"Alligator Stew" Southern Yellow Pine Publishing January, 2014. Every year it seems another apocalypse is predicted. Every day we hear of the pending global warming disaster. there was Y2K. The next one was the Mayan 2012. Every preacher on television rants and raves about the end of time and the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. Preacher Harold Camping went so far as to predict the exact day. After that day came and went, he claimed he had made a mistake and made another prediction. Then he finally admitted he had no clue. No one cared after he missed the second time. During the summer of 1990, Iben Browning predicted an apocalyptic earthquake would strike the New Madrid Fault on December 3rd, 1990, devastating the heartland from St. Louis to Memphis. In Delbert, Arkansas, a fictional town along the New Madrid Fault, the people felt other things were more important than an impending apocalypse—like Wink Gaskill's beer permit application for a new local convenience store he was building. Faydeane Gossett stated the community concerns clearly: "If we allow him to sell beer, next thing you know we'll have crack houses, whorehouses and casinos on every street corner." In this story collection, the townspeople barrel towards their date with destiny while dealing with infidelity, lust, sexual and domestic abuse, drug addiction, cancer, family histories, bigotry, murder, ambition, sexual preferences, mental illness, loss, failure, religion, mistakes, local gossip, elections and professional wrestling. Despite Iben Browning's prediction of an apocalyptic earthquake, December 3rd, 1990 came and went without so much as a tremor, and as with all predictions of apocalypse, the town folks breathed a collective sigh of relief and went about returning their generators to Sears for a refund, pouring their cache of gasoline into their trucks and ATV's, eating their Vienna Sausages, Velveeta loaves, and Spam sandwiches, and dumping stored gallons of water on their front yards and winter greens. They went back to dealing with the every day problems that make a predicted apocalypse seem small in comparison. Facing a once in a lifetime catastrophic event, the residents of Delbert, Arkansas, prove that the truly apocalyptic events are the ones they face every day. God’s Naked Will: Stories at the Collision of Faith and Sexuality. Burnt Bridge Press: Due September 15th, 2013. Many people—preachers especially—flock to church on Sunday mornings where they find it easy to deify themselves while castigating those they feel unworthy of grace. But when religion, spirituality and faith collide with every day life, the pits of doubt, failure, and hypocrisy—like grains of mustard seed—take root and grow, choking out all that is righteous. The character’s in the stories of God’s Naked Will deal with their yearnings in the context of faith and failure. They reveal they are not deities. Within these pages faith collides with schizophrenia and demon possession, incest and deformity, visions and voices, illness and addictions, nudism and wife-swapping, alternative life-styles and nude weddings, sexual choices and sexual preferences, chastity and perversion, cock-fights and executions, voyeurism and violence, prostitution and evangelism. The stories in God’s Naked Will make no apologies, respect no persons, and pull no punches as the text explores raw yearnings that erode the base of spirituality, once again proving that Christ did not die in vain—that we all fall short of the glory of God and exist in desperate need of salvation.(less)