Alum Lee Prusik (fiction, ‘12) was a finalist in the bosque journal 2014 fiction contest. Her story, “An Aptitude for Bird,” appears in the fourth annual issue. Copies are available here.
Alum Jynne Dilling Martin’s (poetry, ’06) collection We Mammals in Hospitable Times has been published by Carnegie Mellon.
Alum Robert Rorke (fiction, ’10) has written about the television drama series based on alum Natalie Baszile’s (fiction, ’07) novel Queen Sugar for The New York Post:
Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, who first worked together on the Oscar-nominated civil rights drama “Selma,” will re-team on “Queen Sugar,” a drama series for Winfrey’s cable network, OWN, that goes into production later this year.
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An essay by alumnus Fred Arroyo (fiction, ’97) appears at Origins:
In the fall of 1992 I began attending Purdue University as an English major. I was a first-generation college student, and I was trying to take an imaginative leap outside my family and class. Books held no value in my family, and though my mother attended night school to receive her GED, my father only had a third grade education. My parents never had any advice, wisdom, or financial means to help me. These are my origins and I felt at the time that I needed to escape them.
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Five poems by alumna Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appear at The Collagist:
Niobe, Letter to an Agoraphobic Father, Double Caryatid, Alternate Endings, Namesake
A piece by alumna Marta Maretich (’91) appears at Boom California:
“Please go away,” the handwritten sign says. “It’s not worth getting a bullet in your ass.” The sign is taped to the wall in the kitchen of the house my family abandoned in Bakersfield.
“I guess they couldn’t read,” my neighbor Mario says and laughs nervously. The house has become a magnet for criminals, a mid-century, ranch-style fortress to be defended by Mario. “Right here’s where I shot through the door.”
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An essay by alumna Alison Powell (fiction, ’10) appears at Boom California:
The United States is a country with two west coasts, separated by three thousand miles. Technically, there are three west coasts if you count the westward shores of Hawaii. In 2012, my bedroom in Tampa, Florida, faced the first of the three bodies of water standing between the Gulf and me. It is a coast, but not the coast. There’s water here, but no waves. The Gulf is neither sea nor ocean. It is a ragged basin with no clear territory. I am from the real West Coast, and this lesser western light won’t play for me. It has nothing to say, and its sunsets are merely warm-ups for California’s three hours later.
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An interview with alumna Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears at Pank Magazine:
1. Workshops and publishers often demand that writers categorize their work along tradition lines of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, but I see short shorts, such as your pieces here, as something like poems and fiction at once. Where would you plot your own work on the genre continuum?
Interesting that you should ask this question of these particular stories, because I have categorized all of them alternately as nonfiction, poetry and finally, fiction. Many years ago I went through a difficult divorce, and I could only write about the emotions I felt by jotting down tiny little scenarios. Anything longer was too painful. At the time I thought of them as autobiographical prose poems, which I thought I was writing only for myself.
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Two poems, “The Bug” and “The Tongue,” by alumnus Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13) appear at Poetry Foundation:
The Bug
lands on my pretty man’s forearm. Harmless,
it isn’t deadly at all; makes his muscle flutter
— the one that gets his hand to hold mine, or
ball into a fist, or handle a gun. It’s a ladybug,
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An interview with alumnus Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13) appears at The Collagist:
Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of “Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi”?
Well, the cause of the poem (if we’re considering the poem itself as an effect) was an excursion to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, CA. I’d met an attractive woman, who also seemed attracted to me, and we took this trip together—as friends. As you might imagine, there was good amount of tension and anxiety between us as we moved through the gardens. As a result, my early drafts of this poem, originally a triptych, attempted to explore the sense of anxiety between two people who could potentially become lovers.
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A story by alumnus Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears at Review Americana:
That they would name our ship USS Jack Lewis stems from the fact that there had once been a true, human Jack Lewis who was the Platoon Corpsman for Company A, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines during the last days of the Vietnam War. One night while encamped near Da Nang, Petty Officer Second Class Lewis found himself next to a live Chinese grenade after a major league pitch by a Viet Cong—which was unusual because most of the Viet Cong had been wiped out during the Tet Offensive three years earlier. Four Marines were also hunkered down with him in their sandbag parapet. They had been alerted to activity, but no one expected anyone to be able to heave a grenade all the way over the sandbags from outside the wire. But there it was, in the mud somewhere, sputtering. Petty Officer Lewis, as related in his citation, “in complete disregard for his own safety” then did throw himself upon the grenade and “smothered the explosion with his own body.” In so doing, Petty Officer Lewis saved the four Marines and earned the decoration known as the Navy Cross.
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