Letter from the editor.
Oxford American readers will want to know what to expect now that the magazine has again changed editorial hands. The OA has always published vital, important stories—from the borderlands, the Gulf Coast, Appalachia, and many locales in between. This will not change.
From the summer fiction issue.
At half past ten the guy from the corner mart came into the shelter. Naomi had only seen him a few times, but he had a distinctive look, to say the least. He was young but rugged, with short-cropped hair and broad shoulders. It figured that the most attractive man in town her age was also a triple amputee.
“Of Thorns,” “Trundle,” “Liquid Assets,” “The Hill Itself”
. . . in that shabby closeness, that’s where whatever it is that saves me is,
where, praise to be something, it waits in briars like Jesus or literature.
For so many years I thought of myself as a Kentucky poet, and for many years, I proudly wrote about Kentucky, or at least my small, cave-hollowed corner of it.
Letters from Little Rock
We are shaped by the era and the family into which we are born, but what can be a greater act of self-definition than making you my wife, my chosen family?
The way I listened to music began to twist on me, becoming less theatrical, more interior, and a time came when I needed to be spoken to more than I needed to speak. And that was when I found Iris DeMent.
Among my mother’s effects that I found after her death was a datebook for the year 1944: her diary. An erratic diary keeper myself, I noted the neatness of her initial entry—even lines, full loops in cursive letters, thoughtful punctuation—a common enough trait at the start of a writerly journey, all optimism and hope and clarity, before the messiness of life intrudes.
The sun rises over the mountains. A young girl wakes up and pads to the kitchen, where a pot of coffee has been left alone to brew. A plane passes close overhead. Out on the deck, a frayed hammock swings in the breeze.
