An interview with poet Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13), entitled “Lifting the Domestic,” appears online in Mother Writer Mentor:
In her review at The California Journal of Women Writers, Benjulian writes eloquently about the ways in which poems about the domestic sphere are overlooked in the contemporary publishing scene.
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An interview with alumna Joanne Dwyer (poetry, ’09) about her debut book Belle Laide appears at Identity Theory:
Joanne Dominique Dwyer was born in Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY. She has lived in New Mexico for most of her adult life. Dwyer has been published in various journals, such as The American Poetry Review, Conduit, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly and others. She received a Rona Jaffe award and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson. Her first book of poems, Belle Laide, was published by Sarabande in 2013.
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A new creative nonfiction piece by alumna Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) appears online at Hippocampus Magazine:
In the shrine room at the Tampa Dzogchen Buddhist Center, all is familiar and quotidian: dull strain in my low back, noted and dismissed; stinging ache in my hips and knees, a warning I’ve sat too long and will pay with sharp pain when I get up. The pitted pale surface of walls I helped the sangha repaint several years ago remains blank except for dusty sets of framed tangkhas under mildew-spotted glass. The permanent scent of the Center—citrus mold, candle wax, resinous Bhutanese red incense, and dust—envelopes me. Veils of spider web drape the unreachable uppermost corners of the building, once a Cuban dance studio, its still-lustrous hardwood floors a testament to better times in this inner-city neighborhood now griped by dereliction and violence.
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An interview with alumnus Christian Piers (fiction, ’12) appears at The Writer’s Job:
Many people think of the sciences and the arts as dichotomous, or at the very least, distinctly different career tracks. Do you see or experience any overlap between them?
Yes! At the risk of sounding cliché, I’ve always wanted to be a healer. I just felt like I couldn’t fully live that out as a clinician. If someone came in after their best friend knocked their teeth out, I could use medicine to get them out of pain. I could use medicine to restore their smile. I could use medicine to make that punch look like it never happened—but I couldn’t use it to touch the sort of pain that comes with knowing that the punch didhappen. That’s when I turn to literature.
A new story by alumna Nancy Allen (fiction, ’12) appears online in The Quotable:
Cross-Stitch
In 1951, the “luck of the Lyzens” became a
common saying in Ontario’s Upper Bruce
Peninsula and is occasionally still heard.
Sophia Lyzen lingered—luxuriated—on the floaty edge of wakefulness. Her parents wouldn’t roust her from beneath the down comforter until they’d finished telling each other their dreams. Coffee and dreams: it was ritual. Today the voices from the kitchen were barely audible, were, in fact, whispers. Whispers? Her mother’s words fierce, urgent, then came a big emptiness, tagged by her father’s guttural murmur, and another crashing stream of Ukrainian from her mother.
Leaving her little brother asleep, Sophia climbed out of the warmth.
…
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A new story by alumna Genanne Walsh (fiction, ’04) appears online in Spry Literary Journal:
Fortune Tellers
She wears flowing robes and keeps a crystal ball tucked in her voluminous sleeve.
He has a pencil moustache, a turban, and a large ruby ring.
They are twin sisters in matching pink dresses and when one speaks, the other’s lips move soundlessly. It is said they share a brain.
He was an octopus called Paul by his handlers, and before he died he correctly foretold the outcome of dozens of World Cup matches. Paul is not his real name—the denizens of the deep know him by something else entirely.
She is a middle-aged grandmother with a ground level studio in the Avenues, and she spent her SSI money on the flashing neon sign—YOUR FORTUNE TOLD—that lights her window in pulsing bursts of pink and blue.
He is a 12-year-old with a creative streak, alcoholic parents, and a knack for the Ouija board.
They are sandpipers and when they run along Ocean Beach at low tide, the particular marks they leave in the sand have been said to indicate the next day’s weather—and in fact foretold the Japanese tsunami. (This according to Stan Noname, who makes sculptures from beach debris and sleeps in the icicle plants).
They are books lining the shelves of independent bookstores, new and gently used, with the relevant pages discreetly dog-eared. Consult these pages for direction when you are lost.
…
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A new story by alumna Vicky Mlyniec (fiction, ’09) appears online in The Saturday Evening Post:
Rump
Gordon saw a rump in the air. An enormous rump, with purple fabric stretched taut over its rolling curves to form an oddly soothing landscape. A woman was on the ground, hands flat on the asphalt, peering under a silver Mercedes.
Engine trouble? Some sort of leak? Gordon edged away. The workings of everything—from staplers to carburetors—baffled Gordon. This was a lifelong source of humiliation, made worse by the fact that people tended to turn to him for just such advice. It was his appearance, no doubt. Gordon had regular features, terrific posture and the tucked-in look of a Scout leader. At times he wished for his grouchy son’s receding chin and myopic look. No one mistook Kyle for someone with know-how about ignition switches.
…
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Four new poems by alumnus Gary Hawkins (poetry, ’95) appear online in Waxwing:
Vanishing Point
Asphalt, bitumen, tarmac —
all too poetic for you.
For you, the road glows
vaselined
like the sequence
of a television dream
…
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Front of the House
In the years of their courtship he was a front waiter at the best restaurant in town. Though she could hardly afford to dine there, some nights he’d come to her window late, after he’d closed down the dining room and recite long, fluent descriptions of the evening’s courses, whispered to her so as not to wake up the man from whom she rented her room. She liked most how he spoke of the cheeses and all the ways he sought not to say “stinky” — though they both loved the stinkiest bleus, which some nights he would palm from the kitchen, along with an unfinished bottle of Dom left by one of his regulars, and he would pull taut the linen of her sheets and carefully lay out a cheese course, which their lovemaking would inevitably dismantle. She knew that she should not fall for this…
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Parenthetical for Our Tenth Year
Leaving the whole sky overhead,
a guywire of ridgeline holds
to this low grove where our cabin sits
within white pines, yearly shedding
their parentheses to the forest floor.
Inside, we whisper and cough,
hum the slow curve of bodies.
Our asides become our plot.
…
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The Late Radical Reckons Mr. Baldwin
This isn’t going to work out,
America.
Four new poems by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appear online in Waxwing:
Facing North
How articulate, the eyes
of silent animals when I chose
to shoot the sick goat. All day,
the dogs would not look at me, not
let me touch them, legs folding away from
the level to which I had lowered my hand.
…
Continue reading online.
The Model Walks Aways From A Job
Tonight, when the trainload of coal, trailing ash
from the power plant, passed, I had no mournfulness left
for the suffering caused by the energy my lights
spend. Like the film images of the clouds that form
when the mountains are blown apart — how they pulse,
fill the screen, obscure everything — …
…
Continue reading online.
I Float
When the river flooded, when
I was a child, I boated
around the fields. And so it began,
my myth-making. I recall that altered time
foremost. I float.
Transformative washes
over the world — the time of evening when
I can have a drink, being in love,
the lyric way of speaking — that’s what
I’ve turned out to live for.
…
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What Music Should Accompany This
If there was a score to those years,
it was the somber percussion
of feed in a bucket, how we would
shake grain to call the cows, chickens,
kibble to call the dogs, call voicelessly
whatever would come. We spoke softly.
…
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A new piece by alumnus and former Beebe Fellow Matthew Olzman (poetry, ’09) appears online in Some Call It Ballin:
Exit From Hockeytown
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Sometime early in my parent’s marriage, a “news” story aired on one of the major networks in Detroit. My aunts and uncles tell several versions of the story, but the one I remember best goes like this:
The reporter looks at the camera and says, Despite hockey’s popularity in the area, few people know where hockey pucks come from, or how they’re made.
They grow on trees.
Not many people know this but there’s a type of tree where the sap leaks out, drips from the bark, and collects at the end of the branches. As it hardens, it slowly turns into nearly perfect rubber discs. These are harvested and used as pucks on ice rinks everywhere.
…
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