In this collection of award-winning short stories, Cynthia Boiter writes with sensitivity and intellect about characters from the South and the social constructs that attempt to define them in the 20th century. With a keen eye toward gender roles and family dynamics, Boiter writes about characters that are as grounded in their sense of place as they are committed to integrity, fidelity, and intellectual veracity. The 14 short stories in this collection share the narratives of smart Southerners as they address issues of love and tradition, birth and death, growing up and growig old with an underlying but unobtrusive sociological analysis. Whether the relationships explored are those of mother and daughter, father and son, husband and wife, daughter and gender-confused father, or nephew and closeted-gay uncle, they are approached with a kind of honesty and intimacy that demonstrates what happens when good people demand the best of one another, even under conditions in which the best is the least likely behavior to expect. Most importantly, Buttered Biscuits brings to light an unexpected brand of Southern feminism and an intense sense of honor and social justice in characters who live and die in a part of the country where the traits are often assumed non-existent.

Buttered Biscuits

Literature & Fiction

Boiter, Cynthia Anne

United States

Muddy Ford Press LLC

To the Wren Nesting meanders through two decades of creative experimentation by a self-taught poet who came late to the dance but continues to learn new steps in her post-midlife years. Subjects here have been harvested with life's widest butterfly net from across the spectrum - anything that moved the writer's spirit to expression. These poems tell stories launched in random moments such as passing a sexy stranger on the sidewalk, having a spontaneous wave of grief after viewing a news clip, buying a book from a vendor on a Manhattan street corner, dreaming about a Frank Lloyd Wright dog house and a 19 percent raise while on pain medication, or - yes - discovering that a pair of Carolina wrens have set up house on your front door wreath. They run the gamut from dark and brooding to meanderingly reflective, heartfelt to humorous and even teasing as they depict stories grounded in moments from everyday life.

To the Wren Nesting

Hartvigsen, Kristine Karol

Poetry

A novel melding the southern literary family drama with a Grateful Dead-inspired neuvo-hippy path of self-discovery, Fellow Traveler follows the journey of Z, an aging, shiftless, Gen X wastrel in search of meaning, if not actual identity--Ashton Tobias Zemp goes by many names, as did other 'flower children' when on tour following legendary 60s band Jack O'Roses around the country. Years after the death of Rose Partland, the Jerry Garcia-like figurehead at the center of the pop cultural phenomenon that the band and its colorful followers had become, Z returns to South Carolina, the land of his birth, to recover from the loss of his marriage, his best friend Brian, and worst of all, and sense of self or purpose--this, a crisis much worse than the loss of a famous rock star someone's never even known . . . right?

Fellow Traveler

McCallister, James D.

Contemporary

In All the In Between: My Story of Agnes, visual artist Laurie Brownell McIntosh uses more than 70 painted panels to tell the cradle-to-grave story of her late mother, Agnes Smith Brownell. A scientist, artist, doctor’s wife, and mother, Agnes approached life with a kind of candor and pragmatism that left little room for sentimentality. From telling her thirsty and whining children to “swallow their spit,” to tending to her dying husband, to orchestrating a life of ritual in her widowhood, Agnes was a force to be reckoned with, eliciting emotions from her youngest daughter that were equal parts fear, reverence, and love. All the In Between: My Story of Agnes is a eulogy, a memorial, a work of art, and a kind of tribute that validates everything between the first and last breaths of a life well lived. There are no heroes or heroines in the story; no parables; no broken hearts or drama; no secrets to take to the grave. Yet the story is extraordinary in its simplicity. By capturing images of her mother’s life through the intimacy of her own interpretations, McIntosh allows her readers a rare kind of insight to the life of a stranger made close and personal for us through the nuance of her daughter’s familiarity. Yet, she does so without folly. Using paintings that are honest and straight-forward, yet beautiful and tender, she tells the tale of her mother’s life with the kind of dignity that would have made Agnes proud.

All the in Between My Story of Agnes

Biographies & Memoirs

Laurie Brownell McIntosh

Community & Culture

Lliterary art book that evolved from a 2012 exhibition by Garciá-Lemos at the Goodall Gallery at Columbia College, SC. Red Social, translates to Social Network in Spanish. 
As he approached this body of work, which is made up of 24 unique portraits, García-Lemos who is a native of Bogotá, Colombia, focused on relationship-building and the community of fellow artists and arts lovers he had become enmeshed in in his new home of Columbia. The sitters for each portrait, members of his newly formed community, were asked to bring symbolic icons for their sitting and many went so far as to collaborate on their specific portraits. &ldquo;The creative space that opened during these sessions provided an atmosphere of candor which mimicked that of the therapist,&rdquo; the artist says. &ldquo;I came to realize the importance of a comfort level between the artist and subject and I chose people who have been supportive of me and are truly friends and family&rdquo;. 
Once the series was complete and had been exhibited, García-Lemos hoped to continue in the collaborative spirit so he approached local writer , Cynthia Boiter. It was his idea to have Boiter create short fictional stories about the characters in the portraits&mdash;whether she was personally familiar with the characters or not&mdash;based on nothing but the title of the portrait and the various icons represented. Boiter says that, &ldquo;Many of the friends about whom I wrote had to become strangers before they could become subjects about whose inner lives&mdash;their worries, fantasies, and insecurities&mdash;I could write. But as unconnected as these stories are to the portrait models who inspired them, they are still real stories, I&rsquo;m sure, that belong to someone else out there.&rdquo; 
The result is a fascinating reverse-process of illustration. Based upon García-Lemos&rsquo;s paintings, Boiter uses fiction to illustrate the portrait subjects. Each piece of short fiction tells the tale of a unique individual with subject matters ranging from love to loss to issues of gender roles, new roles, and throwing off the roles society attempts to impose upon all of us.

Red Social

Arts & Photography

Garcia-Lemos, Alejandro

Boiter, Cynthia

Individual Artists

Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher by Debra A. Daniel is, in many ways, the poignant, yet hysterical life story of an enigmatic, tap-dancing war bride told from the perspectives of the various characters whose lives she has influenced-some for the better, most for the worse-along the way. Though talentless, Myrtle Graham has high hopes for a career on the stage and plans to make her way to Hollywood by dancing in the arms of an attractive, talented, and, hopefully, wealthy, GI. When fate refuses to cooperate with the lackluster Myrtle she tries to take matters into her own hands by raising an ultra-talented son to be her dance partner. Once again, the universe disappoints Myrtle, forcing her ultimately to the point of despair from which there is no return-the pots and pans cycle of her own kitchen's dishwasher. Eight different chapters serve as eight different first person accounts of why Myrtle would one day crawl inside her dishwasher and push the automatic ON button. Among the witnesses to Myrtle's life-and death-are her husband, her neighbors, her husband's mistress, her late son's dance instructor and his ex-girlfriend, the yard boy, and her brother-in-law; all of whom offer unique and hilariously disturbing insights into the mysterious Myrtle Graham.

Woman Commits Suicide in Dishwasher

Daniel, Debra a.

Humor & Satire

The feel of wet soil beneath the knees of the winter-weary gardener as she plants spring peas. The sound of the Carolina fight song echoing down Main Street. The smell of meat crackling in Crisco on the stove top. The taste of tea so sweet it curls your tongue. The sight of deer on the side of the road or the sun going down on the statehouse dome. All these things and more ground us in what it means to be from the South Carolina Midlands. Writer and editor Cynthia Boiter asked more than thirty Midlands-area writers to share how the fidelity of place resonates from their own senses and into their writing in this collection of poetry, essays, and short fiction, A Sense of the Midlands.

A Sense of the Midlands

Short Stories & Anthologies

.Fall Lines - a literary convergence is a Columbia, SC - based literary journal offering poetry, short fiction, essays, and excerpts from both invited and adjudicated literary artists including award-winning authors Josephine Humphries and Christopher Dickey, SC Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth, and more. Edited by Cynthia Boiter with Ed Madden, poetry editor, Fall Lines - a literary convergence is a publication of Muddy Ford Press in partnership with Jasper Magazine, the University of South Carolina Press, Richland Library, and One Columbia, and is published yearly.

Fall Lines - A Literary Convergence

"We return here often," says Al Black in the book's title poem, "to resume mid-sentence our conversation upon my deck." That's the feel of this book, a kind of wide-ranging conversation with a friend. Even as the book teases out in confessional poems the relation between the past and the present, the author's origins in the Midwest and his life now in the American South, and even as it opens out into broader perspective in voices and stories that spin through the heart of the book, it comes back to the quiet intimacy and vulnerability that drives this collection. Leavetaking and loss haunt the book, but a desire for connection and continuity keeps us coming back to the deck for that "gift of time together." - Ed Madden, author of Nest

I Only Left for Tea: Poems

Black, Al

During the summer of 2013, more than two dozen visual, literary, and musical artists from Columbia, South Carolina gathered on multiple occasions with four historical experts to learn as much as they could about a night almost 150 years earlier when General William Tecumseh Sherman and his army invaded and burned their city, an episode that would eventually lead to the end of America's Civil War. There were no war reenactors among them, no Lost Cause mythologists or closet racists. There were no conservatives. In fact, the members of the group were not only artists but die-hard intellectuals with relentlessly inquisitive spirits hungry to learn not only about the atrocities that occurred the night of February 17, 1865, but about the atrocities that led to the events of that night as well as those that resulted from that night for decades to come. In this brief collection of poetry, prose, and even a screenplay, thirteen literary artists respond to their immersion into the facts surrounding the night of Sherman's burning of Columbia. There is frustration, anger, indignation, sympathy, empathy, guilt, and sentimentality. And while this collection is packed to capacity with truth, there are, sadly, very few answers. Written to accompany a month long exhibition of visual art by the painters, sculptors, and installation artists who were also part of the group of artists and scholars, this volume, edited by Jasper Magazine's Cynthia Boiter, is an intimate study of one of the most significant moments in the history of South Carolina, and the country itself. Literary artists include Susan Levi Wallach, Tara Powell, Tom Poland, Ray McManus, James D. McCallister, Ed Madden, Rachel Haney, Will Garland, Debra A. Daniel, Jonathan Butler, Elizabeth Breen, and Al Black. Cover art is by internationally renowned visual artist Susan Lenz.

Art from the Ashes

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