François Scarborough Clemmons

When I was born, the Sanders-Scarborough clan had lived for several generations in the sprawling, blanched little town of Blackwater, Mississippi, just north of Meridian in the backwater region near the Okatibbee Reservoir and the Alabama border. If you weren’t a cotton farmer or sharecropper, or a smithy who worked for white folks, there wasn’t much else to do there. Some folks got along raising chickens and guinea fowl, some did light farming but could not prosper.

J. M. Tyree

Why Terrence Malick, and why now? When I asked poets, novelists, artists, and critics about the films that meant the most to them, Malick was the figure that kept cropping up in our conversations. I got notes back written in brilliantly divergent moods of awe and controlled anger. There’s a sense in which Malick’s films are spectacularly out of touch with our era, in the best and the worst possible senses of the phrase.

Castle Freeman Jr.

I had no choice, Jane liked to tell her friends. Nobody else would come. Why not?
Deer season, said Jane.
Deer season. Of course.
Nobody would come. Nobody could. Nobody was around, I was told.

Heather Christle

The swimming hole abuts
the swimming mountain
she said and I believed her
until I began to think about it,
but I hated to see the mountain disappear

so instead I thought about weasels,
handbags, the future, people I hate . . .