Two poems by alumnus Mike Puican (poetry, ’09) appear at The Literary Bohemian:
La Calle de los Salvados
A messenger on his bike at a light and
a horn-rimmed girl in a Camaro around
whom a salsa rises. Celia Cruz sings:
I am but a wind-tossed leaf longing
Continue reading online…
A poem by alumnus Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Muzzle Magazine:
Question: what has two heads, yellow teeth
and eyes made of grape jelly?
What has green stripes, nostrils that flare like caves
and a tail that dissolves like a braid of smoke?
At the community center in the center
of Detroit, the kids draw the strangest horses.
Continue reading online…
An interview with alumna Helen Hooper (fiction, ’09) appears at American Short Fiction:
Few things are more disappointing than a predictable work of fiction, but one worse thing is the work of fiction that aims to surprise but falls flat. There’s a big, fat, twist in November’s online exclusive work of fiction, “Edge Habitat,” by Helen Hooper. It’s a particularly welcome twist because, well, it blindsided us. We recently emailed Hooper and asked her to tell us a bit about that twist, her other work, and about her previous life as a DC-based policy analyst with The Nature Conservancy.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alumna Annie Kim (poetry, ’09) appears at Mudlark:
Dispatcher
Jonah is more popular than Jesus
on the walls of the chilly catacombs.
Leisurely reclining beneath his vine,
at sea in his little boat. He’s the Man
of Sorrows and our man, too—
no one wants to bear bad news.
Continue reading online…
A poem by alumnus Nate Pritts (poetry, ’00) appears at Four Way Review:
Wasps keep circling
the shutters, long stalks
of grass dangling
from thin back legs,
and when they crawl between the slats
into the small dark,
they bring their greeny materials
with them.
Continue reading online…
A story by alumnus Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) appears at Four Way Review:
“…God will give you blood to drink.” –Sarah Good
It did not go away—as everyone said it would. At nine months Ida was diagnosed with an obscure disorder. It was thought to be caused by an infection in the eyes at birth, a condition that amplifies the production of the rare pigments in the iris, increasing them until they dominate the eye. When most babies’ eyes shift from the lapis slate of infancy to their final and common color, Ida’s eyes turned wolf yellow and remained that way. They smoldered under her white bonnet like filament at low voltage.
Continue reading online…
A story by alumnus Edward Porter (fiction, ’07) appears at The Hudson Review:
Stephanie Kamkowski had been screening carry-on at Kennedy Airport for three years when someone said that an Arab guy had come onto the day shift. Sitting in the Houlihan’s before work, she thought she had him pegged: a dark-haired, dark-complexioned middle-aged man of slender build, standing at the breakfast buffet wearing a Yankees cap. He frowned at the chafing dishes of ham, bacon, and eggs, and placed an orange and a yogurt on his plastic tray. Later, she saw him in the break room, and at the boarding security line for Delta, observing. He ate by himself and disappeared after each shift. Freddie Novak the shift supervisor called him Eee-mad, but the rest of them called him “the Arab guy.”
Continue reading online…
A poem by alumnus Michael Puican (poetry, ’09) appears at The Cortland Review:
A green river bells and
comes into hue, a blues
riff slices the dusk, crows
caw from a trash barge
Continue reading online…
A new piece by alumna Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96) appears in the Belle Rêve Literary Journal:
The baby ran away. The baby was always running away. Like a leaf, he would skitter off down the gutter. And so she was left to leave affairs mid-stride, to dash half bent, scuttling crab-like after, trying to catch a hand. She was a mean, mean mommy, yelling in the street.
Continue reading online…
Faculty member Robert Boswell interviews faculty member Peter Turchi regarding Turchi’s newest book A Muse and a Maze for Fiction Writers Review:
Pete Turchi and I met in graduate school at the University of Arizona. We had the good luck to be in a fiction workshop led by Francine Prose, and we discovered that we had a lot in common: we both loved lousy baseball teams (well, Pete’s team won the World Series that year, but went on to embarrass themselves for decades), and we suffered cheerfully through long seasons with the same combination of pluck and denial. We both had girlfriends who were smarter and better looking than we were, and we pondered the enigma of their apparent interest in us. We both had been raised by good-hearted parents who had climbed from meager beginnings to the lowest rungs of the middle class and who were worried and baffled by our belief that we might escape the 8-to-5 schlep by investing in language and narrative.We both loved literature with a particularly desperate dedication, wishing to write novels that would express the beautiful, terrible wonder of the human treadmill. We both drank beer.
Continue reading online…
You can also read “The Pleasures of Difficulty” from A Muse and a Maze on the Tin House blog.
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.