A story by alum Kathy Bratkowski (fiction, ’02) appears at Drunken Monkeys:

Like always, it’s Luis who unloads our boxes from the trunk of the Escort.  He knows our names; every Saturday that we’re at Goodwill, he is too.   His supervisor starts to approach our car but Luis rushes to get to us first.

“I’ll open the trunk,” I say, and jump out to have a better look at Luis. His arms are tanned to the color of pecan wood from working outdoors at the donation dock. “Hey, Monica,” he says. “Ma’am,” he nods to my mother through her open window. “Can I get you a receipt, Mrs. Evans?”

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A poem by alum Francine Conley (poetry, ’14) appears at Juked:

What could I wring from salt, what sweetness, say,
from the anchovies I was forced to stomach as a child
even after I refused.  You eat what’s on your plate
whether you want to or not. Say we eat what we refuse.

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A piece by alum Cynthia Gunadi (fiction, ’15) appears at The Writer’s Room of Boston:

Here are a number of indecisions—if they can be called that—that have plagued me lately. Whether I felt like typing or writing by hand. Whether I needed noise or silence. Whether I should revise an old story or start something new. Whether I should be writing in first person or third. Whether a character, who is still a new acquaintance, used to be a dancer or a piano teacher, and whether she is in fact vegan. Or a sleepwalker. Or seeing ghosts. A week ago, greedy, I borrowed five books from the library, thinking that if I spent some time with each, the Right Next Book would reveal itself to me. I am still bouncing between them, still uncertain which to read.

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Two poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear at Origins:

Leaving Anthony

It wasn’t the sex or the santo candles his mother
still lit in his bedroom like she’d done
all the nights he’d been gone, the habit
unbroken though he’d come home.

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An interview with alum Peggy Shinner (fiction, ’94) appears at Hypertext Magazine:

After reading Peggy Shinner’s You Feel So Mortal: Essays On The Body, my brain felt like it had been tipped upside down, emptied out, and filled back up again (in a good way). These essays made me look at what it means to be a woman (and a person) in new and startling ways. I envied her gorgeous use of language, her ability to challenge long-held beliefs, and to consistently balance on that tight wire between discovery and realization.

Shinner never failed to dissect messy subjects (including but not limited to women’s bodies, Leopold and Loeb, nose jobs, shoplifting, taxes, death, and Jewish feet), to dig around, to find the essay’s truth.

(An excerpt from You Feel So Mortal: Essays On The Body can also be found on Hypertext)

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