Winter 2018

Interview: Jesse Donaldson

I’m drawn to Kentucky not because it’s some Shangri-La but because it is a complicated place,” says Jesse Donaldson, author of the recent novel The More They Disappear and a native of the Commonwealth who left to attend college in Texas. Now living with his wife and daughter across the country in Oregon, he has found himself drawn back to…

The City

After the rain, the alley smelled of wet screen door, the city-stink of piled up garbage and exhaust washed nearly clean. She noticed this only in spring. By summer the rain when it came bucketing down made thick mud of the foulness. The city dug in its heels, spread its…

Black Magic Gun

Here, in 1970, draft papers in hand, my father’s father begged the trigger of a .22 to blast a small piece of his son’s foot into the hillside so he would not leave the mountains to fight jungle communists. My father. His father. The gun. Gun of worn wood and…

Second Coming

I had known all my life the world would end with the new millennium, that Jesus would return and save the faithful and leave the wicked, and that girls who didn’t want to be left behind had better behave. I knew this because my father told me, me and the rest of the congregation at the Little Martha…

Attics

Tuesday’s midmorning creative writing class, and the fifteen students are clock-watching or note-taking or simply staring out the windows at the bright spring day. We’re talking about writing personal narratives and I am looking for words to describe a place inside from which such stories come. Heart. Belly. I can’t seem to think of a corporeal description that doesn’t make…

Winter 2018 Editor’s Note

I’ve been thinking a lot about Cincinnati lately, recalling the first glimpse of the Queen City as one rounds the bend on I-75 and begins the descent down toward the riverbed just before Covington. A few days ago, I opened my Internet browser and pulled up a map of the Ohio River on my screen, tracing its crooked…