How do we know ourselves? How can we be seen for who we truly are? How do we find redemption in a world that conspires to separate us?

Leaf Seligman explores these and other questions in a collection of linked stories from the midway of a carnival traveling through the Jim Crow South. To learn about these characters in this Midway Tabernacle is enlightening and rewarding, but to hear those characters come to life as Leaf Seligman - herself an itinerant preacher - reads her stories, is heaven.

At once, tender, gritty, angry, and empathetic, Leaf’s narration pulls you in at the outset and leaves you feeling redeemed at the end. From the Midway traces the journeys of people who travel with a carnival, including the owners, the oddities, and the African American laborers charged with tending them.

You will meet Lizard Man, who spends his childhood prophesying at the behest of his mother and his adulthood bitterly chasing off what he wants most: human connection; Tiny Laveaux, the “world’s smallest woman” with a larger-than-life personality; Stony, the fossilized boy; and Lisabelle, the dancing girl who tries to offer him joy; eight-foot-tall Leroy Haines who thinks of trees as his brothers; and Cheever whose endless toil threatens to drown him in the Midway mud.

Lyrical descriptions of the physical environs and the emotional landscape of each character function like a funhouse mirror, providing just enough distance and distortion to see ourselves more clearly. The sharply striated world from long ago aptly reflects the tensions, divisions, and perennial shared yearning for redemption and belonging that mark us as human.

Leaf Seligman began writing during her Tennessee childhood where she encountered the midway, tent revivals, and the Civil Rights movement. She has taught writing in colleges, jails, prisons, and community settings and worked as a minister, a jail chaplain, a youth services caseworker, and a restorative justice practitioner.