Tex Gresham

Tex Gresham is the author of Heck, Texas (Atlatl Press). His debut novel, Sunflower, will be published by Spaceboy Books in November 2021. His work has appeared in Hobart, The Pinch, The Normal School, and Rejection Letters, among other places. He’s online at www.squeakypig.com and on Twitter as @thatsqueakypig. His dog wears a pink dress.

TEX GRESHAM on film with Rebecca Gransden

What film, or films, made the first deep impression on you? This might come as a shock, but I think watching E.T. as a kid rewired my brain, changed my DNA, shaped my life’s path. I would rewind the ending over and over and just bawl my eyes out as the ship made a rainbow across the sky. I wasn’t just sad—it was joy as well. And I didn’t understand how I could have two feelings at the same time, and how this movie could do that to me.  Very often film is one of the ways we first come…

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LOVEBIRD by Tex Gresham

Most people have no idea what goes on in retirement communities. They don’t care to know. When your kids dropped you off at Del Largo Sueño a few years go, they made tearful promises to visit, but you never saw a tear fall. They faked guilt to hide the happiness that they wouldn’t have to watch you die. Your son, Clifford, and his new wife didn’t stay long enough for you to unpack and hang your sweaters. Your daughter waited around, and then she asked for “gas money.” She’d been biting her cheek all day, her eyes sunken like little…

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CUTTING ROOM by Tex Gresham

The woods stopped being an enchanted place where the sound of animals scurrying through undiscovered territory felt light and natural. Sunlight blocked, trees strangling the brassy tones into a steel-tinged umber. A fluorescence coated every surface, something we’d walked into, a transition from scene to setting. Maybe it was the deer that brought this change––maybe it was something else. Limp and drained, the deer’s face was a shocked mask of deadness. Blood spumed out its crooked mouth like seafoam on the surf of a slaughterhouse floor. I was a boy out hunting with his dad and uncle in the humid…

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