storySouth – Winter 2013

storySouth is not about a flashy design or a new digital look. With a clean and readable format, readers can focus on the writing. As the editors say, “Online fads can’t help but fade away; great writing endures. storySouth is all about the writing.”

storySouth is not about a flashy design or a new digital look. With a clean and readable format, readers can focus on the writing. As the editors say, “Online fads can’t help but fade away; great writing endures. storySouth is all about the writing.”

Michael Parker’s fiction piece “Display” is about a boy who works in a pharmacy and is discontent with the staleness and stasis of the shop. He is a boy that likes change, who often rearranges his room “so that he could walk into the room and feel like he’d never been in it before, or that it belonged to someone else, someone with vision and options.” Once he even removed his closet doors and slid his bed inside:

. . . he did not even mind when he woke in the night to a nightmare of jungle and vine, only to realize he was being grazed by the cuffs of his Sunday trousers. Lying in bed among belts and neckties hanging from coat hangers made him feel he was living in a city, in an apartment so small he had no choice but to put his bed in a closet, far from his parents and the pharmacist.

Lee Zacharias contributes a fiction piece from Across the Great Lake. About a little girl who loses her mother and must board the “boat” (a bit of an understatement) with her father, the Captain, this small selection certainly intrigued me to read more.

Mark Smith-Soto’s poem speaks of “Otherness.” While I initially thought it’d be about secluding people that are different from you, it is instead about how we share things with other people:

Other people’s dogs, other people’s babies,
other people’s farts!— how heavily otherness
can weigh on you, what a bore it is and hard
to bear in elevators, airplanes, or now over a beer
to have to listen to another of his amazing dreams

But even though it’s not your dream, and you’d like to yawn, “Wow, you say, wow, wow.”

This issue also contains excellent poems by Rebecca Black and David Roderick as well as a review of Amanda Auchter’s The Wishing Tomb. As a bonus, you can listen to each poem and fiction piece as read by the corresponding author.
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