#joni tevis

[thin-cities]

Look more closely. At the water the color of beef broth, so full of salt and herbicides—atrazine, bentazon, diquat, metribuzin—it's two steps from solidifying, like aspic. I've eaten my fair share of spinach and grapes and strawberries from the Imperial Valley; their runoff is here now, reducing every minute under the powerful summer sun.

Joni Tevis, “Ten Years You Own It,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

[thin-cities]

If the fabric that separates earth and eternity is so threadbare, a chute to hell yawning open beneath your feet at any moment, then it makes sense to name your roads Gethsemane or Golgotha, Sinai or Calvary. Set aside even common land as hallowed. There is no bright line between now and forever.

Joni Tevis, “The Lay of the Land,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

[thin-cities]

For me, glitz and apocalypse go together; I blame it on a childhood steeped in fire, brimstone, and 'Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous'.

Joni Tevis, “Something Like the Fire,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

[thin-cities]

Here is a weapon that enacts hell in three ways: fire brighter than the sun, wind stronger than a cyclone, and fine particles that imbue the air with death. Only myth can explain it. This is the salamander that lives in the fire and eats of the fire. This is the basilisk that binds you, once you look. And this is the hammer that fractures time: the house is gone in the space of a moment, but the radioactivity of the fallout, what he house becomes, will be deadly for millennia, longer than our lanuages will last.

Joni Tevis, “Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

[thin-cities]

In her youth, she had spoken four tongues, but now she spoke the language of nails, to which no one could reply. While her carpenters built, she spoke through them, though they remembered nothing beyond 'Worked on the kitchen today'. They cracked jokes about ghosts, but that wasn't what made them uneasy; it was the way she used them to get outside speech.

Joni Tevis, “What Looks Like Mad Disorder: The Sarah Winchester House,” in The World is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse

[colleen-powers]

Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis

Buddy Holly, John Wayne, and the A-Bomb.

I’m slowly making my way through The World Is On Fire, a collection of creative nonfiction about the atomic age, America, etc. This excerpt is an essay about Buddy Holly, John Wayne in The Searchers, and nuclear tests done in the desert in Nevada in the ’50s. To quote my boyfriend’s mom, who lent me the book, “It’ll knock your socks off.”

[superstitionrev]

SR at NonfictionNOW 2015 Flagstaff

SR at NonfictionNOW Bookfair 2015 Flagstaff

28th – 31st October 2015, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ

NonfictioNOW is a conference where all kinds of nonfiction are celebrated. From long form journalism to the lyric essay, panelists, keynote speakers, readers, and student come together to discuss the craft of writing. Panel topics range from The Beasts Among Us to The Essay as Ruin, from Creative Nonfiction and Cognitive…

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[literaryephemera]

I live my life in the present and future only; without death, the past has no teeth."

Joni Tevis