"Standing By" by Jo McElroy Senecal

 – Not so fast, my slowly dying friend!Out there my heart easily held you with the thrum of ancestral music, song, and dance, as consistent as air.A native fish-taco-loving San Diegan, Jo McElroy Senecal spent decades on the East Coast, blending professional stage and clown credits with various roles at magical powerhouses like The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp and The Big Apple Circus Clown Care (now Healthy Humor). Her NYTimes article hints at her passion for pediatric palliative care, which Jo continues to do along with adult hospice care in Charleston, South Carolina. Jo has been a member of the Lunas, six actors-turned-writers, for two decades. .Jo is a member of Sullivan’s Island’s Poe Library Memoir Group.

“Sister, that sounds like fortune telling. Isn’t that a sin?”What would happen to the rest of us who die swallowing pennies and buttons? But not wanting to be the rooster, I stay silent.Mary Alice Dixon treasures a tattered old index card on which her 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Elvira Friend, wrote the recipe for her Happiness Cake. Mary Alice, a multiple Pushcart nominee, won the North Carolina Writers’ Network Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition and is a past finalist for the NC Poetry Society Poet Laureate Award. Her chapbook, Snakeberry Mamas: Words from the Wild (Charlotte Lit Press, 2025), offers poems of Appalachian women and folkways. She lives in Charlotte, NC where she grows sunflowers in cow manure. Find her at www.maryalicedixon.com.

Freedom and scot-free or freeloader and free-for-allWe acknowledge those blessings and those curses in the stories we tell.

 – I have always told myself I’m not a runner.Race day in November dawned bright and crisp.After a career spent finding the voices of senior business executives, Alison Rice Bruster is writing a new chapter. She holds a BA in English Literature from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has been published in three previous Personal Story Publishing Project collections, and she won recognition in the Charlotte Writers Club Nonfiction Contest. She is a member of Charlotte Lit, the Charlotte Writers Club, the North Carolina Writers Network, and the South Carolina Writers Association. She lives in Fort Mill, S.C., and travels widely, often bringing home stories worth telling.

Diana Neunkirchner is a retired teacher living in Rougemont, North Carolina. An avid reader and writer, she is a member of the Durham Writers Group, the Writers’ Inspirational Network, and the Writers’ Critique Group. When she’s not writing short stories, personal essays, or memoir, she is hiking along the Eno River or playing the flute at Your Saving Grace, the family farm.

Not all the lessons learned in school came from our teachers. This is a story of “unarmed power. “As a music professor and academic administrator, Joel Stegall authored more than 35 journal articles, book chapters, and other such long-forgotten documents. Since retiring to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he has completed a family history dating from the early Colonial Era. Delighted to discover in his bloodline ingenuity, inventiveness, devotion to duty, self-sacrifice and uncommon love, he was at the same time distressed to find insanity, murder, suicide and cattle rustling.

Award-winning writer Steve Cushman reflects on an early experience in parenting his autistic son.Steve Cushman earned an MFA from UNC-Greensboro and has published three novels, including the Novello-Award winning Portisville. Steve’s first collection of poems, How Birds Fly, is the winner of the 2018 Lena Shull prize. Steve lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his family and can be found online at www.stevecushman.net.

– longing for familySeparated as children, a relentless desire to find one another spawned a frustrating search. Patricia E. Watts lives in Mountville, South Carolina where the love of local and family history has given her a passion to write stories to pass down to her children. She has found through stories of tragedies, tears, and triumphs and even mysteries that she has a rich heritage worth telling.  Her story “A Real Small Town” appeared in the 2020 Personal Story Publishing Project, That Southern Thing.

your wingman with angelsAn engineering prodigy arrives in the South, fascinated with an ancient relic and searching for the aerodynamic laws of angel wings, all the while nurturing his grove of Carolina dogwoods. It’s a good life. Mary Alice Dixon lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is a former attorney who often served as court-appointed counsel in juvenile court. She has also been a professor of architectural history, teaching in Charlotte, Minneapolis, and China. She belongs to Charlotte Writers’ Club and Charlotte Lit. Her recent writing is in, or forthcoming from, Living Springs  and Main Street Rag. She volunteers with hospice and delights in reading poetry to the dying, grateful for the lesson this teaches about what really matters.  

—a brush with my bugaboo.A brother’s seeming “betrayal” awakens a loyal kid sister as his fiercest champion and ally.Janice Luckey, who lives in Davidson, North Carolina, is a member of the Write On! writing group sponsored by her local library as well as the online writing group Impromptu. Writing became a rhythm of her life when she scribbled a romance novel in a 3-ring binder in junior high school. This sparked a life-long love of all things writerly—writing, reading, journaling and hoarding office supplies. Janice was a contributor to the 2020 and 2021 Personal Story Publishing Projects. You can see more of her stories at LKNConnect.com. When Janice isn’t writing she can be found encouraging her four granddaughters’ creativity or roaming libraries, bookstores, and Staples.