Pick up the Winter 2017 issue of The Southern Review, the esteemed literary journal founded in 1935 (with Robert Penn Warren as editor), published by Louisiana State University Press. The latest issue includes fiction by National Book Award finalist Joan Silber ("Secrets of Happiness")and Pulitzer Prize finalist James Lee Burke ("The Wild Side of Life"), as well as poetry by U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic ("Charmed Circle;" "The Lifeboat;" "Past a Gull Sitting on a Buoy") and longtime contributor David St. John ("Equivalents"). I'm beyond honored to be included. Here's a glimpse:
An Amount of Discretion
Her husband’s instructions were clear. Within a year of his death, the sum of his collected work—the notebooks, drawings, prints, and paintings—would go to the institute where he’d taught painting for nearly five decades. As Jonathan’s executor, Seline was entrusted with the task, charged with inventorying the studio and dispatching the gift to the provost. (The same provost who, at the wake informed her, Scotch on his breath, that there would indeed be a posthumous retrospective with color catalog and scholarly overview.) Knowing his art would have a home at the institute was Jonathan’s comfort in those final months. It meant the collection would not be divided and sold off, but remain intact, stewarded by an institution that knew and understood his work. Once the immediate legal and personal matters settled, Seline’s work commenced. But as it happened, she’d only just begun her inventory when she came across her husband’s field journals.
It was summer, a glum Los Angeles June, and sitting cross-legged on the studio floor she studied the journals. There were eight in all, and some she was seeing for the first time. Most contained notes on the weather, varieties of light and shadow, observations that couldn’t be made with a drawn line, even one as good as Jonathan’s. But there was one notebook, bound in green, she’d never seen before, and opening it, she found it was filled with marvelous sketches—deer, quail, details of lupine and monkey flower, globed brown hills with scrub oak clustered in the gaps. Her first thought was to make the green journal a gift to Finn. But then she couldn’t bear to break up the lot, and soon resolved that her stepson should have all eight.
Read the story in The Southern Review.
