“Haben Sie Schleim?” by Geoffery Kronik

A new piece by alumnus Geoffery Kronik (fiction, ’12) appears online in The Common:

Because I had a roomy exit-row seat on a full plane to Berlin, I sent a photo of my gloriously unbent legs to my wife. A petty triumph, the frequent-flyer’s tame version of sexting. My seatmate was a small, physically non-intrusive man, but troublingly prone to coughs and sneezes.

The day after, in November drizzle, I walked from my hotel past the street where my great-uncle used to live. I never saw his home, but was intimate with its address from legal briefs and bank statements. Continuing to the historic KaDeWe department store, I paused before its tinsel-garroted window mannequins. I felt a familiar temporal shiver, a generational shift into events I longed to understand but had not lived in the first place. Jean Améry wrote “no one can become what he cannot find in his memories.”

When I was in my teens, my great-uncle worked at the KaDeWe in the men’s department. He sat before customers and helped them buy shoes, but I did not know this until my mother told me years later. He had returned to Berlin in 1975, when I was twelve, forty years after he fled Hitler, and I never saw him again. A lifelong bachelor, with few friends and no children, he died in Berlin in 1998. He and I had no relationship that I knew of, until his death revealed a contractually binding one.

…

Finish reading online.

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“Native Species” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Construction Magazine:

It was nearly still water, that river,
with no rapids talking, but she learned from it
the fish. First, noticing the one with a hard
maw for scraping the algae she ate off stone,
then all the ways beings were made to live
in those parts.

Molly crawl bottom had a downturned mouth
for bottom feeding. The commonest
fish, living even in ditches, Mollies found ways
to make do. And she could identify them
in however much murk because of how long
she’d spent staring at the same places.

…

Continue reading online. 

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“Mine, And Hers” by Christine Hale

A new story by alumna Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) appears online at Still:

My parents built their house, the only one our family ever lived in, over a period of years beginning around 1945.  A compact, one-story rectangle, asbestos-shingled, devoid of any pretension to beauty, it faced busy, two-lane U.S. Route 11. The “Robert E. Lee Highway,” so designated by the legislature in the ‘20s, ran the diagonal length of Virginia from the Mason-Dixon Line at Washington, D.C. to Bristol, situated partly in Tennessee. In fact, the state line, marked with bronze plaques sunk into the asphalt, bisected our main street. Downtown, at what seemed to me as a child a particularly unsightly location where the multiple rail lines responsible for the city’s bygone prosperity intersected State Street, a modest rectangular arch of steel scaffolding straddled the pavement to proclaim the city’s slogan. Hundreds of incandescent light bulbs, always a dozen or more of them dead, spelled out BRISTOL, VA.-TENN.  A GOOD PLACE TO LIVE. When the family car, a beetle-backed, mouse-gray Chevy from the ‘40s, passed beneath the sign on the way home from a trip to “the Tennessee side,” the axles rattled across the rusted rails with the same head-jarring violence set off by crossing a cattle grate.

Our house, on the northeast edge of town, sat on two acres of land; my parents raised flowers, vegetables, fruit, and at one point, chickens. Indoors was much smaller than outdoors; the five-room house had just two bedrooms. One was my parents’, of course, and the other my eldest sister Sara’s.  My other sister Betsy—eight years older and cognitively impaired from birth—shared the attic with me.

…

Continue reading online. 

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New Interview with Lisa Van Orman Hadley

A new interview with alumna and former Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship Lisa Van Orman Hadley (fiction, ’09) appears online in The Collagist:

“Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s stories have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Epoch, New England Review, The Collagist and Knee-Jerk. She was the recipient of the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship and a Money for Women/Barbara Deming scholarship. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her four-eyed husband, two-eyed twins and one-eyed cat. She is writing a novel-in-stories.

Her essay, “Making Sandwiches with My Father,” appeared in Issue Fifty-Two ofThe Collagist.

Here, Lisa Van Orman Hadley talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about concision, chronology, and writing about family.

What can you tell us about the origins of this essay (how/why/when you began to write the first draft or to conceive the initial idea)?

Several years ago, as an undergrad, I read Will Baker’s essay, “My Children Explain the Big Issues.” It was the first time I had ever seen creative nonfiction written in vignettes instead of a straightforward narrative. I liked the playfulness of the form and how much work the title did. I remembered that Will Baker essay years later as I sat down to write “Making Sandwiches with My Father.” My dad had just been diagnosed with dementia (we were still a couple of years away from the official diagnosis of Alzheimer’s). An alternative to the traditional narrative seemed like a way for me to create distance from a situation that was still raw and unfolding. The title (I think I came up with the title first or, at least, very early on) provided a theme to vary on and allowed me to explore different facets of my relationship with my father without being tethered to a traditional narrative.”

…

Continue reading online at The Collagist.

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New Interview with Don Colburn

An interview with alumnus Don Colburn (poetry, ’92) about his book, Tomorrow Too: The Brenda Monologues, appears in The Oregonian:

“Brenda Arrieta Killian was 30 years old and four months pregnant when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Don Colburn followed her ensuing journey and wrote about Killian’s navigation through the medical community and self in a series of articles published in The Oregonian in 2008 and 2009. Colburn’s latest book of poetry, Tomorrow, Too: The Brenda Monologues, chronicles the story as well, but this time in sonnet form. The result is a moving and humanistic collection of poems, presented from various points of view, and expanding on themes of loss, life, illness, and hope.

Tell me about your choice to write each of the poems as a sonnet. What could that particular poetry format achieve and say as compared to a different choice?

It started as serendipity, and became a choice. The first few monologues came out near 14 lines, and I was determined to whittle down the longer drafts to their most telling details and lyric essence. I never intended them to be formal sonnets, but I liked how the sonnet length gave an unruly story a tight formal symmetry. I called them “fourteeners.” The very arbitrariness of that form became a force for revision. I knew from the get-go that this story would not work if it came across as “warmed-over” journalism in lines.”

…
Continue reading online. 
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New Poem by Matthew Olzmann

A new poem and recording by alumnus and former Beebe Fellow Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears online at Fogged Clarity:

Meditation of a Foot Solidier Nearing Medusa’s Sculpture Garden

So these are the monuments.

And these are the faces of the inevitable.

And if I am made one of them, rendered

motionless, made

marble by the gorgon’s stare, then

help me celebrate the abrupt

tombstone my torso becomes.

…

Continue reading or listen online at Fogged Clarity. 

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New Work and an Interview with Matthew Olzmann

A new poem and interview with alumnus Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears online at the Best American Poetry blog:

The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur

does not belong to the dinosaur skeleton

to which it has been attached.

A man thought he made an amazing

discovery.  Now, it’s a towering mistake,

one for which he’ll likely lose his job,

but only after taking this skyscraper

of bones—with its eye-sockets

like windows to hell—apart.

Femur by mandible, I know what it means

to watch your good fortune change its mind.

Like that time in college, when my friend’s

supermodel cousin invited us to a party

and accidentally kissed me in the dark.

She thought I was someone else—I have

no idea who—but the gist of the story

can be seen in her freaking out

when the light ruined everything.

…

Finish reading online. 

The Interview, with Sally Wen Mao

SWM: Who are you? What are you all about?

MO: I like how Ocean Vuong answered this same question a couple days ago, saying, “Some days I feel like a human. Some days I feel more like a sound.”  I like the flexibility of that answer, allowing for an identity in flux.  For me too, it changes rapidly, from moment to moment.  Right now, there’s a baseball game on the radio.  I’m all about—this October—the Detroit Tigers winning the 2014 World Series. If this fails to happen, I’ll be all about them winning it in 2015.  I’m easily distracted, and what I’m “all about” is constantly in motion.  I’m all about the newborn lambs and piglets on the farm of the college where I teach. I’m all about the mountains that surround this place. In the autumn, when the leaves begin to fall, you can see houses behind the tree line that you didn’t know were there.

…

Continue reading the interview online. 

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New Work by Kelli J. Christenson

A new poem by alumna Kelli J. Christenson (poetry, ’13) appears online at The Collagist:

Nycticorax nycticorax audubonparki

Night herons, come to me, for it is night and I
have a poem to be written;
come to me out of
the tree
whose secret you are, nine birds
at-a-glance invisible
in the leafed branches of a live oak.

Come tell me how it is that first I
did not see you, only heard you

…

Read more online. 

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New Work by Michael Collins

A new poem and recording by alumnus Michael Collins (poetry, ’03) appears online at Kenning Journal: 

Self Portrait As A Mobius Strip

It’s true: Soon as you discover           the underground stream
you’ve been wading through     while searching
for a restroom                   is really a river
of urine and shit,       the irony’s often enough
to ruin your journey.        Don’t worry,
you can’t smell                in dreams. And it isn’t real
excrement, just an image.            Grow whole
with what the upperworld           rejects. In the darkness below
Avernum, in the cradle      of the dead,
your old man awaits you    with answers: A bride
with a smile like                 a Sibyline breeze, a new land

…

Finish reading online. 

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2014 Alumni Conference

While the pre-late fee deadline has now passed, it has become abundantly clear that as our electronic communications have been evolving many alumni have missed some of the notices and some of the links. Accordingly, the Alumni Conference Committee is waving the late-registration fee. We still have several slots.

We have opportunities for Fiction and Poetry Workshops, Manuscript Review and Fiction Roundtable Groups for ms-length works seeking new eyes; we will have classes, caucuses, and panels (on James Salter; Sylvia Townsend Warner; Poetic Closure; Metaphor; Poem as Painting, Painting as Poem…more descriptions on their way) Can you even believe it?

Writing time, down time, hanging out with other Wallies time, breaking bread together, dancing.

If you’ve never been, we can all but guarantee that before the end of the first evening of readings you will have decided that you’re going to come back again. And again.

Please feel free to contact Peter Klank with any questions, but know that the absolute deadline is May 31 as we will need to give our host community numbers (and hearing even sooner will be much appreciated).

For contact information and registration links:

http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/conference-information/

See you soon.

Peter KlankFiction ’85

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