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REVIEW:
DEADHEADING & OTHER STORIES
By Beth Gilstrap
 

(Red Hen Press, out now)
 
Reviewed by Adam Van Winkle
 
I haven’t thought about the steam sputter of a pressure cooker in a long time.  But you mention pressure cookers filled with collard greens and fried okra, and I’m right back in Grandma Essie’s farmhouse kitchen in Texoma.  I smell it. I feel the film of grease on the drawer and cabinet pulls built up from years of cooking with hog lard. 

One of the great gifts of fiction is its ability, when it is well done, to give us visceral sensation.  Beth Gilstrap’s southern fiction collection Deadheading & Other Stories, out now from Red Hen Press, makes me feel it, and is very well done.
            
And it ain’t just food Gilstrap makes you feel when you read this outstanding collection of southern stories.  Set in the Carolinas, Deadheading introduces complex southern women, way beyond stereotypes, surviving in a threatening and dying landscape. 
            
Relevant today, many of these women struggle with death and the threat of violence.  For it, they are stronger and wiser, and any reader will respect the hell out of the struggle they’ve endured.
            
These women are fictional, but Gilstrap writes with such authenticity, such compassion for the place and people, such awareness of the southern struggle, you’d be hard pressed to read Deadheading  and not imagine it all comes from somewhere very real. 
            
Reading this collection, I thought of Grandma Essie cooking, of Grandma Essie chopping copperheads with a hoe, of Grandma Essie and all she endured on the farm.  And isn’t that what we want, fiction that reconnects us with ourselves, with our own lived experiences?  I know I do.
            
Buy, read, treasure Deadheading & Other Stories by Beth Gilstrap.  Do it now.

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  • CJ MAGAZINE
  • Current Issue
  • Style & Submit
    • About CJ
  • Books
  • Sheldon Lee Compton
    • Oblivion Angels
    • The Orchard Is Full of Sound (excerpt)
    • Our Lord and Savior Christian Slater
    • Dog With a Rabbit's Head
    • By-blow
    • Until the Going Down of the River
    • The Judas Steer
    • Tooling Up
    • DYSPHORIA (excerpt)
  • Interviews, Reviews, & Presses
    • Blake Johnson's Prodigal: An American Parable
  • Jobbers
    • Big Rig by Shaun Jex
    • A Night Out with Big Ricky by Katy Goforth
    • War Eagle by David Barker
    • True Dreams of Wichita by Shaun Jex
    • Doink the Clown Works Birthday Parties by Michael Chin
    • The Ballad of Ethel Bridges by David P. Barker
    • House Show in Badger County High School Gym by Simon Nagel
    • 288 Miles by David P. Barker
    • Corn Dogs by Shaun Jex
    • Getting Ready + Cowboy by Michael Chin
    • American Dream by Robert Libbey
    • Training Partner by A.A. Rubin
    • Finding the von Erichs by Shaun Jex
    • The Making of Big Sandy by Michael Carter
    • Pot Roast from Vance Godbey's by Mark A. Nobles
    • Abdullah the Butcher in Gotham by Mark A. Nobles
    • PWI by Josh Olsen
  • Harry Crews
  • CJ Issues & Authors
  • Our Father's Lit: Western Pulp