Attention Washington Wallies!

The Second Washington DC Area Gathering of Warren Wilson MFA Alumni

 

DATE/TIME:  Sunday, November 6, 2016, at 3 pm

LOCATION:  Home of Susan Okie; 7941 Deepwell Drive, Bethesda, MD 20817

READERS:  Jayne Benjulian (poetry), Barbara Klein Moss (fiction), Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli (poetry), and Cynthia Phoel (fiction)

This event will be a fundraiser for Friends of Writers (FOW) scholarships.  Suggested donation is $20, but all are welcome regardless of donations.

RSVP to anniekimpoetry@gmail.com by Oct. 28, 2016, if you plan to attend.

Another DC-area get-together will take place April 2017.  Please let Annie Kim (at email address above) know if you are interested in reading then and if you’d like to help organize future events.

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Two poems by Jennifer Givhan

Two poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear at Queen Mob’s Tea House:

Quinceañera

My body he burned          ironing the waxpaper
of my breasts          glue-gunning me papier-mâché

to the smell of arts & crafts in the recreation room
(every room after the recovery room)

like the cumbias of my girlhood dancefloors
flailing like Sunday Mass          Nothing tasted so good

Continue reading online…

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“Barbie Chang’s Tears” by Victoria Chang

A poem and corresponding essay by alum Victoria Chang (poetry, ’05) appear in Poetry Magazine:

Barbie Chang’s tears are the lights of
              the city that go off on

 

off on the men walking around the city
              move but Barbie Chang

 

doesn’t she cannot promote herself if
              she had legs she would

 

Continue reading online…

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“Knotted Tongue” by Shadab Zeesht Hashmi

An essay by alum Shadab Zeesht Hasmi (poetry, ’09) appears at 3 Quarks Daily:

Okra, mint and chilies grow in the back and marigolds and roses in the front yard; they’re in my peripheral vision as I bike and study. The seeing is important. Before my grandmother began teaching me and before I owned a student desk with wheels, I didn’t care much for Math. It’s now a ritual: I roll my desk out of my room to the verandah, bring a stack of paper and ask my grandmother to give me Math problems I can solve. I do this after my daily bike ride in the yard. My grandmother reads the newspaper while I work on equations. Occasionally, she shares a news item of interest. Twice I’ve seen her tear up reading about the brutality of the Indian military in Kashmir. She is a Kashmiri. She folds her spectacles and closes her eyes when I ask her for a story; it’s typically the one from the Quran about Moses in a floating basket, how he chose coals over gold, and the knotting of his tongue. There is too much brutality in the world and not enough words. The knotted tongue resonates with me.

Continue reading online…

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“The World Was At Our Feet” by Heather Pierce

A short story by alum Heather Pierce (fiction, ’15) appear at Outlook Springs:

My best friend growing up was Mark Frantin. His name spelled backward is Nitnarf Kram, and that’s what everyone called him.

My brother’s best friend was Chris Minch. His name backward is Hcnim Sirhc. Everyone called him Chris Minch.

Danny, my brother, would walk the mile and a half to school with Chris and their other friends and say things like “Gee, I sure hope no one shoves Chris Minch into the irrigation ditch.” So of course someone would.

Continue reading online…

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Two poems by Rose McLarney

Two poems by alum Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear at Construction Lit Mag:

Repeal

The abandoned mansion
from the time of Temperance,
what it must have held:

hair bobbed short,
cocktails poured tall,
not just drunkenness

Continue reading online…

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“Tender” by Leslie Contreras Schwartz

A poem by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) appears at Tinderbox Poetry:

A child, my mother showed

                me the small closet of her self.

She stood there, child thin

Continue reading online…

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“Locks” by Rosemary Kitchen

A poem by alum Rosemary Kitchen (poetry, ’13) appears at Tinderbox Poetry:

For tonight, let’s forget those cellophane squares

jammed shamefully between the slats of the rattling air conditioner

sweetening the air with spearmint and horehound—

Continue reading online…

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“The Quest” by Rebecca Foust

A poem by alum Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) appears at Verse Daily:

The quest was a metaphor, of course
—it could mean abroad in a world
where May keeps blooming
right through one’s own fall—but also:
just asking the questions. No longer
not-seeing suffering, not for
the thank-God-it’s-not-me effect of, more

Continue reading online…

 

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“This is What an Identity Looks Like” by Faith Holsaert

An essay by alum Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears at The Courtship of Winds:

Earring holes, chosen by a little white girl in Haiti. Invisible, tonsil scars in her throat. That horse ran away and her father took her to the St. Croix emergency room where a doctor sewed up her knee while the two men talked. And the following week: her first period, but was that a scar? In Santa Fe an Australian Shepherd at the front door frightened the cat in her arms. A jagged scar on her forearm. She was twenty-five, when the first episiotomy, the first cut “down there,” was made, the doctor said to ease her son’s passage. And the male ob-gyn told her husband, the cut would make her tight as a virgin. Bad teeth like her mother’s. Pelvic Inflammatory Disease from a dirty and careless lover. At the end of her thirties, the year after a break-up so visceral that (fill in the blank): gall bladder across her abdomen. Embedded in the bone of her hip, a barbed wire repair. Traction rod hole scars above right shin. Invisible: her tongue almost bitten through in Berkeley the day after her sixty-fifth and her son’s fortieth birthdays, the sting of green soup that evening. Immunocompromised: hepatitis as a consequence of a week in an Albany, GA jail; toxoplasmosis; shingles which still burn at the top of her rib cage. A divot in the flare of her right nostril, skin cancer. Left lens removed for what her sister calls Byronic eyes. A lump taken, leaving a marker like a seamstress’ straight pin in the upper left quadrant of her left breast.

Continue reading part 1 online, and find part 2 here…

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