Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

Read

C. M. Mayo

C. M. Mayo is the author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand
Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico
, and Sky
over El Nido
, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for
Short Fiction.

Fiction

Summer 2004

The Building of Quality

By C. M. Mayo

The average citizen—who went to school in a building modeled on a shoe factory, who works in a suburban office park, who lives in a raised ranch house, who vacations […]