David Meischen's Blog, page 2

Preaching the Gospel of Regional Writers

On April 5 two years ago, my good friend Tina Carlson and I drove from her home in Santa Fe to the Scissortail Literary Festival in Ada, Oklahoma. Scissortail was the discovery of a lifetime—three days hearing fellow writers read poetry, fiction, and memoir, three days knowing that as festival readers ourselves, we were in the best company. Each year, festival director Ken Hada brings in three featured writers. In 2023, the features included Major Jackson, a poet with national prominence, and Allison Amend, who read from Things That Pass for Love, a stunning collection of short stories. Last but not least was Octavio Quintanilla, one of my favorite poets. A week or so ago, Octavio was selected as Texas Poet Laureate for 2025-26.

At Scissortail, I got to mix with Texas writers I’ve known and admired for years, including Lyman Grant, Brady Peterson, Alan Berecka, Ann Howells, Alan Gann, Audell Shelburne, Sarah Webb, and two former Texas Poets Laureate, karla k morton, and Alan Birkelbach. I heard work by writers I hadn’t known before: Benjamin Myers, Paul Juhasz, Hank Jones, Rilla Askew, Joey Brown, Denise Tolan. . . . The list goes on—one delightful surprise after another.

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I returned to Scissortail in 2024 and 2025. This year marked twenty years of the festival. Ken Hada succumbed to subtle pressure and agreed to be one of the festival’s featured writers. He read from Visions for the Night, a new collection published by Turning Plow Press. I’m at about the halfway mark. About these poems, let me quote from the foreword by Paul Bowers:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Ken Hada is a poet who comfortably rejects clear boundaries,   although his work would seem filled with them: light and dark,   the four seasons, beginnings and endings, youth and old age.   But these are mostly offered as moments of transition, signaled   by unexpected sights, sounds, whispers, songs—human or   bird produced—that speak out of the coming light or coming   darkness.

And that brings me to a further surprise—and a reminder. Small presses! They are alive and well and doing the good work of putting good writing in the hands of readers. Turning Plow Press is one of them. As I have discovered since my first drive to Ada, Turning Plow has published other writers I’ve met at the festival, among them, Paul Austin, Alan Berecka, Julie Chappell, Hank Jones, Paul Juhasz, and Cullen Whisenhut.

Decades ago, I remember hearing that Larry McMurtry owned a T-shirt saying “Minor Regional Writer.” From the first paragraph of The Last Picture Show, McMurtry always seemed something more than either “minor” or “regional.” Today, then, I want to quibble with the word minor. I want to preach the gospel of regional writers. Hence, the subtitle I’m adding to my blog.

Notes:

Visions for the Night is available here ⇒

Check out Turning Plow Press here ⇒

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Underwater Narrator

As a devotee of film noir, I’ve long forgotten the first time I encountered Sunset Boulevard—or how many times I’ve seen it over the years. Count me as skeptical when a musical version debuted in London thirty-plus years ago. I couldn’t imagine the dark-lit world of the film translated into stage sets and songs. But then. Ten days ago, my best friend and I found ourselves in orchestra seats for the current revival running at the St. James Theater in Manhattan’s Broadway theater neighborhood.

Spoiler Alert: If you intend to see the current revival, I’m about to give away the show’s opening moment.

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Billy Wilder’s film opens with police sirens racing to a palatial estate. Cut to the dim-lit swimming pool, where a man—William Holden—floats face down, shot dead but, through the magic of noir storytelling, able to narrate from beneath the waters of his death.

As curtain time approached for the revival, two questions pestered me. What kind of scene would open the play / would the revival attempt to suggest a swimming pool onstage? Would the dead man as depicted in the1950 movie serve as narrator?

The curtain opens to a dark stage. No setting. On the floor at center stage, an amorphous shape, also dark. Then: the distinct sound of a zipper. An arm reaches up from the dark shape, a man unzipping his own body bag. He extricates himself. Stands. Begins to sing his story.

Instantly, I suspended disbelief. And watched, enthralled, as the surprises continued: Klieg-light-equipped cameraman onstage filming perfect black-and-white images simultaneously projected, immersing the audience in the ambience of film noir. At one point, the lead male roamed backstage corridors and walked out into the street—followed by the cameraman. I have rarely seen such a creative translation from the world of filmdom to the landscape of musical theater.

The two leads carry this revival. Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, faded movie star descending into madness. Tom Francis as the doomed writer turned gigolo for Desmond. They’ve been nominated for Tonys—Best Leading Actress and Actor. I’m rooting for them.

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Peeling an Apple Without an I

On February 8, I arrived an hour late for the Bad Mouth reading here in Albuquerque. Good luck can result from one of my memory lapses. In this case, Jenny George, who stepped up to the mike shortly after my arrival and read from After Image, a new collection—one stunning poem after another. The reading included a couple of poems with the same title: “Jenny George.” These open with accusatory declarations. “Jenny George is a failure,” says one. And another: “Jenny George is not to be trusted.” From first line to last, I love the wry, self-deprecatory tone of these self-titled poems. Here’s one:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Jenny George    Is not to be trusted. She will tell you  The soul narrows until it is just the breath.  She will call it a violent narrowing.  But her words are just images gleaned  off a dying girl like an apple peel  pared in a slow spiral off an apple.  She herself has never passed through  that hollow reed. An unreliable narrator  they used to call it in the seminars.    There are things you simply can’t know  until you have lived through them.    At any rate, strangers now wear the girl’s clothes  on the streets—the very streets  she and Jenny George would walk  with ice creams melting over their hands.  Or while a slew of blossoms  gusted suddenly through that corridor.    You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.      Jenny George    After Image: poems (Copper Canyon Press 2024)

The poems of After Image are meditations on grief. They observe. They itemize. In this one, the poet steps back, using third-person point of view to look at loss as a phenomenon that happens to someone else. There is a blunt power that comes of cutting the I out of the poem: “her words are just images gleaned / off a dying girl like an apple peel / pared in a slow spiral off an apple.” I can’t vouch for George’s intention here, but in the paring image I see the superstition that if you peel an apple in a single motion and throw the peel over your shoulder, the peel will land spelling the name of your future love. These are poems about losing that person. The most important person. The one you love.

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“Jenny George” moves on to further surprise. The deceased lover’s clothes have been given away, have appeared in the street where she walked with the poet, eating ice cream “while a slew of blossoms / gusted suddenly”—slew meaning many, meaning a murder of.

George’s closing couplet echoes the earlier mention of her deceased love’s clothing, worn by others now, in public:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  You might see a red dress crossing  in the crosswalk. The hem of it billowing.

A skirt hem billows from the movement of air, billows like breath, like a departed love’s breath.

About the Author:

After Image is Jenny George’s second poetry collection; her first is The Dream of Reason. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

After Image is available here ⇒

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Two Daughters, their Fathers

On October 12, 2022, I was glancing at fiction shelved on the wall of books in our great room when I spotted a novella I had no memory of purchasing, no memory of shelving there. I turned to the first page of Cary and John by Houstoninte Neil Ellis Orts, read a couple of pages, and surprised myself by tearing up. This little book is the story of best friends Gloria and Cathy and the love letters they discover written between their fathers decades in the past.

Cathy has found the letters in one of the boxes left behind by John, her recently deceased father. She brings them to Gloria; her father was Cary, also deceased. Both women are reeling from the discovery of the secret their fathers took to their graves. Gloria, a devout churchgoer, is horrified. Convinced that homosexual behavior is a damning sin, she has refused to allow her gay son to bring his partner into her home.

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Short chapters with the two middle-aged friends alternate with the letters in their possession. For me, the first and lasting surprise of Cary and John is Gloria herself. The novella opens with her. It includes her daily ritual of prayer, her deeply felt conviction that her gay son is on the wrong path. Orts steps back and gives this woman space to be herself. As a gay man, I was—and am—convinced that she’s profoundly wrong, but I can see that Gloria is trying to do right—by herself and her beliefs, by her son and her love for him.

And the letters! Cary and John live in these letters. Their love breathes in the words they write to each other. Their individual selves shine. Cary is seriously buttoned down, acutely conflicted, weighing judgments against himself, resisting the word love. John is an extrovert plain and simple. He knows that he’s in love with Cary; he openly expresses joy in the sexual pleasure he and Cary experience together.

John’s letters bubble over. He can’t resist the intensifier Ha! This little tic might have been annoying, but Orts writes John so believably that his ebullience charms. In one letter, he reports on the children who have moved in next door, into the home previously occupied by Cary and his family:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Yikes, but they’re loud! And the parents either don’t care   that they have howling wild animals for children or they’re   too overwhelmed. . . . Cathy says she might get a babysitting   job out of of them. . . . I said not until she had her rabies shot. Ha!

Daughters who loved their fathers, fathers who loved their daughters. Fathers who loved each other. There is heartbreak in these pages. And the lasting surprise of hope.

About the Author:

Neil Ellis Orts is a native Texan, a farm boy from the south-central part of the state and a city man currently living in Houston. His interests have taken him to study theater and performance and theology as well as to dabble in endeavors that don't fit neatly under those headers. He is a generally curious individual.

Cary and John is available here ⇒

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Aching for Touch

Let’s begin with a short poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect    The yellow bearded iris hides its face.  Not one stalk in dozens of green blades, not   one golden petal streaked with rust. It’s March,  it’s rained. Elsewhere in this town, purple petals   crumple, spent with pollen’s trip from stamen  to pistil. Bed after bed as bawdy   as bordellos. It’s not modesty  that blankets my own, but the red oak’s  generosity, beneath which rhizomes lie  like aging fingers aching for the touch   of light. I tuck my black rake, an octave wide,  between them to the blackbird’s song y tú,  y tú. A small gray moth, its sleep disturbed,   rises from the leaf pile in a blur of wings.     Cindy Huyser    Cartography (3: A Taos Press 2025)

Austin poet Cindy Huyser is a master of the closely observed moment. From the prize-winning power plant poems of Burning Number Five to the pages of Cartography, examining a landscape mapped by grief, Huyser all but disappears into the act of seeing. Poet and landscape, poet and moment, become one. Consider “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect”—fourteen lines, an unrhymed sonnet, a world revealed in the space of 140 syllables.

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From the outset, words as simple as bearded and face acknowledge kinship between the poet and the iris she observes, between human life and plant life, vigorous with sexual energy, “bed after bed as bawdy / as bordellos.” And then this: “rhizomes lie / like aging fingers aching for the touch / of light.” I’ve been reading Cindy Huyser’s poems for thirty years, and I’m still surprised by the lightness of her touch, by how longing—in rhizomes, in us—appears quick as a brushstroke before the poem moves on. To my favorite surprise, birdsong translated—y tú, y tú—another touch of human longing: and you, and you.

I used to say that a Shakespearean sonnet—the hypnotic cadence of iambs, the musicality of rhyme—encapsulated the entire Elizabethan worldview in fourteen lines. “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect” arrives some four centuries later, fresh as a woman’s brief time wielding a rake in her yard. The poet breathes in these lines. Her life is here. And the world she inhabits.

Mea Culpa

My blog posts are scheduled for the first and third Friday of each month. This one arrives on the second Friday. Last week, my good friend Tina Carlson and I drove from Albuquerque to Ada, Oklahoma, for the Scissortail Literary Festival, a yearly highpoint for participating writers.

About the Author

Cartography is new from 3: A Taos Press. Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Cindy Huyser co-edited Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) with Scott Wiggerman and has collaborated with Dos Gatos Press and Kallisto-Gaia Press as an editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar (2009-2014 and 2019 editions). Huyser has an MFA in Writing (poetry) from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Cartography is available here ⇒

Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems is available here ⇒

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Surprise on the Oblique

Let’s start with flash fiction at its best:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  I Think About Ordering In   When I ask my father how life is these days with my mother,   a cavillous woman of cubist proportions and angled verbs, he   turns away, points outside to the tractor rusting among the beans   and radishes, tells me farm equipment has a half-life and not to   expect too much. I ask again, and he reminisces about the mail-order   bride his brother divorced, a Bulgarian engineer who lost her hand   in a skirmish and wore a prosthesis with a black leather glove. She   had an air of mystery, my father says, wistful as I’ve ever seen him.   And knew her way around a cabbage. He crosses himself, although   she’s not dead. And he’s not Catholic.    I hear pfffffft pfffffft, peek into the kitchen. Mother’s extruding rows   of green foam dots onto tiny crescent-shaped plates. An aficionada   of reconstruction in any form (never leave well enough alone! her motto),   she’s taken up molecular gastronomy. The froth looks like tubercular   spit.    I return to Father, rework my question, ask if he’s happy. A little, he   tells me. A sparkly feeling in my heart tells me so. Glitter pools onto   the floor, and he leans toward the sun in the middle of a luminous lake.    Mikki Aronoff  MacQueen’s Quinterly, Issue 26, January 1, 2025

Albuquerque writer Mikki Aronoff is an avid practitioner of flash fiction. Dozens of her tiny stories are published every year. Reading one of them, I marvel at how so few words can accomplish so much. The piece reprinted above, for example.

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In 203 words, the narrator asks her father a commonplace question—three times—variations on How’s life with Mom? Twice, the father replies by way of a non-answer. But our narrator is paying attention, surprising us by what she notices during moments when “nothing” is happening. A single phrase puts the mother before us. We can see her “cubist proportions.” We can hear the “angled verbs” that account for her peevish presence. And the father! I take much pleasure in the quirky answers Aronoff puts before us—“the tractor rusting among the beans and radishes . . . the mail-order bride his brother divorced, a Bulgarian engineer who lost her hand in a skirmish and wore a prosthesis with a black leather glove.” At second glance, I notice that his non-answers actually do answer the narrator’s question. After mentioning the rusty tractor, surely symbolic, he advises “not to expect too much.” His second non-answer references a brother’s disappointment in marriage—but also two redeeming qualities in the ex-wife, a way of seeing her that might explain how the narrator’s father sees—and why he stays with—his own wife.

A second short paragraph glances at the mother, at work in the kitchen. The narrative eye alights on images that leave a bad taste—“green foam dots” that look like “tubercular spit.” What story telling accomplishes here is so much more than just ambiance by way of details. What we see is how the narrator views her mother—who the mother is—at this particular moment, to this particular daughter.

I write short stories, and I’ve had considerable success seeing them published. But my shortest successful story runs to just over 1200 words. Reading a flash fiction such as “I Think About Ordering In,” I experience envy attack. And the surprise of a complete narrative experience in the space of two or three minutes of my time.

About the Author

Mikki Aronoff writes tiny stories and advocates for animals. Her work has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and the Pushcart Prize. She has a story published in Best Microfiction 2024 and one forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2024.

“I Think About Ordering In” is available here ⇒

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Kinship’s Thorny Heart

Let’s begin with a poem:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  My grandfather teaches me how to flay the heart     It was considered ritual in our family.  The cleaning of the spiny thistle.     A passing   of tradition and knowledge.     The confidence   that one could handle the blade, as well as the spine.    Catarina, my grandfather calls, questo ѐ come ѐ fatto.  This is how it’s done.    And with thorny heart in one hand   and blade in the other    he teases apart  the layers, each leaf nested tight within the next.    The spiny thorns grow sharper with progression toward the heart.    He left his heart in the sandy soil of his Sicilian hill town home  the day he boarded the ship that would take him west across the sea.    Sitting at his kitchen table, he passes me the layered heart and gives   strong warning: never leave a single thorn in place.    A teasing out, a gentle splay.    My grandfather’s hand on mine.   His shoulder solid for me to lean on.    A stone wall built around a small village.    ~ Katherine DiBella Seluja

Point of Entry, Katherine DiBella Seluja’s 2023 poetry collection, features a strand of barbed wire on the cover, the points of the single barb jutting prominently. Fifty-three poems follow, each one reminding us what barbed wire symbolizes as a challenge to new arrivals, whether from across our southern border or, as in the case of this author, from the Italy of her ancestors. “My grandfather teaches me how to flay the heart” is among the finest of Seluja’s ancestral poems.

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At first encounter, this poem’s title intrigued me—the mystery. What will the grandfather’s lesson be? What kind of heart laid open? What sharp tool employed? Two lines in—“the cleaning of the spiny thistle”—and we have an answer. The poet’s grandfather is teaching her how to prepare an artichoke for the table, how safely to get to the tender heart of “the spiny thistle.”

The surprise here lies in the union of surgical precision and meticulous, loving care, as “with thorny heart in one hand / and blade in the other // he teases apart / the layers, each leaf nested tight within the next.” This heart is well-protected: “the spiny thorns grow sharper.”

Seamlessly, the poem shifts from artichoke to grandfather, from one kind of heart to another: “He left his heart in the sandy soil of his Sicilian hill town home,” bringing artichoke knowledge with him, heart knowledge passed along to his granddaughter, “A teasing out, a gentle splay.”

Kinship breathes at the heart of this poem, strength in a “grandfather’s hand on mine. / His shoulder solid for me to lean on.” And the poet’s closing metaphor for the strength of kinship: “A stone wall built around a small village.”

The poems of Point of Entry are necessary poems, these days more than ever.

About the Author:

Katherine DiBella Seluja is a pediatric nurse practitioner. A resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, she is the author of a prior book of poems, Gather the Night.

Point of Entry is available here ⇒

Gather the Night is available here ⇒

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The Neighborhood We

For my seventy-fifth birthday, at the close of 2023, my good friend Debra Monroe gave me a copy of Scott Blackwood’s We agreed to meet just here, winner of the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel. I opened the first page, reached the last page in a matter of hours, turned back to page one, and read this little jewel of a novel a second time.

Surprise greets me in Blackwood’s introduction to the Deep Eddy neighborhood just north of the Colorado River in Austin, Texas. Pleasant surprise. The neighborhood introduces itself in first-person plural—the voices of a community speaking as one, as we, acquainting me with a cast of characters I want to know, immersing me in a community ethos:

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Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published   . . . we think of deer we sometimes still see along our greenbelt  standing in groves of cedar, motionless, testing the air. . . . we   can feel the morning-dark quiet of our houses just before the  children wake up, just before our hearts are gripped with doubt.

This is Blackwood’s opening chapter: five pages of a neighborhood speaking. Turn the page, and we’re in a traditional third-person narrative, with the focus on a single Deep Eddy resident. Three pages of this second chapter, and we’re back to the magical we, as the neighborhood muses about one resident:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  If you had lived long on our street, and drunk late at our parties,  you would know that before retiring and moving to Texas, Odie  Dodd had been a government physician in Georgetown, Guyana.   Squawking through the hole in his throat where his larynx had  been before the cancer, Odie would have told how Jim Jones  had asked him to the People’s Temple to vaccinate the children.

Odie is known to all in this neighborhood. Scott Blackwood summons them to move his story forward.

We agreed to meet just here doesn’t have a single protagonist. It has a plural, a choral character at center. As the novel develops, intermittently, these characters join to voice the story of their neighborhood.

In January of the current year, I read We agreed to meet just here for a third time. The narrative approach continues to intrigue me.

About the Author:

Scott Blackwood died on October 4, 2023, in Roanoke, Virginia, of complications from ALS. He was fifty-eight. Blackwood was the author of two novels, a short story collection, and two works of narrative nonfiction. His final novel See How Small was awarded the PEN USA Award for Fiction.

We agreed to meet just here is not readily available, but used copies are out there. It is a deeply rewarding read—well worth searching for a used copy in good condition.

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What a Risk to Love

Here’s a poem for you:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published  Dark Praise  My sister had to cut off her breasts. My daughter   asks for a new pancreas. I may be a fool  to believe in goodness. What a risk to love  the soldier who tells me he was hauling ass   when a girl ran in front of his tank. He can’t  sleep. I can’t sleep. I can’t shake the sound   he said her body made. My sister   is a whole new you. She changed her hair,   her name, and she looks good. My daughter  could go blind. We don’t talk kidneys   or transplants or amputated feet.   The soldier told me blood is unreal  on a windshield. He can’t sleep. He likes  to drink. I like to drink, too. I raise a glass  to my sister’s new breasts. Praise my daughter’s  needles, insulin, blood tests. I drink for the girl  who, if there’s mercy, never knew what was coming.    ~ Laura Van Prooyen

Surprise can arrive in many guises. One of them, it seems to me, is the shock of the unexpected, tersely delivered. “Dark Praise” opens with a gut punch: “My sister had to cut off her breasts.” No soft opening, no trigger warning. Two harsh family facts: disfiguring surgery, followed by the possibility of organ transplant.

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This poem arrives eleven pages into Frances of the Wider Field, a remarkable collection of poems about losses incurred over a lifetime—pages radiant with heartbreaking tenderness. Here, the poet dispenses with tenderness—in the service of blunt honesty. Straightforward declarative sentences, a kind of just-the-facts approach, leading to the poem’s third shock:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published            What a risk to love  the soldier who tells me he was hauling ass  when a girl ran in front of his tank.

Risk and love are important words here. There is risk in writing this kind of poem, risk in squarely facing what must be faced, risk in having a heart open to love. Empathy, too, in this poet’s blunt honesty. Witness how she closes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published              I drink for the girl  who, if there’s mercy, never knew what was coming.

I think, perhaps, what I admire most about “Dark Praise” is that Laura Van Prooyen doesn’t let herself get in the way, doesn’t use language that solicits sympathy. Instead, briefly, she addresses three facts and then her own response: compassion for soldier, sister, daughter—and for the girl in the path of a tank. A reminder here, for all of us who write. There is value in restraint.

Note:

Frances of the Wider Field was a Finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Book of Poetry and the Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Laura Van Prooyen is also author of Our House Was on Fire, nominated by Philip Levine, awarded the McGovern Prize and the Writers’ League of Texas Poetry Book Award. Raised in a tight-knit Dutch community just outside of Chicago, Van Prooyen lives in San Antonio, Texas. She is a recipient of an Artist Foundation of San Antonio Individual Artist Grant.

Frances of the Wider Field is available here ⇒

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A Portal Opens

“Two of Her,” from The Hungry and the Haunted, a remarkable new story collection by Rilla Askew, opens by quickly explaining the story’s title: “There had always been two of her, inner and outer, dream self and face self.” Un-named, the protagonist is something of an everywoman for the down-and-out spaces these stories explore. Nineteen, she lives with her arthritic mother and works three dead-end jobs. Her inner self dreams of escaping. Her outer self is trapped in a small Oklahoma town, also un-named. Her face self: regularly “cute and perky.” Her dream self: marinating in boredom.

At her babysitting job, this young woman puts two children to bed, then reads from trashy novels the man of the house has secreted in a bedside drawer. Until one evening, returned from an evening out, he catches her in the act. Instead of driving her home, the man parks in an isolated spot and asks her to describe a scene from her reading while he pleasures himself in the dark car.

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Everywoman calls the man a creep, steps out of the car, and walks to a local bar, where the narrative moves into a mystic space that is both outer and inner, as the protagonist’s hold on her face self gives way to a confused dream self. A strange young woman takes the adjacent bar stool and speaks to our young woman about a past they supposedly have in common, though the protagonist has no matching memory. Jarringly, the stranger knows about “that creep in the station wagon,” knows what everywoman is thinking. By the time the stranger offers three wishes, Askew’s story has opened a portal of sorts—into a fairy-tale world turned upside down. Where are we? Who is this knowing stranger? What about the two in “two of her”? Has outer self lost control to inner self? Dream self escaped to wreak havoc with face self?

At this point I backtracked to what had seemed a purely incidental moment, when the young woman at story center noticed a neon sign flashing on and off against the night sky—slipper-shaped, for the Cinderella Motel. A clue here, to help parse the surprises this story has to offer.

I don’t want to explain my understanding of the disorienting moments that kept me absorbed, that hold me rapt on re-reading. You’ll want to read this story on your own—the complete collection, too. Highly recommended.

About the Author:

Rilla Askew’s novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award and the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in 2002. Askew's most recent novel, Prize for the Fire, is an historical biographical novel about the Early Modern writer and martyr Anne Askew, whose connections to Queen Katheryn Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, put her own life in peril.

I have not yet read Fire in Beulah, but Prize for the Fire entranced me, first page to last.

The Hungry and the Haunted is available here ⇒

Prize for the Fire is available here ⇒

About Narrative Surprise:

For thirteen weeks, I have posted weekly to this blog. As of today, I’m switching to twice a month. I will post entries on the first and third Fridays of each month.

BEST to all . . .

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