Writers are forever pregnant with poetic words that whisper and pray and pause and pacify. We plant and plow and ferment words. We use fertile words such as fecund, semen, soil, fever. We spill our hearts for peaceful, soft, snowy, swollen words, and ...

After four weeks of writing, last night I made the final revisions to my latest short story, Samuel’s Wife.  This morning, I sat in my study drinking a cup of coffee, my dog at my feet, my family still asleep, and read the story one last time. W ...

Today, I placed Jimmy's marbles under my Christmas tree. My maternal grandmother gave birth to a son in January 1934.  She named him James; they called him Jimmy. As the Great Depression and the boll weevil ate through the pocketbooks of southe ...

He's a big guy who sports a smile true to his heart and shakes with belly laughter that erupts with little urging.  In Brackish, a recently released book of poetry, that big man I call friend takes us to the gulf marsh where he digs, revealing e ...