A new piece of flash fiction by alumni Matthew Muller (fiction, ’10) appears in Stone Highway Review:
The small family takes a road trip, husband wife and daughter. The husband drives, full of vigor, the road before him. Read more
Alumni Greg Pierce’s (fiction, ’12) new collaboration with Broadway composer John Kander is featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”:
Broadway composer John Kander is a living legend: With his songwriting partner, the late Fred Ebb, he created the scores for the smash hit musicals Cabaret and Chicago,as well as the enduring anthem “New York, New York.”
Now, at 86, Kander has a new writing partner — and a new musical, The Landing,opening off-Broadway Wednesday. Read more
A new issue of Tupelo Quarterly features work by several Warren Wilson MFA alumni, including a story by Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96).
An Uncle
An uncle is a babysitter in a pinch, which happens rarely, only when Mother has to run out to comfort her friend Suzanne, an emergency that isn’t that rare, in Dad’s opinion, but an uncle is someone who doesn’t take sides in the matter. He comes to the rescue, and sits on the sofa watching a wrestling match on TV, and says Stop it now! after you and your sister have slapped each other’s arms burning red with your Barbie dolls. He gives you a look that makes your stomach heavy and you feel pretty sure he knows you’re to blame – you’re the oldest. You sing all the Beatles songs you can think of, to impress him with how you know the words to so many songs. He’s like your dad in the way that’s he’s not that interested and stares straight ahead at the action on the screen. You brush all your hair from the back of your head forward, smooth it down over your forehead, past your eyebrows and into your eyes to look like Ringo, who isn’t the cutest Beatle but has something special. “Look, Uncle Lew!” He glances over and gives a snort, and you feel a little better.
An uncle is someone your mother likes a lot, and when he drops by unexpectedly, she turns off the iron and sits down with him at the kitchen table, where they drink Pepsis or RC Cola if it’s on sale at the Shop n’ Save, and eat snacks, probably chocolate macaroons, and his voice flows low from out there, and she giggles and giggles again. There is something high and twinkly about that laugh, like the sound of the glass wind chimes suspended outside the neighbor’s door that you wish you could talk her into buying to hang on your porch – but one day. When you grow up and you live in your own house, then. Then.
A new issue of Tupelo Quarterly features work by several Warren Wilson MFA alumni, including a new story by Joan Frank (fiction, ’96).
Two Musketeers
The man and the woman slammed themselves into the car with relief.
Certainly, the little beach cottage had been all they might have wished for. Its heating didn’t function, but they’d managed. The fireplace had finally more or less done what it was touted to do. They’d eaten well, walked on the cold, wet sand (a silver wafer of sun for an hour; better than none)—watched a funny video, made love. The hot water out of the taps was weak and intermittent; they’d solved that by soaking in the little outdoor tub. A real retreat. They’d kissed and joked and nuzzled like Mr. and Mrs. Bear.
Now they were pointed toward home, laughing, eager to be thoroughly warmed by forced-air heating, amid strong reading lights again.
But the fog was a new element.
The fog was a stranger who’d entered the movie of themselves.
It gulped the scenery: majestic miles of beach. The green gentle hills rolling back, back. The apple groves gilded with autumn leaves like burnished coins, rows tumbling toward the roadway in amber light. The eucalyptus groves, the serene river. The little towns nestled in the leafy middle distance.
A new issue of Tupelo Quarterly features work by several Warren Wilson MFA alumni, including translations of Sarah Kirsch’s poetry by Abigail Wender (poetry, ’08), with Hella Von Bonin.
The Little Prince
My eyes have messed me up, so I see Earth
Above me walk on clouds now, where
Directions are, no paths, the mountains
Hang down under as do the trees
With birds inside, out of the houses
Fall pillows, scribbled papers
Now and then a threat, the people
Walk on their heads—their certainty
Frightens, I can’t reach their chimneys
Greet
The twinkle of my abandoned window
As in the past the evening star
A new issue of Tupelo Quarterly features work by several Warren Wilson MFA alumni, including two poems, “Withdrawl” and “After Picking Apples,” by Nate Pritts (poetry, ’00).
Withdrawl
All the leaves on the trees
are yellow explosions.
They’re dead or they’re dying.
It’s too beautiful to process
& it never relents.
I look out over the lake
filled with so many chemicals.
The water is grey like the sky
is grey like even
the grass. I can feel the war
coming.
I know nothing will be left.
I create a fake Facebook profile
so I can check on the people
who I’ve blocked or who blocked me.
I name him Robert Lowell.
Enemies upon enemies.
I can’t believe this is my Wednesday
afternoon activity.
There’s too much
psychic backlash these people
interacting with my persona.
I telephone my boss tell her
I can’t teach any classes today
since I have already seen how this ends.
A new issue of Tupelo Quarterly features work by several Warren Wilson MFA alumni, including an essay by Elizabeth Eslami (fiction, ’03) entitled, “Spikes and Rivers: The Work of Joe Wilkins,” followed by an interview with Wilkins:
What I’m looking for, always, is writing that works me over like a crowbar. That bruises, yes, but also that breaks the skin, so it can slip under and stay put. Writing that fractures bone, so some part of me has to forever knit around someone else’s story. I don’t want writing I can shake off or walk away from.
It’s pretty simple. Great writing does damage. And I don’t want to heal from it, ever.
Alumnus Paul Michel’s (fiction, ’98) story, “Angels For All She Knew,” currently appears in the online and print editions of Writing Tomorrow as the magazine’s 2013 Fiction Contest winner.
Angels For All She Knew
Orville. Wilbur. The names were absurd. It was no surprise that these men had made bicycles. They might have been bakers or street sweepers. But the fathers of flight? The idea made Vincent Molnar laugh. His laughter rumbled up from deep within: some secret secret place of spite and bile. It had festered there, in one Molnar man after another, for nearly one hundred and fifty years.
“Kitty Hawk,” he sneered, shaking his balding head.
“Kitty Hawk my ass.”
Vincent had just turned forty-one. He had a thirteen-year-old son named Rudy, who at the moment was hunched predictably in a desk chair in his bedroom, riveted on a game of galactic warfare that flashed its pixels mere inches from his nose. His thin fingers flew deftly over the keyboard. Civilizations rose and fell at his command. He was paying scant attention to his father, though it was largely on his account that Vincent was cursing the Wright Brothers in the first place. On his account, for his own damned good, and for the honor of his family.
A new poem by alumnus Michael Puican (poetry, ’09) appears online at Prick of the Spindle:
The Man Was Either Discussing Death…
after Anne Carson
The man was either discussing death or he was not.
If he was discussing death, the listener was either visibly moved or was unaffected.
If she was unaffected, either the words were not understood or she was not in church at the time.
If she was not in church, she either went to an earlier Mass or she lied about going to church.
If she went to an earlier Mass, either she told the priest how much she enjoyed the sermon or was distracted from the sermon because there were too many valves open in her heart.
If she was distracted from the sermon because there were too many valves open in her heart, it was brought on either by sunlight streaming through the stained glass or the limits of form.
If it was the limits of form, the natural world was enjoying a moment of strength. Either that or she had been thinking of the uncertainty between skin and what’s recalled as touch.
Or maybe it wasn’t skin and touch at all. Maybe it was the black of a closed mouth or an open one caught in a voiceless cry and set against the pattern, the pattern of no longer returned human love.
A new poem by alumnus Brendan Grady (poetry, ’12) appears online at the New England Review:
We know the moths circling the porch light,
the dolt among them breaking orbit,
dusty Icarus drawn to his demise.
This isn’t new, but seventeen others
stuck on the wall have turned their wings
against it, like stoics, as if the light isn’t light,
and if they move, it is only a slight flutter,
a twitch of motion, before they still again.
My mind should stop here—but we see
one push off from the wall, flying
erratic, as if whiskey drunk or possessed,
and we know the ones that lap around the light
were once still. Love, I know I could
just flip a switch, that’s not the point.
I count seventeen windows on our street
still lit—hundreds of lights
in our neighborhood, millions in our city,
each one attracts an asteroid belt of moths
flitting like dust motes, caught in the wind.
Of course, when seen from a certain distance.
I really should stop. It’s so cold tonight
when I shut my eyes, I can picture
floating in space—the porch light
becomes the red glare of the sun,
morphing shapes, like reflections
fluttering on an astronaut’s helmet,
or the threshold of light, shadowed
when my father came home late, paused
at my door. He hardly ever entered. If he did,
I’d pretend to be asleep, so he’d feel safe
to kiss me on the forehead, or pick me up,
instead of just saying good night, shutting
the door behind him. Let me tell you,
love, my father was no hell-bent lunatic,
nor Daedalus, just a doctor who kept the appropriate
distance between men, and I was merely a son
who’d blush in his father’s shadow. This isn’t new.
Right now, the body of a moth has become
a shadow in the light bulb. You aren’t here to see it.
You’ve been gone awhile now. I could say
I’ve been a shadow since you left with a man
more like my father. But that would be a lie.
We knew a breach opened between us
like a tiny nick in an astronaut’s suit; we knew
our touch felt like moth wings fluttering on skin.
You’ve been gone for a while. When I think it through,
I haven’t been speaking to you at all. I’ve said love
but meant him, meaning you, Father. Wasn’t it you
who taught me what it meant to fall?
The force of gravity is constant, the force
of gravity is actually the downward
acceleration the Earth imparts to all bodies,
equally: the child dropped on the bed after kissing
his father on the lips, a moth with burnt wings.
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