Bobwhite

In 2008 I began writing a story about a young girl growing up in the 1950s, sent by her father to live with relatives in Picayune, Mississippi, while her mother lies in the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. Now, twelve years later, “Bobwhite” has been published by Five Points Journal. I’m honored that the story appears among the work of many fine writers and poets, including Terese Svoboda, Katherine Soniat, Barbara Hamby, and Heather Sellers, as well as artist William Gay. I’m grateful to my agent Valerie Borchardt and Five Points editor Megan Sexton, as well as the many friends and fellow writers who spent time reading and responding to beginning drafts, among them Lauren Inness Norton, A.J. Verdelle, Alicia Hyland, Laurie Foos, and Mark Fabiano.

This quiet story begins:

She’d turned nine in October of 1955, that year when presidents and mothers were sent to the hospital. Carly’s father called the president Dwight instead of President Eisenhower, and he called his wife Vivienne instead of Mrs. Robicheaux. Carly paid attention to what her father said, especially when he called her by her given name: Caroline. Especially when her mother was driven to the Touro Infirmary, and her father became a man of few words. 

Here is a link to Five Points, Volume 19, Issue 3, if you’d like to buy a copy and read more. Gratitude all around for those who love and support the literary arts!

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Photo credit: Annie Spratt

One poetry collection, one novel. Debuts of inheritance, survival, and love.

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2019

Diannely Antigua

A Music Plucked Out of Happiness: An Interview with Diannely Antigua

In Dominican American poet Diannely Antigua’s debut collection “Ugly Music” (YesYes Books, 2019), winner of the Pamet River Prize, one finds sources of despair, ecstasy, and sheer honesty cracked and threaded with lyrics, breath, and tears. Mothers, grandmothers, stepfathers, and lovers enter and exit the pages, while the poems’ speaker sings and shouts and whispers words of violence and love, sex and loss, grief and drowning, miraculous surrender and rescue, forgiveness and faith. Structured as a song, with verse and chorus leading to bridge and ending in outro, the collection is shaped from memory, family, and diary entries and layered with distant islands, children lost, backseats and pregnancy tests, self-love and God’s work.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin

The Dystopia is Now: An Interview with Maurice Carlos Ruffin

In New Orleans’ author Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s much acclaimed debut novel, “We Cast a Shadow,” we find ourselves in a near-future southern city, where white supremacy reigns and the process of “demelanization”—a medical procedure to remove all characteristics of blackness—has become popular. Our unnamed Narrator, a black lawyer at a white-glove firm, is obsessed with the possibility of advancement in order to afford this procedure for his biracial son. In his desperation, he strives to protect his son from racial violence, and yet, it becomes clear that he has fallen into the trap of this very same violence by pushing this “protection” onto his son… Sweeping ideas of inheritance, pride, injustice, humanity standing back-to-back with inhumanity, survival, and devotion swarm and abound in these pages. Language that flies, whip-smart and stunning, uncovers a cracked and unjust society and calls up moments of magnified family love.

Sybelia Drive - a Novel by Karin Cecile Davidson

Forthcoming from Braddock Avenue Books in Autumn 2020!

More to come!

One Poet, Two Storytellers, and Three Interviews

Newfound Interviews, Spring 2019

Maggie Smith

Memories and Re-Imagined Myths: An Interview with Maggie Smith

Maggie Smith’s poems speak of the dangers and beauty, the tragedy and sadness, and the unforgiving joys of the world. Her poems recall the past with reflection and nostalgia, while looking through a fierce lens at the present and hoping wildly for a future, with nuance and precision and the kind of rhythmic breath that runs down a spine. And they call for attention, serious attention, to the proximity of perils, hopes, fears, dreams, desperation, lost girls, unclassified stars, motherhood, home, nature, and death. Shaping her collections to deliver warnings and reminders, memories and re-imagined myths and fairy tales, Smith constructs dwellings from her words, spaces originating in nature, in domestic life, and then shakes out their meanings so that we understand so much more than the words ever intended.

Seth Borgen

Love, Word Games, The Danger of the Flame: An Interview with Seth Borgen

The stories of Seth Borgen’s debut collection “If I Die in Ohio” (New American Press, 2019), winner of the 2017 New American Press Fiction Prize, are stretched with strands of humor and sadness that surprise, that leap about, leaving the reader laughing, sighing, nearly crying, and then laughing all over again. One moment J.D. Salinger—humor edged with something quirky, unsettling, even tragic—and the next moment Eudora Welty—precision and sleight of hand balanced with a situation of unease, all lakeside on a summer’s day—the writing calls out and creates compassion and understanding. It becomes clear that no one else but this author could’ve written these characters, assigned their different measures of vulnerability and daring and kindness and confusion, as well as their circumstances. There are stylistic notes here that might recall previous writers, but in the writing they have shifted into a new narrative approach, one that is distinctive and bold. Endings become beginnings; men who have nothing in common have everything in common; borders crossed lead to a love that was there all along; the realization that what is feared lost was lost long ago. With this collection come stories that beckon and tease, that persuade and enlighten. To read them is to be astonished.

Nick White

Every Which Way: An Interview with Nick White

In his short story collection “Sweet and Low” (Blue Rider/Penguin, 2019), Nick White writes of love, trouble, family ties, and queerness, all wrapped in the heartbreak and lyricism of country songs and storytelling. Set mostly in the small towns and farmlands of Mississippi’s hill country and wide-open delta, these tales are layered with the language of the South and its complicated structures of masculinity. The reader finds herself inside a modern version of Southern Gothic, the softness of the stories here turning crystalline and then hard and brittle, as the characters contend with each other, their endings and outcomes always unexpected.

Three Writers & Their Compassionate, Startling Worlds of Poetry, Essay, & Story

Newfound Interviews, Autumn 2018

Hanif Abdurraqib

One Clear and Clean Surface on Which to Dance: An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

Poet, essayist, and cultural critic, Hanif Abdurraqib has produced two celebrated volumes in recent years—“The Crown Ain’t Worth Much” (Button Poetry, 2016) and “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us” (Two Dollar Radio, 2017). Collections, respectively, of poetry and essays, both walk the territory of family, friendship, and community with compassion, depth, and clarity. There is no shying away from the disparity and death that crack open these worlds; instead, there is facing them, staring right through them to what truly is and what could be. Broken bodies, broken glass, mothers’ arms, closed caskets, hunger, jukeboxes, brothers, ghosts, bullets, grieving, missing those gone and those gone missing. And inside of all this is the thought: What would it be like to look up into the stars instead of fleeing “midnight and questions that come with it”?

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

What Is a Sketch but a Chalk Outline Done in Pencil or Words? An Interview with Nafissa Thompson-Spires

Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut story collection, “Heads of the Colored People,” selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, strides into the worlds of black women and men, black girls and boys, upending stereotypes and straining against the limits of the expected through a dark, provocative humor. With a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois, and as a Callaloo fellow, Tin House alum, and Sewanee scholar, Thompson-Spires infuses her writing with scholarly works, 90s pop culture, and contemporary concerns. Black culture and identity in conversation with the tensions and politics of race are angled in ways that refuse definition. Through the unique cast of characters in twelve exquisitely startling, hilarious, and at times poignant stories, questions are asked about connection, collaboration, assimilation, resistance, and vulnerability. 

Jamel Brinkley

Light, Love, and Luck: An Interview with Jamel Brinkley

In the stories of Jamel Brinkley’s expansively beautiful collection, “A Lucky Man” (Graywolf Press/A Public Space Books, 2018), selected for the 2018 National Book Awards Longlist for Fiction, fathers and sons of the Bronx and beyond try to make their way, to negotiate and understand their world. The language here is at times lyrical, always honest, revealing the reach and fascination and discomfort of the places—of the city, of the mind—in which the characters dwell. As Robert Hunsberger (Duende) writes: “Told in nine vivid short stories, Jamel Brinkley’s debut collection, “A Lucky Man,” tugs sharply at the tender threads of intimacy, race, and masculinity. Brinkley’s prose, as fierce in its vigilance as it is in its empathy, casts new light on the delicate and heartbreaking truisms of American manhood.”