Alum Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96) is interviewed by AWP for an “In the Spotlight” feature:

When do you find time to write?
I make the time. I’ve learned the hard way that if I’m not writing, I’m not really inhabiting myself, and if I’m not doing that, I’m not fit company! I write every day first thing, around 5:30 a.m. It took me many years to train myself to do that. I’d always been a person who wrote late at night, a habit I developed no doubt because of life circumstances, one that probably many mothers share, or have shared, of waiting until the children’s needs are met and the kids are in bed. When I pursued my MFA at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, that’s how it went. By day (and night) I worked as a public education teacher and single mother, attending to all the duties therein: making sure that we all ate and had clean clothes to wear, paying the utility bills, overseeing homework, grading papers and preparing lessons, etc. I ran no less than six miles a day! I had to, to burn off the adrenaline. So, beginning around 9:30 to maybe as late as 11:00 p.m., I wrote. And read. And wrote. The MFA Program was rigorous, rightly so. But those late hours, that was my writing time. I’m not the same person or writer as in those days, but it took a lot for me to become accustomed to making the first true activity of the day my time for writing. I didn’t think my mind or brain could ever function that way, and was highly uncomfortable making myself write first thing. Now I’ve been doing this for about five or six years and I can’t imagine anything else. So maybe I’ll have to change that up again sometime soon! The important point is that I know I need to write, and I have suffered immeasurably when I haven’t, and I believe it’s important that I do if I’m to be the best editor and advocate I can be for other writers—which is what I truly want. So I make sure that I write.

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An excerpt from a poem by alum Annie Kim (poetry, ’09) appears in The Kenyon Review:

Sijo No. 1
at the edge   I sometimes catch   wisps of my   big white childhood

two white dogs   barking madly   two sisters   jumping taut rope

it’s as if   they were neatly glassed   all those years   or I’m glassed out

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Alum Laurie Saurborn (poetry, ’08) interviewed alum Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09) for r.k.v.r.y. quarterly literary journal:

Laurie Saurborn: One striking aspect of your poem “Dark Feather” is how it captures the movement of flight. Flight, or that which makes flight possible, is present in the spilt paint that curves “like a crow’s wing.” It is here in the spring, which will “land light / on those boulders.” As it meditates upon its subject, the movement of the poem is akin to circling, as if the speaker is a bird looking on all this from far above. Could you tell us more about how you came to write this poem, and how close or far you feel from the events it describes?

Christine Fadden: When I sat down to write this poem, it came quickly, which normally would signal to me: Don’t trust it! I know you poets—I’ve heard the stories of nights lost agonizing over the placement of a comma. But also, as a fiction writer, hell, I’ve been working on my novel since 2010. Writing must take time, right? 100 words or 10,000, we had better revise. I did very little revising with “Dark Feather”—I changed a verb tense or two, adjusted a few line breaks.

Continue reading the interview online, and find the poem discussed (“Dark Feather”) here.

A poem by alum Ian Wilson (poetry, ’02, fiction, ’16) appears at Apricity Magazine:

A man looks at the moon
and sees a woman bathing
in the farthest window
at the end of the block.
Perhaps not bathing,
writing or writhing, weaving
maybe waving — his eyes are not that good.

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