John Hart on the South

"I write of the South, always the South. For me, that means small towns and forgotten corners, the fields and streams and the abandoned places. There’s such history in the south: lost wars and racism, the long divide between haves and the have-nots. Memory runs deep in the South, as does the connection to family, history, and place. For a writer, that’s rich soil."

John Hart's complete interview for Criminal Element,
http://www.criminalelement.com/blogs/2016/05/qa-with-john-hart-author-of-redemption-road-comment-sweepstakes

The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit

This remarkable book of essays, which critics liken to a set of Russian nested dolls, are interconnected musings on many topics--maternal love, child abandonment, memory loss, illness, fairytales, labyrinths, Buddhism, the Arctic, and of all things, apricots.

Solnit has a poetic turn-of-phrase which makes these essays extremely enjoyable. Scallops and sea urchins dragged from the ocean floor are "bright like internal organs laid bare by surgery or butchery."

In some ways, these essays are show how interconnected everyone's lives--their life stories--are. In the end, though, these essays are also a deeply moving memoir of one particular woman's life--Solnit's.

In her personal essays, Solnit divulges her difficult relationship with her mother. Strained as a child and young adult, the mother daughter bond grows stronger as Solnit cares for her mother's medical needs. 

Solnit reveals her own narrow brush with death--breast cancer--and her courageous attempt to start anew. 

The Last Summer of Our Youth | Tin House

Early that June, some new neighbors moved in just up the road and built a house around their trailer. We spied on the old couple until their house was done. We watched them start to collect things like tires and rusty chairs in their yard. When the swampy area behind our own house dried out, we took our adventures out back and combed the still-soft ground for arrowheads and any other evidence that the Cherokee had lived on our land. Once, Jamie found a sharp rock that we all agreed was not flat enough to qualify as a real weapon. Michael collected antique rusted bottle caps that had really been tossed aside by folks at one of our parents’ own parties. I kept a tally of the crawdad burrows, which looked like mud chimneys or tiny volcanoes. The muskrat dens were worse because they made the ground collapse, but they were harder to see.

http://tinhouse.com/the-last-summer-of-our-youth/
February 24, 2017


I really like the voice of this flash piece by Erin Harte. So electric! So alive!