I’ve never understood the concept of four seasons. They are a myth. A slight chunk of world experiences them. Where I live, we have summer and not quite summer anymore and then two weeks of something colder than you can wear a T-shirt in. That third thing is not a season. It’s a splinter of a shiver. A glimpse at something foreign.

I’ve moved many times in my life. My father was a minister, and he was always getting bigger churches, until he didn’t get churches anymore. Most of my life has been lived in Texas. I’ve spent nine months away. In Vermont. From April to December. I moved away in a blizzard, packing my things in a U-Haul as snow flicked my nose and tongue, my feet slipping on iced stairs as I hoisted furniture aloft uneasily. That day, it was two degrees. Your breath froze into the forms of animals that begat more animals, and the generations danced away into the grayness of sky. But I wasn’t all that uncomfortable. In fact, the work was refreshing.

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Tom Williams is the author of the novella The Mimic’s Own Voice. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in over thirty publications, including Boulevard, Barrelhouse, Indiana Review, The Main Street Rag, Night Train and Pleiades. A former James Michener Fellow, he has received individual artist fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Arkansas Arts Council.

I’ve spent the past several days contemplating newly released lists. The first is Esquire’s list The 75 Books Every Man Should Read, and the second is One Story’s Top 10 Short Stories of All Time. The first, Esquire’s, caught negative attention for its lack of diversity: the only female on the list is Flannery O’Connor. The second, One Story’s, went fairly unnoticed insofar as I can tell.

I’m always confused by the notion of diversity as represented merely by color and gender. I often feel, and maybe incorrectly, that people who are immediately drawn to these more obvious lines of division have not spent much time around people from other cultures and social statuses. The concept of the “dead white male” feels entirely American to me. I’m more like black males from America than I am like white males from Russia. I’m more like women from Texas than I am like men from Vermont.

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We had our fun. And now you can have yours. The winners of the Brian Allen Carr SHORT BUS book giveaway are:

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Labradoodle. Lusitania. Magicians. Keith Stone. Brian Allen Carr. Brian Carr. Brian Allen Carr Short Bus.

Short Bus, yes. The book is why we’re here.

Sometimes it takes following a random path of search terms to remind you where to go. Fine with me if folks wind up on DSM for reasons as varied as looking after a beer commercial stud to learning about an ill-fated ocean liner. Once they get here though it’s a coup to keep them here. So, hey, random reader: After searching for pictures of cuddly canines finger the following letters into your machine: SHORT BUS.

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