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Country Craft – Let’s talk: An Approach to Writing Conversations
By Stuart Phillips Late summer we transplanted thirty hosta from our front walkway, wheeling barrowsful to more welcoming spots in the shade. As my wife and I planned the new plantings, we went round and round with competing combinations before we realized that what she really wanted was a lavender hedge, and what I really […]
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Country Craft: Crafting a Legacy
By Stuart Phillips Recently, a writer called my work “honest and soulful.” That was touching, especially since I didn’t know he had read anything of mine. The realization that you never know who reads, and likes, your work reminded me of when I came home to Mississippi after my first hitch in the Army. One […]
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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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Country Craft: The Writer’s Knife
by Stuart Phillips The spring earth thawed and yielded eight slabs of New York Bluestone from my front yard, remnants of an 1820s walkway from when neighbors visited neighbors. Sixteen hundred pounds, looking for a new home. I decided to use them for steps in the little slope by our grapevines. Although well-traveled it is […]
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Country Craft: In the Brickyard
by Stuart Phillips I have a pile of bricks. Actually, I have three piles, painstakingly excavated from the yard of my new house over the past six months. That was never my aim, but I couldn’t move a cluster of hosta next to the porch or level a space for a fire pit in the […]
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Country Roads
Fiction by Stuart Phillips “Did you bring me out here to kill me?” My grandmother filled the Buick with her thin, old woman voice; it ricocheted off the headliner as we slewed back and forth in the loose gravel. She was partly right: we were going to help an old woman die. Just not her. […]