Smokey Mountain Breakdown

I'm so sorry I've missed so many days. I've just not been in the mood--I spend so much time writing stories now that I sort of blow my writing mojo on the stories. They are getting to you--but they are getting to you on a delay as they are accepted. Sorry about that. Things were so much simpler when I was just writing the stories here on the blog. Unfortunately--I can't get some of those published, excellent though they may be because I did develop them here.

Anyway, there's a wonderful new Appalachiastana/rural literature blogazine run by Rusty Barnes of Night Train fame. Who knew? Super literati uber-editor extraordinaire Rusty Barnes grew up in the sooty back hills of Pennsylvania. I have a piece up there now called Sister Hayes Takes Up a Serpent.

Sister Hayes is an ekphrasis flash--which is a piece of writing about another work of art or literature. The piece was inspired by Pastor Jimmy's Sister Hayes painting--one of his most striking works. Most over-edjumacated people recognize the kinship between Sister Hayes and St. Theresa of Avila, or at least Bernini's sculpture, The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. St. Therese, a mystic deeply involved in ecstatic religious states would have felt right at home in a signs-following service. My story is an exploration of the phenomenon called "the anointing".

Rusty is looking for new content for Fried Chicken and Coffee so if you have something along these lines:

Send me rural, funky, dirty stories about churchgoing women who never sin. I'd like to read that. What about the story I lived, the one where the kid moves away and goes to college and becomes a writer, and until he's thirty, his male relatives hitch their drawers and ask him when he's going to be out of school? Except don't write about writing. I don't care much, since I live it. I would love to see more stories about women, though. Get to the grit, get to the love, show me the scars, and take Harry Crews to heart: "Blood, bone, and nerve, that's fiction. Show me the stuff that cuts to the quick."