James Robert Herndon Wins Omnidawn’s Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Prize

James Robert Herndon’s “Mammals” (fiction, ’11) has been selected for Omnidawn’s Fabulist Fiction Chapbook Prize. Jeff VanderMeer, who selected Herndon for the prize, writes:
james_robert_herndon“A unique tale of love, commitment and redemption. In “Mammals,” an orphaned teenager sent to juvenile detention because of a violent crime becomes part of an odd experiment to see if he can learn about compassion and also teach it to another living creature.  The story displays sensitivity without sentimentality and a sense of the strange that is grounded in very real emotions.  A thoughtful and unusual gem.”
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New Story by V.C. Shapira

“Poe,” a new story by V.C. Shapira (fiction, ’98), appears in this month’s TriQuarterly:

The well-heeled couple strolling arm and arm discussing the upcoming presidential race had already agreed that General Zachary Taylor would be elected the new president. All the newspapers were extolling the general’s triumphant exploits during the Mexican War, resulting in the annexation of a great swath of land connecting the territory of Texas with distant California. They agreed it was god’s will.

On one of those humid afternoons familiar to those who live in the South, the gracious lady was cooling herself with a silk fan when she stopped abruptly. In the most prosperous neighborhood in all of Richmond City, Virginia, a derelict was blatantly occupying a park bench reserved for her kind alone.

“Dear,” the gentlewoman whispered, elbowing her husband. “It’s preposterous what license these people take. We cannot allow these laggards to invade our community. Already they roam the city at will. Wave him away, will you dear?”   …

Continue reading online at TriQuarterly.

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“Descent With Rope” by Joanne D. Dwyer

A new poem by Joanne D. Dwyer (poetry, ’09) appears in the current issue of New England Review:

Descent by Rope
 
If a throne is an angel of the seventh-highest order
out of nine possible heights, and you suffer vertigo,
 
will you be satisfied being a bottom floor angel?
Bargain basement, Everything’s-On-Sale angel?
 
The South American woman at the gym whose sweatpants
have the word Angel stenciled vertically down the leg
 
will not look me in the eye and is almost always breaking
the no-cell-phone rule, talking so heatedly, a la Latina,
 
while on the rowing machine. In the locker room I am a voyeur
watching her blow-dry her hair, even in summer, when the sun
 
would do the same without injury. Her hair as thin as a queen
ant’s wing which unfastens the instant she mates. I told you last
 
night that it is ironic that I have seen more women’s breasts than you.
I recently laid my eyes on the prototype adolescent Eve –
 
the most beauteous body I have ever seen coming out of a public shower.
A body that illuminated more than any library of books or cave of
 
echolocating microbats or remnants of chandeliers. And understood
for the first time the concupiscence of the old for the young.
 
And just as it is well past the era of electrocuting communists,
it is well past the era of seeing the snake as penis or messenger-boy
 
of the devil. The new symbology of the snake is exemplified in the new
creed of the three R’s: The rinds of limes under a pillow, a bottle of Rogaine
 
and the unharnessed rappelling down the ravine without a reality show
there to film you. The willing, non-oppositional, come-to-me mama dying
 
and then the ingesting of your own death, as if death was a carton
of dyed ostrich eggs or a fanny-pack full of trail mix that will get you
 
up and over the mountain pass, even in the snow, with Nazis chasing you.  
And at the fin de siècle, after crossing the border, you are reunited with
 
your soul mate or your first childhood pet. And for the lucky,
the two are one in the same. You wed soon after your frostbite heals,
 
but before a background check is run on you. And for
the lucky, your betrothed doesn’t care you were a stripper
 
and that most of your best work was scribed in that era
when you were saturated of libations and libertine slogans
 
and sale underwear. And lead in the boots of the messengers
in the form of Revolutionary War musket balls to keep them
 
closer to the saltgrass, to the humidity of ants and resurfacing crushed
beer cans. Look at the folded latticed wing of a hibernating angel, just
 
now unhinging its eyes, rising through the air like caustic powdered
sugar in the bakery warm from the bread ovens. And though there are
 
new forbidden fruits, and new machinery replacing red wheelbarrows –
the truck drivers are still pulling off the road to sleep.
 

Dwyer’s first book of poems, “Belle Laide,” has recently been published by Sarabande Books (2013).

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New Work by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“Rain Meditation” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) appears online at 3 Quarks Daily:

Heat is eerie: lipsticks left unrefrigerated melt into deformity, ice cream liquefies and renders the scoop useless; fruit and flower stalls carry the smell of that peculiar cusp between ripe and rotten.

Then rain comes, licking the sky green; the veil between the mysteries and the sun-weary, bleached and hardened world dissolves away, becoming thin as a glassy insect wing. A dusty estrangement washes out, newly woven silken webs everywhere; meditation is possible again.

Clarity makes me humble: I’m smaller than a melon seed, slighter than a fishbone. I’m the moisture in the air and the movement in antennae; I’m filament and feelers, the quiver within the quiver, the wet crease in the smallest leaves. I’m also a rusty door hinge, static on television, soaked clothesline, scurrying lizard, the moving minute hand on the timepiece that is suddenly ticking louder; Rain changes the acoustics entirely— each syllable, sob, twitter, footfall, turning of a knob, is distinct. The airwaves have cleared and the cosmic channels open up.

I watch the raindrops make rings on the surface of a mossy cistern: water bangles! I imagine the continuously disappearing rain bangles on my wrists. Leaves float, throats are stirred into singing: a frog’s croaking has a timbre of energy today, as if it is charging the earth in its deep, steady way.

Continue reading at 3 Quarks Daily.

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New Work by Patricia Grace King

patricia-grace-king

An excerpt of Patricia Grace King’s novella, “Rooster Hour,” is featured online at Narrative Magazine:

“Val walked out to the milpas, the fields, with the mayor to count the dead bodies. She wrote down the date and the place where they found them. Who they were, or had been, was harder to tell. Their noses were missing, their tongues were gouged out, the skin sometimes peeled from their faces. Together they tried—Val and the mayor—to estimate the hours since death. There were shadings of color: brown into red into purple-green-blue and then black. There were gradations of swelling, and of what happened after the swelling. For the first several months the mayor was better than Val at such details.”

Read more at Narrative Magazine.

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The Larry Levis Prize 2014

2014 Levis Prize of $10,000 for a First Book of Fiction
The Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend is an award given to support a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers who is completing his/her first book. The Levis Stipend alternates between awards for poetry and for fiction and the 2014 award will be made to a fiction writer in the amount of $10,000. The current judge, a nationally-recognized fiction writer, will be announced at the time the award is made, in January 2014.Eligibility: The Levis Stipend is open only to alumni who have not yet published a full-length collection of fiction in a standard edition. A standard edition is defined as 150 or more pages in a print run of 1500 or more copies. Entrants to the competition must hold the MFA degree from Warren Wilson College prior to July 15, 2012, or from Goddard College prior to June 30, 1981.

Guidelines: An entry fee of $25 is required to process the application and should be made on-line via the donation page at friendsofwriters.org. Please note the “receipt ID number” provided after payment.All entries must be submitted electronically, in two pdf attachments:

1) A cover letter specifying

  • Your name, address, telephone number and email;
  • The month and year you received the MFA from Warren Wilson or Goddard College;
  • The titles of the stories or novel excerpt(s) submitted; if submitting an excerpt, give a brief description of the shape and remainder of the manuscript-in-progress;
  • The “receipt ID number” for your entry fee payment;
  • A list of publication credits;
  • A statement explaining how the award will assist the projected completion of your book.

2) A fifty-page manuscript of fiction must be included. The prose should be double-spaced with margins of at least 1inch. Pages submitted above the fifty pages required will not be considered. Please use 12-point readable fonts for the manuscripts. Your name should not appear anywhere in the manuscript submitted. The manuscripts are judged blindly and should your name appear in the manuscript, your application will be disqualified and removed from consideration.The entry should be submitted by electronic mail to [email protected]  The email should have two attachments as specified above, one labeled “cover letter” and one labeled “manuscript.” Both attachments must be .pdf files.

Deadlines:

  • Submissions will be accepted between August 15, 2013 and October 15, 2013.
  • The Stipend will be awarded in January 2014. It is fully-taxable under United Stated tax laws, and Friends of Writers must declare the award to the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes and payments of taxes are solely the responsibility of the award winner.

Larry Levis (1946-1996) was an award-winning poet who wrote six books of poetry during his lifetime. His last collection, Elegy, was published posthumously. A Selected Poems was published in 2000. Levis was a much beloved member of the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers, cherished as much for his incisive mind as for the care and attention he gave to his students.

Any queries or requests for more information should be addressed to:

Nan Cuba
Levis Fellowship Administrator
[email protected]
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New Work by Susan Sterling

An essay by Susan Sterling (Fiction, ’92) “The Summer of Uncle Tom,” appears in the Spring 2013 print edition of Witness: 

“A very old edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel had been on my bookshelf for more than a decade, since my father sold our family home in Connecticut after my mother’s death. I brought the book back to Maine with me because it was historically important, but it never occurred to me even to glance inside it. I’ve always been annoyed with people who have strong opinions about books they’ve never read, yet here I was unapologetically in their camp, certain I would find the novel preachy and moralistic. What I didn’t anticipate was the way the story, once begun, would stir up half-hidden memories and grab hold of my imagination, leading to a troubling discovery about my own family history. The critic Edmund Wilson could have had me in mind when he warned: “To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom’s Cabin…might well prove a startling experience.”…”

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New Work by Jayne Benjulian

Two poems by Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13), “Sister” and “Peace’s Farm” appear online at The Ilanot Review:

Sister

She gives me holy hell when I trim Elvis’ whiskers. That’s how
they fit through things. Potatoes for breakfast & whatever else she
feels like eating, skinny, you’re falling away to a ton, ha ha, I total

the bike, Dr. Litvak cleans the pebbles from my knee, stitches the
skin closed over the bone, holy Mary mother of god, we’re Jewish
but that’s what we say, that’s what the Garibaldis say, holy Mary, 

…[Keep Reading]…

Jayne’s essay, “The Dramaturgy of Audience: Jayne Benjulian goes to the Theater as a Civilian,” appears at HowlRound:

The last time I wrote for HowlRound, in October 2011, I was director of new play development at a theater. Since then, I have turned to the work of solitary writing. I have been in a kind of self-imposed exile learning again to write poetry, earning an MFA and assembling a manuscript of poems. Recently, after lunch with a mentor, I found myself in Philadelphia with nothing to do and no one to call. I bought a ticket to the Wilma Theater—and I emphasize that I paid for a theater ticket. I was too shy and too reluctant to call in favors for an industry ticket. And then, it dawned on me that I was presented with a gift: I might go to the theater as a civilian and see what it was like …[Keep Reading]…

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Catchy Tunes

“Catchy Tunes,” a poem by Robert Thomas (poetry, ’02) appears online at Poetry Magazine.

It’s not just this. Every written word is a suicide note.
And a love letter, too.

There may be no one to talk to who would get it,
but if you write it down maybe someone will get it after you’ve left the room,

or in five hundred years, or maybe someone from Sirius, the Dog Star,
will get it. The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen

claimed he was born on Sirius. You remember him:
the genius who said the crashing of planes

into the World Trade Center was the greatest concert ever held,
although he later conceded the audience had not been given the option

to not attend
and that somewhat diminished its perfection.  …[Keep Reading]…
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Astronomers Locate a New Planet

“Astronomers Locate a New Planet,” a poem by Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09; Beebe Fellow, ’12) appears online at Hyphen.

“Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.” — Reuters, 8/24/2011

Like the universe’s largest engagement ring, it twirls
and sparkles its way through infinity.
The citizens of the new world know about luxury.
They can live for a thousand years.
Their hearts are little clocks
with silver pendulums pulsing inside.
Eyes like onyx, teeth like pearl.
But it’s not always easy. They know hunger.
They starve. A field made of diamond
is impossible to plow; shovels crumble and fold
like paper animals. So frequent is famine,
that when two people get married,
one gives the other a locket filled with dirt.
That’s the rare thing, the treasured thing, there.
It takes decades to save for,
but the ground beneath them glows, and people find a way.

…[Keep Reading]…

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