New Essays about Alabama!

Recently, I’ve had three personal essays about my time living in Alabama last year accepted, which is super exciting for this fiction writer! Here are short excerpts with a link to read “Calf Poetica” online and a buy link for the issue including “Acclimated.”

Gargoyle Online #3 – “Calf Poetica” – October 2022

“High on the list of unlikely possibilities that have now become truths: your closest friend is a cattle roper. She is many other things too, like artist and reader and photographer and mother, but that arena in her backyard on top of the steep hill you climb in your sandals because you didn’t know how to properly dress while your children call to you from the Gator is a powerful definer. There she is on her horse, swinging her breakaway rope. There she is in the box, entering her zone as the calf in the chute beside her strains against the metal barrier. Such concentration. You have never seen it, not humanely possible, not with the baby rocking in his car seat on the rope swing and her daughter and yours giggling from the bench and you spectating or probably just staring, not possible, not when you can barely make a crustless quiche with your two children pulling at your legs.
And yet she holds the gaze of her husband at the release lever with such intensity that the world goes quiet.
You are alone with them.”

Read more by buying the issue here.

Southern Humanities Review – “Acclimated” – September 2022 (vol. 55.2)

“When your parents look up your new address on Google maps, they call back to ask, “Do you know there’s a train behind your house?” They ask as though there is anything to be done—as if you have not already signed the lease for the only available house in the small town in Alabama where you will soon work as the Visiting Assistant Professor of English because you have been hired at the last minute, thank god, during a bad market year and a global pandemic. No, you say, you haven’t bothered to look at the map, or check the median income, or click through photos of the closed movie theater or the empty buildings you will later walk by on Washington Street, because what difference will it make? You are moving. You have purpose.” Read more by buying the issue here.