
When news breaks from star-crossed Sister Evangeline’s central-Alabama hometown that some of her former associates have gone on a bizarre campaign of murder and mayhem, the Mother Superior’s already low opinion of her wayward young novitiate is cemented: there is no saving her. Cast out, Evangeline resumes her former identity (Maria Espinosa), and eventually — against her better judgment — she returns home. As her former schoolmates are prosecuted for their puzzling crimes, and as she reconnects with her “Most Likely to Succeed” high school sweetheart whose vast promise has gone mostly unfulfilled, Maria finds herself — almost despite herself — helping everyone around her pick up the pieces of what they thought they were. An exploded pastiche of sacred texts, primarily in the Abrahamic tradition, Kingdom Come is a new-millennium digital collage housed here on this site. Complete with multiple voices, multiple modes (text, image, sound), and multiple forms (tall tales; court testimony and evidentiary exhibits; realistic fiction; Southern Gothic; disembodied captions; dreams, nightmares, sermons in verse; Jeremiads; shards, shrapnel; etc.), its tenses run the gamut, too: past, present, future. In the end, the overriding question this multimedia narrative asks is this: what happens if we coax the Divine Feminine back into the Western canon’s crumbling creation myths? (To enter the Kingdom, click here.)
TJ Beitelman is the author of several books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, most recently This Is the Story of His Life, a linked sequence of prose poems published by Black Lawrence Press. His work has appeared in DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other venues, and it has garnered him fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham. He has lived in central Alabama for more than twenty years and currently directs the Creative Writing program at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham. (For a self-interview describing the genesis of Kingdom Come in more detail, click here.)