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Alum Robin Black (fiction, ’05) is serving as the February Guest Blogger at Gulf Coast:
Agoraphobia, Writing, and Me: Fear and Laughing at Canyon Ranch
I would pay a lot of money to have the emails I wrote my family and friends in January, 2003, from Canyon Ranch. I suspect they are some of the best writing I’ve ever done.
A little background: In January, 2003 I was nearly forty-one years old, the mother of three children, the wife of one (very patient and understanding) man. And I was a recovering – I hoped – agoraphobic.
Continue reading this piece (along with several others) online…
A poem by alum Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) appears at Poetry Daily:
Catastrophic failures in buildings during seismic events:
big things fall down and kill us all.
u = horizontal displacement, v = vertical displacement:
shear strength, shear stress, sheer shear.
A & B are arbitrary constants. i is an imaginary number term:
M is still mass and T still time.
Continue reading online…
A story by alum Dale Neal (fiction, ’89) appears at Change Seven:
He’d waited in the holding cell most of the morning for his ride home. Dressed in his courtroom clothes, not the usual inmate coveralls, hair wetted and combed, a man calmly biding the last of his time claimed by the state, waiting to get on with a life outside this cage. But right away, I saw him worrying that stick match between his teeth. Not a good sign the past five years had rehabilitated Randy Sprinkle.
Continue reading online…
An interview with alum Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry, ’06) appears at NPR:
Last year, a poet arrived at the end of the earth: Jynne Dilling Martin spent six weeks, funded by the National Science Foundation, living in Antarctica.
She spent the summer (winter, to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) shadowing scientists as they went about their work, and writing about the people who call the icy continent home.
Continue reading online…
(You can also listen to the recorded interview and find an excerpt from Jynne’s collection We Mammals In Hospitable Times at the link.)
An essay by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) appears at Dame Magazine:
While sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office recently, I found myself picking up an academic journal, when something caught my eye: an article called “The Starvation Experiment.” The article I read was about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a research project between 1944–1945 in which volunteers underwent starvation for the purpose of studying the psychological effects on its subjects.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appears at The Good Men Project:
This morning I reached for your name that fresh
white word, the cool wet sound of it inside
my mouth; I grasped and came up with nothing,
Continue reading online…
An essay by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Brevity:
In the filming of The Crow, the only son of Bruce Lee is shot and killed while making a movie about a man who gets shot and killed. Detroit is on fire. It’s Devil’s Night. Sirens everywhere. In the movie version of this essay, he’s resurrected and seeks revenge. In this way, he reminds us of Jesus: to die in the name of the father and return at a later date. But in real life, a bullet blazes from a revolver that’s supposed to be loaded with blanks and down goes Brandon Lee. Six hours of surgery later, he dies.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears in Ploughshares:
Under her tongue, there was a story.
In her mouth, nails. Frances hammered license plates
to the back wall of her garage. There
hang the years that sunk like a foot in loose soil.
That rusted like a hinge. Whose hand or what machine
etched the numbers that cruised along
Continue reading online…
The poem “Degas’s Bather” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06) appears in The Times Literary Supplement. It has republished here courtesy of The Times Literary Supplement:
DEGAS’S BATHER
The orchards of the internet have rooms
for my virtual museums, and portals
to fancies I suppress—Roman revels
enhanced with sound effects, like my neighbour
this noon in his condo, earthquake water
stacked prudently on his porch,
a redwood to shade our double windows.
Sounds like he’s surfed a porno flick. Her yelps
ring out in waves like ripples a pebble
makes, plopped into water. And here’s the jug
she’ll sluice her back with in a second
or a century: longing’s embodiment
as I polish off my chicken breast, chased
with last night’s wine, my foraged plum.