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.

A new piece by alumna Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry, ’06) appears at Food & Wine:

The worst part of sleeping in a snow cave in Antarctica is not the minus-20° windchill or the midnight sun glaring through every crack. It’s not peeing in a bottle or feeling achingly sore from digging the cave in the first place. The worst part is crawling out the next morning, stiff and starving, fantasizing about a latte, eggs and pancakes, and prying open a box of rations to find a choice between a baggie of frozen raisins or a baggie of frozen nuts. I’ve often opened my pantry at home and groaned at the limited options, but that pales in comparison to the scarcity of food on a remote ice shelf where the nearest grocery store is a nine-hour cargo plane ride away.

Continue reading online…

A poem by alumnus Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Mead Magazine:

I’d like a day where all the buildings remain intact.
Let the Hydra stay asleep beneath the surface.
Let the tornado be befuddled, yawn,
go back to bed. No floods. No lightning strikes.
No movie theaters where a man walks
in with a terrible idea hidden in his coat.
Forgive me, for I have longed

Continue reading online…

A poem by alumna Cheney Crow (poetry, ’14) appears in The Cortland Review:

As he closed the door
one night he said,

If you don’t find me in bed in the morning,
Look in the south field.
I’ll be in my white suit.

Continue reading online…

Faculty member Marianne Boruch’s essay, “Saint Kevin, Saint Blackbird,” from the fall 2014 issue of FIELD is currently featured on Poetry Daily:

Certain poems have inside them the source of all poems. I’ve thought this, and probably said it many times. Because it is these I love instinctively, pretty much automatically, poems I read and reread. They share their bounty and radiate wildly or so quietly. They return me—and perhaps others—to the reason one writes poems in the first place. This is not sentimental. This is fact, real as fable to haunt and light the way forward, back to prehistory.

Continue reading online…