Sweet Iowa

“Sweet Iowa” is out in the brilliant 2020 summer issue of STORY Magazine. It’s kind of a windswept midwestern story with love and foolishness thrown in. If you love preview below, think about purchasing the entire issue. The stories of Cara Blue Adams, Chad Simpson, Ann Lightcap Bruno, and others fill the volume with amazing voices. And in the meantime, here are Howdy and Morgan:

The first time Howdy Miller saw Morgan Loving she was walking across the barroom, her legs like scissors cutting up the room, slicing through the stares that followed her. She had the kind of walk that would take her somewhere. Howdy didn’t wonder where she’d been, just where she was going, as if the future might lengthen her stride. Her blouse fit close to her waist and was detailed with some sort of blue flowers. Bachelor buttons? Prairie asters? She wore it tucked into her jeans. Dark, new, slightly stiff—they whispered when she walked.

The fellows at the pool table stopped their game, looking up to watch her, and then someone made a shot, the white cue ball cracking a bright red into the side pocket. Men’s laughter, a sportscast droning from the television above the bar, Merle Haggard singing from the jukebox. Here and around town, Howdy had heard Morgan Loving was a west Texas girl. Young, lean, strong, blown in from the mile-high desert between Marfa and Odessa.

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Photo Credit: Sawyer Morris

New Voices: The Weight of Words & The World of Aftermath

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2018

C. Morgan Babst

Everything, Even Love, Even Home: An Interview with C. Morgan Babst

Lush with the scents of ligustrum, a fallen magnolia, an evening breeze off the Mississippi River, New Orleans author C. Morgan Babst’s debut novel, “The Floating World,” sings the world of aftermath—of devastation, desire, the city’s dead. Here is the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, above and beyond the ruptured levees, inside the psyche of a family wrought with longing and despair at the sight and reek of their drowned home. The five members and three generations of the Boisdoré family reveal this story in ribboning, intersecting storylines, emphasizing the truth of the novel’s epigraph from Virgil’s “Aeneid”: “Each must be his own hope.”

Hilary Zaid

The Weight of Silence, The Weight of Words: An Interview with Hilary Zaid

Bay Area author, alumna of Harvard, Radcliffe, and UC Berkeley, Hilary Zaid surprises, and her debut novel, “Paper is White,” is indeed an astonishing and successful surprise. Balancing weighted subjects with blue skies and beautiful slices of cake, with wedding arrangements and secret encounters, Zaid measures out humor with generosity, hope with passion, even grief with impossible understanding. Through narrative spun in first person, lead character and heroine Ellen Margolis finds her way in late 90s San Francisco, where elderly Holocaust survivors reveal their stories, relationships grow close and become divided, and the past lies like a wedding veil across the future.

Three Debut Poetry Collections: Identity, Intricacy, Wonder

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2017

Molly McCully Brown

What Becomes Beautiful is the Wildest Thing: An Interview with Molly McCully Brown

Molly McCully Brown’s poetry collection, “The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics and Feebleminded” (Persea Books, 2017), winner of the 2016 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, summons historical shadows along with bright beams of empathy and identity. Exploring the lives of those who were institutionalized within and employed by the Colony from Fall 1935 to Fall 1936, Brown’s poems lead us from dormitory to solitary confinement—“the Blind Room”—out into the field, the chapel, the infirmary, and back into the dormitory ... Attentive to the individual bound with physical and mental difference, the collection calls up the cries and scarce laughter, the whimpering and swearing and silence of the bodies within its walls.

David Eye

There Must Have Been Words Once: An Interview with David Eye

The poems of David Eye’s collection, “Seed”, (The Word Works, 2017), remind us to breathe, to sit inside the shimmering, heartbreaking moment, to stop and wonder and laugh. Here is a world curtained in nature, rapture, fertility, and desire, while, beyond, lies a horizon constrained and fragile and full of possibility. Relationships—the “father, filling the doorway,” the “boy slapped into manhood,” the “pretty mother,” the “sister, nearly four,” the “smiling aunt,” the cousin “in the City,” the lovers with their “breathless kisses”—wrap themselves together, then wrest themselves apart, and we are reminded of the addition, subtraction, and division that mark a lifetime. Discovery occurs and recurs in the act of turning inward to view a past, to understand the instant when everything changed, to open and examine and somehow make peace. “Seed” reveals how beginnings are intricate, how journeys are remembered by what lay underfoot—“the sweet, sharp scent of sun on dry needles”—and how we return from the wondrous, reckless place where we began.

Mary Cisper

Open a Cocoon: An Interview with Mary Cisper

Mary Cisper’s debut poetry collection, “Dark Tussock Moth,” winner of the 2016 Trio Award (Trio House Press, 2017), is a sweeping land, crossed by drought and flood, coursed with wildflowers and white-throated sparrows, and never apologetic, always truthful, whether reflecting on the alpine monkeyflower, searching night skies for white and blue dwarfs, or bidding a glacial goodbye. This is a naturalist’s world, one in which scientist and poet meet; where ecological transformations are rendered and, by man’s hand, ruined; wherein 17th century naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian is called forth and cocoons open. In this wilderness, one experiences mountains and meltwater, conquest and confluence, metamorphosis and migration, extinction and memory. Terrain, time, weather, and ways of seeing the world from another angle—via microscopic lens, via telescope, via wide-eyed wonder—are explored here, allowing the occasion to ponder the rich, slippery relationship between man and nature.

Swing Time

"When the music changes, so does the dance." - Hausa proverb

The epigraph of Zadie Smith's novel SWING TIME could be describing the present American political climate, especially with the book's release date exactly a week past the 2016 Presidential Election. The music has indeed changed, as has the dance. Unstable, swinging, shifting times are these. Losing oneself in the words of a novel, between bouts of activism, is what many of us are trying. Escapism? Perhaps. But it's really more like delving into further understanding of how race and difference, compassion and understanding, anger and uprising, problems and resolutions are defined in literature. 

There are so many books by authors of beautifully distinctive backgrounds that call us to read and further understand our world: Colson Whitehead's THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD; Viet Thanh Nguyen's forthcoming story collection, THE REFUGEES; Celeste Ng's EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU; Michael Chabon's MOONGLOW; Louise Erdrich's LaROSE; Ann Patchett's COMMONWEALTH; Edwidge Danticat's CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT; Alexander Chee's THE QUEEN OF THE NIGHT; Helen Oyeyemi's WHAT IS NOT YOURS IS NOT YOURS. And on and on. Read, my friends. The time is now, shifting and swinging beneath us. Ground yourselves in meaningful words and then shout to the heavens all that you have learned.

Rappahannock, Waccamaw, and Pushcart

Rappahanock, Waccamaw, and Pushcart. Go ahead. Say it as fast as you can, again and again. 

A lucky trio. Unlike December's rain, sleet, and snow. More like ribbons in your hair, buttons and bows down your shirt front, and bells on your boots. Go ahead and dance!

And here's why:

“Gorilla” was nominated for a 2016  Pushcart Prize by the editors at Animal Literary Magazine. Many thanks to Sarah Cedeño, Fiction Editor, and Danita Berg, Founder and Co-Editor!

“Something for Nothing” was published in Waccamaw Journal, Issue 13. All my best to Cara Blue Adams, Fiction Editor, for her gorgeous edits and wonderful guidance!

“Waking” was published in  Rappahannock, Issue 2.1. Many thanks to Robert Kingsley, Fiction Editor!

Buttons, bows, and bells! Join me for a spin around the floor!