A nonfiction piece by alumna Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) appears at Watershed Review:
The sky, my Buddhist teacher says.
Those two words, no more. Her shoulders and the up-thrust of her chin provide the verb, her gaze the preposition. The pain she lives with and never mentions—a hip damaged decades ago in a break-neck horseback escape from a Chinese prison—supplies caught-breath emphasis.
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Three stories by alumna Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appear at Pank Magazine:
Divorce for Cuban Dummies
Once—very seriously—Sylvia considered that predictable thing: smashing the windows of his car. He’d refused all her offers of settlement, refused to get a lawyer, asked for half of her frequent flyer miles, lied to the mediator’s face, called her lawyer just to run up her bills. By then all she wanted was out, but still—two years later—he refused to sign the last piece of paper, said he’d re-open the mediation to investigate her finances. Her finances! Pennies between the couch cushions. Stipends spent before they came in. Student loan contracts piling up like promesas to San Lazaro.
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Friends of Writers would like to congratulate alumna Laura Saurborn Young (poetry, ’08) on receiving a 2014 NEA Fellowship in Poetry.
Two poems by alumna Luljeta Lleshanaku (poetry, ’12) appear at World Literature Today:
Negative Space
I
I was born on a Tuesday in April.
I didn’t cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn’t even mad.
I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude
inside the belly for nine months straight.
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A creative nonfiction piece by alumna Goldie Goldbloom (fiction, ’11) appears at Hunger Mountain:
Chevra kadisha (Hevra kadishah) (Aramaic קדישא חברא, Ḥebh’ra Qaddisha
Jewish “holy society” for the preparation of the dead for burial
1.
I want to write about my mother’s life as if she is alive again, as if she never died. But I have not seen her in over twenty years. I have forgotten the way she used to hold her lips, the way she bent to retrieve small items from the floor, the way she looked at me when I had done something wrong. She’s been dead a long time.
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Alumni Andy Young (poetry, ’11) and Sara Slaughter (poetry, ’11) interview each other at Press Street:
Sara Slaughter: Peter Cooley called All Night It Is Morning your “fearless addition to the poetry of disaster.” How do you feel about your work being described as “poetry of disaster”?
Andy Young: We must play the hand we are given—whether or not we write about our lives directly, it impacts the work. Disasters have been in my sphere of influence in different forms in major ways, especially for the last decade. Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill both changed the actual landscape of what I’ve called home for most of my adult life. Then, as part of an Egyptian-American family, we are profoundly impacted by what goes on in Egypt. I wouldn’t call the revolution a disaster, though the fallout of it, in terms of human rights and basic infrastructure of the country, could be described as disastrous. Then there is my Appalachian background riddled with stories of mining disasters. There’s the slow disaster of what has been happening to the land there in the years since I left it. This isn’t what you asked, exactly. I’m just pointing out that disaster has not been some abstract thing I’ve sought out as a locus of meditation, but something I’ve felt I had to address to process my world.
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A story by alumna Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13) appears at Slag Glass City:
It was the high heat of summer. We were married. We were two women in New York City, visiting from Boston, for business, for the pleasure of walking endless blocks, for a glass of Prosecco at a small cafe, for expert wait staff, to intersect with the world’s most beautiful and interesting people, and for the odd comfort of being anonymous in a foreign city and completely at home. One of us was quick and purposeful, the other was dreamy and drifting. One led, crossed against lights, stepped off curbs, landed sure-footed, never missed a step, never paused. The other got stuck behind strollers and shopping carts, expected to fall into an open cellar hatch, was bumped off the sidewalks by the other tourists, by dog walkers with their tangle of indifferent city dogs. The City was itself: an exhalation of overheated garbage and car exhaust, burnt sugar and burnt coffee, sweat and piss and fried food—equally rank and delectable. It was so hot we had crossed the street to find shade; we had rolled up our sleeves, pressed dripping bottles of water to the backs of our necks. We had passed open doors of air-conditioned storefronts and gulped open-mouthed. This was a heat that thickened the air, that slowed our thinking; we were walking on radiant cement walkways; our feet were burning. It was so hot we might spontaneously combust and never get to where we were going.
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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
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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.
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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.
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