In the summer of 2017, I pulled up stakes from Flatbush, Brooklyn and put them down again in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. My official reason for doing so was, and still is, to obtain a Ph.D. in Creative Writing. The real reason is a little more complicated than that, but it involves money, mental health, and an ever-increasing despair with a city that began to jettison its greatness right around the time I moved there in the late 1990s.

Will the Deep South incarnation of The Real Ramona flourish under an increasingly corrupt regime? Will we live to find out?