Row!
My first word.
My mother heard me say it in our brick house with blue shutters in Jacksonville, Florida. She had sung me the nursery rhyme many times, pretending to paddle a boat with her arms. Four pine …
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Genre: Essays
I live in Tucson. People tell me they love the images they see on my various social media feeds of the mysterious, moonscape desert that surrounds. Many of the friends, acquaintances, and strangers who follow me on social media live …
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Adapted from keynote address presented at the Red Clay Writers Conference, Kennesaw, Georgia, 9 November 2019
Southern literary giant Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 in pre–Civil Rights Louisiana. There was no high school for him to attend there …
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GOOGLE DOCS, AN AIRPLANE / MONTREAL, CHICAGO, AND AUSTIN /
3:10 P.M. CENTRAL TIME, 2 DECEMBER 2019.
People shoplift citizenship like it’s a mink stole rather than a spiked choker, a freedom from a failed idea or a drive toward …
Read MoreThe first twenty minutes in line outside the bathhouse sound like thunder. The Broncos have just played—maybe won—at Mile High Stadium, and if it weren’t for a block of four-story apartment buildings we ’d be looking down on the city …
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Reinhabitation was my dream. But in rural America there’s a chasm between what is real and what is myth.
I lived my entire life to arrive on the farm. Ten years ago this quiet, quiet place had everything I wanted. …
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I would not be who I am today were it not for the Bomb.
Had there not been a bomb, my biological father—a Manhattan Project physicist—would not have died in 1951 from radiation-induced cancer a month before my fourth birthday, …
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In this Fall 2019 issue of The Georgia Review, the last with which I will be involved, Anne Wright’s essay “On the Farm”—about her late husband, James Wright (1928–1980), and his important involvement with fellow poet Robert Bly—opens with …
Read MoreAuthors’ note: This essay began after a conversation about writing and our shared interest in documenting the origin and evolution of our identities as writers. We build all our collaborative essays by responding to one another’s sections until a natural