Category: Interviews / Books / Music
Helen Losse communicates joy and love through her poetry. She lets us into her soul. She reveals her spiritual underpinning and creates verses that sing and shine in their glory. Helen served as poetry editor for the Dead Mule for such a long time, I don’t remember when she wasn’t…
I keep thinking about how this unique, lovely story brings the reader a triple bonus — the sense of home, of history and of compassion. Fullerton delivers all three in abundance. One can know the place as well as the people. The characters sizzle with personality. The narrator’s sense of self…
Nora Brown just got out of school. When she finally began to be really discovered as a singer and artist, her YouTube videos were beginning to become popular and she was only 12. Her daddy Benton Brown set up this interview, and they were kind enough to schedule it in….
Take a swallow. Breathe in a deep gulp of air. Walk to the edge of the dance floor. You are about to take the first step. Getting enough nerve to ask a dancer to join you for a step or two is hard. You have to stop being shy and…
Valeria Vose, a Novel by Alice Bingham Gorman Published by She Writes Press, Berkeley, CA October 2018 “Time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome“–Derek Walcott Thus begins Alice Gorman‘s “Valeria…
“I’d never had a broken heart and didn’t understand the difference between what you feel and what you have to do.” The novel, Mourning Dove embraces an enduring story of the 1970s American South and holds onto it with a such precision — dialogs so rare and unique that you want…
Just Published Karen Paul Holmes’s No Such Thing as Distance Karen Paul Holmes is the author of Untying the Knot (Aldrich Press 2014). She is a past recipient of an Elizabeth GeorgeFoundation writing grant and was named a “Best Emerging Poet” by Stay Thirsty Media in 2016. Her work has appeared…
Tricia Boooker’s: “The Place of Peace and Crickets: how adoption, heartache, and love built a family” is brutal, honest, loving and a masterpiece of a memoir. Booker goes in deep, where most of us would never dare to go, she bares her soul. Adopting three children after the agonizing…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will makes songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them in mild evenings.” –Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping It’s tough to come…
According to his website, https://wilgibson.com/, Wil Gibson is “a white trash poet.” I first came to know of his work when he reached out to me several years ago after discovering we were from the same small town in Arkansas. I always like to keep up with fellow Arkansans, so…
sorry you are not an instant winner, by Doritt Carroll. Kattywompus Press, 2017. $12. Reviewed by CL Bledsoe The poems in Carroll’s chapbook are stripped-down narratives, eschewing punctuation or capitalization, in a style somewhat like Lucille Clifton or Besmilr Brigham. Carroll uses line break and phrasing to maintain and…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Being from Memphis, Tennessee, I am an avid reader of Southern writers. Pat Conroy, Anne Rivers Siddons, Donna Tartt, and Ron Rash are among my favorites; all tell a tale in incomparable language, and all speak to the soul of my Southern sensibilities. I’m sharing a book…
The Art of Dissolving, by Donald Illich. (Georgetown, KT: Finishing Line Press, 2016. 28 Pp. $14.99, paperback) Rocket Children, by Donald Illich. (Bamboo Creek Press, 2012. 38 Pp. paperback) I don’t remember the first time I heard Donald Illich read, but I’ve heard him several times. What I do remember…
Phillip Thompson’s latest thriller, Outside the Law, would/should/will attract a vast array of readers. There are those who enjoy the thriller genre, of course. But Thompson’s book will also garner appreciation from those who love books detailing the all important “place.” This is a Southern novel, set in rural Mississippi…
The Dead Mule spoke with Mule writer and author Phillip Thompson after reading his latest thriller Outside the Law, released this month (Feb 2017) by Brash-Books.com. A review of Outside the Law is included in this issue of the Mule. Yeehaw for Mule writers. The bold script contains our questions/commentary…
From the Archives, look at what we found from Fall 1998! CHARLIE DANIELS Interview by Tim Bullard TIM: Could you tell me about the Dew Drop Inn? CHARLIE DANIELS: Well, I know there are several places by the name of Dew Drop Inn, but the one I wrote about was…
Recasting the throw-aways and detritus, the overheard and misspelled, the artist has fashioned a large expository drama that serves as fragmented window into our collective Zeitgeist. Sex, love, death, politics, aesthetics and the muddled semiotics of our age all find a place in this body of work and beckon the viewer to read, decipher and unravel. The pieces in The Letters resonate with an enigmatic poetic presence. The result is a significant body of work by an important American artist…
Review copies arrive on a semi-daily basis here on Brown St. This month brought quite a few volumes of teen fiction and those were passed on to willing recipients. Then there were the two novels that were especially readable and noteworthy. One from a dear friend, Mule writer Jim Booth,…
by Thomas Scott McKenzie *from Summer 2007 Dayne Sherman is writer both dedicated and determined. A former high-school dropout, he began writing fiction in the spring of 1996. In a little more than three years, he has racked up 13 short story acceptances and has published a novel with MacAdam/Cage….
“The narrative thread in these autobiographical and personal poems wanders out and about and then circles back upon itself as Martin relies on the Louisiana terrain for her dark settings and deep images.”
We’d like to thank Jack for his contributions to this Mule. It’s pretty safe to say that without him, our issue would be brutish and gray. Jack is a rare artist, as far as we’re concerned. Anyone who can paint an ass without acting like one is indeed a treasure….