No Way Except Through. Farren Stanley I thought I’d start with a bruise count: 26. Also, 3 sunburns, 4 blisters, dozens of scratches, a seriously scraped knee, a spider bite and burstitis. It took a few days after the storm for us all to comprehend the damage. Without power, water, cable, or cell reception we were all living in a closed world. To speak with a friend I had to walk over to her house. But of course we all wound up together, because we live and die by each other here. It’s a trait not only of our wily band, mostly MFA students, but of the people who live here. Tuscaloosa is all the bad things you’ve heard—crushing poverty and buffoon politicians and gas station wine and soul-saturating heat and ruthless insects—but it also breeds a proud, stubborn, graceful kind of person. (Will this be alright, a journal-style account? Reportage? [There is no way to get at this except through the I.]
I’ll just have to do.)
We all wound up together and we could not really understand what was happening and we had no access to information and nothing to do so we walked, restlessly, all of us, down to the charnel ground that used to be a city we slept and studied and fucked and drank and wept and paced and wrote and played in. We joined the rest of our city’s proud graceful residents in a silent march through the twisted piles of rubble,
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