Swimming the Author

England tested witches with water. The suspect was bound, right thumb to left toe, looped to a rope, and lowered into the village pond. Pure water was believed to refuse the devil’s servant, so a body that floated was guilty and a body that sank was innocent, and the innocent were hauled up half-drowned to receive the town’s apology. The procedure was called swimming a witch, and its genius was architectural: it could only convict. Whatever the water did, the crowd on the bank went home with the verdict it had carried down to the shore. Four centuries on, the pond fits in a browser tab. Paste the chapter. Click the button. Let the water decide.

Continue reading → Swimming the Author

Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty

Today marks the eighteenth anniversary of the Boles Blogs Network gathering under a single domain. That formation date is 2008. Writing under one of the network’s earlier names, however, began much earlier, in 1996, when Go Inside Magazine opened a small storefront on a web that still ran on dial tone and patience. The full arc now covers thirty years, fourteen blogs gathered under the BolesBlogs banner, a sister site on SquareSpace launched during the pandemic, and a stubborn argument about what publishing ought to feel like when the writer answers to nobody but the reader.

Continue reading → Eighteen Years Under One Banner: The BolesBlogs Constellation at Thirty

Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions

Prairie Voice launches today, not because the world needs another website, but because the present has become incomprehensible without the past. We live in an age of unprecedented change, facing questions that feel entirely new: How do we maintain human connection through screens? What does work mean when we produce nothing tangible? How do we raise children when childhood itself has been digitized? These questions aren’t new. They’re variations on themes our ancestors knew intimately. Prairie Voice exists to excavate that buried wisdom and translate it for contemporary crisis.

Continue reading → Announcing Prairie Voice: Where Yesterday’s Wisdom Meets Tomorrow’s Questions