The Alabama Writers’ Forum
The Alabama Writers’ Forum, a partnership program of the Alabama State Council on the Arts, works to cultivate our state’s literary culture. We do that through supporting writers at all stages. We encourage our young writers to find their creative voice through the Father Goose Poetry Festival for Kids!–and through our Alabama High School Literary Arts Awards. We support the work of our state’s literary community through our Alabama Authors Directory, First Draft magazine, and other programming and opportunities for writers across the state. And we celebrate our state’s rich literary legacy through the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. We are, above all, a community of writers united by our desire to advance the literary arts in Alabama. If that describes you — join us! There are many ways to get involved.
The Volcano Keeper
The Volcano Keeper By Bradley Sides Regal House Publishing; 2026 Paperback: $18.95 Genre: Southern Fiction Reviewed by Edward Journey In a 2024 review of Bradley Sides’s short story collection, Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, I used the word “audacious.” Sides’s hugely different but equally audacious new offering, The Volcano Keeper, is a beautifully wrought novella of love, grief, persistence, resilience, and miracles set in pastoral Alabama, where the death of a beloved grandparent results in the emergence of a volcano in a cow pasture. One of the book’s vignettes ends with the words, “The scene. The words. They linger.” Those words could serve as a review of this startling, beautiful book. Anton Chekhov’s great play, Uncle Vanya, is subtitled “Scenes from Country Life,” and those four words kept occurring to me while reading The Volcano Keeper. Charlie Melvin is nine when The Volcano Keeper commences in September 1962. He eats watermelon with his granddaddy who will die soon but predicts a miracle to come. From that point, life and death proceed in a series of short, [...]
