Drew Bratcher

It was eight feet wide and a head higher than the fence. It was made of aluminized steel. In a long line of pine boards painted white for a while and black for longer, its six round bars were cockscomb red. Struck by a stick or a cast-off apple core, it let out a metallic ding distinct from the … Continue Reading

“In the pines, in the pines,” the song insisted, but for us it was always “in the magnolias.” There were five on the hill in Nashville where my grandparents lived. The Southern kind, Magnolia grandiflora, bull bays. Elegant and unruly, they stayed green come June or January. Their squat trunks were … Continue Reading

The first time I saw Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 film about my hometown, I was in my early thirties. After a decade spent living in midwestern college towns and East Coast cities, I had returned to Middle Tennessee for the summer, and I was struck, dumbfounded really, by what I found. … Continue Reading

Sometimes at night when I shut my eyes, and sometimes, for that matter, when I cinch them in prayer, what flashes up on the walls of my mind is a series of three images. Like the dinosaur slides my daughter switches in and out of the View-Master, which, no matter how familiar, retain a capacity for … Continue Reading