The neighborhood where I lived during my teenage years had a community swimming pool. It was small but clean: an aqua rectangle surrounded by pebbled cement, with a cobwebbed bathroom and a splintered picnic table, a rise of trees on one side of the wrought iron fence and a slope of grass on the other. […]
A saline slurry of wastewater passes through rusted culverts and contaminated land, finally reaching the gulf as “a river only in name.”
As a rule, Passarello’s descriptions of sound are more tactile than aural, full of size and shape and texture. When she writes of the “e” ripping her throat as she screams “Stella!” she instructs the reader to “imagine the margin of a piece of paper torn, notch by notch, from a spiral notebook, or an anvil dropping through floor after floor of a cartoon tenement.”
Four years before I changed my name to Silas, when I was twenty, I briefly dated a girl who was deaf. When we were together, I still identified as a lesbian—a butch lesbian. I was a feminist, a women’s studies major, a frequent attendee at Ani DiFranco concerts. I was also firmly in denial about […]
For months an innocuous blue envelope languished in the action box on my desk. A distant relative had sent a late Christmas card with a printed update (keeping busy with the Methodist church, the Lions Club, local Republican Party activities) and a handwritten note wishing me happy holidays. She closed with a simple request: “Please […]
I recently found a scorpion on my father’s desk, which I have since stolen. Not a live creature, but a specimen, long pickled in formaldehyde. The handwritten label inside the jar reads: Paruroctonus silvestrii: Las Estacas, Mexico—1971. The scorpion floats in suspended animation, trapped in the jar I now balance on the flat of my […]
[hear the author read this piece by clicking this link.] Of all natural disasters, landslides are more devastating than most people realize. Worse, they are often triggered by other natural disasters, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Scientists refer to this as the multi-hazard effect. In one of the deadliest landslides of the last […]
Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. —Judith Butler, Undoing Gender Part One When I was in my twenties, I had a friend who was overweight. He wasn’t, as we say now, morbidly obese, and he didn’t look like those people wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops […]
Three murders, two lynchings, a history of racial violence, and very little sense. Thankfully we have a writer like Hollars, a Tuscaloosa native, willing to brave these maddening depths, to relive his home state’s darkest nightmares, and, against all odds, combat illogic with a rational, literary consciousness.
Featured nonfiction from the Fall/Winter 2011 issue.