WELL READ Magazine April 2024

TheyAll Rest in the Boneyard Now

and Other Poems

Raymond L.Atkins

“I enjoyed reading They All Rest in the Boneyard Now, among other reasons, because I got to spend time with Raymond Atkins’ delightful poetic imagination and his ability to assume voices. In poetry, voice or the little poem-plays present the problem of how to make poetry sound colloquial or as if what’s said sounds natural coming from that character. In this case, the narrator’s voice has the calm, poignant tone of someone contemplating the most somber subject. Eternity here is doom, an unbearable prison sentence, but the overriding tristesse reminds me of Emily’s speech near the end of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town in which she regrets not looking life in the face when she was alive, unlike in “Infant Archer” here with “his only regret…he would miss your morning smile.”

Atkins also shows great mastery of the language devices— interesting diction and vivid figures of speech, like the symbolism of “the empty tract right next to you” in the cemetery, a succinct image for the transience of things, as well as the irony in “everlasting nap,” Ellen “live” in the mist, the paradox of “memory / of nothing at all,” “a small slice of eternity” in the poem “Dr. Battey,” and “Necropolis” with its “together, always alone.” Metaphors and similes strike gold sparks in the gloomy elegiac twilight, like the emotionally powerful “dicey rock-strewn trails of eternity,” “weathered / like a plank of barnwood” in the poem “Committee,” the eerie mood of “wolf of the steppes…at night” in “Hesse,” the isolation and sadness of the soldier “who missed the last boat home,” in “Mary Knox” the metaphor of the “stem snapped / and you withered” accompanied by the simple, strange carving on the stone, and many others like “sighed past / like an evening breeze.” The imagery is heartfelt like “a scratch between the ears” in “Prunes,” reminding me of how much my dog enjoys a good back rub. I can easily relate to the poem with Brownie with his “back leg chugging…like a runaway locomotive.”

What I call Atkins’ “list poems” work well, too: the pastiche of lyrics in “Elvis,” the poem “Parts about Parenthood” with its touching “just to check for breath and pulse,” the Dante poem, the poems “What We Found” and “Snippets.” “Closing Out” reminded me of an in-house funeral I attended very young, after which an uncle’s kids were parceled out to various relatives.

Thanks, Raymond, for allowing me to spend some warm, earnest time with you.” - KenAnderson, author of The Intense Lover and Sea Change: An Example of the Pleasure Principle

From the author:

This collection is a departure for me. Those of you familiar with my work know that I am primarily a novelist and sometime essayist, but the truth is that I have always been a secret poet. My mentor at an early stage of my literary development was one of my English professors. He was a poet as well as an educator, thus it was not surprising that he encouraged me to follow the path of verse. My first sojourn into creative writing came during my undergraduate years in the late seventies and early eighties, and the initial medium I chose was poetry, although I later gave the genre up in favor of the novel. I found, as Robert Penn Warren once did, that “poems eat novels.”

You will note that many of the pieces in this volume are inspired by tombstones. I have long had the habit of visiting cemeteries, especially old ones, looking for inspiration and for great character names, and sometimes just for the sense of calm that such places evoke. Over time I have amassed quite a collection of tombstone pictures, and some of the more interesting of these have resulted in poems and in drawings by the excellent Evelyn Mayton. Some are about famous people, and some are about animals, and some are about unknown departed, and some are about just regular folks.

I hope you enjoy this collection as much as Evelyn and I enjoyed bringing it to you.

Available Now!

Dawn Major Digs Deep With Raymond L. Atkins

Award-winningAmerican author, RaymondAtkins, hardly needs an introduction. But for the sake of propriety and for readers just now coming into the fold called WELL READ Magazine, he’s written: Set List, Sorrow Wood, Sweetwater Blues, Front Porch Prophet, South of the Etowah, and Camp Redemption) six novels and an essay collection that range from Southern fiction to Speculative to Mystery and all with anAtkinsian satirical flair.

Fans of WELL READ know him for his column, “OFF THE PAGE,” whereAtkins humorously comments on the idiosyncrasies of theAmerican South, the rollercoaster world called writing, his Republican cat, Jake, and the deck that he started building during the pandemic I’ve aptly named the second Tower of Babel.

What some may not know is that after publishing Set List, Ray expressed to me that he was finito, finished! Done with the BS. Let me say to you that this was right after I graduated with my MFAdegree in Creative Writing where Ray was my instructor and mentor. He’d spent nearly two years mentoring me through my novel, The Bystanders, and God bless him another novel I threw into the mix for shits and giggles, but mostly because I was doubting my work on The Bystanders.Anyway, I could hardly believe the words coming out of his mouth. This was Ray. Not him! Not Ray! Mind you, I was still on

cloud nine. Since then, I’ve cursed the gods numerous times for the affliction that causes this intense desire to write, and Ray has listened to my potty-mouthed rants. He has literally talked me off the ledge.

Let me backtrack a bit. I met Mandy Haynes, author, editor, and creator of WELL READ who asked me to consider taking over “OFF THE PAGE” which River Jordan had been writing at the time. I said, “yes,” and then got nervous about the commitment, and started talking about how Ray was making this outlandish claim that he was done with writing. We concluded Ray and I would split the column, and then I had to back out because I had too much on my plate. That’s the trickery that got Ray back to where he belongs—writing. Plus, he kept writing these prolific FB posts which suggested he wasn’t ready to put a lid on it. So, a bit of witchcraft there and we’re all good.

This brings me to something that may surprise some folks. Ray had been tinkering on a collection of poetry inspired by cemeteries. Reflecting on these comments, perhaps this was a cry for help. He was done with writing and hanging out in graveyards! Whoa, dude.

Nah, he’s just a cemetery guy who needed a new direction with his craft and that’s exactly what he did. He dug up the graveyard. He grieved and partied with the dead and he wrote a damn fine collection called They All

Rest in the Boneyard Now and other Poems.And on top of that he collaborated with someone I count as a dear friend, Evelyn Mayton, who illustrated the interior images. Y’all are in for a treat!!

Now to the interview…

Ray, after authoring a zillion novels you are just now revealing to your fans/readers that poetry was your first love? What made you finally come out of the closet and why have you been hiding in it for so long?

Well, I will admit that this collection is a departure for me. Those of you familiar with my work know that I am primarily a novelist and sometime essayist, but the truth is that I have always been a secret poet. My mentor at an early stage of my literary development was one of my English professors, KennethAnderson. He was a poet as well as an educator, and he has just published a new collection of his own, The Goose Liver Anthology. Thus it was not surprising that he encouraged me to follow the path of verse. My first sojourn into creative writing came during my undergraduate years in the late seventies and early eighties, and the initial medium I chose was poetry, although I later gave the genre up in favor of the novel. I

found, as Robert Penn Warren once did, that “poems eat novels.”Also, and I can’t stress this enough, I was at that time perhaps the world’s worst poet. Lately, though, I have gotten better.

I also want to take a moment for a shout-out to my awesome illustrator, Evelyn Mayton. She took a stack of photos that were never meant for anyone but me—a couple of them actually have a thumb in them—and with her keen eye turned them into images that augment and enhance the poetry. She is a true artist.

Let’s talk about how badass the cover art is. Do you worry you’ve pissed off the Grim Reaper by beating him/her to the punchline? I mean ya went there! Please divulge how that cover came about.

The cover was designed by Mandy Haynes. It is based on the emoji she sends to me every month around the 25th or so when I haven’t gotten my column in yet. Okay I’m just kidding with that one. Mandy is a true Renaissance woman with many talents, and when she showed me what she had in mind for the cover, I knew she had designed the perfect one. She also formatted and edited the book. If any of our readers are ever in need of these types of services, I can’t recommend her enough.

You’ve obviously spent your fair time in cemeteries since most of the poems are inspired by those who once walked our Earth. Since waking the dead, have you been visited by any ghosts or spirits?Any odd experiences you’d like to relate to our WELLREAD readers?

I think I must be a bit doltish when it comes to paranormal occurrences, because in my life thus far I have never experienced one. But I do believe they exist! My house was built in 1890, and we have a ghost. I have never seen him, but each of my family members has at one time or another. He is a little boy who looks to be about ten or so. He wears circa 1900 clothing and spends most of his time standing by the front door, as if he is waiting for someone to let him out. Come to think of it, though, no one has seen him in a while. Perhaps he finally found his way home.

Since becoming a poet, how many jaunty scarves and berets do you now own?

Three and two respectively. Oh, and don’t forget my poet’s jacket. It has a nice inside pocket just perfect for my absinthe.

Here’s one mandatory question. Who are your go-to poets?

I like accessible, down-to-earth poetry. Sylvia Plath is a perennial favorite of mine, and she is one of the poets I insist that my students all read. Lady Lazarus is my favorite of her poems. Wallace Stevens was another great poet, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird may be the world’s most perfect poem. I also like Billy Collins (The Trouble With Poetry), Elizabeth Bishop (The Fish), EdgarAllan Poe (Annabel Lee).

I see you went with Republican Cat Press. How is Jake taking the fame?

Well, he loved his moment in the sun, and I confess that I haven’t yet broken the news to him that I decided at the last minute that Etowah River Press would be a more acceptable name for my imprint. Luckily he can’t read, so if you don’t tell him, he will never know.

And of course, you should now spill the beans on your next project.

Now I am back to writing my novel-in-progress, tentatively titled Pearl’s Century. It is the story of a

woman who was born on 1/1/1900 and passed away on 12/31/ 1999, and of all the happiness and sorrow she encountered between those two notable dates.

Thanks for playing along with this interview and for being my pal. On behalf of myself and WELLREAD, congratulations on your collection. We wish the very best for you!

Dawn Major is the author of The Bystanders and the AssociateEditor at Southern Literary Review. She received MFA in creative writing from the Etowah Valley Program. In 2019, she was awarded theDr. Robert Driscoll Award as well as Reinhardt University’s Faculty Choice Award, both in Excellence in Writing. In 2018, she awarded the James Dickey ReviewLiterary Editor Fellowship. Her publications may be found in: The Atlanta Journal Constitution, WELL READ Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, Southern Literary Review, Georgia Gothic Anthology, Springer Mountain Press, Elder Mountain: A Journal of Ozark Studies, Five Points, amongst many others. Major is a member of the William Gay Archive 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.

WHAT ARE YOU

YOU READING?

Long Gone & Lost: True Fictions and Other Lies by Bobby

Horecka

Finalist for 2021 Texas Institute of Letters’Sergio Troncoso Award for Best First Book of Fiction

Bobby Horecka writes short fiction laced with truth. He tells tales of a man who had the roughest of starts in life. Through the fireside bardic storytelling tradition, readers learn of the resilience of children and the power of love to redeem even the most damaged.As the young man grows, he discovers a talent for observing and recording stories, ultimately becoming a newsman with the bad luck and poor timing of entering a dying field. These partially true, tongue-in-cheek stories offer a first-hand look, at the demise of theAmerican newspaper, and at a slice of the unique Czeck community in and around Lavaca County, Texas. You might've just started out or reached the jumping off spot. Maybe you're the rainy-day saver who never left anyplace without charting a precise destination and itinerary first, or you're plumb astounded you got where you're at and couldn't tell me what happened last night much less what's in store six weeks from now. You might have a working man's calloused hands the calloused soul that only the mistreated know or the

calloused heart that comes with having yours shattered too many times. Everybody needs to catch an occasional break or they risk becoming Long Gone & Lost...

“Horecka’s Long Gone & Lost is a melange, a mix of writing including fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry by a longtime journalist who knows how to whip sentences into shape. Perfect for post-virus reading at inland beaches.” —A. Rooney is the author of The Autobiography of Francis N. Stein, Fall of the Rock Dove, and The Colorado Motet.

Bobby holds an MFAin creative writing and a BAin English. He's taught at Texas State University, Hardin Simmons University and, most recently, Victoria College, and as ofApril 1, he embarks on 38th year as a working journalist, having worked all facets of the news business, and collected writing, photography and design awards from press groups at the regional, state and national level since 1995. He currently serves as editor to five South Texas weekly newspapers, where he serves as lead page designer, writer, photographer, ad salesman, deliquent account collections, onsite carpenter, licensed electrician and occasional auto mechanic. His journalistic works have published worldwide and still regularly appear well beyond his own pages, and his more literary works–short fictions, poems, prose and photography–have appeared in several anthologized works and literary magazines, including Amarillo Bay, Bluestem Magazine, Scribe, and The Ocotillo Review.

WELL READ Magazine's Best of 2023 Volume One

edited by Mandy Haynes

In Volume One, you’ll find thirtyeight 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, and A Hard 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

WELL READ Magazine's Best of 2023 Volume Two

edited by Mandy Haynes

In Volume Two, you’ll find fortythree 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 is by artist, DeWitt Lobrano, who had several pieces published in November’s issue.

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

Haints on Black Mountain byAnn Hite

Ann Hite takes her readers back to Black Mountain with this haunted short story collection.An array of new characters on the mountain experience ghostly encounters. The collection took inspiration from her beloved readers, who provided writing prompts. Wrinkle in theAir features Black Mountain's Polly Murphy, a young Cherokee woman, who sees her future in the well's water. Readers encounter relatives of Polly Murphy as the stories move through time. The Root Cellar introduces Polly's great grandson, who tends to be a little too frugal with his money until a tornado and Polly's spirit pays the mountain a visit. In The Beginning, the Middle, and the End, readers meet Gifted Lark on an excessively frigid January day. This story moves back and forth between 1942 and 1986 telling Gifted and her grandmotherAnna's story. This telling introduces spirits that intervene in the spookiest of ways.

The Smuggler's Daughter

by Claire Matturro

Ray Slaverson, a world-weary Florida police detective, has his hands full with the murders of two attorneys and a third suspicious death, all within twenty-four hours. Ray doesn’t believe in coincidences, but he can’t find a single link between the dead men, and he and his partner soon smash into an investigative stonewall.

Kate Garcia, Ray’s fiancée, knows more than she should. She helped one of the dead attorneys, just hours before he took a bullet to the head, study an old newspaper in the library where she works. Kate might be the only person still alive who knows what he was digging up—except for his killer.

When Kate starts trying to discover what’s behind the murders, she turns up disturbing links between the three dead men that track back to her family’s troubled past. But she has plenty of reasons to keep her mouth shut. Her discovery unleashes a cat-and-mouse game that threatens to sink her and those she loves in a high tide of danger.

THE CICADATREE by

Robert Gwaltney

WHENAN ELEVEN-YEAROLD, WHISKY DRINKING, PIANO PRODIGY ENCOUNTERSAWEALTHY FAMILY POSSESSING SUPERNATURAL BEAUTY, HER ENSUING OBSESSION UNLEASHES FAMILY SECRETSANDA CATACLYSMIC PLAGUE OF CICADAS.

The summer of 1956, a brood of cicadas descends upon Providence, Georgia, a natural event with supernatural repercussions, unhinging the life ofAnaleise Newell, an eleven-year-old piano prodigy.Amidst this emergence, dark obsessions are stirred, uncanny gifts provoked, and secrets unearthed.

"In his novel, Gwaltney assembles some classic ingredients of the Southern gothic tradition, with Analeise’s world being haunted by death, madness, the past, and the supernatural...the eerie tone is well orchestrated for those who appreciate a sinister frisson."–Kirkus Reviews

Red

Clay

Suzie by Jeffrey Dale Lofton

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction 2023 First Novel Prize

Anovel inspired by true events

The coming-of-age story of Philbet, a gay, physicallymisshapen boy in rural Georgia, who battles bullying, ignorance, and disdain as he makes his way in life as an outsider—before finding acceptance in unlikely places.

Fueled by tomato sandwiches and green milkshakes, and obsessed with cars, Philbet struggles with life and love as a gay boy in rural Georgia. He’s happiest when helping Grandaddy dig potatoes from the vegetable garden that connects their houses. But Philbet’s world is shattered and his resilience shaken by events that crush his innocence and sense of security; expose his misshapen chest skillfully hidden behind shirts Mama makes at home; and convince him that he’s not fit to be loved by Knox, the older boy he idolizes to distraction. Over time, Philbet finds refuge in unexpected places and inner strength in unexpected ways, leading to a resolution in the form of a letter from beyond the grave.

“A vibrant collection that is as captivating and diverse as northern Florida’s precious wildlife. Showcasing the region’s finest writers, poets and artists, Encounters with Nature is a celebration of the wonder, inspiration and enduring bonds we enjoy when we pay attention to the flora and fauna around us. A stunning, memorable, and deeply needed anthology.” — Deb Rogers, author of The Florida Woman

Encounters With Nature - a collection of prose, poetry, and art by members ofAmelia Island Writers andArtists edited by Mandy Haynes Coming Soon!

Sea turtles, pelicans, roseate spoonbills, and humpback whales! Spanish moss hanging from aged live oak trees! Sand dollars and fossil shark teeth on the beach! OnAmelia Island, we have all this and more.

I am excited to write this foreword for a book that showcases the enthusiasm of both newcomers and longtime residents for the wildlife that share the island with us. Within these pages writers and artists share their experiences, interesting facts, and thoughts about the creatures they encounter, often with joy, sometimes with trepidation, onAmelia Island.

People here enjoy, first and foremost, the happenings at the beach. Whether it is crabs scuttling across the sand, pelicans diving into the waves, giant sea turtles leaving tracks on the beach, or wild horses roaming freely just across the channel on Cumberland Island, we all find something unique to admire and ponder. Each has been cleverly written about and beautifully illustrated.

One writer explores the magical way two creatures inhabit two totally different bodies in their lifetimes.Another tells the

amusing story of a downtown rooster that crowed on “island time” at ten a.m. Then there’s the subliminal excitement of swimming in the ocean where sharks happily exist. Our writers and local artists have documented all this and more, in their own words, in their own way.

Just performing basic activities here brings our wildlife to light for these writers. One writer reports on the travails of gardening with a mockingbird intent on dive-bombing her.And just pity the real estate promoter trying to explain the presence of alligators around a prestigious golf course.

Pets often show us sides of nature that we might have missed. One writer’s dog developed a fixation on a box turtle that occasionally fed on scraps in the compost pile.Another dog with a hatred for vultures is always on the alert to protect its owner from these hazards.

In one story, we’ll find a group of creatures that live in a deserted house and try to discourage potential rehabbers from coming there. In other stories you will discover a wide variety of birds: red shouldered hawks, eagles, woodstorks, and cormorants.

Many of us develop a fondness for individual animals that we encounter often and some of us give them names. I named a black racer in my backyard, Sylvester. Within these pages you will meet Cleo the box turtle, Otto the gopher tortoise, Charlie the great blue heron, Edith the egret, Rosy the spoonbill, Hannah the pelican, and Lawrence the green anole among others.

The joy of watching wildlife is contained within these pages. And sometimes, the spiritual side of nature watching comes into play. In one story a World War II vet’s encounter with a dead humpback whale brings him back to his time at sea. One writer’s spirit animal, a hawk, presides over her major life decisions. I

feel this bond too, whenever I see river otters, my own spirit guides through the journey of life.

Whether written in first person, fictional form, nonfictional essays or poems and haikus, there’s a lot to be learned within these pages. You will leave this book with a deeper knowledge about the history of horses on Cumberland Island, the life of sea turtles, and how wildlife integrates into our lives on the island. But we hope you find even more to take home from this book too.As you can tell from these stories, this is a place worth visiting and revisiting, worth savoring and saving. It is books like this one that help unite us in efforts to protect the natural splendor ofAmelia Island. In keeping with that theme, Keep Nassau Beautiful, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that seeks to preserve the beauty of our natural environment through their many excellent programs, will receive all proceeds from the book sales. Find out more about them at here.

Pat Foster-Turley, PhD Wildways columnist

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the beautiful art you’ll find inside the pages….

Artist Linda Hart Green

Artist Mary Libby

Artist Barb Wyle

The Kudzu Queen by Mimi Herman

"Funny, sad, and tender... Mimi Herman has written a novel that possesses a true and hard won

understanding of the South." —David Sedaris

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and North Carolina Center for the Book Selection for the Library of Congress "Great Reads from Great Places" reading list.

Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T. Cullowee, the Kudzu King, arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu—claiming that it will improve the soil, feed cattle at almost no cost, even cure headaches—Mattie is ready.

Mr. Cullowee is determined to sell the entire county on the future of kudzu, and organizes a kudzu festival, complete with a beauty pageant. Mattie is determined to be crowned Kudzu Queen and capture the attentions of the Kudzu King.As she learns more about Cullowee, however, she discovers that he, like the kudzu he promotes, has a dark and predatory side. When she finds she is not the only one

threatened, she devises a plan to bring him down.

Based on historical facts, The Kudzu Queen unravels a tangle of sexuality, power, race, and kudzu through the voice of an irresistibly delightful (and mostly honest) narrator.

Mimi is a Kennedy Center teaching artist and co-director of Writeaways writing workshops in France, Italy, Ireland and New Mexico. She currently serves as vice-chair of the Board of Directors for theAssociation of Writers & Writing Programs, and has taught in the Masters of Education programs at Lesley University, served as the 2017 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate and been an associate editor for TeachingArtist Journal. Since 1990, she has engaged over 25,000 students and teachers with her warm and intuitive teaching style.

Mimi holds a BAfrom the University of North Carolina and an MFAin Creative Writing from Warren Wilson. She is the author of The Kudzu Queen,AField Guide to Human Emotions, Logophilia and TheArt of Learning. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, The Hollins Critic, Main Street Rag, Prime Number Magazine and other journals. Mimi has performed her fiction and poetry at many venues including Why ThereAre Words in Sausalito, MemorialAuditorium in Raleigh and Symphony Space in New York City.

Awaken the Dawn (The Awaken Saga Book 1) by

Ellis K. Popa

Acryptic puzzle.Afamily secret.Adeadly betrayal. When her dad dies during a business trip to Romania, Kat Barrett blames herself for their failed relationship. She's racked with guilt, haunted by strange dreams about the crash that killed him, and she’d do anything to have him back.

Then a package arrives. It’s from her dad and contains a list of clues — one of his classic scavenger hunts.

Desperate for answers, she follows the clues to Bucharest and meets Maksim, a local with a dark past who offers to help. Kat doesn't trust him, but when she hits a dead end, she’s left with no other choice.

As they work together, decoding the clues and trying (unsuccessfully) not to fall for each other, the scavenger hunt reveals a deadly secret the dreams have been pointing to, something Maksim’s old crime ring has been hiding all along, and Kat has walked into their trap.

Can she beat them to the final clue — and solve it — before she suffers the same fate as her dad?

Reader reviews:

“Thrilling, intense, mysterious. A cryptic puzzle, a family secret, and a deadly betrayal. This was such a good story, I couldn't put it down. The characters are well developed and the descriptions are well done without taking away from the story.”

“I really enjoyed reading this story. There were some themes of dealing with ambiguous loss and grief that felt relatable and well executed. There is great foreshadowing and is very engaging. As soon as I got into the mystery/ puzzle I wanted to keep reading to find out what was happening. I appreciated the character development. I look forward to the next one!”

When Ellis isn’t moonlighting as a coffee aficionada, you might find her adventuring through Transylvania, doing photoshoots in Old Town Bucharest, or otherwise trying to talk her husband into moving to Eastern Europe. She’s a lover of history with a penchant for World War II and the Cold War, and her favorite places in the world are Wallachia in beautiful Romania and the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia.

(She's also an award-winning writer and budget-minded travel expert.)

{This Tale Is True} by Deborah

Adams

They don’t make goddesses like they used to….

For eons they ruled, but modern times have been rough on the ancient deities— their temples collapsed, their worshippers wandered off, and their purposes were made redundant by industry and technology.

And the Fates aren’t finished with them yet.

Mere days before the annual renewal of their immortality is to occur, the goddess of youth disappears. Without her and her restorative nectar, time and age will catch up with the goddesses. In the blink of an eye, they will shrivel and die, leaving the world to fend for itself….

"Deborah Adams offers goddesses in peril and a protagonist who dares all to save the immortals in a wild, wacky, and wonderful romp. Imaginative, creative, fabulous fiction." ~ Carolyn Hart, author of the otherworldly Bailey Ruth series

Meet Me in Mumbai:A Memoir

by Lovelace Cook

It’s never too late for love…or a rite of passage.

What can possibly go wrong when Jesse asks the universe to help her get out of the rut her life has become? The universe delivers a curveball when Jesse meets a quirky but charming Englishman who visits her sleepy southern town, and they fall in love. Trevor loves wild camping, while Jesse values her creature comforts.Ayear after they meet, Jesse accepts Trevor’s challenge to meet him in Mumbai. Knit yourself a seat belt for their misadventures, as the senior couple sets out like twenty-year-olds on a gap year, and Trevor’s shoestring travel style forces Jesse to adapt to unexpected challenges—not the least of which is Trevor being technologically and directionally clueless.

Set in India, Cornwall, U.K., and SoutheastAsia over three years, the couple navigates cultural differences and faces trials that test their relationship. Jesse confronts her inner demons while Trevor battles his own emotional ghosts. In the poignant culmination of their adventures, Jesse makes a life-altering decision with bittersweet consequences.Atestament to her profound transformation and self-discovery, Jesse’s adventures with Trevor transcend geographical boundaries, forever changing her worldview. Meet Me in Mumbai celebrates the power of love, the courage to embrace uncertainty, and the resilience of the human spirit.

MADVILLE PUBLISHING shines a spotlight on these essay collections by the incomparable essayist, Sam Pickering. (Some say… Sam is the guy Robin Williams’character, John Keating, was based on in the critically acclaimed film, Dead Poet’s Society).

The World Was My Garden, Too (2019)

He roams New England,Arkansas, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and the familiar and odd plots of mind and thought. He explores shorelines and climbs “hillish” mountains. He sits on porches and talks to passersby and their dogs. He meets strange and delightful people, most of whom are real. “Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in The Smithsonian decades ago, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.” “Now,” Pickering says, “I am old, and the friends who thought me witty have fallen off the perch. But that’s okay. What I write makes me smile and mutter, ‘What a guy.’” And what wonderful essays these are—pages that awaken the affections and make readers smile and embrace the beauty of this bruised world.

Terrible Sanity (2021)

Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering’s essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. “Life doesn’t have a neat beginning and a tidy end,” Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul’s Half

a Life, says. “Life is always going on.” In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life’s going on. Great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure.Adental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. “Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them,” she says, “but if they opened their mouths wide, I’d know them immediately.” For the record she also volunteers that in twenty years of toothscrubbing, she had only been bitten once.

The Gate in the Garden Wall (2022)

Last year Sam Pickering announced that he’d written his final word. “I intend to sit in a chair at the edge of the driveway and on sunny days doze through hours waking up occasionally to identify birds on the feeder. My hands and lap will be empty, and I won’t worry about a wind scattering papers across the yard.” Three days later Mike a college classmate wrote him. “Given all the books you have written, it makes me sad to hear that you have written your last book. Please remember what mighty things 80-year-olds can do. For instance, Goethe taught himself Greek when he was 80. Too bad he died at 81.”

“The Truth” (2023)

This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a professional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row. They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”

In addition to these four essay collections, Sam also co-edited MADVILLE’s essay anthology Being Home (2021)

Lights, Camera, Bones:ASarah Booth Delaney Mystery by Carolyn Haines

“The tough-asnails Mississippi belles reveal more than just a killer in their exciting quest for the truth.”

“Amovie company filming in Greenville, Mississippi, gets pushback from people with secrets to hide.

The movie is ostensibly about the 1927 flood that killed and displaced many but made fortunes for others. Though it’s billed as an action flick starring Marlon Brandon, scion of a wealthy and politically powerful family with deep roots in the area, some locals fear a hidden agenda. Private

investigator Sarah Booth Delaney and Tinkie Bellcase

Richmond, her partner in detection, also have deep roots in Greenville, and Coleman Peters, Sarah Booth’s life partner, is the sheriff in the adjoining county. So when a gaffer vanishes, the insurance company hires the women to find him before the film goes down the drain. Local loudmouth Lamar Bilbo, who’s already been complaining that the film will make Mississippi residents look bad, is joined by bookshop owner Mary Dayle McCormick in an attempt to use any means possible to shut down the production. When Marlon disappears, his grandfather, Senator Brandon Brandon, ask the sleuths to find him even though his relationship with Marlon has never been loving.Awater search discloses the gaffer’s severed foot, and everyone fears the worst. The foot was severed by one of the sharks known for occasionally swimming up the Mississippi; having a shark around makes the search for Brandon much more dangerous. Sarah Booth and Tinkie search everywhere they think Marlon or his body could be hidden and suspect everyone involved in the film. Who has a secret so powerful that they’re willing to kill for it?

The tough-as-nails Mississippi belles reveal more than just a killer in their exciting quest for the truth.” - Kirkus Review

Available May 21, 2024 Pre-order today!

The Best of the Shortest: ASouthern Writers

Reading Reunion by editor Suzanne Hudson, Joe Formichella, Mandy

Haynes

Short essays and fiction from the following authors:

Marlin Barton + Rick Bragg +

Sonny Brewer + Doug Crandell + Pia Z. Ehrhardt + David Wright Faladé + BethAnn

Fennelly + Joe Formichella + Patricia Foster + Tom Franklin + Robert Gatewood + Jason Headley + Jim Gilbert + Frank Turner Hollon + Suzanne Hudson + Joshilyn Jackson + BretAnthony 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 Cover photo: Maude Schuyler Clay

“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 large-hearted 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

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 lives in Semmes, Alabama with her three dogs, one turtle, and helps take care of farm chores at Good Fortune Farm Refuge. She is a contributing writer for Amelia Islander Magazine, Amelia Weddings, 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 also the editor of the anthology, Work in Progress, and 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.

When you purchase an “ad” for $50, you get a full page slot in WELL READ’s What Are You Reading? section with a live link to your website and a live purchase link of your choice.

Readers asked for full page, easy to read, “book recommendations” in place of traditional looking advertisements and I was happy to oblige.

As a bonus, there are personalized individual graphics made of your book image and author photo (if you choose to purchase a two page spread or more) with your book description and/or blurbs, bio, etc., shared to eight additional FB bookish accounts and to WELL READ Magazine’s Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook sites –(that’s 39K potential views of your book when you combine all the sites).

WELL READ is distributed through ISSUU (the world’s largest digital publishing and discovery platform available). WELL READ Magazine receives an average of 8,000 views each month from readers all over the world. Past issues are available and easily discovered on Issuu’s site. *All PAST issues, including the article and visual stories, remain active and are linked to the current issue. You can continue to share them for as long as you like.

There is strength in numbers. Your “ad” will be included with the featured authors, great interviews, submissions, and the other fantastic books readers look for to add to their reading lists.

INSIDE VOICES

“Read widely and often! And take risks in your reading”

Robert Gwaltney and Jeffrey Dale Lofton

introduce Clay Smith, the Literary Director at the Library of Congress.

Clay Smith is the literary director at the Library of Congress. In that role, he curates the lineup of the National Book Festival and oversees the Library’s ambassadorships, which include the United States Poet Laureate and the NationalAmbassador for Young People’s Literature. Previously, he was the editor-in-chief of Kirkus Reviews and the literary director of the SanAntonio Book Festival and the Texas Book Festival and worked for Sundance Film Festival.

Jeffrey: You are the Literary Director at the Library of Congress, one of the more impressive titles I’ve heard. It feels like a bend-at-the-waist bow should be required of everyone when you enter a room. What does the Library’s Literary Director do?

Clay: No bowing accepted! Essentially, me and my department produce a lot of book events, large and small, during the Library’s Live! at the Library series on Thursday nights; we think about what kinds of books our National Book Festival audience wants to hear about and which of that year’s writers they want to engage with and we bring those writers to the festival; and once the Librarian of Congress chooses the writers and poets who will become ambassadors for the Library, we are the office that works with those ambassadors on projects that bring the delights of reading to theAmerican public.

Robert: We’d love to hear the story of your career, how you began, how you found yourself at the Library of

Congress?

Clay: During my last semester at the University of Texas atAustin, I asked the Austin Chronicle for a proofreading internship and since I don’t think they’d ever had someone ask to proofread for them for free, they hired me just to see if I was really as weird as they assumed I’d have to be. I eventually became a senior editor there, the books section editor, and then after a few years, I headed to NYU to study in their graduate Cultural Reporting and Criticism program.

My career has been along a spectrum in the book world, really: partly book journalism and book criticism but also the performance of books—book events and big festival productions. That’s been a real pleasure because I use different aptitudes according to what the job demands. After grad school, I returned toAustin to be the literary director at the Texas Book Festival and then worked at Kirkus Reviews, then the SanAntonio Book Festival. I found out about the Library of Congress position from a friend of a friend and applied in the summer of 2021—all interviews for the job over Zoom. I picked up sticks and moved from SanAntonio to Washington in early 2022 and love Washington and am very proud to work at the Library.

Jeffrey: The National Book Festival is arguably the most prestigious such celebration in this country. What does

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Clay Smith Smith

planning such an event entail, well, beside sleepless nights and one of the most envied virtual Rolodexes in the literary world?

Clay: Great question—when I meet someone new and they ask what I do and I tell them my title, they often look a little confused. Essentially, me and my department review publishers’catalogs, which are the lists of books they’re going to publish in upcoming seasons, and we look for trends. We read a lot of book reviews, we talk to publicists about which writers they’re touring, and we get to invite writers we really admire to the festival. The most mysterious part of the job involves looking at all the coverage of this year’s books and what’s selling well and intuiting what’s on the minds of the festival’s audience and as a result, which writers they’d want to hear from the most. Yet we also undercut that mystery by asking our audience who they want us to invite.

Robert: Tell our listeners and viewers about the Library of Congress literacy programs and how they figure into the mission of the Library, one, and two, how they intersect with the National Book Festival.

Clay: One way we achieve that mission is in the project created by Meg Medina, who is the current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Soon, we’re going to start releasing short videos where Meg is “book talking” with some of her favorite writers. Cuentame: Let’s Talk Books is the title of her project and it’s a

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Clay Smith

wonderful idea: that talking about books shouldn’t be reserved for “book reports” in school. Friends need to talk about their favorite books with one another, families should talk about books at home, educators should talk to kids about books in an informal way in addition to a more formal way. We’re excited to launch those videos. The Library of Congress is a place for everyone to learn more about the world and to find out more about ourselves—this series does a great job of articulating that mission. There is vital work my colleagues in the Informal Learning Office and the Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives Office are doing but my department works with Meg and our other ambassadors, so that project comes immediately to mind.

Jeffrey: If there are listeners today who want to start a book festival in their community, what is the single most important advice—perhaps it’s a word of caution—you would give them over an afternoon cup of tea, bone china of course?

Clay: I’d tell them that a free, open book festival is really an investment in the culture of books that the entire city needs to make. It’s wonderful if there is a group of dynamic people who want to start a book festival, but they need to get the city’s government on board and ensure that all the other literary or literacy nonprofits in the city are actively involved. If you can do that right at the start, then you have a better chance of success.

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Clay Smith Smith

Robert: Clay, what early on ignited your love of reading? And is there a type of book, a genre, you are drawn to?

Clay: Honestly, it wasn’t really until high school that I became a huge reader. We were assigned One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and it wasn’t until that reading that novel that I felt what an extraordinary literary imagination can really do. I’m a real generalist in my reading. I tend to stick to a lot of literary fiction and I read a lot of LGBQ+ fiction but one of the virtues of my work is that because we feature all different kinds of writers at the festival, I get to read widely! Being a generalist is under-appreciated in our world.

Jeffrey: Is there anything you can tell us about the 2024 book festival, which I believe is inAugust this year? Just a wee bit of inside scoop?

Clay: PutAugust 24 on your calendars. I am a black box where information is deposited but information doesn’t ever emerge from said black box (until early June, when we will release this year’s lineup)!

Robert:Any last words from the Literary Director of the Library of Congress?

Clay: Read widely and often!And take risks in your reading.

Robert Gwaltney & Jeffrey Dale Lofton introduce Clay Smith Smith

“Annie there is much about this old world that you don’t know, you can’t know, but if you quit talking and just watch, you might learn a thing or two.”

MOUNTAIN MAGIC with ANN HITE

RedbirdsAre Messengers

I was raised by anAppalachian Granny Woman in the worst of disguises, a single woman in the city. Granny left Appalachia when my mama was six to find work during the Depression. She would never go back to live there, but she raised me to know the magic of the mountains, a place in my blood, my roots. She took me to visit my great aunts every other weekend. I was exposed to all the beliefs, storytelling, and language. Often they spoke of the cardinals being sent by those who had died. They talked about haints and conjures.

I will be honest and say I often had to be pulled kicking and screaming into believing in some of the lore from Appalachia. Believing someone dead could visit me as a cardinal wasn’t something I could wrap my head around. I mean they are birds. We are humans even in spirit. I can hear my granny saying, “Annie there is much about this old world that you don’t know, you can’t know, but if you quit talking and just watch, you might learn a thing or two.” Granny was the only person on this planet who could get away with calling me,Annie.

Much of the time, I get in my own way, especially when it comes to the ways of the mountains. The old story is that a “redbird” carries a message from the dead to a love one: mother, father, sister, brother, or dear friend. The redbird is seen as a go-between from the after world. It’s a sure sign us humans are being watched over. Nice thought.

On January 3 of this year, I received news that one of my writing students—we will call her, Sparrow—was nearing the end of her health battles. Her time here on earth was limited. When Sparrow and I stopped meeting in 2023, we were almost finished going over her second draft of her novel based on her life experiences. We had met every week in person and then on Zoom when the pandemic hit for over three years to discuss notes I had made on her amazing story. This book was important for women, and I voiced this to her. Sparrow explained a few years before we began to work together, she died on the operating table and an angel came to her, saying she wasn’t finished in the world, that she had to write her story for others to read.

The news that came to me on January 3 wasn’t surprising, but I was devastated because I knew she had grown too ill to continue work on the book. My gut twisted that she would die before this work was finished. There was no fairness in the situation.

Sparrow and I had developed a friendship while we

worked on her project, spending an extra hour on Zoom talking books and writing. By this point she was housebound in another state. We were similar in our upbringing. Both of us being fromAppalachia with deep family roots. I always saw Sparrow as more of a mountain girl than me because she was born and raised in Kentucky. We were different in our politics and beliefs. Had I met her outside our arrangement, I doubt I would have been friends with her. Yet with these strong differences, we remained friends, something rare these days. Sparrow taught me I could love someone even when we saw important issues from opposite ends.

Less than a week before Sparrow died, her son contacted me saying her time was near and she needed to discuss her book with me. My heart turned inside out that I would lose this friend.Apart of me understood what she wanted to discuss. That night she took a downturn and could no longer have a coherent discussion about the book. I sent her son a message saying I knew what she wanted and even though I wasn’t sure I was the right person, I would agree to her last wish. I also asked him to tell her I loved her. Later that day I would find out that Sparrow wanted me to finish her book. Her son gave me the notes he had taken while talking to her.

How does one say no to the last request from a fellow writer and friend? Even though I felt inadequate, I

promised I would work on her book and help it find its way to publication. Sparrow died the next day. The morning I came to peace with this decision, a redbird came to sit on the branch hanging in front of my living room window. The redbird watched me for the longest as I moved around the room. If only Granny could have been there to see me acknowledge maybe there was something to this messenger thing from the spirit world. Sparrow was letting me know I had her approval, her vote of confidence.

As a footnote:

The redbird has come to sit on the branch beside my deck where I am writing this column.

Folks, whether you believe in it or not, there is mountain magic.

ARemarkable Day Mark Braught

Not uncommon, people believe their expectations will far exceed the slow and tedious unfolding of odd bits and pieces of the life they will actually lead. My experience has been these seemingly benign, unrelated loose threads are the true treasures in their lives that are the real gems. This is the stuff that stories worth telling are made of, and last Monday, this story began.

Spring has the sort of air you breathe in making you feel fresh again, clean and confident. Leaves fluttered to the scent of pine and gardenia. There was a warbling chatter of birds completing this picture. It was going to be a remarkable day, particularly for Blake Stephens.

Nearing the end of his morning regiment, he slid on a pair of black Levis. Remnants of a wardrobe that somehow escaped the “purge” every husband experiences upon marriage. Paint splattered with wear from various home projects, these were reluctantly tolerable now that they were regulated to “work clothes” and out of the public-at-large display.

“Too 80’s, and they just fit you funny,”she would say, he

mused to himself.

They made him feel seasoned, rugged, and ready for whatever a household task may present, like a suit of armor for battle.Ahappy compromise for all concerned. This armor was completed with socks, shoes, a tee shirt, and a denim shirt with the tails out and the sleeves rolled up. Striding out of the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, he glanced to his left at the single row of eyelevel small, square, framed photos of friends, family, and his wedding that hung on the wall. It was the smiles on their faces that he always wanted to see. Nearing the last image with an almost imperceptible hesitation was a black–and–white close-up of his bride during their first dance. Reminiscing those moments was comforting.

Back on stride, he rounded the corner into the kitchen to choose a coffee cup that would be appropriate for the day . . . “ Failure is not an Option.” was absolutely appropriate. That first cup of hot coffee signaled the countdown to square-off with the day. For so many reasons, this rite of spring brought particular joy. He always did this on a weekday, leaving his weekends available for friends, family, and occasional fun.Areward of sorts he relished, reserved for those who were masters of their time, pursuing fame and fortune in the ranks of the selfemployed. It was also a privilege of home ownership with the opportunity to make a statement to his neighbors and

community that he cared and belonged amongst them. In a very small, very normal community, he could offer himself briefly as a responsible citizen, normal in a nominal way.

“Got gas?”

“Yep.”

“Work gloves?”

On the counter over there.

“Phone?”

Nope, I don’t need it. I’ll check it on breaks.

“Oh! Don’t forget the Nano and earbuds,” a throw-back technology he defiantly and proudly refused to surrender to techno-progress.

With that, he gulped down the last bit of coffee, placed it in the sink, grabbed his work gloves, and headed out the back door, down the pink marble walk near the vegetable garden to face the garage where the weapons of choice for the task of the day resided. There was no option for failure; he had it on good authority.

He raised the garage door, and there it was, the biggest power tool in his manly toy chest parked before him. With a confidence rooted in the wild west, he mounted his trusty steed. Settling into the seat of his 42” Craftsman, he placed it in neutral, made sure the mower was not engaged, pushed in the clutch, and turned the key! Oh, the joy of a machine that beckons when commanded. Placing the gear in reverse, he slowly rolled out of the garage into

the daylight, onto the concrete pad, and cut the engine off to begin going through a final checklist.

After his dismount, he began his routine of checking the gas and oil, finishing up with making sure the tires had the proper pressure.All that remained was an inspection of the roughly two acres of his three-acre lot to remove the limbs that seemed to constantly fall victim to gravity from the number of large oaks on the property. The walk was good exercise, and the view wasn’t hard to look at. His property was on the corner and surrounded on two sides by roughly two hundred and some acres of deer-infested woodlands owned by a gentleman in Tennessee. That withstanding, this was his least favorite part of this process. The mowing. Done properly however, the fun part could be fully enjoyed without interruption and, heaven forbid, an incident resulting in damage to his pride-n-joy.

Everything was shaping up very well.All that remained was plugging in his buds and dialing up his tunes. He even had a collection of tunes titled “Mowing” that would run a playlist for the duration.As he hit “play,” he slipped the device into his shirt pocket, settled into the seat, and turned the key to start her up.Atune by the Chieftains from the Fargo album began as the machine was brought about and the mower was engaged. He could feel the motor surge as the blades spun to begin cutting.

The plan was to start the laps at the back of the property

at the tree line so the cuttings were always blown “inside” and continue working until everything was thoroughly mulched and mowed. Cruising along the back of the property, he turned, placing his left hand on the back of the seat to stabilize himself as he checked his work.

Pleased all was going well, he returned his gaze and torso forward, placing both hands on the wheel again as the first turn had to be navigated to meet the next straight away.

As the mower straightened out, he began to truly relax. Like one of those sensory-enhanced films, the sky, a cerulean blue, the breeze so sweet, so clean, only the music could be heard playing over this scene. Unfortunately, like an old movie projector, that celluloid SNAPPED, everything stopped. He lunged forward. There was a blinding light as if he were face-to-face with the lights at a ballpark, but he couldn’t close his eyes, and just as quickly, a deafly silent, cold, black void.

Blake Stephens was dead, face down, well before his arrival on the ground next to his mower.

Originally from Iowa, Mark Braught studied graphic design at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design, and graduated with a BFA from Indiana State University. The first ten years of his career were spent on the other side of the table as an art director and creative director. In 1984, he struck out on his own and created Mark Braught Studios to focus primarily on graphic design and illustration. He has created numerous award-winning visual solutions for various corporations, design firms, advertising agencies and publishers in the United States and locations world-wide. There have been lectures and presentations at schools, institutions, conferences, events, festivals, and organizations across the country and has taught as an adjunct faculty member at the University of Georgia, Portfolio Center, IvyTech, Hollins University, and the Creative Circus. Currently, Mark does his scribbling in Commerce, Georgia with words of encouragement and guidance from Figlette and Buddy.

Girl With Sunshine Hair

Rita Welty Bourke

I have been in this dark place for so long, I’ve lost track of time. It’s hard to remember when I was last allowed out into the pasture. Days have gone by, days piled on days, weeks following weeks, months slipping away. It is dark and cold. I can feel winter approaching.

There’s a window high above my stall, and sometimes the light coming through is bright. I know then that it’s daytime. There’s a girl who comes to the barn and throws a few flakes of hay from the loft into my hayrack. She checks to see that I have water.And then she leaves.

Along time ago, when she was a very small, I used to give her rides up into the California hills. But that was long ago.

Once I had a stablemate; her name was Sadie and I loved her. She was a tiny thing, not thirteen hands. What a picture we must have made, grazing out in the pasture, delicate little Sadie and great big quarter horse Spunky.

Sadie has been gone for a long time. I am no longer so

spunky.

There was a man who spent time with me nearly every day, but he rarely comes anymore. Like me, he is old. There’s a woman somehow attached to him, but she does not like to come into the barn. She wrings her hands and seems not to know what to do, either for the old man or for me.

The girl is trying to find me a new home. She has to be careful, she says. There are kill buyers out there who will her pay good money, if she will let me go. She will never allow that, she promises. Her grandfather has owned me for a long time, and he would be heartbroken.

She told me why he no longer comes to the barn, and she laid her head against my shoulder and cried, and I could feel her warm tears. He was climbing a ladder, she said, and he fell. I remember hearing the siren of the vehicle that came for him, and how the noise shattered the air, and I was frightened.

He broke his back, the girl said.And when he was in that place where they took him, they found other things. Something calledAlzheimers.And cancer.

Sometimes I think I must be as old as the old man who broke his back. My back is not as straight as it used to be. She says I am swaybacked, which is something that happens as horses age. I am quite old, she says. Thirty-two years.

She would like to find a place where there are other horses, and green pastures, and softer footing. She has put pictures of me on something called Facebook. There have been offers, but she is suspicious. She will not let me go to a kill buyer, no matter how bad things get.

Many days go by before I see the old man again. But he finally comes home from that place, and he is happy, and he begins to come to the barn every few days. He runs his hand along the side of my face and he strokes my neck. And like the girl, he often begins to cry, and he has to leave me. In that dark place. * * *

There are lots of responses to the Facebook thing, the girl tells me:

I’d love to be able to take him, but all my stalls are full. Can you make your post shareable?

Yes, we have room in our barn, we’ll take him. Can you message me with more information?

He’s been in a stall for six months? No electricity, no exercise, a 32 year-old horse? Maybe we aren’t the best fit. He might be better off at another barn. I’m sorry.

I might be able to take him. But not until spring.

Are there resources for his care, his vet bills, farrier bills, hay, grain, supplements?

“There is hay that will last a year,” the girl responds. “And some grain.”

Are you prepared to turn over ownership?

Kill buyer, she decides. * * *

Finally, there’s a response from a young woman who says I remind her of a horse she owned when she was a girl. If no one else steps up, she’s willing to take me. She lives in a neighboring state where they get lots of snow in the winter, but she has a heated barn. There are stalls with outside runs if I can’t be on grass.

She comes with her husband for a visit. When the granddaughter is able to find my bridle, they put it over my head and buckle it and lead me outside. It is wonderful to feel the sun and breathe the cold air. It hardly matters that my legs are stiff and walking is painful.

I’ve always been a man’s horse, because I’ve been with the old grandfather for so long, but this girl, that skinny little blonde, I love her the minute I see her. Her husband stands to the side, appraising me, perhaps wondering how much trouble I will be for him. I am unsure about him. Yet something tells me he has a big heart. Like his skinny wife.

When we are outside in the paddock she begins to take

off my blanket, and I step sharply away from her. She stops, and calms me, and waits until I settle. More slowly now, she removes the blanket and lets it slip to the ground. She takes hold of my bridle and moves me away from the old grandfather. I think she doesn’t want him to see the wounds on my belly where the buckles have rubbed, and on my back where the blanket has irritated my skin.

She looks to her husband, and something silent passes between them. He turns from her, toward me, and he holds out his hand for me to sniff. There is no carrot or sugar cube, but he is not a threat, I decide.

The girl turns to the old grandfather, and I know from the way she straightens her back that she has made a decision. She tells him she’ll come for me in two days.

And she does. With a friend, an older, long-legged woman with a sunburned face and eyes that miss nothing.

Climbing up into her trailer is almost too much for me. My legs are so weak. But the girl keeps talking to me, encouraging me, luring me with handfuls of grain.And the leggy woman is behind me, pushing, her face red with the effort.And finally, finally, I am able to do it.

I look back as we drive away, at the old grandfather, and the woman who is by his side, and the granddaughter who filled my hayrack.

It is a long time before we get to the place where the girl is taking me. We race along wide roads, faster than I was ever able to run, roads with many lanes, roads filled with vehicles of all sizes and shapes. Wind rushes into the open windows of the trailer. There are buildings on both sides of the road, so many buildings, all crushed together. Smokestacks, dozens of them, stain the sky a dirty gray.

After what seems like many hours we leave it behind. We climb a hill and there are steep mountains on one side and a great body of water on the other. Then a rusty bridge across water. The roads narrows, and twists, and turns, and I wonder how much longer this will go on. I try to prop myself against the side of the trailer to keep from falling. It is a long, hard, ride.

Then a short ride down a smooth gravel road, and we are there.

* * *

The smell of evergreen trees.Air the purest and cleanest I’ve known for a long time. Fresh-cut lumber.And best of all, horses in a pasture, looking at us, ears perked forward. Agray thoroughbred, a chestnut, and a paint. None of them are Sadie, but they are horses. I have arrived at my new home, and there are horses grazing in one of the pastures.

The girl is patient with me as she tries to back me out of the trailer. It is all so new. Her voice is soothing, and it doesn’t matter what she is saying. She is trying to calm me, fill me with the courage I need to at least attempt what she is asking me to do. She knows I am frightened.

The woman with long legs is again behind me, watching. When I step out onto the ramp and try to turn, she won’t allow it. I must go straight backwards, she tells me. Just a few more steps and I will be on level ground. She promises that it is so. And it is.

The stall is new, and roomy, and clean. But I am a weaver, something I have done since I was a colt. I stand at the stall door and I weave, back and forth. But the skinny girl knows about such things. She says it’s okay, that when I feel more at ease, maybe I will not longer find it necessary to do that. When she’s able to put me in the pasture with the thoroughbred and the paint, I won’t feel so alone and afraid.And if none of that works, it’s okay. The constant moving might cause me to lose weight, but when she’s certain I can tolerate something more than a starvation diet, she’s says I’ll gain it back.And if I don’t, that’s okay, too.

She’s brought two bales of alfalfa from my old barn, but

she worries it is too rich for me. She gives me timothy and orchard grass with just a tiny bit of alfalfa. She tempts me with grain, but I am not interested. She moistens it, but still I am not interested. She adds things to it that smell different from anything I have ever had before, and I would eat these things if I could. She measures my girth, and I know she is hoping I will begin to regain some of the weight I’ve lost.

She keeps me in a special pasture for a time, and I hug the fence line, or I stay by the gate. She watches, certain that as time passes I will begin to feel more confident. The day comes when I venture out to all four corners of the field, and I can tell she is pleased.

What would please me most is if she would take me with her when she saddles the Thoroughbred and the two of them ride off together, into the hills. I catch glimpses of them in the evergreen trees, moving upward toward the snow-capped mountain she calls Mt.Adams. I would love that.

When she comes back she unsaddles the gray and bathes her and turns her into the pasture. Then she comes into my pasture. She tells me of the Buddhists who live in the shadow of the white mountain and of their mission to relieve suffering in the world.And of the Druids who have built a temple next to the Buddhist monastery. Outside the temple is a stone circle where they hold ceremonies of

worship and healing. She will take me there someday, she says, and they will pray over me. But first I must regain some of the weight I’ve lost, and get stronger, and learn to trust that she will not abandon me. She never will, she promises.

She has a friend who comes to visit me nearly every day. He wears a tiny hat that covers just the top of his head and she calls him Rabbi. He talks to me in a language I’ve never heard before, and his voice is rhythmical and strangely beautiful. Sometimes I think he has gone into a trance, that he is talking to someone who is not there. On pretty days he will often take me for walks along the gravel road. He reminds me a bit of the old grandfather, and I like him, but I am no longer just a man’s horse. I have learned to love that skinny girl. * * *

Winter has arrived, but the days are still warm with sunshine. There has been frost, and the grass is yellowed, but it has not lost its sweetness. The sky is blue, the trees green, the mountain white with snow. The water in my stall at night is warm, the footing soft, the sounds around me comforting. The gray horse has become my friend and the paint has decided I am not a threat to him. My legs are still weak, and my body is full of pain.At

times I look toward the far corner of the pasture where there are tall pine trees and I yearn to go there. I could lie down on soft pine needles and rest. But spring is coming, and when the snow disappears from the trails at the base of the mountain, she says she will take me there.And on the way we’ll stop at the Buddhist monastery where she has friends. If the Druids are there, we will join them in their circle of stones and offer thanks for the gifts we have been given.

The pine trees call to me. But when the sky darkens, and the stars begin to appear, the skinny girl with sunshine hair comes into my stall. Every night she spends an hour with me, grooming me, putting salve on my wounds, talking to me. She says I am doing well, that I am gaining weight. She tells me I am a noble horse, and I am dignified, and I am powerful. I believe these things, because she says they are so.

From the window in my stall I can see the white mountain, and off to the side, the stand of pine trees where I could go and lie down, and the pain would be gone. But then I think of that skinny girl, and of the things she says to me, and I know I cannot leave her just yet.

Rita’s novel, "Islomanes of Cumberland Island," was published by Histria Books in November, 2021. "Kylie’s Ark: The Making of a Veterinarian," was selected as a Kirkus Best Indie Book of 2017. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals including “North American Review,” “Cimarron Review,” “Louisiana Literature,” “Shenandoah,” “Witness,” “Black Warrior Review,” and “The Southwest Review.”

Progress

Loretta Fairley

they laid waste the forest of my childhood home turning it into some post-apocalyptic nightmare

I could put some lofty sociological spin on it but it’s just plain ugly and I don’t like it

Loretta Fairley is a native of south Mississippi and has been writing since 1978. She has freelanced for various publications and has published two volumes of poetry at Amazon. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, nature, photography and computers.

Indigestion

BarbaraAnna Gaiardoni

It was not hard to find... a gigantic swath of torn-up ground extending to the horizon, but under that surface, there was something else. Perhaps the sea. The detection of salty ice indicated a reservoir of liquid water beneath its surface. Hard to know what that clue means. Crossing that border meant risking one's life. I took a step forward, and another, until I was walking steadily on a stretch of water. It wasn't what I saw that stopped me, but the sound of my footsteps and a loud noise in the background.A pandemonium of human cries choked by deformed sea creatures.

“I'm hearing the human cries yearning to be King”, I heard whispering. Panicked, I ran away to escape it. It got dark and then nothing more.

paper lanterns breakfast milk weighs on the stomach

Barbara Anna Gaiardoni is winner of the First Prize 2023 “Zheng Nian Cup” National Literature Price and finalist of the Edinburgh “Writings Leith” contest. She received two nominations for the Touchstone Award 2023 and recognized on the Haiku Euro Top 100 list for 2023.

Her Japanese-style poems have been published in The Mainichi, Asahi Haikuist Network, The Japan Society UK and in one hundred and twenty other international journals.

http://barbaragaiardoni.altervista.org/blog/haikuco-2/

Angels Where There is No God S. Dodge

Perhaps that was the way it should have gone. Because nothing would break her, if she was already gone. Perhaps if the sunlight had made its way through the hospital room; to shine on her fluttering eyes, she would have ended up like the rest of us. Suffering through bouts of depression and love affairs.

Suffering with addictions and life's other snares. Suffering

because that's what we do best. Some die first before all the rest. Before life beats out all of its vitality. Some die with some civility.Angels where there is no God.

Shayla Dodge is an artist who is currently based in Argentina. She speaks four languages, loves writing, cooking, and travel. Her keen interest is in Eastern philosophy and the dichotomy of the East and West in the world.

DeLane Phillips

Girl with Geese

DeLane Phillips

The river is her home

The downtown bridge a shelter

Cross legged

She sits

Calling her children

Unaware of the harsh frozen ground beneath

Aruckus can be heard throughout

The city park

Her children cry out

Loudly

Excitedly

Anticipating

Runners pause to see what the noise is all about

Lovers walking hand in hand turn their gaze from one another and watch

And Shoppers dashing in and out of pricey boutiques

Pause

Sparsely clothed in shorts

Wearing a ball cap in winter

The girl removes from a dirty back back,

Alarge plastic bag bursting with bread crumbs

Collected possibly from restaurant garbage bins.

Because, Day old bread never sells.

Young and Old

Large and Small

They gather around Their mother

Some swim to the edge.

Others trusting enough to leave the water …

Aduck shakes off the excess.

Waddling up to her, The table is set.

The frozen ground a seat.

Into the bag she reaches Scooping crumbs

Her hand a plate.

Honks are heard

As softly she speaks to Her children

Geese

Ducks

Mallards

Dine

Atall Canadian goose Stands so close

To her

It’s chest against

Her bare knee

Pecking at her hands

Relishing the bread

The girl converses with her children

Dinner is served

DeLane Phillips is a southern writer, former teacher, empty nester, and parent of Mac, the dachshund. Much of her writing is inspired by the rural life from her childhood in Monroe, Georgia and various characters of the small southern towns she has lived in.

Good Vibes Your Way

Candice Marley Conner

I don’t understand how people don’t see it’s the same thing whether you say for you, I’ll pray, or positive vibes your way.

It could be a yellow sunflower, tilting its brown-seeded face to the sun, inviting you to do the same. Or weeds recognized as wildflowers in the sap-sticky fist of a child, who presents it to you because it’s the prettiest and most magical thing they had to give you.

It could be a smooth, moon-colored rock the exact shape of your thumbprint. (Out of all the thumbs on the planet, this stone fits yours best.) It could be the way dew beads on the fringes of a furry green fiddlehead, dazzling as the morning light (this morning, that has never existed before and never will again) shimmers on its surface reflecting back to you all the colors of newborn stars.

I think if you whisper it out into the world, (a bellow will do too) then listen, it’s all the same thing.

Candice Marley Conner is a haint at the Haunted Bookshop in Downtown Mobile and an officer for her local writer’s guild. Her poems and stories are in various anthologies and magazines including Wild: An Anthology of Poetry, Woolgathering, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and more. She is the author of three picture books and a YA Southern mystery.

Leftovers

Arvilla Fee

VW van, decked out in peace and love, circa 1968, rusted in places, eaten through like moth-riddled clothes, outfitted with new retro hippies: unwashed dreadlock hair, unapologetic polyester, headbands and a faint, sickening-sweet scent that wafts across the campground

beneath a star-spattered sky; we fall asleep to the strum of acoustic guitars and smoke-gutted voices rasping Hey Jude.

Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College and is the poetry editor for the San Antonio Review. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, and her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life, are available on Amazon. For Arvilla, writing produces the greatest joy when it connects us to each other.

It’s Okay

J. B. Hogan

It’s okay to go on, to laugh, joke, even cry; it’s completely natural, it’s the way things work. Don’t feel bad if you forget, sometimes don’t remember; it gets a little easier, hour by hour, day by day. It’s okay to enjoy your life, to shop for groceries, to get a coffee, to let it go.

Let it go, we all have to, we all have to go, we all

have to forget, time doesn’t stand still when we’re gone, so just keep on living, live your life – there’s nothing else for it, you’ll remember when you need to, have to, want to, it’s all okay – to go on with your life, to enjoy your life, it’s completely natural, it’s the way things work.

J. B. Hogan is a poet, fiction writer, and local historian. He 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 twelve books include Bar Harbor, Mexican Skies, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Apostate and, most recently, Forgotten Fayetteville and Washington County (local history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

What the Storm Brought Ramey Channell

Aunt Bobbie actually waited until the storm was right on top of us before she broke into a fitful and honestly comical gallop, out of her front door and, dodging flying tree limbs, odd debris, and torrential rain, made a mad dash up the hill to our house. She kept a tight grip on the waistband of her unzipped mint-green polyester Dollar Store britches as she crouched and sprinted, crouched and sprinted, until she reached the wide wooden steps leading up to our front porch and launched herself past me where I stood at the screen door monitoring her progress.

“Lordy!” she gasped in her signature Marlboro-rough contralto. “I was in the bathroom! On the toilet!”

That was her entire greeting and explanation. Several— three I think—medium sized tree limbs sailed across the dirt driveway, barely missing the cab of Daddy’s ancient black pick-up, and crashed into the thicket of bushes on the far side of the yard at the edge of the woods.

Daddy sat hunched over on the living room sofa,

peering out the big picture window, keeping a steady eye on the maelstrom outside.

“Whew! Gordy!”Aunt Bobbie exclaimed, maintaining her death grip on the waistband of her britches.

Daddy shifted his attention from the chaos outside the window to his half drowned sister standing, dripping, in the middle of the small living room.

“Well, I’ll declare, Bobbie! We were just fixin’to run down to your house! You’re down lower than we are up here on the knob. We’d all be safer down there.”

“I know it,” Bobbie replied, nodding her head vigorously and slinging rain water around the living room. “But you know I feel better up here with y’all anyway. Roy’s at work, and I couldn’t sit down there by myself, waitin’to get blowed away!”

At that moment, an airborne tree limb struck the window with a loud whack. Luckily, the window didn’t break, and the three of us watched as our black and white tomcat, Black Bill, made a mad run out from under Daddy’s truck and dashed up the front steps.

“There!” Daddy motioned urgently toward the door. “Let Black Bill in, Patsy!”

I opened the door, barely able to hold onto it in the violent wind, and Black Bill made a bee line through the living room, into the bedroom, and under the bed.

Meanwhile,Aunt Bobbie finally succeeded in getting

her pants buttoned and zipped up, just as the lamp beside the couch blinked out and the living room was thrown into gray gloom.

“There went the electricity,” Daddy calmly noted.

“Well, shoot!”Aunt Bobbie griped. “I was just thinkin’ about makin’us a pot of coffee. I need a cup of coffee! What about you, Patsy?”

“There’s a pot on the stove, left from this morning,” I answered. “It might still be warm.”

So, as the storm intensified andAunt Bobbie issued forth an occasional fervent prayer, the three of us drank room-temperature coffee and ate Fig Newtons.As sometimes happens, much to our relief, the storm finally blew itself out.

“I’m goin’home,”Aunt Bobbie announced as she stubbed out her cigarette in the round ceramic ash tray. She stood, cautiously patting and fluffing her black curly head of hair as if she wanted to assure herself it hadn’t blown away in the storm. Outside, the wind and rain had subsided, leaving a mess of tree limbs, leaves, and trash scattered as far as the eye could see, and a few stray clouds with the bright sun peeking through.

Daddy and I stood together on the front porch, watching Bobbie pick her way judiciously down the dirt trail, hopping over small limbs and skirting around big ones.As she disappeared down the hill and into the front door of

her house, Daddy cocked his head to one side, took a few steps into the littered yard and stood, hands on his hips, peering up into a near-demolished dogwood tree.

“Look here, Patsy. What is that?” he asked as he approached the tree and stared upward into the rain battered branches.

The thing we saw up in the tree looked like two really big aluminum pie pans, one atop the other.About the circumference of a Hula Hoop, and about two feet tall, it was lodged at an angle in a fork of the tree.And there it sat.

“They . . .” Daddy slowly exhaled. “What do you reckon that is?”

Right off the top of my head, I didn’t have an answer. I looked all around the yard, out into the woods, and up toward the mountain ridge in the distance. Then I returned my gaze to the round thing up in the tree. It was still there, and I still didn’t have an answer.

“Run get the ladder,” Daddy said, motioning vaguely in the direction of the rear of the house. “See if we can get whatever that is down out of the tree.”

I dragged the wooden step ladder around from the back of the house and Daddy positioned it under the dogwood tree. Just then, the round metal thing emitted a low whooshing sound and a puff of what looked like steam drifted from underneath it.

“Hmm!” Daddy said.

Then he stepped onto the lowest rung of the ladder and said over his shoulder, “I’ll go up the ladder and see if I can wrench it a’loose from the tree, and you watch out. If I was to drop it, don’t let it fall on you.”

I nodded in the affirmative.

The round metal thing in the tree was surprisingly light. Daddy was able to get it down off the limb, and I grabbed hold of one side of it as he came down the ladder. We had no trouble carrying it out from under the tree, and we set it on the ground near the front porch steps. It was dented in on one side, and there was a big crack running from the dent underneath the underside of the thing.As we studied the object, another poof of steam wafted up from underneath.

Askritchy-scratchy sound from inside the circular object alerted us that there was something moving around inside there. Daddy gripped my arm and pulled me a step or two away, and we both watched as a skinny brown hand and arm appeared out of the sizable crack in the metal orb. The little fingers on the hand opened and closed a few times, then retreated back inside the metal thing, then reappeared. The fingers waved and flexed again.

Astrident chirpy sound emitted from inside the object, as the little arm and hand waved frantically in our direction.

“Chee chee chee chee. Chee chee, chee chee chee.”

“It’s a chipmunk!” Daddy exclaimed. “They’s a chipmunk trapped inside that thing.”

I watched the little brown hand fluttering in and out of the crack in the round metal thing.

“I don’t think that’s a chipmunk’s hand,” I ventured.

“Chee chee chee chee,” the little voice squeaked. Then — the top fell off the round pie pan object and clattered to the ground in front of us.And there, in the lower half of the round thing, crouched a little almost-person. Definitely not a chipmunk.

“Chee!” it squealed.

The occupant of the round metal thing looked to be a little bit more than a foot tall. It had brown smooth skin, large brown eyes with long thick eyelashes, a tiny little mouth, and it wore a little suit that was looking worse for wear. There were several tears and rips and a couple of singed places in the smooth brown fabric.And a thin patch of wispy white fuzz on top of its head was definitely singed. With arms waving furiously, fingers pointing up toward the sky, then toward the dogwood tree, then back down to the interior of what I now recognized as a vehicle, the small being continued to chirp and screech.

“Chee chee chee chee!Ah chee chee ah, aloo uhtay!” he exclaimed.

Daddy put his hand up to his own mouth and

thoughtfully scrutinized the little being.

“Nope, not a chipmunk,” he said, shaking his head.

Out hopped the little almost-human, and standing beside his round vehicle, he poked at it a couple of times with one long knobby finger, then while keeping up a constant chatter, he threw both hands toward the sky and pointed first to the east, then to the west, best I could figure. Then suddenly he balled both hands into tight little fists and covered his eyes and began to sob.

“Well the pore little feller,” Daddy said, and the two of us stepped closer to the being and his damaged round space craft.

That’s what it obviously was: a space craft.

Our moment of sympathy was interrupted byAunt Bobbie, calling from her front porch down at the bottom of the hill.

“What are y’all lookin’at?”

The little occupant of the round metal space craft uncovered his eyes and looked towardAunt Bobbie’s house. He seemed to focus his eyes on her for a second or two, then covered his eyes again and continued weeping.

“It’s a . . . it’s a . . .” Daddy called out in Bobbie’s direction. “We don’t know,” he finished.

Bobbie wasted no time picking her way back up the hill.

When she got to us, she stood behind Daddy where he had crouched down to get a closer look at the odd and

apparently traumatized being. The little almost-person had collapsed onto the ground and lay on his back near the circular craft.

“Hmm,” Bobbie snorted. “Hmm! Well, Gordy! What is it?” she asked.

“He’s wrecked his flying machine into the dogwood tree,” Daddy answered. “We don’t know what he is. It’s not a chipmunk.”

“Naw, it’s not a chipmunk,”Aunt Bobbie agreed. She leaned in for a closer look. “Well, the pore little feller,” she crooned.

“Chee, chee, chee,” the little fellow wailed. “Eee may toh nollin!”And he reached out one hand and patted the side of his space craft mournfully.

“Well, Gordy, you’ll have to fix his flying machine,” Bobbie announced. “You can’t just let him lay there on the wet ground like that. Do you think you can fix it?”

Daddy looked atAunt Bobbie like he thought she had lost her mind.

“Aflyin’machine? Now, how in the world do you expect me to fix a flyin’machine?” he inquired.

Aunt Bobbie shifted from one foot to the other. “Didn’t you work at HayesAircraft during the war?” She asked.

“Bobbie,” Daddy exclaimed. “That was a long time ago!And I made windshields and doo-dads out of Plexiglas! I didn’t make little round flying machines!”

Aunt Bobbie shifted her gaze in my direction. The little fellow on the ground continued to sob.

“What about you, Patsy? Did you study anything about aerodynamics in that physics class at school?”

“Aerodynamics?” Daddy erupted. “Pshhhh! Where’d you hear a word like that?”

“It’s a word!” Bobbie retorted. “I bet Patsy knows about it.”

I actually didn’t know anything about aerodynamics, or at least very little. But I agreed withAunt Bobbie that something had to be done. The little fellow had stopped sobbing, but still looked pretty pitiful lying on the ground beside his cracked space ship.

“Well, I’ll see,” Daddy finally conceded. “Get up from there,” he said to the prostrate little space being. “Get up, now,” he said as he gently, and cautiously, touched the almost-person’s shoulder.

The little fellow immediately grabbed hold of Daddy’s hand, and slowly pulled himself up off the wet ground. Gesturing toward his wreckage, he once again started chattering and chirping. He raised up one side of the round metal object, and ran his hand over the cracked surface. Then he flipped the entire pie-pan thing over to expose the damage. He grabbed Daddy’s hand again and placed it on the broken metal.

“Dimmin. Dimmin a CHEEE!” he insisted.

“Maybe duct tape . . .” Bobbie ventured.

Daddy once again looked at his sister as if he thought she was insane. Then he shook his head and said, “I got duct tape.”

“I bet that’ll work,” Bobbie insisted, nodding her head. “What do you think, Patsy?”

“Maybe,” I answered. But I was already on my way into the house to scramble through the junk drawer to locate Daddy’s roll of silver duct tape.

With no electricity, there would be no middle of the day dinner cooked, but we had bread and peanut butter and jelly.And I mixed up a package of strawberry KoolAid with lots of sugar. We all sat out in the damp yard on a big quilt I spread on the ground near where Daddy was working on the broken space vehicle.Aunt Bobbie filled a little cup with KoolAid, and offered it to the space being. She took a sip from her glass of red KoolAid, then held out the little cup toward the little almost-person, whom she had started referring to as Chee Chee.

“Drink it,” she crooned. “Drink it. It’s gooood.”

He drank it.AndAunt Bobbie set her glass down and clapped her hands.

“Look, Gordy! He drank the KoolAid,” she cheered, like she had just witnessed a genuine miracle. “And he’s stopped cryin’. I bet he was just thirsty!” She patted the little brown hand. “I’d cry too if I’d rammed my flyin’

saucer into a dang dogwood tree!”

Daddy was busy with the silver duct tape, and he had me holding the bottom of the space craft while he worked on sealing up the crack.

“Chee Chee,”Aunt Bobbie chirped. “Peanut butter sandwich? Eat some,” she urged. “Ummm, it’s so good. Here. Taste of it. It’s got lots of grape jelly in it.”And he ate a little square of peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“Bless his little heart,”Aunt Bobbie crooned. Then she looked at me and whispered, “You reckon he has a heart, Patsy?”

Daddy looked up from his duct tape and answered, “Why of course, he’s got a heart! He couldn’t live without a heart! The pore little feller!”

Then he called out, “Chee Chee! Look here! Come here and look,” he said, nodding his head toward the repair work on the pie-pan shaped craft.

The little fellow approached his space craft with an inquisitive expression on his face. Running his hand over the duct taped repair job, he muttered a few little chirps, then broke into funny dance that looked like he was doing the jitterbug!

With no warning, he quickly began grabbing random objects and tossing them into his space craft. He threw in half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the little cup he’d been drinking KoolAid out of, the entire roll of duct tape,

and a handful of ordinary gravel from the dirt driveway. Then he eyed the front door.

And there was Black Bill, sitting on the front porch, licking one paw and casting a surreptitious glance at Chee Chee.

Chee Chee immediately threw his hands into the air and started chattering. I foresaw disaster, and ran toward the front porch to grab Black Bill and get him back into the house. But Chee Chee got there first.

I don’t know what I thought would happen. But I’m pretty sure I thought Black Bill would eat Chee Chee. That’s not what happened.

Chee Chee threw himself at the big tomcat, wrapped his skinny frail arms around the cat’s neck, and pressed his face into Black Bill’s fur.

“Chee chee, chee tissin, mis lah. Chee chee may yah, ah loo itay!” he chirped.

He motioned toward the bushes and swept his hand in a wide arc around the yard. Then he stared into Black Bill’s eyes and waited.

Black Bill sauntered down the porch steps and disappeared into the bushes. The little space man looked at us and nodded his head, as if all was well.Arustling and thrashing commenced in the bushes.

Then Black Bill reappeared, carrying something small and furry in his mouth. It was a chipmunk. Chee Chee

immediately broke into peals of high-pitched giggles.

“Chee chee may ah, ah loo itay!” he squealed. “Chee chee may ah, ah loo itay!”

Black Bill dropped the chipmunk onto the ground in front of Chee Chee, who was dancing and hopping around. The chipmunk cautiously approached the almost-person, who dropped to his knees and struck up a lively conversation with the small animal. Black Bill lay down on the bottom porch step and closed his eyes with disinterest.

“Well, I’ll say!” Daddy exclaimed. “What are they doing?”

The little space fellow appeared to be giving the chipmunk a full account of his activities and misfortunes, waving his hands in all directions, gesturing at the sky as he chirped and chattered. Then he held up both hands, palms forward, in a gesture that looked like he was saying “Wait just a minute.”And he ran to his repaired space craft and hopped inside. For several seconds, everything was still and quiet inside the round space craft.

Then, Chee Chee emerged cradling a very tiny animal in his hands.

“Why, look y’all,”Aunt Bobbie gasped. “It’s a little baby chipmunk!”

And sure enough, that’s what it was. Where it came from, or why it was traveling in a round metal space craft

with a little almost-person from space, I have no way of knowing. But as we watched in awe, Chee Chee placed the baby chipmunk on the ground in front of the adult chipmunk. Then he clapped his hands and chirped excitedly. The adult chipmunk lifted the baby chipmunk in her paws, examined it head to toe, then gently placed it on the ground beside her. The baby chipmunk snuggled against the mama chipmunk’s fur.

That accomplished, Chee Chee resumed tossing things into his space craft: twigs, a handful of grass. He chirped and poked at Daddy’s pocket until Daddy handed him a penny, which he gleefully tossed into his vehicle.

Then he hopped in and gestured toward the upper part of the craft. Daddy and I lifted it onto the lower compartment, and with a snap and a click, the two piepans sealed shut.

“I think we better stand back,” Daddy said.

Aunt Bobbie, Daddy, and I moved a little distance away from the space ship. Black Bill lazily opened one eye. The mama chipmunk chirped and scampered into the bushes, followed closely by the baby chipmunk.

“Good bye,”Aunt Bobby called, waving her hand at the space craft. She elbowed me and said, “Wave goodbye, Patsy.”

I waved and called, “Good bye.”

Then Daddy waved and said “Bye, then. Good luck.”

There was a soft whooshing sound, and the circular metal space craft, looking like two big pie pans, one atop the other, about the size of a Hula Hoop, rose into the air and disappeared over the mountain.

Ramey Channell, award winning Alabama author, poet, and artist, is the author of three novels: Sweet Music on Moonlight Ridge (2010) The Witches of Moonlight Ridge (2016) and The Treasure of Moonlight Ridge (2021). Her children’s picture book, written and illustrated by Ramey, is Mice from the Planet Zimlac (2021), also available in a French edition, Les Souriceaux de la Planete Zimlac (2022), translated by Alexandrine Duteil Stebach. Ramey’s poems and stories have been published by Aura Literary Arts Review, Alabama State Poetry Society, Birmingham Arts Journal, Alalitcom, Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak (1999), Belles Letters 2: Contemporary Stories by Alabama Women (2017) Stormy Pieces: A Mobile Writers Guild Anthology (2021), and many other journals and collections. She is currently working on her fourth southern fiction novel in the Moonlight Ridge Series.

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“I am the host of the Pat Conroy Writer’s Residency,” wrote Mary Ellen Thompson, a name then-unfamiliar to me but one which would soon be etched indelibly in my heart.

Dreams do come true!

Lea Anne Brandon

Beaufort Writer’s Residency

LeaAnne Brandon

Something I had secretly dared to wish for, fervently pray for and elaborately imagine in my heart and soul was recently transformed into reality, for me, alongside the magical marshlands of Beaufort, South Carolina.And, I am eternally indebted and forever changed by that - gift.

It was a cold, blustery day in early January. Everything outside my windows was gray and rainy and bone-chilling. Ignoring the Christmas tree and mantle decorations that sorely needed taking down, boxing up and moving into storage for another year, I picked up my phone to scroll. Clicking on my emails, I opened an unexpected message.

“I am the host of the Pat Conroy Writer’s Residency,” wrote Mary Ellen Thompson, a name then-unfamiliar to me but one which would soon be etched indelibly in my heart. “I would like to offer you the opportunity to come to MarshSong (Cottage) to snug in and write...It would be

my pleasure to have you here so I hope you will accept my invitation.”

I couldn’t catch my breath before I typed an immediate “Yes and thank you” followed by an inordinate number of exclamation points.

Mary Ellen’s response came back with equal rapidity.

“I am so glad. I think you will find this property to be very inspirational.”

Truer words have not been penned. To say that the aweinspiring marshlands and towering centuries-old oak trees draped with wispy Spanish Moss surrounding Mary Ellen’s eclectic and colorful MarshSong Cottage are museworthy is an understatement.Add a surreal backdrop of vivid orange, hot pink and lavender hued sunrises and sunsets. Dot the landscape with a family of inquisitive white-tailed deer and a medley of marsh birds filling the pristine sky.Animate the masterpiece with the mesmerizing rise and fall of the tidewaters. You are only beginning to paint the picture that awaited my arrival.

It is perfection. But it is much more.

Something about Beaufort and its surrounding islands envelopes a mere mortal visitor with its soft, comforting embrace.All is well here, it whispers. You are safe here. You can breathe—deeply and easily—here. You are home here.

When I first turned off the paved highway and onto the

crunchy shell-covered driveway of Oaks Plantation on St. Helena Island, I knew immediately I was about to be changed. For the good. My white Sante Fe and I slowly crawled underneath the oak canopy and followed Mary Ellen’s texted directions to find my temporary cloister. She probably wouldn’t be home when I arrived, she’d said. The cottage door would be unlocked. Come in through the screen porch. Make yourself at home, she said.

And so I did.

After lugging far too many suitcases and bags into my bedroom and stocking my fridge with bottles of green tea andAtkins shakes, I sat down at the dining table which would be my writing desk for the next 10 days. I neatly stacked my reference books to my left; plugged in my laptop; arranged a row of pencils, pens and highlighters; and place a notebook containing the first chapters of my long, long, long-delayed manuscript to my right.

I stared through the wall of windows and glass doors into The Prince of Tides’beloved marshland. Two deer leapt and jumped with abandon.Agiant egret landing on the dock railing.

I began to cry. Tears washed my face and dropped onto the keyboard. I couldn’t stop.

I was there! Where I had hoped I would one day be. It had come true. This once-in-a-lifetime, unmerited opportunity to do exactly what I had—for so very long—

said I wanted to do. Write. Put words onto the page. Finish my book. I had no excuses. No distractions.

Bliss.

As my writing mentor River Jordan had chastised me to do for years, I finally put my butt in my chair and I kept it there. For hours and hours and hours each day. Whenever I struggled to paint the picture I wanted to share, I simply moved my focus from the screen to the marsh. The tide came in and the grasses disappeared. The tide went out and the pluff mud began to sing.

And the right words returned.

In the evenings, my wonderful hostess and new best friend Mary Ellen and I would meet on her screened porch, wrap ourselves in sweaters and quilts and watch the sun watercolor the sky as it set. Warmed by a glass of wine or bourbon or refreshed by my favorite Dr. Pepper Zero, we’d talk through my day’s work. Discuss the words. Ponder the stories behind the stories. She critiqued. She encouraged. She pushed me to go deeper.

Every morning, I would roll over to welcome the rising sun and its explosion of pastel watercolors splashing just outside my bedroom window. I would snuggle between crisp, pink linen sheets and draw warmth from a lighterthan-air down comforter. Words that I would soon type

into phrases, sentences, paragraphs and chapters danced unrestrained in my head. (I call that process my “book thinking.” My husband John labels it as my excuse for staying in bed too long.)

Slipping into a pair of leggings or pajama pants and an Ole Miss t-shirt, I would journey the dozen or so steps from my cocoon to my writing chair. Open the laptop. Perch fingers onto the keyboard.And let the stories flow.

It was a comfortable and comforting routine.

As I would complete one chapter after another, I would text Mary Ellen to let her know pages were being emailed to her for review. When she had digested my latest offering, I would then hear a slight knock on the screen door and see her head full of beautiful orange curls peeking in. She’d curl up on the overstuffed cottage’s sofa, pile pillows around her and we’d talk words. How to say it better. Ways to help the reader understand. Polishing. Reworking.

It was a comfortable and comforting routine.

Mid-afternoon on Day 9, my tears began to rain again. I blinked through the waterfall at a blank screen. The cursor blinked back at me. I had no more words. There wasn’t anything left to say.

I was done.

My fingers were shaking, not from my Parkinson’s, but from sheer relief.

I was done.

I typed “The End.” Took at picture of the screen. Posted it on Facebook with a declaratory “Hallelujah” and closed my laptop. Outside my window, the deer had come to celebrate with me. Four of them were jumping and chasing each other across the yard. The one with the extra-long ears, the one who had greeted me on my first day at MarshSong, had walked up to the porch steps and was staring back at me.

“I’m done,” I told her. “I’m done!”

While Beaufort is unequaled in its natural beauty, I have decided its uniqueness lies in the people who call this slice of heaven their home. During my writer’s residency, I was embraced not only by the sheer physical glory of the place and its storied architecture and history but also by the dozens of strangers-turned-friends who welcomed me and supported me and encouraged me so generously and undeservedly. From the delightful “oh-so-South-Carolinahospitable" cocktail party graciously hosted by Mary Ellen and the Cheese Biscuit Queen Mary Martha Greene at their friend Mike McFee’s beautiful home to the private tour of the Pat Conroy Literary Center by the beloved

writer’s sister Kathy Conroy, I was made to feel special. Beaufort has a literary community equal to any place I’ve known, including my cherished Oxford. My sweet friend and constant encourager Bren McClain both started and ended my visit with her positivity and heartfelt support. Cassandra King, one of my favorite storytellers and Pat’s sweetheart, spent time asking about my book and encouraging me on my way. Pat’s agent Marly Rusoff came to the party as well, taking me aback with her interest in my project and what we hope to accomplish with its publication. Other names and faces—including the amazing Pat Denkler and John Warley—still fill my heart to overflowing. The generous support and encouragement from all of Beaufort’s sweet souls built within me a confidence to go the distance.

Mary Ellen woke with the sunrise the morning I was to leave. That was a true sacrifice, given that neither she nor I stir quickly after a night’s sleep. My car was loaded. I was taking home with me more than 34,000 new words on the page. The book, or at least a draft of it, was done. We stood on the edge of the marsh, struggling to find the words.

Words.

There were none I could find to describe what I’d been

given. By her. By Beaufort.

We both cried a little when we hugged each other goodbye.

No words.

Except, thank you.

Mary Ellen Thompson, host of the Pat Conroy Writer’s Residency

Lea Anne Brandon is a recently retired, award-winning journalist who covered education reform, state and local government and civil rights for Mississippi’s flagship newspaper The Clarion-Ledger during its investigative heyday. Her upcoming book “Our Truths Be Told,” penned with co-author and fellow journalist Charlotte Graham, is a personal, secret-shattering reveal of shared experiences viewed from divergent perspectives of growing up black and white in the epicenter of the violent civil rights movement in their racially divided hometown of Laurel, Mississippi.

“At night when the dander of the world makers me cough and sneeze, I strap on a headlamp and roam the yard…”

Sam Pickering shelling peas with his daughter Eliza.

I have been stung by honey and bumble bees, paper wasps, bull ants, and swarms of bald-faced hornets and yellow jackets. I have stepped barefoot on the stinging hairs and spines of slug and saddleback caterpillars. Rarely have I explored wood and scrub without being jabbed into a jump and exclaiming, “Oh, shit!” I’ve inhaled the setae of flannel caterpillars, and the hairs of gypsy moth caterpillars have raised ridges on my arms. I have fallen over and been submerged beneath waves of nettles hotter than boiling oil. Poison ivy grows faster on me than it would if farmed hydroponically. Often, I returned from wandering the outdoors having been stung so many times that my face resembled a knobby cluster of red grapes. Mysterious bites and stings have made my legs bloat and look broiled. Twice I munched berries that made my throat swell and almost blocked my breathing. In the spring when I mow the lawn, grass pollen makes me cough, gag, and eventually throw up. In the fall when I rake leaves, mold doubles me over, and I throw up again. In lakes I attract leeches; in the ocean, ill-tempered jellyfish. Yet, not until recently have I thought about allergies.As a child I lived on peanut butter, and instead of making me break into hives, penicillin saved my life. I

could eat a salad of ragweed, and the only time I sneezed as a child was when I tickled the inside of my nose with a straw.

Age has changed my tolerance of and fondness for welts and jabs. Once upon a time after the pain and swellings passed, showing and telling took over adding zest to my days. This year pollen from birches and red maples turned my nostrils into unruly creeks, and two weeks ago, a mystery insect stung me on the little finger of my right hand. The finger turned purple and doubling in size looked like the outside finger on a child’s baseball glove. For six days the finger throbbed, and my hand sweltered. I wondered if a harvester ant stung me, but I have never seen a harvester in Storrs. “Maybe a cow killer,” I said to Vicki, a doubtful attribution because I did not spot the wasp. Vicki urged me to see a doctor. I refused. Much as I’d aged beyond susceptibility to the pricking of all lusts except that of the Platonic variety, so my allergy to stings had clearly worsened. It had not, however, reached and never would reach the anaphylaxis and epinephrine stage. “Gone,” I muttered later as I looked at my little finger wondering if the skin would spit, “gone are the hardy boyish days when eight or ten stings led only to bad language.”

Taxonomies simplify living by defining and separating. Some people, Chesterton wrote, identified the lower

classes as “humanity minus ourselves.” Retirement has given me the leisure to overindulge observation. Rarely, alas, does a closer walk with a stranger foster tolerance and active benevolence. Often it induces distaste and causes a person to distance himself. I am now allergic to a superfamily of humanity, anApoidea of types, exposure to which blisters, particularly educational drones collecting money for universities that are hedge funds with hives of classrooms attached. I am also allergic to the allergies of other people, for example, both that of the wealthy for the poor and that of the poor for the wealthy. Complicating the diagnosis of an allergist is the fact that I’m occasionally allergic to consistency. For example, I avoid spirits and the conversation of topers. But then a mixologist stirs a story into talk and turns demon bourbon into a mint julep. In his Reminiscences and Recollections, “anecdotes of camp and society 1810 to 1860,” Captain Gronow described Twisleton Fiennes, the Late Lord Saye and Sele, a legendary epicure and bacchanalian. “I shall never forget the astonishment of a servant I had recommended to him,” Gronow wrote. “On entering his service, John made his appearance as Fiennes was going out to dinner and asked his new master if he had any orders. He received the following answer, ‘Place two bottles of sherry by my bedside and call me the day after tomorrow.’” Such a tale is worth a hot flash of mental cirrhosis.

Additionally, I’ve never admired politicians. Do they run to avoid the self-knowledge that comes to every stationary person? Do they run to escape thought? Do they ache to embrace the assuaging fiction that they are not so flawed as others? How can anyone repeat the old lie and proclaim he is campaigning to serve other people when the truth is that his ego rides him, spurs jabbed into his flanks and whip hand raised above his conscience? Do many adore flowers? Flowers are “the expression of God’s love to man,” Joseph Breck said. In early summer do politicians saunter across sandy neglected meadows bristling with wild raisin? Do pinks and black-eyed Susan’s make them stop talking? Do they notice the blossoms of potato vine bleached and looking like sea shells? Do they lose themselves in the lavender mist rising from the anthers of Timothy? Do they believe that anything they accomplish can rival the blue of chicory or the yellow of bird-foot trefoil? Can they appreciate the potpourri of milkweed balls or have the malodourous fumes oozing from putrefying integrity destroyed their sense of smell? Do any ever sing, “Oh, to be beside a beaver pond now that June is there, and white tails are clipping through the air”? Presidential gardens would serve people better than presidential libraries. Obviously, I don’t know much about politicians. I have never met one. During campaign season when political worker bees

stream through my neighborhood, I shoo them out of my yard. Slightly less noxious and more easily avoided are sports disciples. Imagine attending a dinner at which all the other guests spent Saturdays and Sundays praying in football stadiums. Even before the aspic appetizer, a person would find himself in “The Mind of Darkness,” quoting Joseph Conrad, and moaning, “The horror! The horror!”

At the end of life, a person’s allergies become him. Rhetorical matters make me dropsical with bile. In two successive days last week, three people encouraged me to “Have a Great Day!” Because of their eructating, formulaic triteness, the remarks lacked the zing of a sweat bee’s sting. Yet, they provoked a self-inflected response, not a reaction immediately painful with wasp kinin but instead delayed and gloppy with nausea-producing selfloathing. “Thank you,” I responded to all six speakers, “that’s so very nice.”As my allergies to verbal and social matters have waxed, so my tongue has become waspish. At times I think everyone I have ever met, not simply people my age hastening toward their grand climacterics, visits a physical therapist. I have never talked to a therapist. I refuse to allow anyone to grope my muscles and joints. “Hands-on experiences cause callouses if not blood blisters,” I explained to Vicki.

Putting socks on over damp feet is tedious and

exhausting.Afortnight ago in the locker room at the Community Center when a sock pasted itself to my right heel and sprouted Velcro preventing me from pulling it above my ankle, I said aloud, “if a therapist tried to put on this sock, lumbago would knock him to the floor.” Two other men were in the room. On noticing them, I continued, “not that I’d let a therapist work on my footsies. That feely stuff is a medical racket.” “I’m married to a physical therapist.” one of the men said. “And,” the second man continued, turning the first man’s simple sentence into a compound sentence, “my older son manages a firm that specializes in physical therapy.” “Oh,” I said, realizing the time was ripe to change the subject. “What do you think aboutArgyle socks?” Neither man ever woreArgyle socks, and that conversation ended before it started. I am easily deterred unless I don’t want to be deterred. “Have you noticed,” I then asked the men, “that people who use this locker room never groan or moan? Perspiration to the tune of silence isn’t exercise. What do you guys think?”Afriend told me that moaning, if not whimpering, was an integral part of physical therapy, and I chose the topic to appeal to the men. My friend was wrong; the men did not respond.

Age has changed my literary taste. Nowadays I prefer Emerson to Faulkner. I like mulling Emerson’s sententious wisdom, statements like “Words are finite organs of the

infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.” I have grown allergic to Southern gothic and books that depict the grotesque antics of the usual extended Southern fictional family, cousins of the Snopes, twice embraced, not removed, folks called Big Bubba Borax and Sweet Baby Tail-Tail. Becoming allergic to place and the bestknown literature of that place disturbs me, and occasionally I spade into my library and exhume a book I once liked. Invariably I conclude the book should have remained buried. Last month I re-read Harry Crews’s novelAFeast of Snakes. The Feast featured a carnival of feral scenes of the kind that naïve outlanders once expected in Southern novels and in the South itself. If a woman “would not come across,” Sheriff Buddy Matlow locked her in his jail in Mystic,Alabama. If she continued to resist Buddy’s affection, Crews recounted, Buddy turned a rattlesnake loose in her cell. “Ain’t it a God’s wonder what a snake can do for love,” Buddy declared after a successful seduction. Buddy would have fared better had he given Lottie Mae, one of his inamoratas, a box of pralines. Sight of the snake unhinged Lottie Mae, hexed her, Lummy, a friend, said. Happily, and memorably, Lottie Mae rid herself of the hex. During a rattlesnake roundup Buddy purchased a snake condom adorned with two small fangs. The next time he courted

Lottie Mae, he put on the condom. When a snake rose “straight as a plumb line” in Buddy’s lap, Lottie Mae saw the mouth and fangs at the top of its body. “It was the snake she had been waiting for.” She pulled a straight razor out of her shoe, and “in a single fluid movement,” struck at Buddy’s lap “and came away with the snake in her hand, its softening head with the needle fangs still showing just above her thumb and forefinger.” Emerson never imagined the mincing which Lottie Mae practiced. For my part the scene made me erupt in spotty allergic laugher.Afterward I reinterred the novel.

“Literature in its highest forms,” Richard Holt Hutton wrote, “almost always requires a certain amount of solitude, of separateness of spirit, of imaginative brooding.” Hutton’s requirements are boons to most writers, be they producing signatures of high or low pages. At their best allergies insulate the aged scribbler not only from the bacterial but also from the vagaries of his times. Although the anchoritic life has some appeal, I am sane. Despite my allergic reaction to the world with its wasps, caterpillars, nettlesome people, and books releasing cadaverine and putrescine, I am unable to remain reclusive for longer than a snip of time. Since childhood I have been a meanderer, and habit is stronger than allergies. “To the quietest human being, seated in the quietest house, there will sometimes come a sudden and unmeaning hunger for

the possibilities and impossibilities of things,” Chesterton wrote. “He will abruptly wonder whether the teapot may not suddenly begin to pour out honey or sea water, the clock to point to all the hours of the day at once, the candles to burn green or crimson, the door to open upon a lake or on a potato field instead of a London street.”

On that street or in the potato field appear sights which immediately make me forlorn. Most are so trifling that they don’t rise to the level of allergy. Nevertheless, because schooling civilizes, the sympathies of educated people are imperfect. Shortly after graduation I saw a student walking across the campus wearing a mortar board, black gown, and as a scarf an albino Burmese python. In Florida Burmese pythons have become an invasive species. In spring or summer females lay hatcheries of eggs, almost ninety at one count. I associate people who buy pythons from pet stores with beer cans, burgers, French fries entombed in salt and ketchup, the use of questionable medicinals, cars missing hubcaps, and pickup trucks festooned with rude bumper stickers. I suspect most purchasers are young like the boy I saw. They have rattletrap minds and hope to shift attention away from their prosaic characters. By wearing snakes, they imagine appearing adventuresome thereby attracting admirers. In truth the boy was a visual soporific less interesting than the linguistic short-order cooks who

season talk with “Have a great day” or the insultinglyreductive “Have a good one.”

If I sprayed myself with an antihistamine and rid myself of allergies. I’d become sleek, reverent, prudent, and in my anonymity respectable, admired, and popular. I’d be recognized as good social mayonnaise. I’d be the sort of all-purpose spread who because he didn’t care about anyone or anything never criticized a raw or underdone thought. In sum or rather in subtraction, I’d be a politician. Happily, someone with allergies cannot shed his spots. Moreover, such spots spread and drift into each other like run-on sentences. Within twenty minutes of noticing the boy with the python, I overheard a man haranguing a woman about religion. He believed God created the earth for Man. “Isn’t that a little presumptuous?” the woman asked diffidently. “No, haven’t you read Genesis?” the man responded almost shouting. “If you were a Christian, you’d know that you and all the other daughters of Eve are responsible for evil and man’s expulsion from Eden.” Such talk makes my thoughts burn like shingles. If I listened to more of the conversation, I knew the sores would burst, and in viral language I’d urge the man to see a psychiatrist. I like creation stories, but I am allergic to the inhumanity Calvinistic divines have bled out of Genesis. On the wall of my study hangs a painting of Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent. The painting was

produced by an aboriginal artist living inArnhem Land, and I bought it in Darwin fifteen years ago. Ngalyod can be male and female. While female she was the mother responsible for the creation of mankind. She or he also causes wet and dry seasons and can nurture as well as destroy life. In my painting she is coiled protectively around five eggs. When I look at the painting, I imagine that one of the eggs contains humanity’s first ancestors. In the other eggs are flowers and trees, clouds, words, the great oceans, herds of beasts, the firmament—everything and all things, all equal and beautiful. What a soothing contrast to the allergenic biblical assertion that the earth and its denizens, vegetable and animal, rooted, feathered, real and fabulous were created for man.

Many things I notice are placebos. Neither do they cause or cure allergies. Occasionally they puzzle or delight. Deciding which can be difficult. Instead of becoming the slave of definition, perhaps it’s better to keep Emerson in mind and admit that words “cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth.” My friend Josh recently sent me snapshots of four photographs mounted on a Wall of Remembrance in a community gymnasium in Louisiana. “Four pictures,” Josh noted, “selected from many.” The pictures were matted and encased in black fourteen by twelve-inch wood frames. The photographs depicted community members who died while exercising

at the gymnasium. Under each photograph was a small oval brass plaque. Engraved in cursive on the plaque were the name of individual in the picture, dates of his birth and death, cause of death, and equipment being using when the person died. Thus, Sally Bruckner Brinker was born on April 3, 1927 and died on May 8, 2012 of a stroke while using a rowing machine. Pegram Royce was seventy-three years old when he dove into a pool after hours and drowned. Culpeper Bowman died at fifty-nine after being bowled over by a medicine ball and hitting his head on the floor, suffering an intracerebral hemorrhage. On February 13, 2016,Adelaide Bogusky died prematurely at forty-two when she got entangled in Battle Ropes and snapped her neck.

Accompanying pictures of the wall were two other photographs, the first of the motto stamped across the top of an Oklahoma license plate, “Fracking for You.” In the second picture appeared a sticker pasted to the bumper of a Dodge Ram from Texas. Printed on the sticker was “Don’t Fence Me In.”Athick black X ran like rails through “Don’t” leaving behind the imperative “Fence Me In.” On the left side of the sticker was a cameo depiction of the Texas state flag with its single white star; on the right theAmerican red, white, and blue flag. The truck was parked on the curb in front of a shop selling essential oils. Side by side in the store window, Josh wrote, were two

books: Healing Oils of the Bible and Lucy Libido, “A Girlfriend’s Guide to Using Essential Oils Between the Sheets.” “Sam,” Josh said, “in idle moments you sometimes mention leaving Connecticut and returning to Tennessee. Fifty years of living in New England have compromised your immune system. Two days after settling in the South, you’d have a massive allergic reaction and sink into a fatal catatonic stupor.” Josh may be right. Next to the essential oils shop was a knife store. “Toys for Men” a sign declared. The store on the other side of the shop sold leather goods. Hanging on a rack inside the door was an assortment of Gun Pocket jackets. Manufactured by UNIK LeatherApparel, the jackets were on sale for $149.99 each. Inside the jacket was a pocket in which the wearer could conceal his 1911 forty-five caliber pistol and an extra clip of bullets. “Carry laws have really helped business,” a clerk told Josh. “You should see the Concealment Purses made for pistol packing mamas.” “Their prices ranged from $59.99 to $94.99, not exactly Louis Vuitton,” Josh concluded. “Praise the state legislatures and pass the ammunition.”

“All things are artificial,” Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici, “for nature is the art of God.” If that is true, mankind’s aesthetic sense which neglects appreciation and concentrates on exploitation is blasphemously perverted. If it is also true that the world

was created for man and that, as Genesis states, God gave man dominion over all the earth, then man is an unconscionable ingrate. Nevertheless, as a cure-all for my social allergies, a panacea common enough to be labeled patent therapy, I often roam wood and field. In contradistinction to the gospel song, the dew is not still on the roses. I walk alone, and no voice whispers in my ear. Sometimes a bee startles me, but another person’s whims or opinions do not determine my pace. I am free from monosyllabic agreement and disagreement.Alas, the suspension of allergenic thought is temporary. Experienced people realize that shucking allergies is impossible. Pessimism cannot be excised and is a fact of everyday life. If an aged individual claims to be an optimist and isn’t consciously lying, then he is suffering from an incurable poverty of mind. I’m allergic to such people. When I meet a goose, I imagine someone cramming a pipe down his throat and force-feeding him, fattening his liver before grinding it into foie gras. Of course, the result would be so tasteless that its best gastronomical use would be as cat food.

In the woods, the only geese I see are Canada geese, and I am silent. Words do not break out and impoverish, and my allergies ease into charmed remission. On walks all I hear and see are familiar and domestic: yellow iris in a marsh, red-winged blackbirds nesting amid cattails,

overhead the high burring of gray tree frogs, and nearby the fragrance of wild pink azalea spilling over the banks of a creek. The fiddleheads of royal ferns roll into green marbles then suddenly turn brittle and begin to shred into fronds.At dusk chimney sweeps chitter and rise and fall like motes across the sight. In shadowy light the bark of northern white cedar looks pin-striped, reddish and brown, elegantly smooth but also worn into informality, fibers pulling loose here and there. The heartwood of double-file viburnum is sienna and smells berried and roasted. While the songs of vireos jump nervously like a bad conscience, those of rose-breasted grosbeaks are gay and welcoming crying “cheerio, cheer, chee.” One morning I slipped off rocks loosely wrapped in algae and tumbled into a stream. Water soaked my clothes, and that night bruises bloomed along my arms and over my knees; yet, the fall was pleasing. I was dirty and cold, and in the soiled, uncomfortable moment, I was happy, my crankish allergies forgotten.As I walked home I found a newlyhatched snapping turtle withering on a dry path. I carried the turtle to a quiet inlet of the Fenton River. I held the turtle in my hand and pushed my palm under water. For a moment the turtle didn’t move then it shook and wiggled off my hand into life.

At night when the dander of the world makers me cough and sneeze, I strap on a headlamp and roam the yard.

Rabbits freeze immobile in the grass. While their eyes gleam silver in the light their fur spreads loose and foggy, and their bodies lose definition. Raccoons cling to the trunks of red oaks. Five or six deer trail through the woods, their eyes gold and flickering like candles carried by a procession of cowled monks.Across the ground the tinny blue flowers that make shafts of bugle seem rough and vulgar in the day soften, and the color becomes dreamy and sleep-inducing. “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune,” Emerson wrote, “I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.” No one with strong allergies to humanity can enjoy a perfect exhilaration. But in the woods the stings of civilization become almost unnoticeable. “If a man would be alone, let him look at the stars,” Emerson declared. Today skyglow tossed upward from cities makes seeing the stars difficult. But if a man would be content let him stand under a fringe tree and inhale the absolving fragrance of its blossoms. Let him watch yellow warblers flit through alders or study the slow dance of a walking stick. Let him breath the musky spray of foxes and listen to the cocky shrilling of northern flickers. Let him cradle one of the chalices blooming on a tulip tree and let him drink deep of the orange lapping the bottom of the bowl, slowly and thoughtfully as if it were communion wine.

Let him also be aware that contentment on the moldy above-ground side of the grave is evanescent. There is no land of pure delight. On both banks of the Jordan flowers wither and the living green dries to straw.Aperson’s winged thoughts, as Thoreau put it, inevitably turn into poultry. The next hour, the next day, I will blurt something regrettable or a cloying acquaintance will say, “I’m praying for you.” I will be tempted to respond, “I hope you mean to the Rainbow Serpent?” But I won’t say anything. Consequently, an allergy to my own cowardly respectability will break out, and I’ll retreat to the quietest room in my quiet house. The retirement won’t last long. Home is where the heart dies. “You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon,” Robert Louis Stevenson advised walkers.At home I’ll sit and read. Too often the winds that play upon me are fetid. Two days ago, I started a novel but kicked it into waste can when an insane girl adorned her hair with a barrette of her own feces. That afternoon the mail brought the photograph of another picture hanging on the Wall of Remembrance, this of Carter (Duke) Sudduth who committed suicide after losing his bearings on an elliptical trainer and becoming a liberal was shunned by his devout friends. Folded inside the local newspaper was a flyer inviting me to join a literary group on the town square on Saturday and explore my “inner creativity.” On the radio a gosling honked endlessly about “the

transformative effects” of the mid-life crisis. “Listen to the voice of your inner angel and lay your head upon her manly shoulder.” Such inanities cause headaches even to mechanical men with aluminum ears. The prating forces listeners to swallow objections to gagging commonplaces. It almost drives them to the extreme of dosing themselves with life-long learning in hopes of exhuming courses that teach knotting necks and extension cords.

Four times during the day a solicitous robocaller urged me to take advantage of a special promotion promising “peace of mind twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.” The offer consisted of a medical alert system. Purchasers hang little buttons around their necks and press them if emergencies arise. Instantly they are connected to advanced care specialists. During the fourth call an allergic flush spread over my face.Although I knew that I was addressing a machine not a person, I raised my voice and described the barnyard activities of the caller’s mother in scarlet round-heeled detail. By the next morning I calmed down and went to Dog Lane Café to have coffee with friends.

Elderly people reminisce and look backward with complacency. They don’t live new lives. They are at ease with their mediocrity, and their conversation soothes. They tell good tales and are canny enough to appreciate anecdotes. “My Uncle George died last month,” Larry

recounted. “But it doesn’t matter. He didn’t leave me anything.” “At the family dinner last Christmas,” Belle recalled, “I was seated next to my ten-year-old grandson. An absolute horror! The prospect of schoolboy conversation inflamed my diverticulitis.” “What did you do?” Larry asked. “I behaved sensibly,” Belle responded. “I funneled wine down the urchin’s throat and made him tipsy. When he banged his head on the table, my daughter was forced to remove him from the room and take him upstairs and put him to bed. He did not return.”Age itself is the source of much conversation. John’s wife Martha bought him an electric lawnmower at Home Depot. John unloaded it from the car then took it to the side yard it and assembled it.After adjusting the handle to his height, he pretended to fiddle with the machine, examining its parts, turning it onto the side, and lifting it off the ground, every so often shouting an expletive peppery with exasperation. “Honey,” he eventually said going into the house and addressing Martha directly. “What kind of lawnmower did you buy—some sort of Chinese mechanical tangram? I can’t start the damn thing. Where in the hell do I put gasoline and oil?” John thought his remark hilarious. Unfortunately, Martha didn’t laugh. She believed he was serious, and nothing he said later convinced her that he was joking and wasn’t a simply an old guy who had slipped another notch closer to the ground.

Between rows of reminiscences my friends sow remarks about human nature frequently transplanting aphoristic reflections from wise books to clear the fuliginous hours. “If a man must needs be conceited,” Henry said quoting G. K. Chesterton, “it is certainly better that he should be conceited about some merits or talents that he does not really possess.” “Robert Lynd wrote something almost as perceptive in The Cockleshell,” Belle noted. “I can scarcely recognize a blessing in disguise except when it is bestowed upon somebody else. The theory that blessings in disguise are constantly happening to other people I find consoling,” Lynd said, “it enables me to bear their troubles without feeling too miserable.” Earlier in the year, Larry citedAgnes Repplier’s criticism of overly-assiduous editors whose notes interrupted reading. They, Repplier, wrote, build bridges over raindrops and “put ladders up a pebble.”

In the eighteenth-century Edward Young criticized people who quoted excessively, writing, “Some for renown on scraps of learning dote, /And think they grow immortal as they quote.” My coffee mates quote frequently and often discuss death, but they don’t believe in immortality. They know words molder quicker than flesh and recognize that all ends are full-stopped. However, if forced to choose between resurrection of the body and that of the mind, they’d choose the latter,

especially if its temporal lobes were tumescent with wit. Recently,Albert announced that he had written his obituary. “If I list it as forthcoming, can I include it among the publications on my resumé?” he asked. We agreed unanimously that he should include it. We also concurred that it was unlikely that he’d see it in print. Larry then interrupted saying he agreed with Clarence Day’s Father who supposed that all people had to die and “said he wouldn’t mind if people died only once in a while, as they used to.” “But,” Father continued, “he didn’t know what the matter was nowadays, somebody died every month.”

Only rarely do we talk about local doings, but occasionally happenings astonish us. Last fall, a Human Resources administrator went to a pharmacy in Vernon to get a flu shot. The store’s computer was broody, and after entering administrator’s name and date of birth, the clerk had to massage the key board before the machine consented to bring up the man’s medical record. The machine preoccupied the clerk, and she didn’t notice that the man had only one arm. He’d lost his right arm years earlier in a car wreck. Once the insurance information appeared on the screen, the clerk asked, “in which arm would you like the shot?” “I don’t think that’s funny,” the administrator responded. “What kind of horrible person are you? You aren’t blind. Use your eyeballs.” “Huh?” the clerk said looking up from the computer. “Oh, my god!”

she exclaimed when she saw the man lacked an arm. “I am so sorry,” she said staring at the stump of his right arm. She was so flustered she confused right and left. “Clearly you’ll have the shot in your right arm since that’s the only.” She didn’t finish the sentence. “You insensitive lump! You vacuous imbecile! You’ll pay!” the man said raising his stump, jabbing it at her as if his missing hand was filled with graveyard dirt, and shouting repeatedly, “Take that.” The clerk took it poorly. She went home in tears and didn’t return to the pharmacy until the following week. Even so she resigned shortly thereafter. She could not sleep after coming back to work. Every night she had a nightmare in which a one-armed man chased her though a dark house, carrying her coffin under his left arm.

For the record we do not discuss politics. The subject is bumptious and oozes urushiol. Nevertheless, occasionally one of us slips. Last month before we shushed him, Henry opined that in present-dayAmerica “civil obedience is moral disobedience.” Henry is verbally trigger-happy and is fond of shoot-from-the-lip maxims. He is also a retired lawyer. “If you want justice in the United States, you have to buy it,” he once declared. On another occasion he quoted the old saying, “He who preaches war is the devil’s chaplain.” “Never trust a man who doesn’t mow his own lawn,” he said last Friday. “I don’t know about that,” Larry responded. Larry’s mowing ended years ago. He almost

amputated his left foot shortly after disobeying his wife Peggy and buying a chainsaw. On most days we disperse after we’ve had a cup of coffee or if we are feeling adventuresome two cups, one of which our cardiologists advise us ought to be decaffeinated. Twice outside the café on the sidewalk we sang a benediction, not a canticle from Morning Prayer, but a verse from an old music hall song: “We’re all growing older, older every day, / Older and older, so the people say; / Some are growing uglier, and some are growing gray, / But we’re all growing older every day.”At the end of the verse we didn’t bow our heads and whisper “Amen.” Instead we grinned and shouted a rhyming “hurray.”

When I left the café on this occasion, I was alert and in good spirits. Behind a rack of pamphlets on the town square stood two Jehovah’s Witnesses. Passersby avoided them, and the men looked forlorn, so I stopped and chatted.At the end of the conversation, I said, “Be seeing you.” “Do you live nearby?” one of the men asked. “Yes, on a side street not far from here,” I answered. “Well, then,” the man said, “We’ll be seeing you first.” Later as I sauntered home along a state highway I watched a chipmunk scoot under sweet fern then noticed a damsel fly clinging to an autumn olive. The wings of the fly were gray and modest and hung down over its back like a veil. Adoe stood on a ledge above the road. She looked posed.

Her skin glowed in the sunlight, and muscles rippled across her flanks in currents. Bunched along the shoulder of the road were bouquets of yellow hawkweed. Ox-eyed daisies had begun to bloom and were so bright and spirited that I smiled. Sadly, the smile disappeared quickly. I spotted a painted turtle in the road, but on darting onto the asphalt to rescue the turtle, I discovered that someone had run over it exploding its shell. The turtle was on the center line, and the driver who crushed it strayed out of his lane on purpose. “Damn,” I exclaimed, but I didn’t limit myself to one expletive. Exposure to the human mongrel makes me fester into words, and I described the driver’s phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, this last, rancidulus filius canis or for the urbane cosmopolite, schweinehund.

CLAIRE CONSIDERS

Homelight by Lola Haskins

The poems in Lola Haskins’newest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), are equally elegant and eloquent in their graceful blend of theme, imagery, and language. Elegant in their refined, fluent use of words and eloquent in their visions and messages, these are luminous poems. While some poems are nearly haiku-short, others contain many stanzas, yet all resonate with beguiling, stirring words from a poet with a close connection to the natural world and an intense perceptiveness. There’s a spiritual quality to many of the poems, even a metaphysical element to some as in “The Discovery” where “time is as / random as the patterns the sun makes on / any given day…”As Haskins travels between accessible and elusive, the personal and the observational, Homelight offers a stunning collection of well-crafted, evocative poems which flow with a natural rhythm.

Organized into seven named sections, these 63 poems are diverse in their topics. In part one, titled “On the Shoulders of Giants,” Haskins writes in the style of such renowned poets as William Blake, W. S. Merwin and Mary Oliver. In part two, “Wings,” she celebrates wild birds, often a topic of hers in prior collections. Other named sections include: “And TheyAre Gone,” “(In)humanity,” “Corona,” “The Slapped Girl,” and “Rehearsing.”

Haskins’talent for the poetry of nature is well established with her prior books and her poems of the

natural world stands out superbly in Homelight too.As a long-time environmentalist and outdoors enthusiast, she occasionally tilts these poems toward a world-weary awareness of what we are damaging and seeing slipping away. In “Dominion,” she questions when we will understand how “the tips of our fingers / are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.” In “Those Who LookAlike butAre Not,” she ends the poem with “They are not the ones destroying the world.” Yet, the poems usually lend themselves to hopefulness and celebration of what we still have as she finds a yin and yang equilibrium. For example, in “The Hundred and One Names of the Wind,” Haskins rejoices in the wind for “its voices / have taught us song, / and its swaying dance.” Yet, she also recognizes “for any day / of the world it may crush us under / our houses.” In the end, she wonders “be we wise or foolish do we / understand what we have done.”

Haskins’vivid use of metaphors, simile, and precise, unique descriptions is so powerful that images lifted from the natural world become so much more—which of course is the alchemy in truly good poems. In “The Salt Marsh,” for example, “At dusk the water turns melted pearl” and in, “Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love,” readers find “The earth is a kind chair. When I have stopped breathing she will not tell me / I must get up.” In “At the Park,” robins “drab as

dead leaves” nonetheless rise “like children swinging / lanterns, stars among the darkened trees.”And the bird in “The Woodpecker” will “hammer at the tree / like a resolute / toddler / pounding pegs.”

Among the nature and personal poems, a few are also topical. The pandemic appears in the section titled “Corona, 2019-2021” where in a poem entitled “Woods,” Haskins observes sharply that “Home and here are / the only places / I’m allowed / now the world is sick.” Yet, even in that narrowed space, she finds beauty—“Atiny violet moth / has fallen in love / with my socks.”

Other topical poems include “Aleppo,” where a Syria father “speaks of his six month old boy, born here / who has never seen the sky.” In “Bear,” referencing Ukraine, she writes:

If a group of bears attacks your village, lie still.

If they are not fooled, fight back with everything they are trying to rip out.

If this means you have to set fire to your country, do it.

The most deeply personal poems are those in “The Slapped Girl” and in “Rehearsing.” One of the poems in those sections is a bittersweet, haunting love poem entitled “Though We Can Never Be Together.” In only twelve

sublime lines, the poem captures both a story and a feeling, beginning with this line: “I live with you / in the interstice between breath and breath / in the cool damp hollows tides leave in the sand” and ending with these words:

And I wear you the way a Sikh wears his cord under his clothes in token of the ineffable beauty of the world.

All in all, these are rich, layered poems of beauty and transcendence which once more establishes Lola Haskins as a poet worthy of her many accolades and worthy of reading, re-reading, and cherishing.

Lola Haskins’poems have been broadcast over the BBC and her work has appeared in such prestigious publications as TheAtlantic, London Review of Books, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and others. Her body of work also includes thirteen previous collections of poetry, a beginner’s guide to the poetry life, and a non-fiction book about Florida cemeteries. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, she has been honored with three book prizes, two NEAfellowships, four Florida CulturalAffairs fellowships, the Emily Dickinson/Writer

Dominion

by

Lola Haskins, from Homelight (used with permission)

We name the birds and think those are their names but our throats are helpless when calling flights pass over and we can’t taste the earth that comes up with the worm in a robin’s beak nor in the worst moments of our lives can we approach the way an owl sobs.

We analyze the sky using charts one phenomenon at a time yet when light pierces the clouds like our visions of God we turn into open mouths and when that light enters us no matter how much we want to keep it because we do not have the tools we can never.

Magazine award from Poetry Society ofAmerica, and many others.

We wade through undergrowth whose leaves and sticks are our words for them but the nodules and stitchings on our ankles will always know more about plants than we do and we have no idea what to call the way trees dwarf us nor when we hold them how to interpret the patterns their barks leave on our cheeks.

We have stories but we cannot parse them so when we step on a seedling struggling through a crack we never think of Cain andAbel nor does the way water cascades towards us from high and ancient rock bring Rapunzel to mind nor when we look at the stars do we rememberAs it was in the beginning.

When will we understand that all our classifications are only attempted dust?

That nothing pinned to a card is true? That sight and hearing and taste and our hearts and our brains and the tips of our fingers are like yellow butterflies? Reach for them and they are gone.

Ms. Haskins’ recent collection, Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (Pitt, 2019) was featured in The New York Times Sunday magazine. Previous to that was How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016) , set in the woods and waters of North central Floride. The two before that, The Grace to Leave (Anhinga, 2012), and Still, the Mountain (Paper Kite, 2010), won Florida Book Awards. Her in-print books of poems are Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2004), Extranjera (Story Line, 1998), and The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001). The books before these, Hunger (University of Iowa Press, 1993– winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize), Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida, 1990), Castings (Countryman Press, 1984), and Planting the Children, (University Press of Florida, 1983), are out of print but can be ordered from this web site. Across Her Broad Lap Something Wonderful (State Street) and Solutions Beginning with A, fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor (Modernbook) are unavailable.

Ms. Haskins’ prose writings include Fifteen Florida Cemeteries, Strange Tales Unearthed (University Press of Florida, 2011) and an advice book for people interested in poetry, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life (Backwaters, 2007). is now available from the University of Nebraska Press.

THE WRITER’S EYE

Watching The Classics

From A Different Point View

Recipe for a classic comedy:

1 raffish sax-playing Casanova

1 second banana who plays bass fiddle

1 sexy woman with bad taste in men

The seasoning: Tony Curtis, Jack Lemon, Marilyn Monroe, and great character actors like Pat O’Brien, George Raft, Joe E. Brown, and Nehemiah Persoff

It’s the 1920s, and Joe and Jerry (Tony and Jack respectively) are seedy musicians desperate for work. When they witness a mob hit in a garage, they’re desperate to get out of town. They need a gig, but the only one hiring is an all-girl orchestra bound for Florida. Enter Josephine and Daphne, our heroes in drag. They make it to the train station, and just as they board, Josephine catches sight of Sugar Kane Kowalczyk (Marilyn), and he’s immediately in lust with the curvaceous, gorgeous woman. Shenanigans ensue on the overnight train to Florida with Joe doing his best to get Sugar alone, though he knows he can’t reveal himself.

In Florida, Joe appropriates the baggage of the band manager and then masquerades as a Standard Oil heir to win Sugar’s heart. She’s through with poor musicians, you see.Adopting a hilarious Cary Grant accent, Tony commences wooing.

Unfortunately for our heroines (heroes?) the mob shows up for the meeting between two gangs. What will they do? It’s funny, suspenseful, and surprisingly tender at times.

What can a writer learn by watching this film?

First, there’s the physical comedy, like a man in drag stumbling in high heels. It reveals Jerry’s character completely. He’s a bumbler and slow on the uptake, while Joe, the sharp operator, is fine. Second, there’s the way the screenwriters, including the director, the great Billy Wilder, limn character through dialogue and action. There’s no finer master of this than Wilder, six-time Oscar winner with an additional fifteen nominations. If your ambition is to write screenplays, this one has it all.

“… authors have been pushing their work and themselves for as long as the written word has been around. There were probably a few disgruntled writers at the manna bar grousing about Moses’ outlandish gimmick with those stone tablets.”

Hello. I’m Not Selling Anything

Deborah-Zenha Adams

We’re all targets, aren’t we? Marketers of one sort or another are always trying to pry a few (or a lot) of pennies out of our hands in exchange for merchandise or information. People who study such things say that we each see about 10,000 ads every day on social media. How many more pop into our email boxes and our television screens? On our phones? In mailboxes? Billboards? It wears me out. How about you?

Years ago I ran into a woman who’d been a sales rep for one of my publishers. She wasn’t with that company any longer, she said. She gave her resignation the day they stopped selling books and started selling “units.” I admire her dedication to the literary arts, and I love her idealism. Books—indeed, literature in any form!—should be above the gutter of commercialism. If only writers could live on high mindedness and good wishes.

Marketing madness had already started when my first book was published in the dark ages of the 1990s.Authors in Hats was a thing. Oh, and there was that time the author told a room full of readers that they should buy her book because, she said, “It’s excellent.” Much was made of these blatant examples of self-promotion, and I recall muttered pleas for a return to decorum and modesty in the literary world. Now publishers require a marketing plan along with a cover letter and sample chapters. Having a platform and a billion followers is requisite. Connections,

networks, and perhaps underground tunnels connecting the author to Oprah’s soundstage are necessary before contracts will be signed.

Listen, I’m not oblivious to the ways of the world. I understand that an author who rests in the shadows will be ignored. No one will buy a book they’ve never heard of, and people are far more likely to buy books by people they’ve met. I also know that authors have been pushing their work and themselves for as long as the written word has been around. There were probably a few disgruntled writers at the manna bar grousing about Moses’outlandish gimmick with those stone tablets.

Is there a way to get the word out about our work without metaphorical megaphones? There must be, and I want to hear from you about this. Send me your ideas for promotion that don’t require authors to stand naked on rooftops while spouting cover blurbs. Tell me how you’ve subverted the expectations.

Over the past few years I’ve turned my own blog into a space for promoting other writers’works. I post an occasional review, but mostly I use guest posts and author interviews from writers whose work I enjoy. My guidelines stress that there be NO gratuitous self-promotion in their responses; instead, I post book covers and summaries along with purchase links at the end of the post. This allows blog visitors to get the information they’re pro-

Hello.I’mNotSellingAnythingbyDeborah-ZenhaAdams

mised without having to slog through ads and blatant self promotion.

My website, like any writer’s, contains the requisite links for purchasing my books. There’s also a page with links to my published work that’s online.Again…I’m not oblivious. Feel free to ignore all of that. I don’t have a mission statement (it’s a blog, for goodness’sake!), but here’s what it’s about:

I bring in professional writers and editors, and they offer great advice to writers, readers, and anyone interested in creative writing. It's all completely free. You are cordially invited to visit my blog. You’re under no obligation, and no salesman will call.

Visit Deborah’s blog here

Deborah Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry. She served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years, and is currently a reader for Boomerlit.

She has been a guest speaker at numerous events, including Southern Festival of Books, Appalachian Studies Conference, Warioto Regional Library Board of Trustees Conference, Southeastern Booksellers Association, Georgia Library Association Convention, Emory University, East Tennessee State University Writers Program, and many others. She is a lifetime member of the Southern Literary Coalition.

Deborah-Zenha is available for interviews, speaking, and author events. Her signature workshops include Write Your Memoir (even if you aren’t a writer) and Write Your Yoga Memoir.

An utterly delightful and exquisite romp through the playgrounds of the Southern aristocracy, Ship Watch, Johnathon Scott Barrett's debut novel, has it all. The cover sets the tone for the excesses contained within.

The Randolph family, and the characters that encircle them are a privileged group, with perhaps one exception, are surprisingly not haughty to extreme.Amongst them, they wear their exquisite jewels, drive their Bentleys, Mercedes and BMWs, wear leather driving gloves, and frequent their exclusive clubs, all with the same day to dayness of the less fortunately financial.After all, they are exceedingly wealthy and it is simply their birthright to do exactly as they please.

The story begins with the Randolph’s extended family gathering for dinner at Ship Watch, their riverside plantation so named for the view of the shipyard from the Victorian cupola and widow's walk that adorned the top of the house. “George Randolph had been sent to Savannah to expand his family’s shipbuilding and iron business, which proved to be very successful ventures in these new United States. Commerce and shipping were booming, and the family prospered with it.”

With his money, he bought land, built an extraordinary house in the 1870’s and filled it with custom made furniture that was featured in a magazine stating, “the most extensive, important, and valuable collection of fine

American Southern furnishings in the world.”

The grande dame, Martha Stephens Randolph, aptly called Grand Martha, is a wickedly wonderful leading lady. To call her a steel magnolia would be an insult, like comparing a dinghy to a container ship. She not only has the fortitude, but also the means and resolve, to jiggle her bracelet laden arm and watch the marionette’s dance. You just can't help but wish she had been your very own cousin and best friend.

Prior to dinner, Martha holds a family meeting and a discussion ensues about the future of the plantation. Will the bad behavior of the current residents lead to the plantation being deeded to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, or can the Grand Dame-wannabe finagle a different scenario?

Elizabeth “Lily” Baylor Randolph, poor thing that she isn’t, as she is getting ready to go to the dinner at Ship Watch, “… walked to the elevator at the rear of her house. She rode up two floors to the top and stepped directly into her dressing room. Before she andAdd Jr. had moved into the townhouse and given up the plantation to that difficult beyond words daughter-in-law, he allowed her to convert the 1500 square feet fourth floor into one large, exquisitely designed space to house her wardrobe.”

The entire fuss over the future of Ship Watch is the

pending divorce of Lily’s children,Addison “Trip” Peyton Randolph, III and Jana Ray Chandler Randolph, ostensibly due to an affair conducted by Trip. Jana is eager, so she says, to secure the plantation for their twins. But apparently Jana may have done a little stepping out on her own.

You will root for the good guys, sneer at the snobs, and want to lunch and shop with the women, play a round of golf and catch a fish or two with the guys, and then sit on the veranda and share a cocktail. In other words, most of the characters, despite their bank accounts, are just plain likable. Then, there are some instances where you might like to tear the pearls off of a woman, and stuff them up her nose one at a time.

Among the affable characters are sprinkled the disdainful, the sorrowful, the weary, the bereft, and the humorous.

Louvenia Steward MacGregor, aka Lovey, well, she just could not have been more aptly named.

“While not a large woman, she nonetheless always seemed to fill up a room due to her expansive and garrulous personality.”

I fell in love with Lovey on the very first page when she offers her friend,AprilAnne, a cocktail apparently before the stroke of 5:00.AprilAnne demurs but Lovey explains the fine art of drinking, “Nonsense. Here in Savannah it is

a tradition to have some libation when you are getting ready to go out for the evening. It’s called a gettin’ready drink.”

AprilAnneAdams, as her name suggests, is a breath of spring air. She is a best selling author and attorney visiting Lovey for the summer, after her own divorce in New York City. Has love leftAprilAnne behind or is there some spring left in her chicken?

Patrick Collin Steward Hogan is Lovey’s cousin and driver. His sense of humor and quick wit have everyone laughing and championing his future. Lovey tells Patrick,” Well now, you know I’d rather walk a mile on my lips than criticize someone.” To which Patrick quips, “If that’s the case, Miss Lovey Mac, your odometer is about to turn over another hundred thousand any minute now.”

Buckner Pearson, appropriately called Buck because his name is an accurate description of his personality and rhymes with his favorite pastime, is a deplorable little snot and we are happy to see him get his comeuppance at some unlikely hands.

The cast, for the most part consisting of people with at least three names, goes on and on.

Mr. Barrett has very kindly included a list of characters at the beginning of the book, which is very helpful and I found myself having to reference on occasion.

Like many segments of wealthy society, it is essential to

have at least two vacation spots - one to get away from the heat (or cold) and one at the beach. From the town of Savannah, north to the mountains in Highlands, and southeast to the beaches of Sea Island, this crew of the rich and famous move easily between the three, and it would seem, never even have to fill their own gas tanks on the way.

Evictions, lawsuits, plotting, conniving, cunning, and revenge are deliciously interwoven. We have all heard stories of revenge but emptying cans of tuna fish in the spare tire compartment of the car your mother-in-law has repossessed is a new giggle.

Savor the descriptions and you will find that you are right there in the action, tasting the biscuits, enviously admiring the 9 carat diamond, feeling the fluffy fur of the dogs, breathing the fresh mountain air, falling in love again, and imagining what it would be like to be wealthy beyond belief.

Pick Ship Watch up when you have time to read it all at once because you will not want to put this book down.

Mary Ellen Thompson’s interview with the legendary Pat Conroy was published in A Lowcountry Heart. A lead features writer for Beaufort Lifestyle Magazine for eight years under Julie Hales reign, and columnist for Lowcountry Weekly for ten years, she has also written for WELL READ Magazine, Southern Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, Pooler Magazine, Effingham Magazine, Carolina Arts Magazine, St. Mary’s Magazine and Eat, Sleep, Play Beaufort.

Mary Ellen has very happy feet and loves to travel. Raised on the Main Line of Philadelphia and the Eastern Shore of MD, she has a B.S. From Skidmore College in Business. Currently living on Saint Helena Island, SC, she hosts a Writer’s Residency for the Pat Conroy Literary Center, and is writing a retrospective narrative.

“Bold Women. Dark Stories.”

Annie McDonnell introduces Tonya Mitchell, author of The Arsenic Eater’s Wife

Every month I choose to interview someone in our industry that I believe was born to shine. My interview is very specific. I have a love affair with The Proust Questionnaire. It began as a parlor game created by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. The interesting part of it is not only do you get to know the author, but this is a tool that authors can use to breathe life into their characters. It is a lot of fun for various reasons! So, when you watch the podcast, you will learn much more about Tonya!

I had no hesitation when asking Tonya Mitchell to be a guest this month because her new book, The Arsenic Eater’s Wife, was just released in February by Bloodhound Books, and it is one you’ll devour. Her sophomore novel is about a woman who is accused of killing her husband, but is she actually guilty? Inspired by a true historical case, this novel will delight and engross readers.

Liverpool, England, 1889: In the shadowy streets, the air is thick with secrets and the line between guilt and innocence blurs. Twenty-six-year-old Constance Sullivan is brought to trial charged with poisoning her husband, William. But William was no ordinary victim…

As Constance's barrister fights to prove her innocence, a sinister web of deception unravels, exposing the dark underbelly of their seemingly idyllic marriage. One by one, witnesses emerge with incriminating testimony and facts about the dark side of Constance and William’s marriage are revealed. For many, the widow’s guilt seems clear. But is someone holding the key to the whole truth?

Inspired by a true case, The Arsenic Eater’s Wife will hold the reader spellbound until the final, heart-stopping revelation.

Her debut novel, A Feigned Madness that came out in 2021 was one of my top 20 books that year. It won the Reader Views Reviewers ChoiceAward and the KopsFetherling International BookAward for Best New Voice in Historical Fiction. Tonya is not only committed to her research, she is also a truly mesmerizing storyteller. I don’t know which swept me away more. Her subjects are beyond absorbing and curious. I became deeply invested in who she wrote about beyond the last page. I love when I close the book and I feel like I need to know more.

Trust me when I tell you that you want to read Tonya Mitchell’s books and follow her!

Don’t forget to check outAnnieAsks on WELL READ's YouTube channel BETWEEN THE PAGES for more to this interview - lots of fun and interesting conversation! Tonya is one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met.

To find out more about Tonya Mitchell CLICK HERE.

"A gorgeously Gothic and atmospheric whodunit filled with surprising twists and memorable characters that I tore through in a single sitting. Inspired by a true-life crime, The Arsenic Eater’s Wife offers proof that the darkest mystery remains the human heart."

—Kris Waldherr, author

of Unnatural Creatures: A Novel of the Frankenstein Women and The Lost History of Dreams

TheArsenic Eater’s Wife

Tonya Mitchell

THE WISDOM OF WINTER: REFLECTIONS FROM THE JOURNEY

The Wisdom of Winter by Jackie K. Cooper is a gathering of his memories over decades of his life in the South. According to one reader, the stories feel “like a comforting, warm blanket on a cold winter night.” Cooper reflects on a life well-lived in his eighth book with a collection of stories he presents in a narrative format. He invites readers into his world with open arms.

Cooper’s stories are reminiscent of conversations with an old friend while sitting on a front porch and sipping sweet tea. The narrative flows seamlessly and carries the reader from one heartfelt story to the next. What sets The Wisdom of Winter apart is Cooper’s ability to connect with readers in a way that makes each feel a sense of closeness. His stories strike a chord with readers on a personal level.

From the first page, the book captivates with Cooper’s honesty and transparency. Each story focuses on an event in his journey through life. Cooper weaves tales that are heartwarming and thought-provoking. He explores the themes of faith, family, friends, and food, and, through his stories, he demonstrates how the “Four F’s” are integral to his life. Cooper’s stories are not just reflections; they are life lessons, delivered with warmth and sincerity.

In a world filled with chaos and uncertainty, The Wisdom

of Winter stands as a beacon of hope and is filled with Cooper’s optimism. It serves as a reminder of the enduring importance of life’s simple joys and the impact of sharing one’s journey with others. Jackie K. Cooper’s ability to blend humor, wisdom, and nostalgia leaves a lasting impression that provides comfort and insight long after the last page is turned.

Lovelace Cook is a storyteller, writer, podcaster, and narrator. She worked in NYC for magazine publishing and television, and she worked on feature films in LA while attending film production and screenwriting classes at UCLA and the American Film Institute. She traveled through and lived in India, SE Asia, and the UK from 2013-2016. The books, authors, and films she discovered influenced her podcast Bollywood and Books and her misadventures on the road, traveling like a 20-year-old on a gap year, inspired Meet Me in Mumbai.

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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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OFF THE PAGE

A monthly column that takes us off the page and into the life of Raymond Atkins

Beware the Ides of March

By the time you read this I will have retired from fulltime employment. Yes, after 57 years of slaving over a hot salt mine, I have stepped aside to make room for the next generations because to hear them tell it, I’ve been holding them back long enough. So now I am retired. Well, there is one codicil to that. When I told Mandy that I was hanging it up, her attorneys came to my house in the dark of night to invoke in person theAw Hell No clause of my contract. I awoke, and there they stood, serious-looking angular men in black suits with narrow lapels. We conferred, and apparently, “in perpetuity” means something different than I thought it did, which just goes to show that it is not the best of ideas to let the boys down at the barber shop look over your legal documents before you sign them. So, I must write these columns from now on, and you must read these columns

from now on. We are in this together.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, never confer with serious-looking angular men in black suits and narrow lapels while you are wearing only boxer shorts. The dynamics of the exchange are such that you are at an automatic disadvantage, and the negotiations are likely to get away from you.

During my long years in the workforce I have pursued a variety of endeavors, some because I wanted to and others because I needed the job, including, in no particular order, grass cutter, snow shoveller, factory worker, truck driver, gas pumper, mill worker, mechanic, farm worker, car salesman, supervisor, vice-president, sawmiller, writer, professor, carpenter, contractor, entrepreneur, and antiques dealer. Some of these jobs were fun, and some of them definitely were not, but they all had one thing in common. Payday.

The old saying goes that the only three things you can’t get around are death, taxes, and bad jobs. Okay, I just threw that last one in there, because everyone you talk to thinks they have had the world’s worst job at one time or another, and also because I needed a setup so I could move this thing in the direction I wanted to head.Anyway, there is no doubt that some people have had some doozies. I know a guy who used to repossess widescreen rental televisions at night. That’s a bad job.And I know another

person who was the dead-chicken burner at the poultry farm.Again, that’s a bad job. But what really gets me is the people who think they have had it rough in the workaday world, but who in actual fact wouldn’t know a crummy job if you ran over their feet with a dump truck full of them. You know the ones I’m talking about. Oh, we also need to add dump-trucker to that list up there. Sorry. I forgot.

These clueless folks have to take some personal time after they chip a nail at the company fruit and yogurt bar. They file a grievance when the canteen is out of whole cream for the coffee and they have to use Coffee Mate instead. They must take a moment to gather themselves when someone parks in their spot next to the building and they subsequently find themselves walking all the way in from the parking deck.

I don’t like to brag, but I have had my share of horrible jobs. Ironically, though, the worst time I ever had at work happened while I was performing a task I didn’t mind doing at all.As a matter of fact, I kind of liked it, and if it hadn’t been for the unfortunate set of circumstances that led up to theAttack of the Rogue Twinkies, I might have just stayed put.

First off, they weren’t really Twinkies; they were a competitor’s version of the iconic creme-filled sponge fingers. I worked at a commercial bakery that made a

gajillion of the things every day, and my job was to drive a switch tractor, which was a small truck of the tractortrailer variety. I spent my days backing empty trailers up to the loading dock and pulling out trailers brimming with Twinkies.Alas, it was that “brimming” part that got me. For those of you who don’t know, Twinkies pack out at twenty-four cakes to the box, eight boxes to the tray, forty trays to the rolling rack, and thirty-five rolling racks to the trailer. That works out to exactly 268,800 Twinkies per trailer, which is a lot of cake, and which is a number you’ll want to keep handy.

There I was on that fine fall day, switching trailers like the true professional I was, young and in my prime with all the days of the world before me, bringing creme-filled snack cakes to the masses. Life was good. Then I got a call on the two-way radio informing me that trailer number 1068 was loaded and should be pulled to the staging area. So, I whipped my little switch tractor around, backed up and attached to trailer number 1086, hooked up my lights and air hoses, and headed for the staging area two miles up the highway.

Yes, I said, “trailer number 1086,” and no, that’s not a typo.

I had grabbed the wrong trailer, and even though it, too, was full of Twinkies, the load was not secured. So, as I headed up the highway, a full rack of Twinkies was rolling

out of the open back door of the trailer at the rate of approximately one every five seconds.As I drove, I looked to my left at the loading area. Every vacant door was raised, and all manner of co-workers and supervisors were waving, pointing, and hollering at me. Being the friendly sort, I waved, pointed, hollered back, and kept driving up that slightly inclined stretch of US 11, spitting out rack after rack of Twinkies like they were some kind of high calorie contrail. Then I looked in my rear view mirror, and the world as I knew it changed for the worse.

NorthAlabama was covered in sponge cake, and I slammed on the brakes just as the last rack rolled out of the trailer onto the asphalt, as if to punctuate the whole unfortunate episode. In the aftermath of the tragedy, even allowing for the dozens of boxes I slipped to kids in passing cars, I still spent about a week picking up, dusting off, and reloading 268,800 Twinkies, which was not as much fun as it sounds.At one point during the ordeal, I asked my boss why he didn’t just fire me, and his reply was that he wanted me to suffer. By the time I finished, I had developed an aversion to snack cakes and a sense of perspective.

Although this incident happened early in my work life—I guess I was 22 or 23—the lessons it taught served me well for the rest of my time in employment. I learned to always check the numbers (I also learned I was

dyslexic). I learned to be sure the trailer was ready. I learned to pay attention to what I was doing. I learned how to get fired with grace because after the boss had made me suffer enough, he did. I learned that when you give out boxes of Twinkies to all the kids you know, you become very popular in the extended family. I learned how to write an extended metaphor, and if you get it you are my people.

Oh man! I forgot another one! We need to add poet to the list up there! I’ll see y’all next month.

Mandy Haynes, Editor-In-Chief

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. She is the editor of Encounters with Nature - a collaboration ofAmelia Island Writers andArtists, The WELL READ's Best of 2023 anthologies, and a co-editor of The Best of the Shortest: A Southern Writers Reading Reunion anthology. Mandy is the creator, designer, content editor, and publisher of WELL READ Magazine.

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

Raymond L.Atkins is a reputed and award-winningAmerican writer, who is famous for writing Southern fiction, paranormal, mystery, and humor stories. He has penned several mind-blowing standalone novels, including Sorrow Wood, Sweetwater Blues, Front Porch Prophet, Camp Redemption, etc.Atkins lives and works in the mountains of Northwest Georgia

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.

Ann Hite, Contributing Editor (MOUNTAIN MAGIC)

In September of 2011 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. Haints On Black Mountain:AHaunted Short Story Collection was one of ten finalist for the Townsend Prize in December 2022. It has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won Bronze in the Forward Indie 2023. She was raised by anAppalachian Granny Woman and steeped in mountain magic. Her passion forAppalachia and history heavily influences her writing.

Meet the staff

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. Aseventh 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.

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 crosseyed rescued black cat and her husband.

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.

Annie McDonnell, Contributing Editor (ANNIEASKS)

Annie McDonnell, best selling author of Annie’s Song: Dandelions, Dreams & Dogs, contributor to In Flow Magazine, NZ and founder of the Write Review, teacher, speaker, book reviewer, author consultant, co-administrator of the World of the Write Review Book Club, blogger, and author online event planner.

Fucking Hipsters by

Mandy Haynes

(Dedicated to fellow East Nashvillians who mourn the loss of a great city...)

Frank ignores the young doctor and wonders if he might be having a heart attack and welcomes the idea. He has no control over the flood of tears that pours from his eyes, or the way the muscles contort and pinch in his face. The pain comes from deep in his stomach, forcing its way into his chest. It feels as if his ribs might break before the pressure rises up his neck and pushes its way out of his mouth.

“Fucking hipsters …” he says before another wail chokes off the rest of the sentence.

The young therapist’s eyebrows are the only things that move. She quickly brings them back down and adjusts her glasses. This is not what she expected, but she’s glad to hear his voice. She sits behind her poker face and waits for him to continue. Several minutes pass before she attempts to hand him the box of tissues. If he notices the tissues she offers, he ignores them. She pauses before deciding to put the box back on the table and starts to wonder if she heard him correctly. Hadn’t she just said the same thing this morning as she jogged past the new and so-called improved Dino’s? Fucking hipsters, she’d cursed under her breath as she ran past the litter of red plastic cups and cigarette butts left out on the sidewalk from last night’s crowd.

Fucking Hipsters is a short story that’s in the collection, Walking the Wrong Way Home. If you want to hear the rest of Frank’s story, you can read it now for free through Kindle Unlimited, or purchase it for ninety-nine cents.

"It may be fiction but it's all true. Mandy writes razor-sharp, down-to-the bone southern tales about total strangers that you've known your whole life. She knows us better than we know ourselves. This is the good stuff." Mike Henderson, Grammy award winning singer/songwriter, musician, and all around badass.

"From her mind come people who inspire and infuriate and inform. They'll make you ache and smile and sigh, all at the same time." Peter Cooper, award-winning journalist, author, singer/ songwriter, and musician.

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 recently with her three dogs and one turtle fromAmelia Island to Semmes,Alabama into a barn at Good Fortune Farm Refuge where she helps author, Carolyn Haines take care of farm chores and rescues of all shapes and sizes with various medical issues and special needs. They are collaborating on a Feminist Thriller/ Suspense novel that mirrors their life on the farmminus the body count.