Meg Mendenhall is from Jackson, Mississippi.
In Bill Joyce’s hands, The Man in the Moon is the story of a solitary man, bereaved of his parents in infancy and raised on the moon by a brigade of moonbots and other friendly lunar creatures. He listens to the wishes of children that have been carried up to his home by lost balloons and, unable to cure children’s inevitable fear of the dark, devises a way to make the moon shine at night.
Everyone knows something about the power of things, how they remind us of our actions over time, how they have the power to delight or disappoint us. I’m referring here to what Katy Simpson Smith calls “oddments”—the items we don’t mean to collect, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to throw away, that we put on a desk in a spare room and forget.