StorySouth

21/06/2024

Dear friends,
We're hard at work on our 57th issue, which will launch next Friday. We will re-open for submissions on July 1st.
Thanks for your patience!

26/03/2024

Happy Pub Day to StorySouth Assoc. Poetry Editor Jason Mccall! RAZED BY TV SETS is out today from Autofocus Literary

ABOUT THE BOOK Jason McCall wanted to be a Hector, a hero who dies fighting for a worthy cause. Instead, he’s a Narcissus. He can’t stop seeing his own reflection. And, for him, that might be just as dangerous as being a black man in the United States. In Razed by TV Sets , McCall uses a variety

07/01/2024

I prefer big, open-ended instrumental stuff when I write. While working on this book, I spent a lot of time listening to Alice Coltrane, Mary Lattimore, William Tyler, and Stars of the Lid. I was also introduced to a new band, SUSS, that came along at the perfect time while I was writing this, sort of ambient but with definite shapes emerging, seemingly threadbare but then all of the sudden astral. Beautiful stuff.

from The Windup and the Pitch: An Interview with Matthew Fiander
by GABRIELLE GIRARD

http://storysouth.com/stories/the-windup-and-the-pitch-an-interview-with-matthew-fiander/

06/01/2024

It’s a function of age, the way the propaganda of youth gets peeled away like paint on a car left out in the weather for decades. The glossy shine goes first. Then tiny pits in the surface get picked at and abraded until the integrity of the coat is lost and the bare metal starts to show through. Eventually the protective qualities of the paint are revealed to have been temporary, possibly even an illusion. In the same way, the tools they give us when we’re young to be able to go out into the world with any kind of fortitude—optimism, self-confidence, trust, faith in others, vision, doggedness, compassion—are chipped away at as we live life, and by the time we’re in our sixties and seventies (I’m sixty-five as I write this) we’ve seen some things. It’s hard not to chuck all those tools as having been not much more than crutches, though crutches, I admit, are necessary tools.

from The Optimist Concedes
by KEVIN BRENNAN

http://storysouth.com/stories/the-optimist-concedes/

05/01/2024

I cannot live
without rapture.
Fashion me a house of compassion.

Carpenter, along the scaffold
I walk in bloody twilight.
My toes grip the boards . . .

from Ascent
by LYNN STRONGIN

http://storysouth.com/stories/ascent/

04/01/2024

My dealer’s trap house on Fridays was the most poppingest trap house you’ve ever been to. Soon as you walk in, it’s like party time. Music turned all the way up. Video games playing on the TV. Other regulars would be there, sometimes a few girls. All of us, chilling, smoking, drinking, in this one little room, having a good time.

from Bus Money
by OTHELLO OMARI

http://storysouth.com/stories/bus-money/

03/01/2024

Yesterday I passed the place on the running trail
where if there would be a dog who attacked me,
he would be. I only knew I was meeting an agreement
I made with myself to run four miles, and that no dog
impeded it. He must have been busy or too cold
to come rile me, and when I cleared his jurisdiction
I thought of the first time I was chased by this dog.

from The Dog’s Woods
by BROOKE HARRIES

http://storysouth.com/stories/the-dogs-woods/

02/01/2024

When Ford realizes that a collage he is working on for Grace, a woman he is beginning to fall in love with, is based on an album itself based on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the various pieces of the novel begin fitting together in surprising ways. Readers familiar with Eliot’s poem might already have recognized that poem’s influence on the novel’s title, but Calder draws on the poem in deeper ways as well. Most significantly, by associating Ford with the sea (the novel opens with Ford dressed as a pirate, for instance) he – or is it his estranged son, Bailey, a burgeoning surfing megastar – is metaphorically recast as the Phoenician sailor from Eliot’s poem, a character whose death in the poem’s fourth section brings about the potential revitalization of the Waste Land hinted at in the poem’s fifth and final section. Of course, whether or not the Phoenician sailor’s sacrifice succeeds in dispelling the spiritual torpor of the Waste Land depends on how you read the poem’s ending. The same is true here.

from For the Work Itself: In Conversation with Thomas Calder
by EVAN FACKLER

http://storysouth.com/stories/for-the-work-itself-in-conversation-with-thomas-calder/

01/01/2024

On a trip home to Mississippi, I sat with my family on Christmas Day. I asked one of my brothers, in whose den we had gathered if he knew anything of Edwin Alexander. He had been on my mind, and I thought I might try to contact him . . .

from A Rainy Afternoon with My Dead Lover’s Mother
by JONATHAN ODELL

http://storysouth.com/stories/a-rainy-afternoon-with-my-dead-lovers-mother/

31/12/2023

One pitcher grows out of a leaf’s end
Edged with a lip around the jug’s rim,
A mouth hanging in mid-sentence.

This plant of mouths grows fat, as leaves
Bend into tangled tresses of mute jugs . . .

from Propagating Pitcher Plants
by MELINDA THOMSEN

http://storysouth.com/stories/propagating-pitcher-plants/

30/12/2023

I keep seeing/landscapes
in the brain
(the gift’s been driven in
that keen.)

I keep fearing/stars
inside the skull
(the wound’s
that beautiful.)

I waken to the heartbeat
in the vein
that round
the mind
is wound . . .

from Archer
by LYNN STRONGIN

http://storysouth.com/stories/archer/

29/12/2023

I fired my rifle in the air. Birds shook the trees, but the dog barely moved. It panted in front of my cabin, cooling itself in the pawed-up dirt. My cabin was clean-swept and pine-smelling. I did not want a dog. Next day it came back, studying me with dull eyes, digging the same shallow hole and lying down in it. November blew orange leaves from the oaks. It was a good year for acorns, and the woods thundered with their falling . . .

The Hunt I Need to Get Out of Me
by FORESTER MCCLATCHEY

from http://storysouth.com/stories/the-hunt-i-need-to-get-out-of-me/

28/12/2023

In a house with brown shutters
flapped open like wings,
I build a close-lipped room,
go shoeless for beauty,
twirl my tongue out of tune,
pick at scabs tucked spic-and-span
behind each ear, feeble fingers
douse the lights . . .

from Tonight the Air
by KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR

http://storysouth.com/stories/tonight-the-air/

27/12/2023

Idiot Men was actually supposed to come out during the pandemic. It’s got a weird publishing history. I guess you could file it under “Curious Adventures in Indie Press Publishing.” Here’s what happened . . .

from “Idiot Men”: An Interview with Scott Gould
by NELLIE HILDEBRANDT

http://storysouth.com/stories/idiot-men-an-interview-with-scott-gould/

26/12/2023

Her feathered nape puffed up, eyes wild with the exhilaration of her kill—the redtail hawk sat there in a carpet of leaves, talons gripped into squirrel meat. Dangerously close to her open hooked beak, her handler tried to distract her attention from her catch by covering the carcass with a brown hand towel hoping to get her to loosen her hold. But she wasn’t having any of it.

from Talking Hawk
by H.M. COTTON

http://storysouth.com/stories/talking-hawk/

25/12/2023

Plows blade the blizzard to the corners
of the parking lot, high piles under netless rims

so tempting that when we arrive for the dance
we don’t go inside; we find a semi-deflated

basketball in the trunk of the Caprice,
scale the snowbanks and dunk from the icy crust . . .

from Winter Ball
by BARRY PETERS

http://storysouth.com/stories/winter-ball/

24/12/2023

Run, run, run with the rising moon!
The people are sleeping in calico,
and you (my heart) do not know where to go.

from Now in the green year’s turning
by LYNN STRONGIN

http://storysouth.com/stories/from-paschal-poem-now-in-the-green-years-turning/

23/12/2023

When the dismissal bell rang on Friday afternoon, Betty found herself swept into the hallway, as if a dam had broken. If she lifted her feet off the ground, she’d be carried off who knows where by the whooping crowd in their denim jackets and Converse sneakers, giving wedgies and smacking each other on the head. She felt part of the current, but she also felt apart. A part and apart. This was her biggest problem, not counting the note Phil Walsh had slipped her today in math: Do you like Coke or Pepsi better? How could she explain?

from A Good, Wise Human Being
by REBECCA LANNING

http://storysouth.com/stories/a-good-wise-human-being/

22/12/2023

Bless the plow, metal tines
rousing drowsy soil, clover and fescue
surrendering to twist and spin.

from All is Well with the Garden
by KARI GUNTER-SEYMOUR

http://storysouth.com/stories/all-is-well-with-the-garden/

21/12/2023

Thomas Calder’s debut novel The Wind Under the Door (Unsolicited Press, 2021) follows Ford Carson, a forty-year-old divorced artist living in Asheville, NC, as he struggles to mend past relationships and forge new ones. Like a collage, the medium Ford works in, the novel cleverly functions through the juxtaposition of its various images and scenes, interweaving past and present in a way that involves the reader in Ford’s own practice of meaning making and fractured sense of self, and raises the question at the heart of any collage project: will Ford be able to unify these disparate elements into a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk of his own life, or will the work only end in further fracture and fragmentation?

from For the Work Itself: In Conversation with Thomas Calder
by EVAN FACKLER

20/12/2023

Garden Hills, the idyllic name of my childhood neighborhood in Atlanta, didn’t have a lot of gardens, just lawns, except at my house where my mother and grandmother wielded spades, clippers and weeding forks. My chores were in the garden too, removing Virginia creeper vines, and something called love-in-a-tangle. Voices of neighborhood kids made me eager to pull a few weeds and get to them quickly.

from Why I Hate Bagley Park
by BEVERLY BURCH

18/12/2023

You only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
—Warson Shire

The night I heard the clock count down
the final hours of my life,
my son-in-law came to me and said
We have no future here. This war will kill us . . .

from The Bread Maker’s Last Testament
by MARIA ROUPHAIL

http://storysouth.com/stories/the-bread-makers-last-testament/

17/12/2023

Jason Sanford: Your father worked with injured soldiers in the Southern United States during World War 2. What was it like for a Jewish family in the South during that time? What memories of that time period continue to stick with you today?

Lynn Strongin: I was four years old when we moved south, outside Miami during World War II. Later, I learned that our father worked with the most extreme cases of injury: trauma, what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, bipolar disorder, and shellshock.

from Wearing Olive Drab: An Interview with Lynn Strongin
by JASON SANFORD

http://storysouth.com/stories/wearing-olive-drab-an-interview-with-lynn-strongin/

16/12/2023

I once overheard Mr. Yam in the faculty lounge talking to a junior colleague, one of the legion of bright young women who annually enter the ranks of American public education only to marry or burn out within three years. He was explaining to her the process he had deduced whereby all the difficult students end up in his class. He has a remarkable talent for failing to perceive his failures as his own . . .

from Resurrection
by JONATHAN FREY

http://storysouth.com/stories/resurrection/