Such attention to arrangement and production details became Merriman’s signature on the hundreds of compositions—not only jingles and commercials, but corporate musical events and theme-park-ride music—he produced over an impressive fifty-year career.
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Hallelujah the Blind Gifts by Katherine E. Standefer
Oh Hallelujah the blind gifts, the foundation of all privilege. Hallelujah what we might call innocence, the idea that before things got fucked up they were once good.
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"If you didn't want to raise the dead (which we most certainly did not) then you couldn't have sex in the upstairs bedroom, the one with the red painted floorboards and the mattress from 1934, so choked up with dust that lying on it was like lying on a bed of skin ..."
The Long Night by Matt Jones and Jess E. Jelsma
Jess E. Jelsma is a doctoral candidate of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Catapult, Post Road Magazine, The Rumpus, The Normal School, Indiana Review, and various other publications.
Matt Jones is a graduate of the University of Alabama MFA in Creative Writing program. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Post Road Magazine, Slice Magazine, McSweeney's, Wigleaf, The Journal, and various other publications.
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, or How I Learned to Love My Paranasal Sinuses By Dinty W. Moore
These grape-sized blobs of I-don’t-know-and-I-didn’t-ask are what kept my sinuses from filling with air. They also kept them from flushing out all the horrible mucus. Thus: infection, pain, poor breathing, infection, gunk, embarrassment, infection, more pain, a box of Kleenex on every flat surface of my home, burning, swelling, infection, pain. Repeat cycle once each month.
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The Exhibit Will Be So Marked (Treemix 12” Remix with Fade-Out) by Ander Monson
A couple of years ago, I asked friends and family to make me a mix CD for my birthday, hoping to get 33 mix CDs, one per year I’d lived. I got 59, including some, pleasingly, from strangers. Somewhat predictably, though not unpleasantly, there were a number of Jesus-Year-themed mixes, though fewer Jesus-themed songs. I also put out the call to friends to pass it to anyone they thought might be interested in sending a mix CD. I made it a project to listen actively to each of these mix CDs and to respond by annotating, riffing on, and responding to the selections, and sending a note with my response to the mix-maker, or I suppose we should call her an arranger, since therein is the art of the mix.
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Panel Discussions: Look! Up in the Sky! By William Bradley
The recent PBS documentary Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle showed footage of a young Christopher Reeve talking about Superman’s continued relevance, as part of the 1980 television documentary The Making of Superman: The Movie. “We all know that the Man of Steel could leap over tall buildings, but the question is, could he leap over the generation gaps since the early Jerry Siegel / Joe Schuster days? We wanted to know if the man from the innocent thirties could survive in the post-Watergate seventies.” Then, looking directly into the camera, Reeve told the viewers, “Well, thanks to all of you, he’s doing just fine.”
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Panel Discussions: Men of Yesterday by William Bradley
I didn’t know much about Curt Swan when I met him—only that he’d penciled a lot of Superman and Superman Family comics during the “Silver Age” of comic books—that hazily define time that covers the 1960s and early 1970s. I knew that he was important, that he was someone I ought to know—the way I felt like I probably needed to listen to more John Lennon and read more Ernest Hemingway.
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Brands and Promises by Alex Khansa
Precious moments. That’s what life is all about. Your first step. Your first word. Your first bike ride with no training wheels. The first time you hold a pretty girl’s hand. When she rests her head on your chest and you smell a fruity scent on her braided hair. The new or hand-me-down car you get—that first gear you shift, grabbing the wheel with both hands, grandma style. It’s beautiful. But that’s not my story; mine can be summarized in five-year increments, not in fragmented moments.
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When We Were Animals by Lacy M. Johnson
There was a time when we lived in a place that was green and alive, where trees grew together in clusters we called forests, where we grew food we could eat right from the soil, where we could swim in the creeks after working in the fields and the water felt clean and cold. We could swim in the rivers, too, protected only by our own skin, and in the lakes we could catch fish that we might cook over an open fire after the sun had set. We would gather logs for this from the forest floor, rub two sticks together until they smoked and then with our breath or a bit of wind, they would catch a flame and burn.
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On Exhibitionism by Joe Bonomo
The tiny flat at 102 Edith Grove in west Chelsea, London, is located in a district that was derided, centuries ago, as the “World’s End.” The name still seems apt: from the looks of things, I could push my fist through a water-damaged wall pretty easily, but I’m scared of what I might find living behind it.
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Dislocation by Verity Sayles
I never told him I imagine spines like necklaces.
Read MoreFemme Fatale by Felicia Rose Chavez
By Felicia Rose Chavez
Felicia Rose Chavez is a digital storyteller whose work features regularly on National Public Radio. She holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Iowa. Former Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founder of GirlSpeak, a literary webzine for young women, Felicia teaches creative writing and new media as a Riley Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. Find her at www.feliciarosechavez.com.
Schoolhouse at Corbin Hollow. Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. c. 1935
For You and I to See by Ryan McDonald
Virtually every Saturday, my girlfriend and I make the hour-and-change drive to Shenandoah National Park from DC’s suburbs, where we rent a townhouse apartment with three other cash-strapped graduate students. She and I each went half in on the $80 it costs to buy an annual national park pass and have used it so many times that our trips now feel free. A routine visit to our favorite refuge looks like this: we do a six to eight-mile hike; we drive down Skyline Drive; we eat dinner at the lodge in Big Meadows (My “treat” is a craft beer. Hers is blackberry ice cream pie); we catch the sunset.
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700 pounds: Telling Facts and Fictions around WrestleMania III by Andrew Cartwright
Perhaps the most contentious aspect of that initial statement is the number 93,000. On video of WrestleMania III, the crowd isn’t very well illuminated, so it is difficult to see how well they fill the expanse of the Silverdome; in the sections that are shown on film, nearly every visible inch is covered with thronging bodies. The din when Hogan walks down the long entrance ramp to the ring, and throughout the match whenever the tide turns in Hogan’s favor is constant and deafening.
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The Sadnesses of March: In Search of Extreme Emotion by Ander Monson
“Why listen to sad music if it makes one feel sad?” asks Stephen Davies, a professor of psychology at the University of Auckland, in 1997. I ask myself this not for the first time as I’m neck-deep into the Joy Division discography on the way to a job I do not dread, mourn, or fear. The singer sings “Don’t turn away / in silence” and I do not turn away, not as I drive past sunblasted car dealerships and burrito shops on Tucson, Arizona’s, Speedway Boulevard, a street Life magazine once called the “ugliest street in America.” I turn away in song, if not in silence.
Read MoreWhat Real Men Do by Silas Hansen
He has heard people say this his whole life, even when he was a kid, even back when he was still trying, desperately trying, to be happy as a girl—and later, too, after he told people the truth of his gender (“Just trying to help,” they would say)—so he knows it must be true: He shouldn’t be afraid of anything.
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This is by Christen Noel
There’s a wrong way to leave a husband. A bag with clothes for one night. Half a tank of gas. A man crying on the floor.
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After Sandra Bland by Rachel Charlene Lewis
My partner is driving ninety miles per hour on our road trip from east to west coast when we’re pulled over to the side of an empty highway through Kansas. Her white, freckled skin is glowing in the early evening sunset, twists of pink and purple and orange billow uninhibited against the flat planes on either side of the highway. It is mostly quiet but for one or two cars passing us every dozen or so miles. They are mostly trucks, their drivers mostly older white men.
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Dreams in a Mirror by Gabrielle Bellot
It was a wonder none of us were expelled for breaking broomsticks over each other’s backs in secondary school, for hitting each other with thick foldable chairs we scarcely blocked, for using the tiny library on the lowest level of one of the two classroom buildings in order to wrestle each other instead of returning home on the bus or cleaning the chalkboards as the Brothers who taught our school lessons had commanded was our duty for that day.
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The Making of a Hive by Amy Wallen
I hear a tiny tap, the smallest of sounds like a thumbtack has fallen on the tile. Or, someone very small is tapping on the window asking permission to come in. I hear another tap making me glance toward the stove. But I see nothing. I turn back to rinse off my one plate, my one glass.
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