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
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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