Rants and Commentaries

Pre Election Rant

Father Pepe swept the volcanic ash off the sidewalk leading to his church. The narrow shoulders on his slight frame moved back and forth in rhythm as he worked his way down the walkway. A young man approaching middle age, Father Pepe appeared delicate but wiry.

The volcano had never erupted in an explosion of lava. Instead, it constantly belched out the ash that covered the town of Santa Clara and the fields of coffee plants nearby, like God emptied his ashtray over the land.

What happens to Father Pepe and the village of Santa Clara? Find out in:

The Fields of Santa Clara now in The Bookends Review

Ann S. Epstein's Spill It! article "Is Hope Hopeless?" prompted Steve Bailey to consider his observations about hope. - Vine Leaves Press

HOPE

Four Recently Published

A Zoom Wedding

A humorous peice that appeared in 101 Words

Sludge Cakes

This is a very short piece that appeared in 50 more or Less

Published in Commuter Lit

A flash fiction story.

As the editor said" "This could get confusing."

The Real Sally Cartwright?

Published in Discretionary Love

A short story about a woman coping with her husband's slide into insanity. Mildred Martin

The Doll Wife Reprint

The Doll Wife was originally published on Horla.com in February 2021. Since then Horla has gone offline.

The editors at Corvus Review picked it up for their Spring/Summer 2022 issue. (Page 29) The word most frequently used by readers to describe this story is "Creepy."

Quoth the Owl ,Nevermore

I could hear him in the late afternoons when golden summer sunlight pushes through the trees and makes the leaves facing it look luminescent against their counterpart's black background. He would hoot from a tree in the wooded lot behind my house...

This just came out in Canary, an environmentally-themed journal. Quoth the Owl ,Nevermore

Absko Kipkorir.

There is a story about the story of "Absko Kipkorir." Originally written in November 2020 as a satire directed at journal editors under the title "More Splattered Paint," it went through sixteen submissions and rejections before finding a home today (June 1, 2022) at Commuter Lit. So, is the piece that bad, or are editors that thin-skinned? You decide. ABSKO KIPKORIR

Golf and Writing

This is in the early spring edition of Outlook by the Bay

I write for the same reason many of my fellow retired septuagenarians play golf. We have

the time to do what we want with our lives. I am passionate about my writing, and serious golfers

are passionate about their sport. I am reasonably good at writing but rotten at golf.

It is not that I never tried...Golf and writing

Tripping With TJ

Thomas Jefferson, experiences an unusual trip into the future.

Tom Jefferson, while working on something profound,
Was surprised and distracted, buy a soft knocking sound.
"Do come in," he called out, "My daughter so sweet."

And tell me, dear Patsy, do you have my treat?"

A traveler," she said," from far New Spain,
Journeyed through the cold and rain
He brought you these buttons and said with a grin

Read the rest at Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis

Its Time to Rethink Freedom of the Press

This article appeared in Spill It, a monthly newsletter put out by Vine Leaves Press designed to be controversial and stimulate conversation. I hope to you it meets those objectives.

How can we reduce the polarization that is destroying democracy?

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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