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The Story Behind the Idea
An Interview with Edward A. Farmer by Stuart Phillips Edward A. Farmer’s novel, Pale (Blackstone 2020), follows the course of several years on a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, interweaving themes of race, power, and the stultifying effects of the inhabitants’ connection to the land. In the end, the novel plays out the entire Southern…
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Exodus
fiction by Jamie Etheridge The marks are high up on the inside of her left arm where no one is likely to see them. I see them. Pink striations. They are jagged and furrow across pale, tender skin. She sits in detention with Julia or Kim or both of the North boys, neither of whom…
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Flexing My Creative Muscles: Art Nights, Line Art, & Daily Doodles
by Melissa Llanes Brownlee If I told you that I once got busted for doodling in my Composition Notebook in math class, my hearts carved into its speckled black and white cover, stars streaking across polynomials, dragons roaring at word problems I didn’t want to solve, would you believe me? Until that day, doodling in…
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Dumpster Cats
Fiction by Kyle Seibel Gang all at the bar in their suits and ties and dresses and clacky shoes. Coming from Carter’s sentencing is why so fancy. Gemma, Carter’s most recent whatever, openly sobs. Six months, she says. No one knows what to say to that. Why Carter got six months is because he was…
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Healthy Habits: Interdependence
by Valerie Peralta When my doctor’s phone number flashed on my caller ID a month after my biannual blood work I wasn’t worried. “I’m sorry it took so long to call you with this information,” the nurse said. “I’m glad you didn’t call sooner,” I responded. She would have called immediately if the results had…
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Frost Tender
Fiction by Amanda Baldeneaux Autumn loosens everything. The cattails come uncorseted by late September. Hard wind unties the binding of seedpods for spreading. But just before the wind chill dips below freezing and the killing frosts come, the flowers in Crystal’s garden still bloom. Crystal only leased the lot of land from a neighbor, but…
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Altered Earths: Beyond Dystopia
Tackling the Narrative Challenges of Climate Change, On and Off the Page By S.E. Hartz This past weekend, I coped with a particularly bad bout of climate anxiety by watching seven straight hours of Stranger Things. Something about witnessing a group of young kids repeatedly face down various iterations of the same catastrophe, beating back…
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The Ghost of Buxahatchee Creek
Fiction by Bobby Mathews Caleb White has been dragging around behind me ever since I chained his body to an anvil and dropped the whole mess into the deep water near the base of the railroad trestle that spans Buxahatchee Creek. Ain’t no telling where the little bastard will show up. Last week, he was…
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10 Steps to Getting Rid of the Ghost in Your House
Nonfiction by Maureen O’Leary Give away the twelve boxes of your dad’s clothes your mom packed for their move to assisted living where he only survives nine days after finally, painfully dying in hospice care which is nothing like the blissfully drugged good-bye you swear he was promised. His last night in the hospital before…
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Soundscapes: Radio Lessons
by Erin Calabria The first time I heard the world through a field recorder, it was like falling into a parallel dimension. Here was another universe rubbing shoulders with ours, where everything looked the same but sounded completely different. Ears cocooned in heavy foam headphones, I slowly rotated the levels to pull this alternate reality…