Manure Fires and Possum Magic

October 10, 2013

Marc WatkinsMarc Watkins’s stories are exciting, offbeat, colloquial, and lyrical. We’re thrilled to be featuring his story “Shivaree,” about a backwoods marriage and the compromises of queer life in rural American, in our upcoming issue. 

In his own words, Marc writes about:

High school dropouts, botched burials, cat ladies, a manure fire that won’t quit, church lady gossip, hustling stolen corn, women taking Cialis, a crucified dog, Wal-Mart greeters, a gelding, catfish noodling, passing your nephew off as white, a handsome pair of church shoes, an empty Minuteman III silo that might be a tunnel to China, three-legged dog breeding, setting fire to the land to save the soil, and hope is held in the magic offered in a possum’s penis bone.

Marc lives and writes fiction in Oxford, Mississippi. This year, you can read his stories in BoulevardSlice, and Foxing Quarterly. His stories have appeared all over creation, including in Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses. In 2012, he served as guest editor for Pushcart Prize XXXVI.