You searched for michael gills - Madville Publishing

BC1

BC1 by Michael Gills. A Coda to his Go Love Quarted. A portion of the front of a guitar shows on a blue background.

BC¹, or Into the Land of the Woolly-Headed Washers

A Coda: The Go Love Quartet by Michael Gills
ISBN: 978-1-963695-51-9 paperback $22.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-52-6 ebook $9.99

February 18, 2026

Luce has no idea what she’s stepping into when she knocks on Big Rose Begay’s front door on Mother’s Day weekend, her own mom on the other side of the continent, ever staring off the beach access stairway to the sea—mourning. Whatever Mountain Meadows had meant to her father, it had ended with his ashes back at the family cemetery in Solgahatchia on the Trail of Tears. She’d brought the Martin, made good on the promise. What Edgar and Rose, who was expecting, did with it was their own business.

In BC¹, the dazed travelers—like so many before them—make one last run for California and its hope for renewal. They escape for the time being whatever it is that has dogged them all the way. Then, as in all great quests, Luce must turn back toward home, with little but prayer and the newly won knowledge of what matters most in this world as guide.

Praise for Michael Gills’ previous novel, Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear:

Michael Gills’ novel begins with an avalanche and never slackens pace thereafter. These pages jangle with incident, present a pageant of unforgettable personages, and speak a language of ruefully humorous lament and celebration. Every phrase exhibits the generous outlook of its author. Every sentence reveals and affirms a surprising truth we already know. The ornery humor is truthfully mordant, energized by sprightly melancholy.—Fred Chappell, author of I Am One of You Forever and Midquest

Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of thirteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Before All Who Have Ever Seen this Disappear (Madville 2023), New Harmony (Raw Dog Screaming Press). Burning Down My Father’s House (Texas Review Press 2023). Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s Alegría (Madville Publishing 2021) and Katie Sayal’s Lady of the House (Madville 2025). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty-four years, Jill.

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear
a novel by Michael Gills

ISBN: 978-1-956440-31-7 paperback $21.95
ISBN: 978-1-956440-32-4 ebook $9.99

274 pp.
March 21, 2023

Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear, Michael Gills’ fifth novel, plumbs the depths of the Stepwell family tendency toward theatrical catastrophe. When Weldon Stepwell, bare-knuckled catcher for the Danville Little Johns and town florist, has his leg amputated in a wood-cutting accident, the team shows up on the hospital lawn to give blood, pray, and curse God. Mostly they gather to be with the stricken wife, daughter, and son and wait to see if their teammate will live through the night. One teammate is sent to retrieve the leg, and just what on earth do you do with such a thing? Rural Arkansas in 1950, they are men who’d just whipped Hitler and come home to play ball, volunteer firemen, rural mail carriers, the stray senator-to-be, hardware store workers, and fish farmers. Spanning three generations, they just can’t seem to outrun whatever it is that stalks their periphery. Finally, an adult grandson must contend with the Stepwell business in the form of a plague that comes on them and the world from nowhere. Quarantined between a gleaming football stadium on one side of the road and the city cemetery on the other, a moment comes when they must walk out under the sun and re-commune. A story that dives as deep as you like into the abyss, then fights its way out with all the hope and grace this life allows.

What people are saying about Before All Who Have Ever Seen This Disappear:

Michael Gills can flat out write fine sentences. His writing is part Old Testament prophet, part Cormac McCarthy. It’s not as violent as either, but it’s not without its moments of violence, betrayal, and the attendant tragedies those things bring. All of Gills’ novels are rooted in the Stepwell family’s history, which is dark and shiny in turns. This, his fifth novel, Before All Who Have Seen This Disappear, is, to some extent a baseball novel, but not as much about baseball as the cover might lead us to believe. Like all good baseball novels, it’s about life, love, loss, and most of the time rallying, finding enough strength to persevere. This season, 1949, after the war against Hitler has been won, is cut short by the buck saw that takes Weldon Stepwell’s leg, and soon his marriage. It does not end with a shot into the gap with the winning run in scoring position. No, Weldon, like the mighty Casey, strikes out. He’s “sorry to beat the band. Sorry like no one’s business. The sorriest man on a planet full to the sorry brim with sorry people.” And yet, his grandson Joey forgives him, as we are wont to do, and loves him to the end of his days. This novel will leave you a bit bruised and battered, but it also will help you find your way through the dark times, past and yet to come.

—Rick Campbell, author of Sometimes the Light and Gunshot, Peacock, Dog

Michael Gills’ brand-spanking-new novel begins with an avalanche and never slackens pace thereafter. These pages jangle with incident, present a pageant of unforgettable personages, and speak a language of ruefully humorous lament and celebration. Every phrase exhibits the generous outlook of its author. Every sentence reveals and affirms a surprising truth we already know. The ornery humor is truthfully mordant, energized by sprightly melancholy.

—Fred Chappell, author of A Shadow All of Light
and many other works of poetry and fiction

Arkansas native Michael Gills is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel New Harmony (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Book 4 of the Go Love Quartet. A fourth collection of short fiction, Burning Down My Father’s House, will be published by Texas Review Press in 2023. Other work has been nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Hoefner Prize for Fiction, Southern Review’s Best Debut of the Year, recognition in the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize Anthology, and inclusion in New Stories from The South: The Year’s Best. His undergraduate novel writing workshop has been featured in USA Today, and several of his students have gone on to publish books of their own, including Emi Wright’s Alegría (Madville Publishing, 2021). Gills is a Distinguished Honors Professor at the University of Utah, where he lives in the hills with his wife of thirty-four years, Jill.

Runaway

Runaway, an anthology

Louanne Smith, Michael Gills and Lee Zacharias, editors

978-1-948692-26-7 paper 19.95
978-1-948692-27-4 ebook 9.99
6×9, 256 pp.
Fiction anthology
March 2020

Available from these online retailers: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo

Roseville to Kansas City, Jamaica Plains to Lubbock, the characters in Runaway find new lives. These exciting stories find transformation via spirit, heart, loss, hope and emptiness. Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, and Lee Zacharias have crafted a collection that is at once devastating and utterly magical. This is a collection to be read and re-read, shared in writing workshops and savored.

—Karen Salyer McElmurray, Wanting Radiance

What follows in this anthology is a collection of stories, real or imagined, that have been carefully crafted into works of art on the theme of running away. . . . In many of them absence becomes presence—the absences created for those left behind or the absences created within those who leave, or even think about leaving, others behind. In every one of these stories something is missing, a parent, a feeling, or some essential part of the self.

It is no surprise that many of these stories are motivated by abuse. . . . In one case a teen mother sacrifices herself by returning to an abusive father to let her baby daughter go for what she hopes is essential medical care. Not many of us know where—or even how—to run, and though a few characters run to, most of them run from. But to or from, one thing comes clear to them and to the reader: you can run from yourself, but no one ever completely escapes.

The two prize-winning stories both involve rituals, one mysteriously invented, the other ill-conceived. And though both of the honorable mentions begin with young women barely into adolescence hanging out with friends, the tone and atmosphere of those tales diverge. That these are all such different stories should give everyone heart. . . . No one’s running away story is quite like anyone else’s. Perhaps no one’s circumstances are quite like anyone else’s. Memory and imagination never spin exactly the same way. More importantly, the art one creates from such circumstances, or the circumstances imagination creates, is unique. These fully realized stories speak in diverse ways to a nearly universal desire. Who has never wanted to run away from something? Every one of these stories has been selected because it contributes to a larger narrative. Every one of them speaks to the questions that belong to that larger narrative. Who are we if we refuse to be shaped by our pasts? Who are we if we choose no longer to be ourselves? Who are we, whether we are left behind or gone?

from the forward by Lee Zacharias

Contributors:

“Neighbor Boys and Cousins” by Jodi Angel

“Kansas” by Emily Chiles

“Ritual” by Albert Aden

“Running Toward Away” by Richard Jay Goldstein

“If That Isn’t a Sign From God, Then I Don’t Know What Is” by Philen Bradford

“Sugar” by Misty Skaggs

“The Whiskey Monkey” by Maureen O’Brien

“Vivian Delmar” by Louise Marberg

“Nothing to Light Our Way” by Emily Hoover

“Daphne: The Aspen Version” by Erica Olsen

“Reapers” by Jeffrey Byrem

“Reading Herzog” by Michael Simpson

“Iris with Mermaids” by Deborah Johnstone

“Sioux Falls, South Dakota” by Marisol Cortez

“Sever” by K.B. Carle

“Lubbock 1974” by Bobby Horecka

“Running in Circles” by Merrill Gray

“Under the Grapefruit Tree” by Shelbi Carpenter

“Willie’s Crucifixion” by Rick Campbell

“The Thing” by Lou Morrison

“The Anchor Song” by Maurice Ruffin

“After We’re Gone” by Brett Riley

“Xmas, Jamaica Plain” by Melanie Rae Thon

“The House of Unintelligible Omens” by Randall Watson

“The Fishing Dog” by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Editors:

Luanne Smith lives in New Jersey and works in Pennsylvania, but she is a born Kentuckian. She is an Associate Professor at West Chester University outside of Philadelphia where she has taught creative writing and film for nearly 30 years. Her work, usually short fiction, has appeared in Puerto del Sol, The Oxford Review, The Texas Review and other literary journals.

Michael Gills is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel West (Raw Dog Screaming Press, March 2019) and the forthcoming visionary memoir, Finisterre. His short story collection The House Across From The Deaf School (Texas Review Press, 2016) was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Prize for Fiction. Gills is Professor of writing for the Honors College at the University of Utah, where he lives in the foothills with his wife, Jill.

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; three novels, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council, North Carolina’s Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Southern Humanities Review’s Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award, and a Silver Medal in Creative Nonfiction from the IPPYs. At Random was a finalist in literary fiction for the 2013 International Book Awards, the National Indie Lit Awards, and the USA Best Book Awards, and Across the Great Lake has been named a 2019 Notable Michigan Book. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals. Ten times her essays have been named Notable Essays of the Year by The Best American Essays. For a decade she served as editor of The Greensboro Review.

Posted on February 21, 2026February 23, 2026 by kpdavis

AWP Retrospective

It’s that time of year again, already–AWP!!! We feel like we are hanging on for dear life. Somehow we forget every year how fraught January and February are… no matter how carefully we plan and organize.

What causes chaos at the start of the year?

End-of-year bookkeeping is a beast. Royalty calculations, statements, and then checks going out. It happens every year, and we always think, “next year it’s going to be easy…” But each year brings special challenges. still we’re pretty sure this time. Next year WILL be easier. but the royalty checks went in the mail yesterday. Whoosh! (6 weeks of my life I’ll never get back… and the bookkeeper’s life… You all have no idea how much work goes into getting those statements right. So many small sums of money come and go from so many directions that it takes a specialist or two to get it right, and at the end of the year, no amount of careful recording makes all of it make sense!)

AWPs past

Then there’s the anxiety brought on by memories of AWPs past. So many things have gone wrong. Kim’s first trip to AWP she was very green. She shipped four or five boxes of random books and didn’t read all the convoluted instructions about tax documents and all the rest of it, so spent that whole conference sitting with more experienced poets and authors who published with TRP. We couldn’t really sell books, so we gave a bunch away, and Kim learned plenty just shooting the you-know-what and people watching.

Current Madville authors, Mike Hilbig and Michael Gills stand at TRP's table at AWP 2017. Gills holds his book from that year. There's a bit yellow sign with blue lettering on the front of the table that says Texas Review Press

AWP in Washington DC in 2017. The table for the press with Mike Hilbig standing with Michael Gills.

AWP 2018 in Tampa

In 2018, Kim was at the tail end of her time with TRP, and planning for Madville’s launch. She sat, for the second year in a row, next to Rick Campbell, veteran editor, publisher, and poet, and a friendship developed. It was once more a good time and place to people-watch and learn. An unfortunate connection was made to a printer/distributor who offered what we thought we couldn’t get for Madville as a start-up… full distribution. (Y’all know that old adage about when something seems too good to be true?? But these guys were old school, respected…) At any rate, friendships grew at that Tampa conference and seeds were planted for Madville.

Luanne Smith, Lisa Rose, Kim Davis, Suzanne Heagy, and Laura Leigh Morris

AWP 2019 in Portland

2019 was Madville’s, our big introductory year. And that Thursday morning as Kim was walking into the bookfair to kick the whole thing into gear, she received the email from her printer/distributor that they had filed for bankruptcy and Madville should figure out what to do with their books. We got the books back, but those so-and-sos ate all our money for our first year of operations. But you know… we did what we do… We put a brave face on it and had a good time.

Then there was AWP 2020 in San Antonio

2020 should have been our big breakout year. We were determined to make a grand splash in San Antonio–in our home state. We splurged and took a whole booth space in conjunction with our friends at Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art that is put out by Fairmont State University. And wouldn’t you know? March 2020 marked San Antonio, Texas, as ground zero for the Covid-19 Lockdown.

We had fun anyway, not realizing how serious the situation really would become. We saw old friends, breathed in each other’s general directions, and tried to figure out social distancing. And we didn’t make the splash we hoped we would. Many people were sensible and stayed home, but news was breaking while we were driving to San Antonio. We carried on with our plans, and Kestrel shifted over to an empty booth up the way. We had rented a house and made all those plans… sponsorship reception, reading in the bookfair, parties in the house every night. It was a good time… right up until it wasn’t! Yes, some of us did get sick, but we pulled through.

AWP 2021 was virtual

Nobody knew what to do. To be fair, we were learning how to do things remotely, but this one was a waste of our time, and a very cheap way for AWP to get out of reimbursing us for 2020, which they said they’d do, but did not.

AWP 2022 in Philly

Or… the 2022 SNAFU! We were traveling large to Philly. Luanne Smith splurged again, and bought us the nice sponsorship package with all the bells and whistles. She had a book coming out, you see… I think it was Muddy Backroads that time. And she is one of our board members. Kim, meanwhile read all the instructions from the material handling company, and they suggested quite strongly that we should palletize the books we shipped there because otherwise we would be forced to pay exorbitant fees per box delivered to the booth. Cutting the story short, FedEx were extremely difficult to deal with and didn’t get the books there in time. We had no books to sell at the booth. We had fun anyway, but we really wished they would have just allowed us to claim a loss. But no. They found the books, sent them home, and had the gall to bill us again–several thousand dollars for the pleasure of dealing with them. For future reference, FedEx has no live humans running things anymore. They answer the phone and read from prompts on screen. No decision making capabilities at all. It was really an expensive trip for nothing other than camaraderie, and poor Lu, who paid for it all, barely got to attend due to family issues.

AWP 23 in Seattle

AWP23 in Seattle was a blast. Once again, we had help from Madville board member Luanne Smith, who splurged on a fancy sponsorship package for us. We had a a fabulous location for our booth on sponsors row with Dolly Parton, larger than life to celebrate the launch of our Dolly Parton anthology, Let Me Say This. We had a fun, fun panel about writing poverty, a reception, and an “off-site/on-site” reading that was really nice in one of the hotel conference rooms. Many of the contributors to the Dolly anthology came out to read their work to us, as did the rest of our Madville authors who attended AWP that year.

AWP 2024 in Kansas City

Thanks to Michael Simms and Vox Populi for sharing their space with Madville in 2024 in Kansas City. And thank you to Lee Zacharias for the photos!

AWP 2025 in Los Angeles

Dolly had proven such a success, we attempted something similar with Honkeytonk Sue, a character created by Bob Boze Bell originally, and used to illustrate several poems in our Santa Fe Trail: Chasing the Big West. She was great, but no where near the attraction that Dolly was. The most fun, we think, from Los Angeles, was the University of Utah honors college students who helped out at the booth. They’re all novel-writing students of our Michael Gills.

Search Results for: michael gills

BC1