Yellow Dirt
by Eva Claire Jordan
[Editor’s Note: Click on the triptych below to view it at full size.]
Eva Claire Jordan has worked as a landscaper, visual artist, and therapist. She is currently occupied full-time by domestic life in San Jose, California, rising in the black hours before dawn to write at the kitchen table. Her family’s zine, The Corona Times, is archived in Stanford University’s Digital Repository.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Yellow Dirt”? This is a true story, one I’ve been working to tell in longer form. I had to perform quite a surgery, whittling and excising in a way that felt more physical than visual, to shape it in the boundaries of a triptych. The resulting spareness suggests the bleakness of the desert itself (I hope). As soon as I saw the Journal’s examples of sidebars, I thought of my court transcript. It took time to land on a series of cross-examination questions to best evoke the difficulty of being on the stand as a victim who is also primary witness. At first I included my replies, then I cut those for space, then questions intermingled with facts-of-point, then questions were grouped on the right to follow the chronology of events, and finally they migrated left, where they build tension that leads into the landscape where the central story begins. It is interesting to me that native speakers of Hebrew or Arabic (the other two languages present at the trial) might out of habit start on the right and drift left to end with interrogation.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
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09/21 • TBD