A story by alum Cass Pursell (fiction, ’96) appears at Shenandoah:

JT’s sitting at a dark corner table in Carla’s and raises his arm to look at his wrist and make a point on my running late. The watch’s illumination lights the stubble on his face in a tight glow, and the house band starts into another one of those guitar-driven jams that never seem to go out of style. Timmy’s younger sister shakes her hips at the mike and smiles at me as I pass. I give her a nod, and think there’s another talented girl who’ll have to settle for whatever she can get. I motion to Carla for a beer and sit down across from JT.

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Four poems by alum Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appear at the Delaware Poetry Review:

His Boots
1
Jefferson’s boots
stand against the wall, they are small
for a man who shaved off the top
of a mountain for a view: Blue
Ridge and one thousand yards of mud

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An essay by alum Rachel Brownson (poetry, ’14) appears at The Toast:

My grandparents’ living room was almost too warm after the cutting December wind outside, and the Christmas tree blinked pink and gold, ringed with piles of boxes. My cousins and their parents could be heard laughing and bickering in the den downstairs, and as we shed our chilly coats and exchanged the usual hugs, I looked around for my uncle Dave, wondering which version of him was here today. As we sat down I heard his heavy step on the deck behind the sliding doors, and he came slowly into view: tall in his dusty-looking coat, his round belly pressing at the zipper, his University of Michigan knit cap pulled down over his ears, cigarette smoke emerging in clouds from behind his graying beard. He was pacing the deck as he often did, walking on the wooden benches, followed closely by his hyperactive little black poodle. Seeing us, he stubbed out his cigarette, came into the room in a gust of cold, and made his round of hugs. “Rachelieu,” he said—pleased as always with the nickname he’d found for me—as he wrapped me in his big smoky arms.

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A story by alum Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears at Oblong Magazine:

We used to go shopping at stores we’d been told we could not afford, buy nothing, stand around smelling things at perfume counters, tap our feet at the saxophone players outside. Snow flakes blew innocently in every direction, as if they’d been born in mid-air. No one rushed us at all. Once, at a football game, we sat alone, without our men. We ate gummy bears, chocolate kisses, hot chocolate, pretzels, coffee, encouraged each other to eat more. They couldn’t tell us not to. She had a house she’d lived in thirty-five years. There were pictures of gap-toothed children on the walls, home-made rag dolls in clear plastic boxes in the closets. I liked to breathe the air there. I liked to hole up against winter and take the plastic lounge chairs out to the shade of the oak when spring finally came. Because it made me feel better she hid things from her husband too: the chocolate chips in the cupboard, the price of her Talbot’s shorts.

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An essay by alum Genanne Walsh (fiction, ’04) appears at Spry Literary Journal:

Years ago I went to SFMOMA and saw the work of Joseph Cornell, maker of strange wonderland boxes. His art was new to me and entrancing: surreal and nostalgic and beautiful. I went to see the show again, and read a couple of books about him. And years after that I wrote a character into my novel Twister who I realized has the spirit of Joseph Cornell: alienated, sexually repressed, and maybe a little creepy, but acutely observant and creative. My character, Scottie, is not overtly Cornell in any way you’d recognize. He doesn’t make shadow boxes in his mother’s basement in Flushing. But Cornell’s fictionalized spirit is there. Although I didn’t consciously summon him, he showed up when he was needed—he made me see something I might not have found otherwise.

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