Lisa Van Orman Hadley’s “Making Sandwiches with My Father”

New work by alumna and former winner of the Levis Stipend in Fiction Lisa Van Orman Hadley (fiction, ’09) is featured online at The Collagist:

1.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, he teaches me how to make a Reuben.  We assemble ingredients, get them ready so we can add each one as quickly as possible because we must eat the sandwich while it is still hot and the top of the bread is crispy.  I learn his tricks: drain the sauerkraut well (“nothing worse than a soggy sandwich”), use just the right amount of butter on the outsides of the bread, choose the very best Thousand Island dressing you can find because it makes or breaks the sandwich.

When we talk, it is only about the sandwiches.

Reubens have become our art form; he cooks while I drain and assemble.  For a while in the summer we eat a Reuben together every day at noon.

My mother is alarmed by this.  She plugs her nose at the smell of the sauerkraut, her face wrinkles in disgust at the corned beef.  Her taste is not distinguished enough for such things.

By my senior year we are making our own bread and pickling our own cabbage.  We corn our own beef.  We find recipes for Thousand Island dressing in gourmet recipe books and we add our own secret ingredients, making it even better. Read more

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Interview with Marian Szczepanski

An interview with Marian Szczepanski (fiction, ’97), in which she discusses her book, Playing St. Barbara, and her time in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, appears online at Late Last Night Books. Author and interviewer Terra Ziporyn writes:

Novelist Marian Szczepanski and I met at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in the summer of 1993. We recently reconnected through a mutual Facebook friend who had just reviewed Marian’s new (and first!) novel, Playing St. Barbara. Marian was gracious enough to catch me up on the missing twenty years, including how she came to write this historical novel chronicling the brutal lives and enduring spirit of Depression-era immigrant coal-mining families in southwestern Pennsylvania.

TZ: When I first met you at Bread Loaf, you were working on young adult fiction. When and why did you shift form the young adult world to the world of historical fiction?

MS: At Bread Loaf, I had just started what turned out to be a coming-of-age novel for adult readers. At the time, YA lit was read almost exclusively by preteens. Hunger Games and Twilightwere years in the future. My first novel dealt with a variety of adult themes and contained scenes that would have gotten it onto the Banned Books list for school libraries in short order. When I first pitched it as a coming-of-age story to an agent, he was interested, but wanted me to tone it down and market it as YA lit. I decided against it and continued to pitch it as an adult novel. When I got the idea for the novel that became Playing St. Barbara, it appealed to me because I’d never written anything set in a time period different than my own. With each book, I like to do something different, add a few new gadgets to my writer’s toolbox. I’d done a coming-of-age novel, followed by one with a metaphysical theme. Writing something historically based struck me as a worthy challenge, and it more than lived up to that expectation!

Read more

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New Work by Edward Porter

A story entitled “Milk,” by alumnus Edward Porter (fiction, ’07), appears online in Beetroot:

Porter-standardThe man explains the world for the benefit of his wife and daughter as yellow-winged vireos chase each other through the open stanchions of the garden restaurant, scolding and cawing in imitation. It’s still the cool of the early morning: the Central American sun hasn’t gotten over the leathery green cocoplums yet. Nystrom stares at his coffee in misery. His mind had been a merciful blank this morning, almost as if time and distance had finally started to do their work. Then the pundit showed up.

Read more

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Nathan McClain featured in Muzzle Magazine

Alumnus Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13) is featured online in Muzzle Magazine‘s “30 Poets in Their 30s.”  One of the editors at Muzzle writes:

8207174Nathan McClain is probably the poet on the list with whose current work I’m most familiar. He is a great supporter of other poets’ work, including mine, and our friendship emerged from our ongoing conversations about poetry.

The quality I find most admirable in Nathan’s poems is how he manages to create abiding, sustained ache. His speaker never grandstands, and never indulges in self-pity – on the contrary, his discursive interrogatives often implicate him in his own sadness. Nathan accomplishes this using understated language, a quiet voice that knows sorrow well, and accepts it. Few poets have the courage to enter that place and stay there – I think of Larry Levis as one, and Carl Phillips, often – but it’s fundamental to good writing: to look and speak clearly, even when it comes to pain. Please enjoy.

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Houdini

Who would’ve known you’d grow so afraid of stillness,
enclosed spaces, that you’d no longer remember a time you weren’t
subtracting seconds from your life, as if each breath were held?
If you had the strength to pluck your lucky quarter

from behind your wife’s ear, would you have? Would she still laugh?
A teakettle boils on the stove, its steam enough
to unlock your lungs. Your wife reads from Robinson Crusoe,
whom you cannot help but dream of, enveloped

by endless miles of ocean. Outside, paper skeletons are strung
up on every house in your neighborhood. You hear a boy
skipping up and down the block, begging his mother,
for Halloween, Mom, can I please be a ghost, please?

Read more online.

 

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Rose McLarney’s “Electrification”

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

Electrification

The dark didn’t scare her.
It’s this way days

have grown long, like distances
between them of an evening.

It used to be they gathered
at the fire, had to draw near.

Maybe her husband played music,
but there was nothing more

to do until dawn. Since he’s been
working at the sawmill, and cut

the stand of wild cherry, she can see
town glowing in the valley, hear

the saws sing, but not him.
He doesn’t come home

until the coals are cold.
She eats in the kitchen while she cooks,

and reads the news, leaning into
the stove hood for its light.

The boy wants to get to town too.
Quick, eats what she hands him,

standing under the porch bulb,
while moths fly against it

and drop singed around them.
Then her son steps out

into the night.

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Andy Young on Bringing the Egyptian Revolution to New Orleans

Alumna Andy Young (poetry, ’11) is featured on the Poets & Writers blog, discussing her readings. She writes:

The P&W-supported readings I’ve done in New Orleans, like most of my writing from the last couple of years, were inextricably linked to revolution and the uprisings in the Arab “world.” These grants have catalyzed readings that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. The readings took place at the Antenna Gallery, a dynamic gallery space which features writers as all as visual artists, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Loyola University, and, at the invitation of the Tulane Arabic Club, at a restaurant which no longer exists called Little Morocco.

Most of the poems I read on these occasions were from a chapbook called The People Is Singular, a collaborative response to the Egyptian revolution featuring my poems and the photography of Salwa Rashad, an Egyptian photographer. All of these readings featured words that try to find a home somewhere between observation and engagement, between Arabic and English, between two cultures. As the spouse of an Egyptian poet, and the mother of two, I am part of a family that constantly seeks to find a point of balance between these things.

Poetry helps me to find that place, and these readings created opportunities to share it. Since January 2011, I have often been asked by American friends and family to help them understand what’s going on in Egypt: to direct people to reliable news sources or to give further context to the headlines. Poetry, of course, is about more than the facts, but I have found that it has served these last couple of years, among other things, to flesh out experiences that may feel distant, other.

Each of these readings also provided opportunities to explore different ways of presenting work. At the Antenna Gallery, I conducted a multimedia presentation with projections of Rashad’s work, soundscapes, and different reading styles. At Loyola University, I hung a small exhibit of Rashad’s work to accompany the poems. At the New Orleans Museum of Art, the reading was in a small gallery space filled with artwork providing a different context.

At Little Morocco restaurant, my husband, Khaled Hegazzi, and I read all the work bilingually, accompanied by the oud and guitar. The restaurant was packed, and the aromas of lamb, cardamom, carrots, and mint tea floated around our voices. It was January 2011, a frightening and exciting time at the beginning of what would come to be known as the “Arab Spring.” My chapbook was yet to be published, but the poems I chose (many in translation from Arabic) were in the spirit of the times. In the question and answer session after the reading, one person asked, “What would you call what is happening in Egypt now?” And I responded, “I’d call it a revolution.” Little did I know how big it was or how long the struggle would be. I continue to seek words that make the narrative(s) of these times tangible and human, though there are times I am hopelessly mute. These opportunities to read and share my attempts to voice my thoughts have helped me to feel that they matter to others and the world.

Read more online. 

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New Poetry by Ross White

Two poems, “Cargo” and “Should You Be Accosted on the Road to Mecca,” by alumni Ross White (poetry, ’08) appear online in storySouth:

Should You Be Accosted on the Road to Mecca

Should you be accosted on the road to paradise by thieves,
should you be waylaid on the road to Shangri-La by butchers,
should you be diverted on the road to Xanadu,
should the other pilgrims similarly delayed look upon you with such pity,
should the guardsmen spit and laugh,
should you feel a sudden pain in your sides or stitches,
should the willows bend in patterns to suggest a more intense weeping,
should the gold coins fall from your purse to the soft dirt,
should you find yourself wishing for a homeland that’s no longer there,
take solace that the road was not carved or paved but worn by feet,
take solace that the feet belonged to travelers clothed as you are,
take solace that the path trod time and again seldom leads to nowhere,
but that the travelers made a life, as you do, traveling.

 

Cargo

For a time, I was a stowaway aboard a great ship,
hidden in great coils of rope.

A stormcloud followed.

I thought back to the maître d’ boning a fish
at the tableside,
and how you whispered to me
as though every word was contraband.

There must be secret plans
to smuggle all the love out of the world.

I was beaten by the captain when he found me,
though now I am a midshipman.

What care we take not to disturb the albatross.
What care I take to keep the sight of you
contraband in my heart all these years later.

What care we take to keep the sight of land
in our minds for days
after the horizons have swallowed the last of it.

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Dilruba Ahmed’s “Snake Oil, Snake Bite”

A new poem by alumna Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appears online and in print in Poetry:

They staunched the wound with a stone.
They drew blue venom from his blood
            until there was none.
When his veins ran true his face remained
lifeless and all the mothers of the village
wept and pounded their chests until the sky
             had little choice
but to grant their supplications. God made
             the boy breathe again. Read more
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Christine Fadden’s “The Empty State”

New work by alumna Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09) appears online at Pithead Chapel:

Here in this small town, the bars are dark, and outside, life glares.

Here Janelle is meeting Macie, because all the other bars in town allow smoking, and the women don’t want their clothes to stink, their hair, the things they’ll take out of their purses the next day. Janelle trusts the wine at this bar not to be sour. The bartenders here know how to set drinks in front of customers without dripping, spilling, or sloshing. There aren’t many choices in this small town, but Macie chose to move here, in part, for its lack of pretention. Read more

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Elisabeth Hamilton’s “Loafed”

Alumna Elisabeth Hamilton’s (fiction, ’13) short story, “Loafed,” appears online, in five parts, at Five Chapters. Read Part One here:

We’ve got a bag of Wonder Bread in the backseat. It’s hot in the car with the vents blasting and I keep turning to check if the plastic of the bread bag is melting, fusing with the Peace Train’s blue vinyl upholstery. I like this car. It’s got window cranks and exactly one temperature option and you never have to worry about whether pressing a button will cause the car to back up, or sound its alarm, or ask you intimidating and direct questions about your mileage. It doesn’t confuse you with icons that hint at window washing and instead trigger emergency wheel locking systems. If you want to defrost the windows, you rub them with your sleeve. I long for that kind of simplicity.

Read more

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