Entasis: Badlands

The latest issue of our journal Entasis is up. It includes fiction, poetry, memoir, art and photography from extremely talented artists. Please check it out.

Here's my editorial note from the issue.

150 years ago on April 12th, soldiers in Charlestown, South Carolina opened fired on soldiers in a small masonry fort in the harbor. A few months earlier, both groups of soldiers had been in the same army; they would spend the next four years killing each other. The Civil War may have officially started on that day but the divisions in American society had been obvious, and increasing, for decades. Until they couldn’t be covered up any more.

We weren’t thinking about the Civil War when we picked ‘Badlands’ as the theme for this issue but division and darkness were on our minds. In America today, we see a country that seems increasingly at odds with itself and a media that resounds with rage, mendacity and shrill desperation.

The artists and writers for this issue all explore these growing divisions, separations, cruelties. It’s the dark alleys that draw them. They feel the undercurrents; they can’t overlook the contradictions, even when it’s their own selves that are divided. As Jimmie Dale Gilmore sings, ‘My Mind Has a Mind out of Its Own.’ It makes for compelling work.