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A poem by alum Maya Janson (poetry, ’06) appears at Guernica:
Word is, the villagers have fashioned special sticks to prop it up,
to keep its 1000-year-old hat from falling to the ground.
Everyone wants to picnic beneath its waterfall
and laugh about the petals that fall into their drinks.
Continue reading online…
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)
Continue reading the interview online…
Alums Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13) and Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) had a conversation about novellas and other topics for Full Stop:
Lynette D’Amico: Was it an intentional decision to write a novella? Did you feel pressure to pare down or scale up? Did you choose the form or did the form choose the work?
Nathan Poole: My intention was to write a novel, but this was before I knew what novels were. Novels are like charitable giving, I’ve found; you’re not supposed to let your right hand know what your left is doing. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was trying to write a novel the way I’d been writing stories, one-handed, without any premeditation. I’ve been told good novels are written through a hemispheric consciousness: part of you is engineering, thinking ahead, ruminating about structure, plot, causality, while another part of you is being a stubborn artist, writing blind, discovering everything as you go. Occasionally you let the two come together to talk things through . . . but I wasn’t doing that. This is what happens when you don’t do that.
Continue reading online…
“Biting the Moon” by alum Joan Frank (fiction, ’96) has been released as part of Ploughshares’ digital-first series of individual long stories called Ploughshares Solo. Here’s an excerpt
One afternoon, during our colony time, he told me that he knew when he was going to die.
He’d been drinking, of course. White wine, middle of the day. Sprawled along the couch in his studio toying, on his chest, with a pack of Lucky Strikes. Long corduroyed legs crossed, sunlight a soft dust over everything. In my mind, reviewing these scenes, it’s always autumn: that breathing pocket, warm and soft but excitingly pine-needle-scented, before the big smackdown, the opera of winter. Later, when I walked to my own cabin, the wind was a madwoman in the pines, humming and singing, bending down to stroke my arms, my cheeks. Read more
A poem by alum Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13) appears at The Offing:
Look at your Manhunt profile: “White muscle power bottom looking
for a non-fem black top to fuck me in a mask and a hood.” You want
a rape scene you saw in a movie once, a kind of beauty
only a man not used to pain prays for. “The door will be unlocked —
Continue reading online…
Three poems by alum Michael Collins (poetry, ’03) appear at Sequestrum:
The Sacrosanct Mallard of Mamaroneck Harbor
Listen, Jesus, it wasn’t my idea
for this mallard to stand on the dock,
stretching his wings out all crucifixiony.
Hell, I thought he was a crow.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) appears at Rattle:
God bless Jonathan Matthew, asleep
on the table, a piece of his liver plucked
out and planted in the jaundiced boy
from up the road, for Jonathan Matthew’s
weak thumbs-up, his face swollen, his wife
falling all over him lit by the kind of love
I don’t know yet, for the way the liver regrows,
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Mary Jo Thompson (poetry, ’09) appears at Drunken Boat:
1. In black and white
—there was no color—she taught me
that mischief was the work of cats
and oilcans. My grandmother warned that evil
came in kinds and sizes. Pint-sized oilcans
squawked like crows and squirted when they saw me.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appears at Drunken Boat:
I keep trying to read the tea leaves greening
the lukewarm belly of the mug—
instead I keep ingesting them.
Continue reading online…