- Connie May Fowler
- Richard Bickel
- Skip Horack
- Tom DeMarchi
- 2005 Hurricane Katrina Benefit Reading
- From the Archives: An Interview with Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone
- An All-New-Content 30-Day Writing Regimen for Adults starts September 1st, as well as a Young Writer's Regimen Re-Run! And make sure to check out the winning work from June's cycle by Celia Leber and Wendy Breuer!
- A Tribute to the Gulf Coast, featuring commentary, testimonies, celebrations, and memories of the Gulf Coast region from authors such as Skip Horack, Michael Garriga, Diane Roberts, and more. If you would like to contribute to this ongoing feature of SER Online, Summer 2010, email the editors with your proposed contribution.
- THE RESULTS ARE IN! To view the winners and finalists of SER's 2010 Poetry, Narrative Nonfiction, and World's Best Short Short Story Contests, click here!
- Regular Submissions are Re-Opened! We've had a productive summer and are now pleased to invite submissions of original fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as timely book reviews, via our online Submission Manager. We hope you'll show us what you've been working on!
In Memoriam for Jill Caputo
We at The Southeast Review
and Florida State University are reeling from the sudden and tragic
loss of one of our own. On the morning of August 10th, 2010, the driver
of an SUV struck and killed Jill Caputo, a recently-graduated MFA
student, as she was crossing a street by FSU's campus in her wheelchair.A native of Wichita, Kansas, Jill was a teaching assistant in the English Department from 2006-2008 and served as a reader of incoming submissions for SER. After graduating in the spring of 2008, she worked for the Agency of Workforce Innovation, aiding people in filing for and receiving unemployment benefits. She was a beloved friend, daughter and sister, as well as a talented fiction writer hard at work on her first novel, a project she pursued in and out of her fiction workshop classes at FSU. At the time of her death, she was 30 years old.
All of us at SER would like this page to serve as an ongoing and permanent tribute to her life and work. Many thanks to everyone who has helped us celebrate Jill here. If you would like to contribute to the page as well, please email us at southeastreview@gmail.com.
To read a poem by Jill Caputo, click here.
From A Q&A with Skip Horack:
Nothing about writing really comes easily for me—though, it’s true, if I do have any kind of comfort zone it is in writing about place. And I suppose of all the different landscapes I’ve moved through in my life, that stretch of Interstate 10 between, say, Houston and Jacksonville, is the one that I know best. It captures my imagination for some reason, and I find that if I think hard enough on a particular dot on that Gulf Coast map a story will eventually come to me.
—Skip Horack
Summer descends on Tallahassee early and with a fury. Long before the sweltering heat settles in and wraps us in its humidity blanket, we start dreaming of boat rides down the Wakulla, taking in the cool breezes and fresh oysters of Apalachicola, and skipping off for Saturdays at St. George Island. This summer, we are painfully aware that our Gulf Coast dreaming has turned nightmarish for many. Tensions are running high for Gulf residents, and the continuing bad news is heartbreaking.
In light of the oil spill disaster plaguing the waters just south of us, The Southeast Review is devoting our entire summer issue—one we hope will turn into an ongoing discussion—to the Gulf Coast. It's a tribute and an attempt to raise awareness about the region so many call home and repeatedly turn to for their subject matter. We only wish we could do more.
To start your own Gulf Coast dreaming, you can visit our Tribute to the Gulf Coast feature where authors intimately connected to the area share their love for the region and thoughts on the disaster occurring there. Then, read a new interview with Florida writer Connie May Fowler. We are also pleased to feature the work of Apalachicola resident and photojournalist Richard Bickel. The photographs you see here are from his Last Great Bay and Apalachicola River Series.
Finally, to continue our celebration of the Gulf Coast, we have combed through our archives and invite you to revisit Q&As with Skip Horack and Tom DeMarchi and The FSU English Department's 2005 Hurricane Katrina Benefit, featuring readings by James Kimbrell, Ken Foster, Elizabeth Dewberry, Virgil Suarez, Janet Burroway, David Kirby, and Robert Olen Butler. If you would like to participate in our tribute to the Gulf, or would like for us to link to relief information, please email the editors. Thank you, in advance, for reaching out to help.
Introduction text by Jessica Pitchford, former Editor-in-Chief of The Southeast Review.
Photography by Richard Bickel.
