Motherload: Stories

The desperate, the pure-at-heart, the charmingly manipulative, the wise, the deluded -- mothers and children of every stripe populate this collection of stories by Avery Caswell.

In "Irish Twins &?Thoughts of Suicide," Marann, a young artist down to her last three dollars, knows she can either fall into the unknown, or venture forth like a tightrope walker, while in "64 With a Sharpener"?ten-year-old Frances, in her thin-soled Keds, is aware already of how much better the world looks at a distance. A military school cadet cons his mother in a series of text messages, only to discover he's been conned himself. And in "Salvation" Maggie remembers her Gullah grandmother Pasqueline describing a summer sky, "so still, like a body, a kuwfa, with no more breath left in its bones."

Caswell evokes past and present and paints a southern landscape with a deft brush, from neighborhoods with split level houses and paved driveways, dirt roads the color of mahogany with a cluster of shacks no bigger than a child's playhouse, to a garden full of cures and curses, where the gardener knows which plants nourish and which are pure poison, and should she choose, she could "consign anyone to his fate, with no more thought than deadheading a bed of chrysanthemums."

Originally from Chicago, Avery Caswell holds a BFA and MFA in design, and an MFA in creative writing and publication arts. She studied writing at Iowa Writers’ Workshop and illustration at Maryland Institute College of Art. Passionate about combining words and images, she was the lead writer and book designer for LUCK, A Collection of Facts, Fiction, Incantations & Verse. Her collages were featured in Far From the Centers of Ambition, and she is the author of Motherload, stories.