Spring 2021

This American Fife

Jake Maynard ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils. But give me the banjo. —Mark Twain In 2007, bluegrass banjoist Eddie Adcock did an ordinary thing at an extraordinary time. Robbed of his ability to make music due to involuntary…

In Conversation: Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Jason Kyle Howard ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Interview

There’s a certain amount of defiance hovering between Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s words as she discusses Kin, her debut memoir slated for publication by Bloomsbury in June—and after spending time with her searching, resilient book, it is easy to understand why. Kin recounts her family’s exile from their native Eastern Kentucky…

Excerpt from ‘Kin: A Memoir’

Shawna Kay Rodenberg ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

Grand Marais, Minnesota, 1978-1979 Most mornings, the first sound I heard was either a mosquito, tinny in my ear, or the rusty springs of the rough-hewn door as it closed behind my father when he left to stoke the stoves in the other buildings or to wait tables in town.…

Old Woman at My Window

Elaine Neil Orr ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Creative Nonfiction

It’s six a.m. on an April morning. I sit at my desk before the window, ready to write. The first thing I see are dogwood flowers. They appear suspended like lanterns over water. Eventually, tree branches come into view. I look down at my writing and when I look back…

Gone

L. Renée ♦

Spring 2021 ♦

Poetry

It is the week after my eldest living aunt has, with us all in proximity, buried her sister. It is the second sister, out of nine siblings, she has buried. Her youngest brother, gone too. My Aunt Rosetta, of course, did not lift her eighty-five-year-old, tiny, weathered limbs toward a…