The Beauregard Group

FICTION
By LESLIE WHATLEY
Otto hauled me up out of the passenger seat of my mother’s Buick and slung my arm over his shoulder and dragged me over the grass because my legs weren’t working properly. Halfway across the lawn I looked up at his shiny red face, awash in Old Spice, and … »

Chapter Four: The Mayor

EXCERPT
From the new nonfiction book Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide?: (’Cause I Need More Room for My Plasma TV), released this spring by Zondervan Books. Click here to read the interview with Spears.
By KAREN ZACHARIAS SPEARS
A red Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner sits out underneath the Live Oak. Around the corner… »

Author Karen Spears Zacharias: On Jesus and the Economy

INTERVIEW
By KIMBERLY ELLEN ANDERSON
Karen Spears Zacharias’ last reading promoting her latest book, Will Jesus Buy Me a Double-Wide, drew a standing room only crowd, much to her dismay. Zacharias took photos to verify her story when she told it to her mother. Despite the success of the book, and after more than 20 years… »

For Whom Grief

POETRY
By SUSANNAH NEVISON
I mean to say how he worked the rows for hours,
hoe steady in his hand, striking earth again and again—
how we watched night settle
as he leaned against the hoe,
wiping his brow with the back of his arm,

and then, wielding his instrument,
began again—
how we quietly left a plate out—
mornings, plate scraped clean
and him,… »

Fifty Dollar, Fifty Dollar

FICTION
By CHRIS HELVEY
It was Tuesday morning, so early the crows weren’t even cawing. I was in the rear of the Three Point Market buying night crawlers. Bob Hemphill and I were going to do some fishing on the Ohio. I was meeting him down below the Falls of the Rough. Bob was an artificials guy;… »

What You Make

POETRY
By JENNIFER WHEELOCK
Across the room, you
are a bowerbird, building
a nest from junk we hauled
from the roadside: warped wood,
dented metal, a painted canvas ditched
like an embarrassing memory.

From these you make art.
“Assemblages” you say,
and each time I think
of insect bodies pinned to paper.
Bridges. Also: arms of mannequins,
large gatherings of politicians,
marriage, pipes, trains, manufacturing
plants, the factory worker… »

Brilliant and startling, Noriega’s poems deliver ‘kiss-the-canvas, one-two punch’

BOOK REVIEW

By ELIZABETH IANNACI

Kim Noriega’s debut collection, Name Me, is unflinching in its honesty and breathtaking in its straightforward approach. These 11 poems are written with such startling lack of guile, one could almost miss Noriega’s brilliance in crafting them.
The book is a journey that takes the reader from womb to rebirth, and the… »

Tomlinson’s fictional stories reveal hard truths of mountaintop removal mining and other subjects

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM

Fiction offers a close look at the truth in Jim Tomlinson’s group of short stories, Nothing Like An Ocean. When he delves into issues such as mountaintop removal coal mining, marriage difficulties and the loneliness of single people, he gets to reality—the heart of the subjects.
In lovely prose, Tomlinson reveals the interiority… »

Memorable characters, narrator’s insights immerse reader in House’s latest novel

BOOK REVIEW

By MARY POPHAM

With a magic wand of words, Silas House casts his readers into the mind of a 10-year-old boy, Eli Book. This is the age when a child’s experiences begin to inform his life and his emotional makeup jells. Eli’s formative period is 1976, at the end of the Vietnam era, when all… »

The Power of Names

HALF-EMPTY MASON JAR
By LESLIE SMITH TOWNSEND

“Now there’s a car that costs $200,000,” my husband Loren says as we’re driving down the highway. “It’s Italian—a Maserati.”
I’m dozing in the passenger seat of our yellow Mazda wagon and barely register this information. Can’t he see I’m napping?
The fact that he knows the name and nationality of this… »