Essays

12 Arches, 13 Apostles: The Liminal Wealth of the Grand Union Canal

12 Arches, 13 Apostles: The Liminal Wealth of the Grand Union Canal

The Grand Union Canal, or G.U.C., is a 137-mile-long, 220-year-old man-made channel of once purely functional water. It is now long relieved of its original vocation of channeling industrialised loads of coal and aggregates between the great smoking behemoths of London and Birmingham. Now only leisure narrowboats and lightweight cruisers chug down it, their pilotsContinue Reading 12 Arches, 13 Apostles: The Liminal Wealth of the Grand Union Canal

Creating our own Wild Lot, or what we’ve been doing, 2018

Creating our own Wild Lot, or what we’ve been doing, 2018

Our idea for starting a press originated about 10 years ago, when Sonja dreamed up a plan to create a writing retreat, located in some remote-but-accessible corner of the country (far enough away from it all to see the stars at night, but close enough to urban settings for access to airports, train stations, and urban/academic communities). We hadn’t even met, yet, but when we did finally meet at grad school and work together on the literary journal, the idea quickly gained traction, growing to include a publishing component, and eventually named “Wild Lot.” Although specifics of the plans have changed over the years, the goal has basically remained the same: to contribute beautiful and valuable publications and to provide an affordable and idyllic setting for fledgling and pedigreed authors and other creatives to do nothing else but focus on their craft, while allowing us to do the same.

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Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds

Stranger Things 1: Portals, Periphery Woods, and Parallel Worlds


The air is toxic. Floating, ashy bits of debris swirl around 
like particles in a snow globe. They flicker through flashlight beams and gather on canvas bodysuits, yet never amass on the dark, uneven ground. Voices echo, stunted, through the murk: “Willllll!” The mix of sickly green and flat marine-blue hues lends an aquatic quality to the atmosphere, a quality made even more pronounced by the submerged, undead condition of the ubiquitous trees. It’s a place to look for and find the lost, dead or tucked away in an incubation chamber. A place to listen for the bipedal flower-headed beast that hunts, scenting blood across dimensions. Forever night, it’s a place on the other side of the routine, the normal, the safe. It’s the Upside Down. But what is the Upside Down? Where does it end? And what does it mean?

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Garden Fortress, Garden Chaos: Wild Lot Discusses Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”

Garden Fortress, Garden Chaos: Wild Lot Discusses Welty’s “A Curtain of Green”

We emerge from our summer wanderings with a discussion of one of our favorite works of fiction and really one of the most perfect summer stories: Eudora Welty’s “A Curtain of Green.” Originally published in 1941, it is the title work of her first collection. “A Curtain of Green” takes place in the fictional town of Larkin, Mississippi.

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