Month: October 2017

Rock and Roll: Triptych

By Erin McGraw
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Erin McGraw is the author of six books, most recently the novel Better Food for a Better World (Slant Books, 2013). Her stories and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Atlantic, STORY, the Southern Review, Allure, and other magazines and journals. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, the poet Andrew Hudgins.

 

The Thirteen Wonders of Tammy

By Samuel Ligon
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Samuel Ligon is the author of four books of fiction, most recently Wonderland (Lost Horse Press, 2016), illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Among the Dead and Dreaming (Leapfrog Press, 2016). He’s co-editor, with Kate Lebo, of the forthcoming Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books, 2017). He teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, edits the journal Willow Springs, and is artistic director of the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference.

Hambone

By Gary Dop
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Gary Dop, a poet, playwright, and performer, is an associate professor of English and the director of Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. He is the author of two books of poetry: Father, Child, Water (2015) and the forthcoming Earth Never Settles (2020), both from Red Hen Press.

Left

By Renée Branum
From the Fall 2017 Issue

She broke all his moments in half with the kitchen door standing open.

—Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

 

A Good Place to Dig

When my mother left, I had no idea of her leaving. She took nothing with her, …

Renée Branum’s fiction has appeared in Blackbird and the Long Story, and she has stories forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, Tampa Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her essays have been published in Fields Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Hobart, and others. Her essay “Certainty” was awarded first prize in the Los Angeles Review’s Fall 2016 Nonfiction Contest, and her essay “Bolt” received first place recognition in the Florida Review’s 2017 Editors’ Awards. Branum holds two MFA degrees—one in creative nonfiction from the University of Montana and one in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

A Salaam of Birds

By Rachel Heimowitz
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Rachel Heimowitz is the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach Press, 2014). Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Salamander, Crab Orchard Review, and Prairie Schooner. She was recently a finalist for the COR Richard Peterson Prize and the winner of the Passenger Prize. Heimowitz received her MFA from Pacific University in Spring 2015.

Ashes, Ashes

By Brian Turner
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Brian Turner is a writer and musician living in Orlando, Florida. He curates The Kiss series at Guernica, soon to be published as an anthology by W.W. Norton & Company (2018). He has published a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W. W. Norton, 2015), two collections of poetry—Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010), and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney’s/The Poetry Founda-tion, 2013). He is currently at work on a second memoir, “The Wild Delight of Wild Things,” and an album of music, “11 11 (Me, Smiling),” with his group, The Inter-planetary Acoustic Team. His late wife, the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, will have her second collection of poems, Angel Bones, published by Alice James Books in May 2019.

Dazzle, Mimic, Blend

By Cate Hodorowicz
From the Fall 2017 Issue

Recently, after writing for a long while on World War II, I was exhausted by the subject, which had become a joyless task—as it sometimes needs to be. But then, the Saturday night of Labor Day weekend, my husband and …

Cate Hodorowicz’s essays and reviews have appeared in or are forthcoming from the Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Southern Indian Review, Arts & Letters, Hippocampus, and The Rumpus. She has been a Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellow at the Kenyon Writers Workshop and a Pushcart Prize recipient.

On Loose Thread

By Carol Ann Davis
From the Fall 2017 Issue
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Carol Ann Davis is the author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), both from Tupelo Press. An NEA Fellow in poetry and a finalist for the National Magazine Award for work in our pages, she has an essay collection (The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Parenting) coming out in 2019, also from Tupelo. A professor of English at Fairfield University, Davis lives in Newtown, Connecticut, with her husband and two sons. 

Trying to Find My Li’l All ’n All (Sitting on Top of the World)

By Michael Downs
From the Summer 2017 Issue
Label from the original 78 record by the Mississippi Sheiks as shown on a historical marker in Bolton, MS. Photo by the author.

A campground in Mississippi, a cold December dawn: I climbed from a  sleeping bag, befuddled by the clarity of morning. Blinking into sun-glare off the steady surfaces of ponds. Stumbling across frozen, heaved ground that had been mud the night …

Michael Downs’s books include The Greatest Show: Stories (LSU Press, 2012) and House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City (University of Nebraska Press, 2007), which won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. His recent writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Southern Review, River Teeth, and Sport Literate. Among his awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.