“Many and Many a Year Ago,” the winner of the 2019 Norton Girault Literary Prize in Fiction from Barely South Review (Old Dominion University), is now available in the Fall 2019 (11.1) issue online, for purchase on Amazon, and for my family and friends back in Virginia, may be in select bookshops. Congrats to fellow contributors and thanks to BSR staff and judge Janet Peery, who said
This is a smart, demanding, tautly-written, risk-taking puzzle of a story that amounts to no less than an Industrial Age creation myth, specifically the creation of the narrator. It bears the mark of family lore, a story told and retold over time. On first reading, the marvel is that the second person narrator works so beautifully, and on first reading the payoff is emotional. On second reading the story delivers its thematic riches, the seemingly random occurrences, the misapprehensions, and plain luck coming together as surely as chromosomes and alleles come together to make a new person in the world.