Thirteen hours up, through four states and seven-hundred miles, and three different ecosystems.  With Joseph behind the wheel, we barely make it out of Alabama.  In Osceola, Missouri there was a cheese shop with a giant plastic mouse and hundreds of flavors.  We drove by an Amish man in a horse-drawn buggy as we left; he didn’t wave back.  The rest of Missouri is full of billboards that advertise things like mustache removal and ski shops in the middle of a land-locked state; we wake up from our light car-sleep to laugh at the best signs.

But then we are in Kansas without fanfare… I slept through the welcome sign.  The sun is setting non-triumphantly in the plains as we drive down I-70, and I remember wondering where all the trees could be.

Downtown Lawrence is organized by streets named after each American state as they were admitted into the Union.  We laugh at Tennessee Street, which is an unlit dead-end with a run down fried chicken restaurant.  Alabama Street is residential, houses and apartments on both sides.  Kansas Street curves around and leads to the local junior high, empty this late at night.

We never really do see the school’s campus, mainly because we never asked.  The only glimpse we get as we drive by in the middle of the night is of beautiful stone buildings and red roofs, of fall trees still in the middle of color transition, and it reminds me of home.

The next two days are wonderful.  The first we spend at the Great Plains National Park, among the buffalo and tallgrass.  It is here, on a hill overlooking smaller hills of golden grass, that my eyes were opened to the world.  I laid down in the grass, one leg bent toward the sky, completely in love with the prairie.  Later that day, as the sun set through the window into a mixture of orange, purple, and pink, we ate dinner in one of the Seven Culinary Wonders of Kansas and reflected on the day’s impact.

The last day began at small park, with a reading in front of a fountain.  As one of the readers from Lawrence spoke, a squirrel ran behind her for a drink of water.  We all notice, laughing. The second reading is in the basement of a downtown bar.  Many of us read our work impromptu into a duct-taped microphone: I from a phone screen, others from folded papers and from memory.  That night, we drank together and said our goodbyes.

Fifteen hours back, through four states but stuck in one for what seemed like years, the Ozarks and Arkansas.  We stop for a short time at a park overlooking a tributary of the Red River and countless ever-green trees, and I remember thinking of home.

It’s four in the morning and we hear tires screeching through the plumes of air puffing from our six chilly mouths. It’s Joseph and he’s swinging a white van into the Ferg bus lane. We all hopped into the illegally idling vehicle and off we went. (Sort of.)

Our start for the Kansas Excange was a little slow. In the hour we spent at City Café, we covered everything possible in conversation: Kansas, MFA school, the weather, preferred dog breeds, education in low-income areas, and coffee consumption (Joseph and I were the only ones who ordered coffee. Everyone else’s excuse was that it was too early; my excuse was that it was that early). After yummy eggs and biscuits, we squeezed back in the van and hunkered down for the 12-hour drive. We didn’t get far; less than an hour later, we had tire pressure issues in the middle of Fayette County, but Shea just happened to have a tire gauge in her purse (how handy!). She has since been gifted the title of ‘Van Saver.’

After that Mary Poppins moment, the drive up wasn’t too eventful, unless you count visiting an Amish store with over 200 homemade cheeses and an eight foot tall mouse mascot, an invitation to an Ozark bike rally over lunch at The Garlic Rose, and reflecting on sheep rights at a random gas station in what we later dubbed ‘the worst state ever’ (aka Arkansas) as eventful.

After about 14-hours, we rolled in Lawrence, Kansas and found our way to Becky’s house (which is named Avalon and is on Avalon). The Kansans were there to meet us, and we all bonded over margaritas and mild salsa at a local Mexican restaurant we parkour-ed over walls to get to. The night of bonding commenced with a trek in the pitch dark through the woods and over a bridge to a (potentially illegal) bonfire and s’mores and Woodchucks. (Looking back on these events, it’s obvious these endeavors were pseudo-trust fall exercises in disguise.)

Saturday was spent driving to the untouched prairie land and just being on the prairie. That next day was the Sunday morning event in the park’s graffiti-ed gazebo. We read the pieces we wrote while sitting in the prairie grass. Mine was extremely short and completely unfinished so I wasn’t totally thrilled about this part. I had the distinct feeling (and not for the first time) that the Kansans were quite used to reading their work and it gave them no qualms to share. I was not so fortunate and my nerves got me a little bit; they were obviously oblivious to the fact that there was only one non-exchange attendee at the whole reading. However, after spending so much time with the Kansas group, I was very excited to hear how each of them writes, to know what drives their work. It’s just like taking a skip or two towards them to see how and who each of them are, just a little more intently than before. I loved what I saw. Such distinct voices and all different.

The same goes for our mighty Alabama group of six. I hadn’t heard or read anything for my fellow Slash Pine-ers and I was delighted with the work they shared. From Shea’s odes to Bill Murray to Sara’s lyrical pioneer story, we all had different stories to tell. It’s funny; we’d all been out on the same prairie, rolled around in the same grass, dug our fingers into the same thick thatch, laughed at Ranger Eric’s bison, petted the orange barn cat, and eaten a ‘Handful of Everything.’ But as in all things in life, we came out with something different. I think of the grasshopper that licked by boot and liked it, of the ‘presidential floors’ in the schoolhouse (to steal a line from Trevor), of how clean the air made me feel even while it was tangling my hair,  of “contemplating the flower” and Joseph’s lesson on distance manipulation and vanishing points, of “everyone looks good on a prairie” and of now knowing how to correctly spell ‘prairie.’

Of the four days, we only spent one day on the prairie but it’s that identifier we given everything from the trip. It’s no longer the Kansas Exchange but the Coniferous Prairie Project. In that wide-open space, we convalesced and clustered. We bred writer-ly ties in the inspiring thatch.

10:30am, Saturday, November 12^th: Sara and I arrive at the Drish Mansion, all nerves and anxious speculation. The first reading doesn’t begin til 11. Since it’s our job to set up, we are the first to arrive, save fellow Slash Pine intern Trevor, who sits on the porch looking very small indeed against the looming Drish backdrop. A small part of me panics. That’s it, I think. I’m looking at the event. Welcome to Slash Stitch Burn. A handful of sullen-looking interns staring into empty ill-attended space, wondering what the hell these past months of planning amounted to.

 2:30pm, downtown Tuscaloosa: I am leading a long parade of people I have never seen before in my life. We are weaving through downtown Tuscaloosa, meandering through the city on a tour of words. I am exuberant, flabbergasted; I can hardly believe my eyes, much less my ears or my skin. The weather is perfect: a sunny fall afternoon, with slanting shafts of light and red leaf-strewn paths. The writers really seem to have taken to the “false history” prompt, delighting listeners with tales of elves inside the Old Bindery, letters to a theoretical city, and plenty of murders/eerie deaths to go around. I don’t know these people, and maybe that’s the best part. This is not a procession of interns’ and writers’ friends. This is not an event for writers by writers. This is an event for Tuscaloosa by writers. There are lots of pairs and trios of friends, none of whom know each other; we all arrived as strangers but unite for a single afternoon, not as isolated pairs and trios, but as lovers of art and this Druid City we call home.

8:45pm, Sokol park: we might have rekindled history by day, but somehow kindling this pile of sticks by night seems a much more daunting task. We are writers. We think in similes and impractical adjectives, not in matches and lighter-fluid sensibility. Thank goodness for Katerina, wood-gatherer and fire-champion of Slash Pine Press.

9:00pm, Sokol park: S’mores. S’more s’mores. Light-up hula-hoops, human pile-ups, and snuggly cuddle sessions. Friends. S’mores. S’more stories and poems. Chilled and fire-warmed, smokey air. A final triumphant Slash Pine “Roll Tide!” Journey back to the parking lot, all of us retrieving the mason jars with candles that line the path. (They look like caught fireflies in your hands). Farewells and goodnights. Relief, and then—is it possible?—almost immediate excitement for the next Slash Pine venture. All I can say is, I hope you’ll join us.

Til next time, friends!

This chapbook is so dang cute I carried it around with me for a few weeks. I liked to pretend it was a small notebook for me to write down flashes of genius, prose-y lines and obscure subjects. The entire chapbook is made out of repurposed paper. The cover feels like a rough two-pocket folder, a milky texture-ized color. The cover image is a cutout. Looks like a paper tag with a man stamped onto the refurbished paper. The man on the cover looks like the King of Spades.

Greying Ghost Press was born in 2007. Like Slash Pine, all of the their books are handmade. But this isn’t why I’m a fan. They stuff the chapbook full of stuff. FREE poetry pamphlets, an old photo of a baby named Paul Roos, a page out of Lassie, shapes of the map of the mouth of the Chattahoochee River. The text is printed on résumé paper. Novelty and personality rolled into one.

The story told by Andrew Borgstrom is about a boy, a mother, and a father. It’s also about a cat named Kitsch and a murder. The entire piece focuses on possibility and irrelevancy in a world in which matters don’t matter. Each page possesses three “sections.” Each section moves from clarity to ambiguity. A favorite section occurs on the last page. Don’t fret – this part doesn’t give anything away:

The inscription may have mentioned the time year, the holiday that
required the gift to be inscripted. The inscription may have referred
to the book as a classic, even if it was not an actual classic, even if the
inscriptor did not know what constituted a classic, even if the pages
were blank, even if it was a dictionary, which is possible and likely.

Borgstrom disorients the reader by his constant building and breaking down of the same images. It is both mystifying and absorbing. An aesthetically charming chapbook with a twist: a mysterious slaying of a possible father.

 “You guys know that what you’re doing is brilliant, right?”

Before Joseph Wood posed the question to us during the Kansas Exchange, I had yet to think about our event in greater terms than word choices or tiki torches. But what Joseph said forced me to think about what, exactly, we were doing with Slash Stitch Burn. In a city so enveloped in tradition, it’s easy to take on an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. Holding on to tradition isn’t always bad thing, but I’ve learned this semester that it is Slash Pine’s nature to transcend it. In Slash Pine, we’re always talking about the importance of place and how we interact with it. These readings definitely captured that essence of our group.

The places we chose for the tours served not only as inspiration to the writers, but also heightened the experience for the reader. It’s one thing to hear about Amelia Gorgas meandering through the stacks of her library while sitting in a board room or in a coffee shop miles away; it is another, more powerful experience, to hear about her ghostly fingers sliding across spine after spine while standing in that very basement among said books. While reading in and of itself has the power to transport the reader, it felt like our historical walks took that to the next level by actually bringing the reader along for the ride.

It was great to hear undergrads, grad students, and professors alike interact with the space we were in. I felt like the theme drove much of the event’s success by making it feel much more cohesive than a traditional one. By breaking from tradition to do something like fake histories, we interacted with and, in some ways, reshaped the history that thrives around us in the Druid City. A fake history, or alternative account, forces us to find truths, explore new tales, and express our own take on tradition.

In the beginning, I didn’t readily see the “brilliant” nature of what we were doing; however, by the end of the night, I felt truly inspired by the fantastic writing we heard all day, and by Slash Pine itself. I felt nothing short of accomplished. I know we all loved the event and were proud of it, but it was even better seeing people from the community enjoy this event we had planned ourselves.