Curated playlist of music that inspired our 2024 Fall artist, Mike Ousley, as he created the artwork featured within our issue:
"Wildcat & Snake"
Brushy Fork of St. John’s Creek By Daniel Sherrill
"Night Train"
Old Train by the Tony Rice Unit
"Company Town"
Sally Ann by Dirk Powell
"Cults Are Fun"
Little Things by Adrian Berenguer
"Come With Me"
Hainted Ground by...
The last spring shall come, the last summer, too,
so no to politicians peddling impotence, no
to preachers stitching our lips into eclipse, we want
the misfits, the women unafraid of descent,
—from "Self-Portrait Lined By Sándor Csoóri," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Jackie & Simone: For our new collection, The Under Hum, one of the first pieces we wrote was “Disclosure,” which developed into a sonnet, and one of our goals at the outset was to extend the feminist project of interrogating traditional (male) forms. Pointedly, then, we “turn” the argument of the poem at the end of the first quatrain with the...
In three interconnected plays, The Till Trilogy is an imagined, speculative exploration of the epic of Emmett Till and the birth the modern Civil Rights Movement, the events as seen from the perspective of the youth, himself, in his final days of life, as a specter during the trial of his killers and a shadowed presence in the aftermath.
—Excerpt from Ifa Bayeza's "The Till Trilogy," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
Not counting “Mahatma Gandhi, Man of Peace,” which I presented to my fourth grade class after discovering him in the World Book Encyclopedia and reading “What Negroes Can Learn from Gandhi” in LOOK magazine (I guess I might call that a...
In the village we let the nail go deep into the foot until picking up tetanus like
a surprise. We watch each other live, we turn to see every car that passes: it’s
winter’s fierce dance as it wraps us in its cure for lethargy.
I don’t know what it will take to be strong enough, with bedroom wi-fi needed
half the time to know how to look at the earth’s stark naked body.
—from Marie-Andrée Gill's "In the Village," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you translated.
The first literary translation I did was an excerpt of La route du lilas by Quebec novelist Eric Dupont. This long novel follows seventy-year-old Maria Pia. With the help of Americans...
No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel,...
Front Cover by Mike Ousley
In these Dark Hills 2023
Acrylic on panel
30 x 40 in.
