanc lives in Austin, TX with his wife and two children. Some of his other work can be found in Barrelhouse Magazine, Deep South Magazine, and Coffin Bell Journal. He also reviews for The Southern Review of Books. His novel Dark Roux (2022) was published by Unsolicited Press. His upcoming story collection Soaked is available for pre-order from Cornerstone Press.

Amos Jasper Wright is from Alabama. His first short story collection, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good was published by Livingston Press (University of West Alabama) in 2018. Livingston Press published his first novel titled Petrochemical Nocturne in 2023. Livingston Press will also soon publish his second novel, The Battle of Danziger Bridge, a collection of interrelated short stories set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

You come to the city because your passion called you here. Whatever that passion may be. That thing you love. And you wander out into the streets searching for a place to pull up a stool, order a drink, chat with the bartender about all things divine.

Welcome to God On The Rocks. Serving up great drinks and soulful conversations since time began.

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A monthly column that takes us off the page and into the

Atkins Family Yuletide Traditions

As is the case with many families, Christmas is a time of tradition at my house. When early December rolls around and the air becomes crisp, the children—now all grown— gather once again at the family home place for the trimming of the tree. I make that annual climb to the attic to retrieve the decorations, each one a small piece of family history with a story all its own. Then I bolt the Christmas tree into its stand and carefully place it in the corner of the living room while Norman’s Tabernacle Choir—a long story for another time—provides a background of joyous holiday music.

We light a fire in the fireplace and drape strings of colorful, twinkling lights. Then we carefully hang each ornament and bauble on the tree before tossing handfuls of tinsel to finish the effect. We address Christmas cards and put antlers made of felt on the dog. We bake festive cookies and stir up a bowl of holiday punch.And later, when all the preparations are completed and the gaiety and love are at their absolute peak, the Atkins family gathers in the parlor

and engages in that most wondrous of all Yuletide traditions.

We lie to my wife about how much I gave for the tree.

The origins of many traditions are lost in the mists of antiquity, but I know exactly when this one began. When I was a youth, it was my job each year to go get the Christmas tree. My family lived out in the country with woods all around, and I got in the habit of cutting down the biggest thing I could find. Old habits die hard, I suppose, so when my first married Christmas rolled around, I once again went out with the intention of finding and dragging home a large tree. Unfortunately, I no longer lived in the country, and as it turned out, in the city you weren’t allowed to just chop down the one you liked. In fact, you had to buy the tree, and since someone else had done the work, they were expensive.

Despite the strange ways of city folk, I had to have a Christmas tree, so I located one I thought would do—which coincidentally just happened to be the biggest tree on the lot—and I bought it. This was in 1975, and I gave $19.95 for that tree. To put this sum into perspective, you need to realize that at that time I was earning about $2.75 per hour. So I gave what amounted to a day’s pay for my first storebought Christmas tree before tying it on top of a $50 Buick Electra 225—affectionately known as the Gray Whale— and beginning the drive to our $60-per-month apartment.

On my way home, I began to have buyer’s remorse. Nineteen dollars and ninety-five cents was a staggering amount of money. I had blown a hole in our budget large enough for Santa, the sleigh, and all nine reindeer to pass right through, with maybe room for a couple of elves as well. Yes, nine. You forgot Rudolph, didn’t you? Anyway, my wife was and is a practical woman, and I knew I was going to be in trouble when she found out about my exorbitant expenditure. But what was done was done, and a man’s just got to stand tall and be a man. So when I got home, I did the right thing.

Wife: Wow. That’s a great tree. How much did it cost?

Me: $5.

Yes, I lied like a dog. I lied like a rug. I lied like a bad kid sitting in Santa’s lap. And of course, she knew it wasn’t a $5 tree. Five-dollar trees aren’t twelve-foot-tall, perfectly shaped, fragrant, Scotch pine works of art. But she let me get away with my deception, perhaps because it was Christmas, after all. Where I come from, that’s called permission, and a tradition was born.

The years passed and we had a passel of children. First one, then two, and finally all of them began accompanying me on my annual tree-buying excursion.And first one, then two, and finally all of them saw me pay ever-higher prices for our yearly tree before going home to swear on a stack of fruitcakes that we had spent only $5.And then finally, each

stepped up to bear the torch and repeat the familiar and comforting words.

Wife: Wow. That’s a great tree. How much did it cost?

Designated Child: $5.

It makes a father proud.

Mandy Haynes, Editor-in-Chief, Designer, Publisher, & Founder

Mandy Haynes is the author of two short story collections, Walking the Wrong Way Home, Sharp as a Serpent's Tooth Eva and Other Stories, and a novella, Oliver. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies and literary journals. She is the editor and designer of Encounters with Nature, a collaboration ofAmelia Island Writers andArtists, The WELLREAD's Best of 2023 anthologies, and also the co-editor of The Best of the Shortest: A Southern Writers Reading Reunion.

Raymond L.Atkins, Contributing Editor (OFF THE PAGE)

Raymond L. Atkins resides in Rome, Georgia, on the banks of the Etowah River in an old house with a patient wife and a lazy cat. His hobbies include people-watching, reading, and watching movies that have no hope of ever achieving credibility. His first novel, The Front Porch Prophet, was published in 2008 and was awarded the Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel. Camp Redemption, was awarded the Ferrol Sams Award for Fiction and the 2014 Georgia Author of the Year Award for Fiction. Sweetwater Blues was a Townsend Prize nominee, the 2015 GeorgiaAuthor of the Year runner-up for fiction, and the 2016 selection for One Book, Many Voices. South of the Etowah, his first creative non-fiction book, was released in 2016. It was nominated for a Push-cart Prize and was the 2016 GeorgiaAuthor of theYearAward runner-up for essay. In 2017, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Georgia Writers Association.

Robert Gwaltney, Contributing Editor (INSIDE VOICES)

Robert Gwaltney, award winning author of southern fiction, is a graduate of Florida State University. He resides inAtlanta Georgia with his partner, where he is an active member of theAtlanta literary community. Robert’s work has appeared in such publications as The Signal Mountain Review and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. His debut novel, The Cicada Tree, won the SomersetAward for literary fiction. In 2023, Gwaltney was named Georgia Author of the Year for first novel.

Meet the staff

Ann Hite, Contributing Editor (MOUNTAIN MAGIC)

In September of 2011 Gallery, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, publishedAnn Hite’s first novel, Ghost on Black Mountain. In 2012 this novel was shortlisted for the Townsend Prize, Georgia’s oldest literary award. In the same year, Ghost on Black Mountain won Hite GeorgiaAuthor of the Year. She went on to publish four more novels, a novella, memoir, and most recently Haints On Black Mountain: A Haunted Short Story Collection from Mercer University Press. In December 2022, Haints On Black Mountain was one of ten finalist for the Townsend Prize. The collection was a Bronze Winner in Foreword IndieAward 2023 and GeorgiaAuthor of the Year Second Place Winner for Short Stories 2023.Ann received a scholarship to theAppalachian Witers Workshop Hindman Settlement in the summer of 2020 and was invited back in 2021. Her passion for history influences all her work.

Dean James, Contributing Editor (THE WRITER’S EYE)

Dean James is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of the Cat in the Stacks and Southern Ladies mystery series. A seventh generation Mississippian, he lives and writes in the Jackson, Mississippi area with four cats and more books than he can ever count. He keeps his younger sister Carolyn Haines locked in the attic. Despite his best effort she escapes constantly and wreaks havoc on the countryside.

Jeffrey Dale Lofton, Contributing Editor (INSIDE VOICES)

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia. His years telling the stories of playwrights and scriptwriters as a stage and screen actor taught him the pull of a powerful story arc. Today, he is SeniorAdvisor at the Library of Congress, surrounded by books and people who love them. Red Clay Suzie is his debut novel, a fictionalized memoir written through his lens—gay and living with a disability— in a conservative family in the Deep South. It was longlisted for the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and awarded the Seven Hills Literary Prize for Fiction, among other distinctions.

Claire Hamner Matturro , Contributing Editor (CLAIRE CONSIDERS)

Claire Hamner Matturro is a former attorney, former university writing instructor, avid reader, and the author of seven novels, including four published by HarperCollins. Her poetry appears in various journals including Slant and Lascaux Review. She is an associate editor ofThe Southern LiteraryReview and lives happily in Florida with her cross-eyed rescued black cat and her husband.

Dawn Major, Contributing Editor (TRIPLIT with D Major)

Dawn Major is an associate editor at Southern Literary Review and a graduate of the Etowah Valley Creative Writing MFAProgram. In 2019, she was awarded the Dr. Robert Driscoll Award as well as Reinhardt University’s Faculty Choice Award, both in Excellence in Writing. In 2018, she was a recipient of the James Dickey Review Literary Editor Fellowship. Major is a member of the William GayArchive and has helps edit and publish the late author’s works. She also advocates for southern authors on her blog SouthernRead. She lives in Atlanta, GA with her family. The Bystanders, Major’s debut novel, just won finalist for 2024 GeorgiaAuthor of the Year for Best First Novel.

Annie McDonnell, Contributing Editor (ANNIEASKS)

Founder of The Write Review Literary Community, Podcaster, Book Reviewer, Author Consultant and Matchmaker. She also teaches workshops on top of all of this! Annie has been introducing us to books and authors since 2006, when she began reviewing books for Elle Magazine. Proud Stiff Person Syndrome Warrior, and several other illnesses.

This issue is dedicated to you, Moe. Keep smiling and find that hole in the fence little buddy! When we see you again, we’ll all run wild together.

Baby Moe, the day I adopted him and his brother, Curly

Moe’s impression of Tom Waits…

“Pretty Boy” Moe

June 2009 - November 2024