Alle C. Hall’s work appears most recently in Dale Peck’s Evergreen Review, as well as in Tupelo Quarterly, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Brevity (blog), and Literary Orphans. She is Associate Editor at Vestal Review and former Senior Nonfiction Editor for JMWW Journal. “Wins” include: a Best of the Net nomination; First Place in The Richard Hugo House New Works Competition; and finalist or semi-finalist in the contests of Boulevard Magazine, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, Hippocampus, and Memoir Magazine.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Hall about her experiences as a journal editor, her experiences shopping around her book, whether or not the current pandemic will help or hurt the eradication of hatred, toxic masculinity, and much more!…
Cold crystals beautifully shaped and delicately formed into soft snow or the harsh ice on an inaccessible mountain. This is what the word crystal conjures up for me.
For others, it may be the cure of
crystal healing or the devil calling in piece of crystal meth, an expensive
cut-glass thing or just a pretty stone. I had even known a girl called Crystal,
whose beauty had the magic of a piece of crystal rock.
Berlin. November 9th 2014. The bar was dimly lit. In fact, from the outside it barely looked open. There were no customers, not even a barman was visible. The only clue that it may be open was the flickering of candles burning on top of empty wine bottles, thick with teardrop wax.…
I hang around a lot of people who are older than me. I have been labeled as an “old soul” who is well beyond her years in wisdom, actions, and musical tastes. Nonetheless, I have also been the victim of tongue lashings by older women of color for the lack of activism and attention that Generation Y and Z pay to social injustices and current events. According to these “seasoned” women, we are more focused on “fake hair and popularity appearance” and “who’s fighting on Basketball Wives” and “the Snapchat filter.”
Obviously, these women have not cleaned
their bifocal contact lenses lately.
Young women of color are speaking up and out on injustices that happen every day, and it is not just with a social media filter. …
“Toubab! Toubab!” A band
of small children break the morning silence. They are following us at a respectful
distance, just in case the ‘white people’ would suddenly turn on them.
More than 20 years have passed, yet these memories remain as vivid
as if they occurred yesterday. A journey to Senegal, the cradle of the West
African drum scene, changed my musical appreciation—and my life—forever. I
still get goose bumps when I mentally relive the journey’s high point, our final
night in the nation’s capital, Dakar. But more about that in a moment.
It was the culmination of my youthful exploration of West African
drum and dance culture, a truly life-changing period of immersion into some of
the greatest music on Earth. You couldn’t make it up, a tale of bribery,
malaria, and ecstatic musical virtuoso.…
White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination – Jess Row
Through an unflinching look at the literary canon since the Civil Rights era, Jess Row’s collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, examines the influence of whiteness on white writers’ imagination and America’s historical antipathy toward race.
As
Row deconstructs the fiction of white writers- notables like Raymond Carver,
Annie Dillard, Richard Ford and Marilynne Robinson, among others- he points out
a pattern of omission, of narratives curiously devoid of racial question, or
tension, which Row defines as nothing short of “wishful thinking as a way of
life, a way of seeing, a way of making art” (10).
Written
primarily for white readers (of which I am one), I found Row very successful
making the connection between white writers’ literary deracination and the
literal ‘white flight’ from neighborhoods as blacks moved north during the
Great Migration, seeking refuge from lynch mob terrorism and Jim Crow (9-10).…
Terry Barr’s essay collections, Don’t Date Baptists and Other Warnings from My Alabama Mother and We Might As Well Eat: How to Survive Tornadoes, Alabama Football, and Your Southern Family, are published by Third Lung Press of Hickory, NC. His essays have appeared in Under the Sun, The Bitter Southerner, Eclectica Magazine, Wraparound South, storySouth, Cleaning Up Glitter, and The Chestnut Review, among other journals. He lives in Greenville, SC, with his family, teaches Creative Nonfiction, Modern Novel, and Southern Film at Presbyterian College, and blogs on Medium.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Barr speaks with Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum about his work, the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and writing, some favorite films, and much more!…
“Anything is better than being homeless,” says Rose Labbe in
a thick accent that basks in the warmth of her island heritage. She is a middle
aged Haitian woman and is seated with her legs crossed on a black wooden crate
in the backyard of her three bedroom house. She is five feet two, caramel
skinned, and dons a blue scarf on her head in a wrapped style. Her dress is red
and matches the color of her eyes which signals the many hours of work she puts
in as a part-time McDonald’s employee and full time Amazon warehouse worker.
Seated on her throne of a crate, she gives me the likening of a tired Erzulie, a figure of strength and passion in her native homeland ready to take on any obstacle and carry on a life cognizant of a faraway American dream; one she probably formed as she watched different American sitcoms on her antenna TV in Haiti seven years ago.…
