Unless Soul Clap Its Hands and Sing, by Seana Graham

Here's another one of my stories that you can still find online. The Homestead Review picked it up. This was kind of a funny story. Another story of mine had gone out to various magazines, and by the time the editor of the Homestead Review asked for it, it had already been picked up elsewhere. She was gracious enough to ask for something else, and this is what she ultimately got and took. At a certain point in the process, it dawned on me that the name of the editor was sort of familiar, but it took a friend to connect the dots for me and lead me to realize that Jessica Brehany was actually the partner of our former used book buyer JIm Maughn, who is a poet in his own right. When I hesitatingly mentioned the fact to her by email--which was the only kind of correspondence we'd had--she replied that yes, she thought we knew each other, but hadn't wanted to say in case I thought she was taking the story only because of that.

This is one of the few stories I've written that has a specific local setting, so it seemed appropriate that it found a home at a fairly local college in Salinas. It's a story is about Alzheimers and the title is swiped from Yeats. Despite the topic, I don't really think of it as a gloomy tale. But you be the judge of that.

Unless Soul Clap Its Hands and Sing .