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.…
Flower girl in white cotton and white petals, look at them rot in the aisle, like bruises on ballerina heels, she’s all cracked callouses and pink skirts, a porcelain doll, she is skinny but her tears are fat as cherubs.
They let the doves out of the box and put the pictures in, the dust will fall like feathers, make a veil.
And your old clothes stretch and your new clothes shrink and you go back to the beginning.
