The Reason the Dress Is Yellow

In Steve Mitchell's third book, The Reason the Dress Is Yellow, he allows us to see the world through his characters' eyes, hear their thoughts, and feel their joy, sorrow, and pain. Of Mitchell's first story collection, Fred Chappell, Poet Laureate Emeritus of North Carolina, shared this passage: "'This time I'm not walking. I am a still point. This time, I merely sit quietly and allow the full weight of joy, of family, of the love we share, to bear me forward into a moment of glory where for one single and splendid instant I am absolutely one with every soul around me and the terror of it burns me clean.' This is perhaps the most telling passage in Steve Mitchell's impressive volume because it reveals in dramatic though indirect fashion one theme common to almost all the stories in The Naming of Ghosts: the unabideable fear of loneliness, the need to escape by any means the solitary confinement of self. Albert Camus would admire this book." Mitchell brings more of the same to The Reason the Dress Is Yellow.