"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.
In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more. Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east. They all ran from it, they had to.
Read MoreThis memoir excerpt will be published in full in the Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Spring 2023, a collection dedicated to the theme of “Exception/All: An Exploration of Normal"
In June 1967 Pete learned he had been selected for a summer job in California with the Student Health Project, a federal anti-poverty program. He asked and I said yes and watched him move into action. Pete was the great planner, the great provider, controller, idea man, with notes on index cards in his pocket and boxes of loose change on the dashboard. We had to get to California soon. But where to get married? The District, where I lived, had a waiting period for blood testing; Virginia, where Pete lived, prohibited interracial marriage. The laws of slavery had written that one-part Negro blood meant you were the master's property, and Jim Crow titrated blood along similar lines.
Read MoreNominated for Best of the Net 2020
The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs. “Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.”
Read MoreFrom Empire Magazine, The Denver Post
It is a world of birds here in the morning. Busy magpies with sticks. Occasional duck couples settle into the lake. A thousand starlings fill the empty branches of an enormous poplar. When I look up at the tree again, and the black birds have all departed without a sound, without a trace. I am stunned. I grieved the whole year my last child left home. When I dream at the change of seasons, it is often about them as little children, as they were then, sleek and wild, our life full of surprise and struggle. In the dreams we are together again, as if they arrive and depart from me regularly due to the energy and excitement of the equinoxes. All the seasons of my life circle around and I can be all ages.
Read MoreThis “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society
In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was. It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by. There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke. I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen.
Read MoreMemoir Excerpt
In the field of reverie I am wise and wordless. The urge toward words is small and moves quietly, simultaneously with all else that cannot be named.
Read MorePublished in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001. It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.
Glenn Miller was missing. Somewhere over the English Channel,
his plane went down in December 1944. You'd been drafted,
even with a wife and two daughters to support and
day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,
your teeth clamped onto the reed of a saxophone, chin tucked in…
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