A Green Glow on the Horizon Shout Out
Dawn Burns a great writer and someone I’d hoped to meet up with when I moved to Michigan—a person with similar sensibilities about art, literature, God!—is having a book launch in a few weeks in Lansing.
It’s funny how the necklace of feminist writers all link together. One person brings another one into your life, and on and on.
Anyway, I read Dawn’s short story collection, Evangelina Everyday, feeling as if she were writing about me when describing Evangelina’s small victories, how she walked through a mundane Indiana housewife life while still finding things to celebrate, such as a plastic bag caught in straw grass in a forgotten field.
Her newest collection is also linked stories based upon visiting what amounts to “tourist traps.” As we all know, there is something very human and basic in the curiosity we show to outsiders, the different, the just plain odd. We are attracted and yet repelled; we want to know more—perhaps because we secretly harbor the knowledge that it is there we belong. Like in Hell, Michigan.
Hell is real. It is a crossroads of bars and putt-putt golf. All it really has is its unusual name and whatever the random traveler brings to that place. Guilt, naughty excitement, cloaked anxiety.
SCOTT HARRIS ON "A GREEN
GLOW ON THE HORIZON":
I always enjoy when Dawn
Burns visits and introduces me to her friends—real, imagined, and amalgams. In
A Green Glow On the Horizon, Dawn’s friends are as fascinating as I would
expect her friends to be. Both ephemeral and eternal, they include what-if lovers
who bond over angelic “water cats,” and a thirteen-year-old more worried about
her mom’s wellbeing than about a potential intergalactic alien stepfather. They
might be hyperdontic, hypertrichotic, or Oscar Wilde (making an in-absentia
cameo).
A Green Glow on the Horizon
is gently and lovingly curated—steeped with earnestness, hopefulness, copious
amounts of humanity, and just the right infusion of whimsy. These characters
would be fine company over a cup of Celestial Seasonings peppermint tea.
I know that in a myriad of
alternative universes—ones that Dawn must surely have visited—a version of me
would be a card-carrying member of the National Association of Tourist
Attraction Survivors. But until I find the portal, I am grateful for her sharing
this travelogue.
–Scott Harris, Everybody Reads Books and Stuff, Lansing, Mich.
3:00 PM
Everybody Reads, Books and Stuff
Enjoy a reading, get your
book signed, and share a slice of pie on Pi Day.
Celebrate a book 25 years in
the making!
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