Folk Art

Returning from Steinhatchee, Fla. , from the Native American steen (man) + hatchee (river), on Memorial Day, KK and I see metal sculptures on the side of Hwy 19. Thrilled to find some American folk art at last (even the folk crafts for sale in Georgia State Parks’ gift shops are imported), we turn the [...]

Things That Bite In the Night

by Douglas Bernon  If you’ve spent all day knocking back high-octane chicha – fermented ceremonial corn – at an islandwide jamfest celebrating a Kuna girl’s first menses and it’s the middle of the night and you’re on the throne in a rickety outhouse perched over the water’s edge, you’ve neither time nor reason to determine [...]

Down in Mexico with Chief Vic, Big Blue, and Bernadette

by Clyde Edgerton (Written in 2004) www.clydeedgerton.com   We stop to get groceries at a little grocery store in the village of Zapata, southwestern Mexico, near the Pacific coast.  A big wooden barrel full of brooms sits just outside the wide front opening to the store, and just inside are bins of fruit almost chest high.  [...]

Dream Catcher

By O. Victor Miller  …the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity… wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world gilded to and fro before his passive eyes…Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the [...]

The Soul’s Damp November

By O. Victor Miller …having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world…Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…–Ishmael A [...]

Graveyard Dead

By O.Victor Miller The thunder of a magnum revolver reverberates through the cypress pond in sync with the rocking canoe.  John and Brent, marginal English students, stare into the fizzing swamp water where the eight-foot alligator disappeared. Their awed faces, illuminated by a spotlight held down in case a game warden should happen by, seem [...]

Smoky Mountain Bear

It wasn’t a very big bear, but it was bigger than me, not a cub, but maybe only two or three seasons old, like maybe a teenie bopper bluffing his way into a gang, foraging on a steep embankment over the park access road, minding his own business. KK stops the truck and I get [...]

Panamanian Devils

By O. Victor Miller                               “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.”—Othello  Today is for being alive. Sprawled naked in a bright hammock strung between mast and mainstay, I’m rocked by northerly swells beneath Caribbean breezes that cool the sting and natural shocks the [...]

Coming Soon!