Rot and Redemption is a quiet, three-year experimentation in writing and memory. Wide-open eyes, interpretations of place, and passing time shaped over 60 autobiographical pieces. Stories, images, and poems range in subject but are unified by common, very human themes specific to a time and place in the American South. Love and death, interpretations of decay, dignity, broken trusts, eccentricity, and severed culture reflect a childhood spent moving around within the Mississippi Gulf Coast region. The author's imagination, nurtured by underlying pathos and humidity, grew large and wise (and even joyful) from circumstances revealed story by story.