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Articles by Martha Park

Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She is a 2022-2023 Fellow with the Religion & Environment Story Project and a recipient of the William Graves Sackett Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, The Guardian, Guernica, Granta, Ecotone, ProPublica, and elsewhere.

Featured Article

This story was published in collaboration with The Bitter Southerner and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Transcript

Well past midnight on July 28, 2022, 12-year-old Kaleigh Baker tiptoed into her mom’s room and rustled her awake. “Mommy, the house shook,” Kaleigh said.

Linda Baker, still groggy, heard only the air conditioner’s whirr. She told Kaleigh it was probably just thunder. Kaleigh crept back upstairs. Minutes later, Linda heard a deluge of water. From the back door, she saw rain pounding down on a wall of mud almost 8 feet tall that had slammed against their home’s vinyl siding. Linda recognized the disaster: another landslide.

Linda raced to round up Kaleigh, 16-year-old son Ian, and the dogs. By 2:30 a.m., they’d thrown essentials into bags and fled toward Hazard, the county seat roug... Read more