WRITING

According to various blogs and other unreliable internet sources, the phrase “I’m digging a hole to China” first originated in the 1850s...

There is something within us, and it is logical and unforeign but unnoticed. Even the animals sense it: the brainial stun that tells us what is pain, what is fear. But here, in the autumn forest, it is different. The moon is a mere suggestion—scribbled light on a depressed sky— and the fallen leaves are stiff sheets on the ground, covering the path I once followed. Weathered trees bend down, and I can feel their sunken backs, can hear the echo of snapped bark. They collapse l

I don’t know how the body functions here or why it slows but echoes “more,” sirening out the clock, the persistent reminder while the mind traces work down bottomless lists and schedules. I have seen the striked words before—papers stacked like crates against the window—but can’t finish their requests. I am dizzy with hurry that disrupts the room’s stillness, moving from one task to the next—a flickering pulse pressed by red-lined insufficiency. Guilt is energ

It’s happening again: hungry aphids are tearing holes in the flowers’ skin— sunlight leaks through, fades into sluggish dirt. It’s only flushed petals with turned up lips they crave, burrowing straw jaws into tender pores. I hear them chomping barrenness into the garden, but I cannot see them—the waxy creatures weakening what took months to build, my fingers still raw from raking away bent twigs and cobwebbed flies. The aphids don’t know doubt, unlike my stati

Knowing is to find the mirror stitched through the body—anchoring a single, winged truth. Knowing is a self-helmed clock poked through by a bird sounding on hour— an echo-feathered signal that presses the talon until it unlocks and stops, light circles to tell us: this is the real red thing everything else hums around, the needlepoint where ripples reel inward—blood soaking the heart— a liar’s tongue drowned in our hollow-less chests. Knowing is a convex gathering at sight’s

I recall the first time I walked through the Piazza della Libertá in Spoleto, Italy, glancing at shop windows and poking my American head through open doors to find my first glass of authentic Italian wine. I was fortunate to be accompanied by my roommates – two other students who, like myself, were part of the study abroad program College of Charleston hosted every year. Kate, with her thick mahogany hair, stood a couple inches above me and always looked like she was going o

Bret Lott, a Creative Writing professor at the College of Charleston, read from his latest novel, Dead Low Tide, on February 16 at the college’s Alumni Hall. This novel marks Lott’s thirteenth since his first came out in 1987 and, according to him, is the sequel to his 1999 novel, The Hunt Club. Of course, this information isn’t anything one couldn’t find on the internet nowadays. What you can’t find online is the rich story beneath the powerful words that make up Dead Low Ti