A piece by alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears at The Collagist:

The taxi slows, stops before the mailbox, staked to the edge of the small front yard. The driver’s door opens and a man comes around the car with something in his arms – or several things, judging by the way his arms contort to contain them. He shuffles stealthily toward the front porch, the concrete steps. Then stoops to place the objects, one by one, on the top step: a small bundle of pamphlets tied in twine, a large fruit that looks like a combination of football and cactus, a pair of calf-high boots, and a doll lying on her back in a box.

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A piece by alum Lauren Alwan (fiction, ’08) appears at The Millions:

It’s a single line of dialog in Ernest Hemingway’s classic story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” but that one line, 11 words, has had an outsized influence on the course of literary titling. It’s spoken by the female character, Jig, as she waits for a train in Zaragosa with her unnamed American man. In the train station they begin drinking, first cervezas then anisette, and soon conduct a suppressed dispute about whether or not to end a pregnancy. Tensions mount, differences are exposed, and with that, Jig utters the legendary line. It’s a breaking point that is as much textual as emotional: “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”

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An interview with alum Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) conducted by alum Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears at Fiction Writers Review:

Rolf Yngve: Nathan, congratulations on all your successes, and even more, congratulations for this wonderful collection, Father Brother Keeper. We’ll talk about the stories, but something came up in the author’s notes that I thought might kick us off—you call yourself an amateur dendrologist and theologian. Tell me about that. Or, what I want to ask really, where would you rather start, with the dendrologist’s interest in hardwoods or as the student of Job? I feel like I should have the King James Bible and The Field Guide to North American Trees and Shrubs next to me when I read your stories.

Nathan Poole: Ha! Well, I guess they could both be considered field guides, in their own way. I can’t choose which to start with. This is so funny. I walk around all day fantasying about being asked this exact question and when someone actually asks me, I feel totally speechless, like Charlie Brown trying to spell beagle.

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We are also pleased to present an excerpt from Nathan’s novella, “Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost”:

Decima was an aunt before she was born, the youngest of fourteen brothers and sisters. Her older siblings, men and women she hardly knew, lived all over Burke County with their husbands and wives. She would often meet new kids at her school or new playmates in the church yard, only to find out later they were her nieces and nephews. “I see you’ve met your Aunt Decima,” their mother might say, Dessie turning a bright shade of red, as if it were a scandal. There was a creek path that ran beneath the hardwoods that bordered the back pasture behind her house. When there was cotton in the late summer it meant the heat had established itself and that the path would be trafficked by migrant pickers and sharecroppers because of the shade, cutting back between the ferry where it crossed the Savannah into Georgia, down across Claxton-Lively road to highway 23. The men moved down the hill and out toward the road in the valley, appearing where the trees opened up and disappearing just as suddenly as they turned back to follow the stream.

She could not remember a time when men did not walk that path in the picking season, men and young boys, carrying their own sacks and passing like ghosts, never coming up to the house to visit, never asking for anything, all except once. Read more

A poem by alum Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05) appears at Blackbird:

Six Explanations for Migraine
1 Demon
Flashing like lightning it is loosed
above and below. Weather, wind

enters through the eye, row
of trees along the road. Like one 

sick of heart he staggers, like one
bereft of reason he is broken.

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An interview with alum Alicia Jo Rabins (poetry, ’09) appears at The Collagist:

“No One Can Give You What You Take from Yourself” and “Home Birth Videos” have some thematic similarities. Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of these poems?

Last summer, I was pregnant with my second child. He was due July 31, and I decided to write a poem a day throughout the month of July, to trace this heightened and strange time with words. There is a psychedelic stillness in the last weeks before a baby is born, when you literally embody the term “pregnant pause.” Both these poems come out of that moment and that series…full of birthing imagery, energy, and thoughts.

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