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Skylight Inn BBQ: The Long-awaited Heartlands Review
I’m not going to wax eloquent about a BBQ joint. O, heck, who am I kidding? I’m totally going to go overboard about a place with as much character as the Skylight Inn. Should you find yourself in tiny Ayden, North Carolina, (and really, why would you find yourself there? – go!), you’ll discover an old →
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Life at The Crossroads
The Crossroads Coffee House made my urban soul sing when it came to town this spring. (Yes, I have an urban soul. It shares space and fuels a lot of creative tension with my rural soul. Welcome to my world.) Matt and Brittney spent a year transforming an old bank building at the main intersection →
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Spirit Duplicator – The Streetlight Essay
I recently got news that I had won an essay/memoir contest run by Streetlight magazine. Today, it’s up on their site: Spirit Duplicator by Alex Joyner →
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In Which I Win An Essay/Memoir Contest
Spirit Duplicator “Streetlight Magazine is happy to award first prize to Alex Joyner for his essay, Spirit Duplicator, a poignant, unsentimental—but touching—account of returning in maturity to a place and people known in childhood. This short essay mixes an awareness of the historical past with a sharp remembrance of personal experience.” →
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The Future is Print: An interview with Ted Shockley, part 1 of 2
Last week I got my hands on the second edition of Eastern Shore First, the new, local, free paper in our community. People will tell you that newspapers are dying, particularly those that rely on old-fashioned print. But Ted Shockley, the visionary publisher (and writer, editor, photographer, and marketing department, among other things) of ESF →
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Writing: “A Blessed Unrest” – An interview with Trudy Hale – part 3 of 3
Trudy Hale, editor of Streetlight magazine, and owner of The Porches writing retreat, has talked in previous segments of this interview about her love affair with the retreat house and the writing life. In this segment we continue the conversation about the compulsions of writing and the forms it takes in her life. And we come →
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Writing at The Porches – An interview with Trudy Hale – part 2 of 3
In the first part of my interview with Trudy Hale, editor of Streetlight magazine and owner of The Porches writing retreat, we discussed the relationship she developed with a neglected farmhouse in the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. In this segment, we talk about the writing. (And all the ways we contrive not to.) The Porches →
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This Old House: The Love Story – an interview with Trudy Hale, part 1 of 3
There’s a great love story going on up in the Virginia foothills rolling up to the Blue Ridge. Actually, there’s a bunch of them. Every writer that finds his or her way to Trudy Hale’s writing retreat in the little village of Norwood discovers something to love. I’ve got my list: The big stony bluff →
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Dismantle Confederate Memorials? Let’s Build Some Different Ones
A Robert E. Lee monument is dismantled in New Orleans. A torchlight rally in Charlottesville, Virginia to protect another one. A lieutenant governor candidate in Virginia calls for removing all Confederate memorials and renaming all highways and buildings named for Confederate leaders. William Faulkner had it right. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” →
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“A Grace Wholly Gratuitous”
‘Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to encompass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump up against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull. For unless all ages and races of men →
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