Welcome to the Fall 2015 Issue of Barely South Review, featuring our roundup from the spring contest season. First, our issue artwork “Why Do You Not Love Me Anymore?” comes courtesy of Paul Bergmann, a musician and visual artist based in Los Angeles. The piece is from his mixed media art cycle “Please Don’t Tell Me Why,” which originally showed at the Pitzer Art Gallery in April 2010.

To kick things off we have Kristine Zeigler’s awesome story of a Hollywood stuntwoman, The Girl’s a Bore; after that comes Brian Clifton’s dual and haunting apocalypses – Apocalypse with Body andApocalypse with Neighbor.

We have, then, the Norton Girault Prize Winners, selected by the incomparable Natalie Diaz, one of our own ODU alums – How-To-Blind-Cyclops Instructions by Jeffrey Beck, and Zohydro by Kelly Michels.

Then Paul David Adkins’ harrowing Walter Dunbar, Deputy Superintendent, Attica State Prison, Explaining Himself After His Duplicitous Press Conference. Todd Mills’ The Oku feels like an ancient classic.

Next, we have the winners of the ODU College and Ruhi Dayanim Poetry Prizes, both judged by Rick Barot, nationally acclaimed poet and Editor of the prestigious New England Review. Mr. Barot selected the following: Emily Duquette’s Odd Sister, Nathan Whelan’s Codlata Fear Bocht, Lucian Mattison’s Duende, Sarah McCall’s Dear Love & Co., and Leslie Entsminger’s My Neighbor Said.

Get a load of Jamie Lyn Smith’s humorous and meditative Home Talk, Carrie O’Connor’s Childhood Visions, Adam Palumbo’s Ode to BX442, Alec Hershman’s Desperate Orders, and Gregory Lee Sullivan’s The Sirloin of the Sky. A collaborative work, Between Sidekicks by John F. Buckley and Martin Ott brings us, with Dustin M. Hoffman’s The Mouth Full of Flying, into the nostalgic part of our Fall 2015 Issue, with throwbacks from Barely South Review‘s predecessor journal The Dominion Review.

I combed the archives of The Dominion Review at the University of Wisconsin last summer to bring you these gems: Laura Washburn’s Avngulek (1987, No. 5), Once I Saw a Sad Old God (1989, No. 7) by Hans Ansgar Ostrom, and A Literary Cartoon (1989, No. 7) by our own indomitable Norton Girault, the namesake of our annual contests, our resident sage.

Finally, we at Barely South Review have decided to merge our annual Craft Issue (Comprised of Essays and Interviews garnered around our annual Old Dominion University Literary Festival) with our regular Fall and Spring issues. To that end, we have interviews with Theodore Deppe, Manuel Muñoz, Susan Power, and Mitchell Jackson for your perusing pleasure.

Please enjoy – and stay tuned for updates on our 2016 Norton Girault Literary Prize in Fiction. Read generously,

-Caleb True, Managing Editor

 

Table of Contents

The Girl’s a Bore [Fiction]
Apocalypse With Body [Poetry]
Apocalypse With Neighbor [Poetry]
How-to-Blind-Cyclops Instructions [Winner of the 2015 Norton Girault Prize]
Zohydro [Honorable Mention, 2015 Norton Girault Prize]
Walter Dunbar, Deputy Superintendent, Attica State Prison, Explaining Himself After His Duplicitous Press Conference [Poetry]
The Oku [Fiction]
Odd Sister [Winner of the 2015 ODU College Poetry Prize]
Codlata Fear Bocht [Winner of the ODU Undergraduate Poetry Prize]
Duende [ODU Poetry Prize Honorable Mention]
Dear Love & Co. [Winner of the 1st Annual Ruhi Dayanim Award in Poetry]
My Neighbor Said [1st Annual Ruhi Danayim Poetry Prize Honorable Mention]
Home Talk [Nonfiction]
Childhood Visions [Flash Fiction]
Ode to BX442 [Poetry]
Desperate Orders [Poetry]
The Sirloin of the Sky [Fiction]
Between Sidekicks [Poetry]
The Mouth Full of Flying [Flash Nonfiction]
Avngulek [Poetry]
A Literary Cartoon…
Once I Saw a Sad Old God [Poetry]
Beautiful Wheel: A Chat With Theodore Deppe [Interview]
An Interview With Manuel Muñoz [Interview]
An Interview with Susan Power [Interview]
If It’s Not Like Music I Don’t Want to Read It: Mitchell Jackson on His Love of Language [Interview]