“Taking My Father Back To Louisiana One Last Time” by Natalie Baszile

An essay by alum Natalie Baszile (fiction, ’07) appears at Buzzfeed:

It’s 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in early May, and the air inside the New Orleans airport smells like fried shrimp, mildew, and a hint of the Gulf. It’s a comforting smell, at least to me, and every time I fly down here from California, the first thing I do after stepping off the plane into the terminal is inhale deeply.

If I were here by myself, I’d be on the road by now, easing into the Crescent City or flying down Highway 90 towards New Iberia, where my friends live. But this trip is different: I’m on a mission. I’m meeting my mother, my dad, and my sister, Jennifer, whom I just started talking to after a two-year estrangement. I’m taking them on a drive along the Boudin Trail.

We have a lot to heal on this trip.

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“Nights Below” by Ian Randall Wilson

A poem by alum Ian Randall Wilson (fiction, ’16; poetry, ’02) appears at The Collagist:

All night I think
how earth gives up
its bones.  A thousand
thousand years and all
that’s left.  The little nags
my thoughts again
though in a different order.

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“Evidence” by Maryse Meijer

A short story by alum Maryse Meijer (fiction, ’09) appears at The Collagist:

He steps around the body and its shadow of blood. The head, where’s the head? He leans closer; some kind of mashed in. Pulverized. But it’s all here. Kneeling he sniffs, pokes, prods, guesses, wonders. A bit of brain like putty dried on the oven door. One of the cops whistles. The detective stands. Peeling off gloves, giving orders, pages of notepads flickering. Making the usual jokes. He turns his back on the other guys, rubs his eyes. Somehow he is expected not to go crazy. Blood even on the flowered wallpaper. He squints. The flowers and the blood compete for white space. He is sure a woman was here. Circles of blood on the linoleum left by a pair of pumps. Either she did it or she watched it and didn’t make a call and that makes her a bad lady.

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“What Knots Know” from Noah Stetzer’s new chapbook

Noah StetzerAlum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) has a new chapbook titled Because I Can See Needing a Knife out now from Red Bird Chapbooks. Following is a poem from the chapbook:

What Knots Know

So I unlace our shoes; strands of leather
and cotton snick as tips slide out each eye.
I push this nib into my pillowcase,
pick apart the warp and weft, unweave both
into yarn and thread; lay across our bed
laundry twine, red spools of Christmas ribbon.
My canvas belts and your silk neckties: what
you don’t know is everything can be tied.

Learning rope gives you a knack for “two-round
turns into an overhand hitch with one
more pass.” This one takes unlayed strands, the string
pieces untwisted and works them tightly,
until they spiral.  No love poem, instead
I tied a rope to you; with the far end—
called “running,” “living,” “tagged” —attached to me.

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An essay by Dawn Abeita

An essay by alum Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96) appears dawn abeita the Superstition Review blog:

Guest Post, Dawn Abeita: Virginia and Flannery Together Again

Last year I went on two literary pilgrimages: Great Britain/Virginia Woolf, and Georgia/Flannery O’Connor.

The juxtaposition wasn’t intentional. My husband had work in London and I tagged along, walked around the tiny corner of Woolf’s London called Bloomsbury, then got a car and left him there working while I rambled around Sussex where she later lived. Which is to say that I drove down lanes with hedges that constantly swatted my side view mirrors to visit ramshackle houses with frowsy and riotous interiors.

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An interview with Krys Lee

An interview with alum  (fiction, ’08) about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, appears at The Guardian:

Krys Lee’s debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, opens with a description of a lavish banquet hosted in Pyongyang by the dictatorial “Dear Leader”. The guests wear fur coats and Rolex watches, and sit at a mahogany table, eating delicacies flown in from the Tokyo Tsukiji fish market by private jet. Following the meal, the host raises his hand: “a glittering disco globe came down from the ceiling and the Joy Brigade began strutting in pink hot pants to a banned American pop song”. One couple, a senior party official and his wife, whose story we are following, are among those obliged to dance. Suddenly the mood changes, and the evening ends with the official shot dead, and his wife and son, Yongju, forced to flee the totalitarian state across the heavily patrolled border into China.

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An interview with Gabriel Blackwell

An interview with alum Gabriel Blackwell (fiction, ’09) about Madeline E., a cross-genre book about the film Vertigo, appears at Entropy Magazine:

1) In multiple ways, Madeleine E. presents itself to the reader as a continuum of failure. Scotty’s and Judy’s inability to achieve their desires within the scripted universe of Hitchock’s Vertigo; the movie’s own disappointing initial box-office performance; the failure of the narrator to write the book his agent wants him to write; etc. Why is failure such a compelling literary subject?

There’s this scene, a little over midway through Vertigo, where Scottie goes up the tower after the woman he believes is Madeleine Elster. Though he starts up the stairs, he can’t make it all the way to the top. Now, if he had, we, the audience, know, he would have found not only Judy, but also Elster and the “real” Madeleine waiting there for him—the mystery would be solved, the story would be resolved. And to Scottie, getting to the top is the difference between saving Madeleine and letting her die. No matter how one sees it, then, Scottie’s failure to make it up the stairs is quite serious, so serious that thinking of it sends him to some sort of rest cure. Even knowing how serious the situation was, though, Scottie could not make it up the stairs.

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“Once, A Field” by Laura Van Prooyen

A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears at The Cortland Review:

Always wrapped in her red sweater, Frances walked
against the wind. First when the fields were open

and onions stung the air. Then when bare beams
rose into frames, reaching up from fertile soil.

Split-levels took shape and filled with strangers,
and Frances walked among them, her hair

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“The Light” by Fay Ann Dillof

A poem byFay Ann Dillof alum Fay Ann Dillof (poetry, ’15) appears at The Cortland Review:

We send the kids out to the swings
in the barn. Ask them, please, to go away, go,
we’ll join you soon, but soon is not a thing
they trust. They need us now. Their now
not the same as ours in middle age

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