Good news: Right as I was packing to head out to Tucson for 10 days I noticed that an excerpt of my semi-final status chapbook Lies, and Saturdays and the accompanying interview is up at Honeysuckle Press.

So exciting!

The piece is written in a hybrid form that alternates between past and present tense, between first- and third-person. It examines the fragility of memory and how we can never be sure of what we believe to be true is really true and yet how those very memories, whether real or imagined, shape and define us.

Here’s part of the excerpt titled: A truth, and a prologue

Lies, and Saturdays

A city boy, your father romanticizes the country, believes he will find peace in the green hills and solitary nights. He thinks that looking up and seeing stars, so many stars stretching across the sky will ease the stiffness in his neck, the ache across his back he tells himself is stress but is really a bad heart. In five years he’ll be dead but that’s not the story, or at least not this part of the story.

Though of course it’s a big part. Your father wants you to grow up free and strong so he takes you away, offers you gifts of oak and poplar trees, raspberry bushes along the back property line and inside the woods a dark, hidden world of dirt and shade, worms fatter than your fingers. Oh, the glory! The long afternoons capturing butterflies and bumblebees beneath plastic sand buckets. Sitting under the weeping willow and playing house, your Barbie dolls in their homemade dresses because you can’t afford store bought. You are poor and will soon be poorer, but you don’t care. It’s always summer and you are always outside.

Read the interview here.