Memoirous

A Green Glow on the Horizon Dawn Burns Cornerstone Press, 2026 Green Glow is a collection of linked stories supposedly compiled by an editor and written by survivors of tourist traps. The subtitle is: Tales from the National Association of Tourist Attraction Survivors. NATAS. It seems legit—but what is this book, the stories, really about? What are they really fighting against? I know Dawn Burns and her background and I have a good guess. The last story is about finding paradise in Hell. That is, Hell, Michigan—another made-up place?! I’ve actually been there. To the restaurant, the billboard, and putt-putt golf venue. It exists—but is it real? But I’m getting ahead of myself with existential questions. One may as well ask if Las Vegas is real or Heaven/heaven or any number of places that may or may not exist. And who gets to decide. I guess that’s what the book is about/asking. Let me pose my own question in the form of an anecdote. All across campuses, institutional sit...

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 t...