A poem by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at The Offing:
1.
Dear Angel of Death,
A long time ago, one of my writing teachers said, “Make a list of what you’re most afraid of and write to the thing at the top of the list.” I looked at my list, saw your name, and ignored that teacher for the rest of the year.
Continue reading online…
Two poems by alum Nora Hutton Shepard (poetry, ’10) appears at The Cortland Review:
It Was A Friday
How did the child end up
in the stream, his eyes
the flat blue of the sky,
water clear as breath
sluicing over his cheeks,
over the stones cradling
his head?
Continue reading or listen to a reading of each poem online…
Friends of Writers wishes to congratulate Karen Smyte (fiction, ’15) for winning the 2015 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize. Karen will be graduating from the MFA Program for Writers this July. You can read more about the award, as well as the winning story, “Anya,” online…
An excerpt from alum Mary-Sherman Willis’s (poetry, ’05) new book Graffiti Calculus appears at Beltway:
from Kilroy
10.
In my Cold War duck-and-cover American girlhood, in the bulls eye
of Washingtons nuclear radius,
under a blue sky etched in contrails and filled by day with keening
air emergency sirens, in brick-walled
Horace Mann Elementary, Mrs. Wilson drew her chalk across the board.
Let AB be a line segment with midpoint M.
Continue reading online…
A piece by alum Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appears at phoebe:
The word deviant. A lovely, leering word, its two keening e sounds and the snap shut of its final syllable. You would never guess this body harbors such linguistic loveliness. This deviant body. I move it around during the day, along the asphalt, up the stairs. I tend to it in the shower, imagining that I am a gardener with a vast acreage to water and weed. I walk the body to work. I search out eye contact, but all eyes deviate. Look at me, I want to say. What my body says: don’t.
Continue reading online…
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.
Continue reading online…
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?”
Continue reading online…
A story by alum Adam Jernigan (fiction, ’15) appears at Qu:
Curtis walked until West Girard turned into East and his feet hurt. It was 5:15 in morning and the sky was still as black as it comes when he went through the bright blue door with the sign above saying PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPT 26TH DISTRICT. Inside, it was too hot and crowded. He felt itchy. But he kept still as he waited his turn. When it came, he unfolded the flyer with the pictures and put it flat on the counter with the thick scratched glass between him and the cop. He said, “I’m the one killed them kids.” He turned the paper around so the two children in the black and white photo stared right up at the policeman on the other side of divide.
Continue reading online…
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.
Continue reading online…
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
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