Bootleg Trout

By JOEY DEAN HALE

When I’m there I never think about Mr. Sam O. Dale, an eight term state representative for whom this site was named.  Actually, I’ve never heard anyone call this 194 acre lake anything other than Johnsonville Lake, that being the nearest town.  I’m not sure if this is because in southern Illinois there seems to be a common disdain for politicians or if it’s just that Johnsonville Lake seems like a more fitting moniker.  All I know is this Sam Dale guy never crosses my mind.  Usually I’m trying to stay focused on the subject at hand, be that catfishing, building a campfire, or trying to land a nice rainbow at the trout pond.  Regardless, when my mind does wander, and it often does, especially while I’m waiting for a fish to bite, I often find myself thinking about my grandpa Dutch Hale who drove down from Clay County to fish here.    

Bootleg Trout
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Candyland After a Neutron Bomb

By KATHERINE JAMIESON 

“Life has gotten real complicated, and when you think of Enchanted Forest, it’s not.”  –Paul Kennedy, documentary photographer of Enchanted Forest

On August 15th, 1955, a month after Disneyland Park opened its gates, the second theme park to be built in the US lowered its drawbridge for the first time to a humbler fanfare.

Candyland After a Neutron Bomb
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Review: Stop Here

Book by BEVERLY GOLOGORSKY
Reviewed by JUNE GERVAIS

Stop HereMy family eats a Long Island diner breakfast every Saturday morning. We say hi to our neighbor, Lucille, who waits tables; our toddler jabs at the jukebox as my husband orders the Hungry Man; we try to ignore the flat-screen on the wall, which is unfailingly tuned to Fox News. Luckily, there’s good eavesdropping to be done. What we overhear from nearby tables usually beats Sarah Palin stumping for the flat tax.

Beverly Gologorsky knew what she was about when she chose a diner as the center of her new novel, Stop Here. I’d wager there’s a diner at every exit on the Long Island Expressway, and they’re rich with fictional possibility. More than other restaurants, somehow, diners feel like places to talk politics, hash out family conflicts, make business plans, cement friendships—and Gologorsky serves up all of these in her novel Stop Here.

Review: Stop Here
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3 Movies: In Conversation

These were not snapshots, but motion pictures – hence, “movies.” Or rather, they were “talkies” – sound happened too. And through editing there were unions and disunions of movement and sound, the building of story, of character. In the span of seven weeks I watched three.

Things we experience in close proximity in time come to bear on each other, bridge the gaps between them. Persons in close proximity attempt a similar bridging.

The first movie was a drama, imagined from the ground up. The other two were documentaries crafted from ongoing lives. Each brought a unique document of a couple-at-home to the screen in my home.

3 Movies: In Conversation
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Vanishing Chinatown

By ALLEN GEE

I know the Chinatown, New York, of long ago from my parents.  My grandfather, like a grand impresario, hosted their wedding reception there.  They were married on September 19, 1959, and he personally invited everyone to the reception, stopping by at the Gee, Lai, and Gong family association buildings, which was where men gathered to consolidate finances and dictate business decisions, and where women met to socialize.  Once invited to the reception, you could bring any number of family, but it was a matter of honor not to overstep the generosity of the invitation. I should add that the reception lasted for three consecutive nights.

Vanishing Chinatown
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Phantom Tec

By SAHIBA GILL 

1.

When I read the list of companies who owned the now-ruined clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh—New Wave Bottoms, New Wave Style, Ether Tex, Phantom Tec—I thought about my walks in Abu Dhabi, which have been driven from the start by following the bright spool of electric shop names wrapping around each block. It’s not so much the city lights that pull me out there as their measurement of my distance from home, conveyed not in watts but in the degree of mistranslation.

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In the Field behind the Condo Where the Fat Boy Plays

By JOHN MCNALLY

In the summer of 1975, in the southwest Chicago suburb of Burbank, my parents finally became homeowners when they bought a condominium unit in a brand-new development comprised of eight buildings. The cost: $25,000. First, however, we had to break our apartment lease and move out in the middle of the night. I was nine years old, carrying my toys down the stairs to my father’s pick-up at three in the morning while everyone else, our friends and enemies, slept soundly. In every apartment building we’d ever lived, we always had friends and we always had enemies, and we never lived in any one place for longer than two years. Things were finally going to be different.

In the Field behind the Condo Where the Fat Boy Plays
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Shawn Vestal’s Memory Castles Made of Lego

MELODY NIXON interviews SHAWN VESTAL

Shawn Vestal headshot

In this month’s author Q&A, Melody Nixon speaks with Shawn Vestal about childhood, the afterworld, and the “irrevocable lives” we lead in between. Vestal’s short story collection Godforsaken Idaho was published by Little A / New Harvest in April.

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Melody Nixon (MN)Your collection is named Godforsaken Idahoand several stories are set in or touch on Northwestern farms. You yourself live in the American West. Has that place shaped your writing?

Shawn Vestal (SV): I think my views are formed in large part by the places I’ve lived and experiences I’ve had, and I’ve lived in the West all my life — Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and now Washington. There is a space and distance to the landscape out here, an ability to escape others or an inability to find others to connect with. The mythos of the West — the self-sufficient, self-defined individual, who doesn’t need others — is a strong part of [my] characters’ own mythologies. Or perhaps just something that feeds their personalities just as it feeds mine.

Shawn Vestal’s Memory Castles Made of Lego
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