“You are overweight,” Tonya, the Delta Airlines desk attendant tells me. “It’ll be an additional two hundred dollars.” Judgement seeps from Tonya’s guinea hen eyes, slips from the corners of her mouth in spittle. How dare you, I think to myself, looking down at Miss Audrey Hepburn, my suitcase. (I call my suitcase Miss Audrey […]
“Lick the Sherbet Sky: Reflections of a Writer’s Residency” by Robert Gwaltney
April 18, 2023 by 10 Comments
Legal Thrillers: Why we love them—and reviews of three new ones
December 20, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Essay and Reviews by Claire Hamner Matturro What is it about legal thrillers that consistently entice readers who return to time and time again to this genre? Maybe it starts with the enduring legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird, American’s most beloved book, according to a PBS poll. At its core, Mockingbird is a classic […]
Oedipus, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and “Astonishing Primitives”
October 19, 2022 by Leave a Comment
“How to Read a Novel” by Caroline Gordon Cluny Media Edition, 2019; Originally published, 1953 “The Malefactors” by Caroline Gordon Cluny Media Edition, 2019; Originally published, 1956 Review Essay by Edwina Pendarvis Caroline Gordon’s How to Read a Novel is a little outdated, but still intriguing in its observations on the novel. Because her […]
If You Want to Understand Code-Switching, You Need to Read Jean Toomer’s “Cane”
September 7, 2022 by Leave a Comment
Toomer’s groundbreaking 1923 work reflects the complexity of racial performance By Lee Williams As the Harlem Renaissance skipped to a run, the South Georgian characters of Jean Toomer’s Cane demonstrated what present day Black Americans know all too well: to survive the collisions of racial trauma or violence, one has to switch identities. Constantly. Published in 1923, […]
David Bottoms’s “Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump”: Forty Years Later
February 10, 2022 by 1 Comment
Essay by Steven Croft After forty years, David Bottoms remains a poet of Georgia who, like other great Southern writers of place, e.g., Faulkner, O’Connor, McCullers, is able to make the markedly regional universal. Author of nine full-length books of poetry, Bottoms increasingly asks through the arc of these books, to quote Wallace Stevens in […]
How “I Love to Write Day” Got Started
November 15, 2021 by Leave a Comment
By John Riddle In the spring of 2002, I was driving from my home in Delaware to the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writer’s conference in Asheville, North Carolina, where I was scheduled to speak. My oldest daughter, Bonnie, was in the car with me; she was a college student at the time and interested in attending some […]