The Place Where I Write: Maya Smith Janson

Maya Smith Janson (poetry, ’06) talks about where she writes at the Orion Magazine blog:

MayaJanson

Any attempt to speak to where I write becomes tangled-up with the when and how and why, the where of it existing as just one element in a formula that involves interiors and exteriors, a sort of psychic littoral zone that has to do with looking inward and outward at the same time. Has to do with being stationary and concentrated and mobile and expansive. Both parts equally important, the whole endeavor influenced by factors seasonal and situational and temperamental.

For example, this past January, in order to meet a commitment to write every day, I began rising before dawn and wrote until sunrise. This meant I had an hour or so before daylight and the stirring of my family signaled the end of the day’s early work. The assignment required that I develop a new routine. First rule: no houselights. I stoked the woodstove and boiled water in the dim light provided by my bicycle headlamp. Then, for reasons mostly romantic, I wrote in the small globe of light afforded by one candle, looking through the French doors out to the snowed-over yard.

Five a.m., but not really dark, the yard bright with snow and illuminated by what I came to think of as dual moons. The real one and a small, domesticated one in the form of a solar-powered paper lantern hung on an ornate iron crook in the dormant Budleja bed. The actual moon waned toward mid-month, then waxed to full by its end. It featured large in my writing. Every poem in some way moonie, moon-soaked. (Did I notice a small, brightening of mood in the lines on the page as the moon returned, fattened, taking up more space within the white pines as it drifted from east to west? I did.) …[Keep Reading]…

/by

Matthew Simmons in The Wigleaf Top 50

“Gerald Ford,” a short story by Matthew Simmons (fiction, ’08), first published in Melville House, was recently included in the 2013 Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions:

GERALD FORD

by Matthew Simmons

Gerald Ford wakes up. He’s the president of his own morning. He opens both his eyes at the same time, like a president does. He is ready.

Gerald Ford wakes up and does one push-up. He takes four deep breaths. He gently slaps his face ten times: both hands, both palms, his cheeks, gets the blood flowing. He cracks his neck and cracks his back.

Gerald Ford opens the window and looks outside. It is spring. It looks like it’s going to be a nice day. He takes one more deep, deep breath, and he smiles.

And from somewhere out in this very nice day, he hears a shout:

“The fuck you pardon Nixon for?” he hears.

“I did it for America,” says Gerald Ford. And he slams shut his window and puts on his clothes. …[Keep Reading]…

/by

“Little Wife”

“Little Wife,” a story by Lara Markstein (fiction, ’13) appears in the latest issue of The Greensboro Review.

We are leaving Elizabeth City in a week. The bus tickets and a wad of twenty-dollar bills crunch between my thin mattress and the crooked slats of the bed at night. I haven’t told Tuyen we’re going, yet. She’s only eight and asks too many questions, and there’s not enough time to prepare Mom’s memorial and explain to her how I am not a thief.

I tried to get a job that summer at Pizza Hut so we could run away. From the storms and the way the gas stove leaked and the mold in the bottom of the sink that stuck beneath my nails and Uncle, pick-pick-picking at the gaps between his teeth. Tuyen wanted me to work in a grocery store because there were whole aisles of candy she said she’d never tried. Twizzlers. Mars bars. Swedish Fish. But no groceries were hiring.

“Pizza Hut is,” she said between mouthfuls of sour jelly worms.

I said I’d stink of grease and thwacked a fish I’d caught for dinner against the dock where she sat watching me. Tuyen spat on her palm to clean the dirt from the hem of her dress.

“You could catch fish.”

The bass still flopped, so I hit it with a rock. Its belly shivered in the sun. In a bit, I’d slit the stomach, then saw the fish guts free from where they were fixed to the bone. The innards would float on the water, pointing down the river bend to where Will Johnson lived. Will Johnson played basketball and drove his brother Joe’s sedan.

“When we find Dad, will he buy me glitter shoes?” Tuyen asked.

“That mess on your dress looks like squashed Milky Way,” I said, ankle deep in warm June sludge. It was a clear day, full of stars. In the scales of the largemouth and the mud.

Read more in the print issue of The Greensboro Review.

/by

Elaine Terranova Wins Off the Grid Press Prize

Goddard graduate Elaine Terranova’s poetry collection Dollhouse has won the Off the Grid Press 2012 Manuscript Contest.

41zKF2e5wqL._SY320_

This new poetry collection by Whitman Award winner Terranova is her sixth, and it is breathtaking.  In pellucid language the poet walks through a kind of “vale of soul making” by re-visioning hours she spent as a child playing dolls with a friend.  Terranova weaves her poetics of space by setting the fragile orders of the dollhouse against the realities of family fiction and the terror of a whole world outside where no shelter can be found – all this in exquisite, minimalist music.

From Dollhouse
By Elaine Terranova

The dollhouse is a box
like most things,
a tooth, a heart, a tomb.
Cloud glory crowns it
or it is maybe struck
by eyeball-shaped hail.
At dusk, the earth’s shadow
falls over it.  The dollhouse
is an ecosystem with
a fixed population.
Their wool-strand hair.
Their wooden feet. …[Keep Reading]…

/by

Dilruba Ahmed on NPR

NPR’s Weekend Edition recently spoke with Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) about what makes poetry so important.

Ahmed_photo_BW_sm

Ahmed says it’s a little difficult to tease out exactly why she started writing poetry. “I can only guess that it was sort of two major factors,” she says. “One was that I grew up in a literature-loving household. … My parents are from Bangladesh, which is a country where poetry is very much a part of the cultural fabric. I think probably the other reason is that, growing up, my family moved a lot. And so that experience of being an outsider over and over again, sort of, small towns in western Pennsylvania and rural Ohio, and just trying to figure things out, sort of where I fit in, and I’m sure other people were trying to figure out where I fit in too, and we were all sort of trying to figure each other out. Being an outsider had a large influence on my poetry — maybe not my earliest efforts, but when I really started trying to write in earnest.”

“There’s potential for poetry to have more of a presence in public life,” she continues. “At formal events like readings, or things like the poems that have been posted on buses — you know, I love that idea of that sort of carrying a poem in your pocket. That might be a way to start incorporating poetry into one’s everyday life.”

Listen at NPR

/by

Kanawha Dog

“Kanawha Dog,” a poem by Faith Holsaert (fiction, ’82) appears online at Union Station.

Kanawha dog
is in the river
lion head turned
to Malden.
The feathers of his
legs pluming
into twentieth century
poison water, heart
pumping with
machine din.

At Kanawha Salines
his forebear saw the woman
on the bank. Dog,
he waited for her to
play their game of sticks,
lay his big head
on his paws
barking throw it
throw it and then
leaping light as a finch
feather
while the auger
bit deep into the earth
wringing free the iron
red salt treasured
for curing meat. …[Keep Reading]…

/by

Survivors

“Survivors: Shanghai and Beijing, China” a piece by Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears online at The Common, as part of their “Dispatches” feature.

yngve_aprildispatch

We took the fast train to Beijing across hours of deadened countryside where all the trees grow in rows, various heights, but all new and emaciated under the dusting of early leaves. I asked an acquaintance what happened to all the old trees. Was this a result of the Cultural Revolution? He said, maybe they ate them. They ate grass sometimes. Maybe they cut them down for firewood. Now and then you see some that don’t look planted; volunteers, they had been fattened up by age and randomly placed. There are always survivors.

The train whistled us over nearly a thousand miles in less than six hours, a smooth, silent ribbon pulled gracefully through the hard fingers of this landscape. It was comfortable, well ventilated, warm, and the seats gracefully proportioned. Between Shanghai and Beijing, we stopped at four stations. This was the cleanly constructed new China. Big expanses of glistening escalators and parking complexes void of even a single passenger or vehicles. …[Keep Reading]…

/by

Poems by Mark Prudowski

Two new poems by Mark Prudowski (poetry, ’09) appear online at the poetry blog On Barcelona.

The radio says sequestration before sunrise

so that the soft vowels and hard que alliteration
put in my mind equestrian, though
another part knows it for an accretion of cuts.
People are losing their jobs. In an interesting twist
a public defender lays himself off rather than
a less senior beneath him. That from his mouth
I hear the poor can’t get a fair shake is not thus ironic.
If not forever, hasn’t this been true for an awfully long time?
Three cheers for those who still give a damn,
by which I mean actually do something about it.
                   Like the  torturer’s horse,  I just want
relief for the itch on my ass.
I obey the bit and bridle.
The alternative is just too damn hard.

Read more at On Barcelona

/by

Post-MFA Conference Deadline

Tomorrow, April 30, is the deadline to  register for this summer’s 2013 Goddard/Wally Alumni (Post MFA) Conference!

As a reminder, The conference itself is July 28 – Aug. 3 (or shorter stay option of July 31 – Aug. 3) at St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA (SF Bay Area).

From Peg Alford and Cass Pursell, your friendly conference co-coordinators:

We’re getting very excited as the registrations come in, from alums all over geographically — and temporally, as in grads of early days to brand spanking new.  Alums who have never attended before, ever, will be there.

The proposals for the classes and panels are varied and delectable, such as (very roughly paraphrased) theater games & improv & writing; writing “away from the self”; getting your mojo back; & more. There will be a fun Shakespeare reading, and of course, YOUR readings of your work.

To your choice of workshops, in addition to poetry & fiction, you may choose creative nonfiction this year.

Really, there’s simply too much to cover in this communiqué! You’ll have to come and see for yourself and from all the tasty offerings select your own smorgasbord.

You can be as involved as you like. Give a class, organize a discussion, participate in a panel. Attend those of your choice. Attend none. Hang out in your room, in the library, in the courtyard (St. Mary’s is gorgeous) and write, sleep, daydream. Hike! Swim!

Dance? Why, yes, if you care to. We’ll have one for sure.

The one thing you need to do, however, is get your registration in — now! Go to the website link and fill in the forms and pay on line, or download the forms, print out and fill and send the paper forms to us at the address listed.

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

You’ve heard it said before and if you haven’t you need to: it doesn’t matter if you don’t know a soul who’s coming to the conference. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t interacted with another alum in years, decades. You belong. Your presence is wanted. You’ll find initial awkwardness will dispel quickly. You’ll see.

Questions? We’ve got answers! Just ask.

/by

“Letting Words Bear Down and Burn”

“Letting Words Bear Down and Burn,” an interview with Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appears online at RHINO.

Ahmed_photo_BW_sm(credit Mike Drzal)

…Bengalis hold the Bangla language very dear to them. It’s a very soft, beautiful, expressive, and poetic language—and a matter of regional and cultural pride and political import. Bangla (Bengali) was my first language, English my second. I grew up in a bilingual household in which, over time, my parents spoke Bangla to my sisters and me, and we responded in English. (To this day, this is typically how we communicate.) While my siblings and I have retained our comprehension of Bangla, our spoken Bangla lags behind.

I think that growing up that bi-cultural and bi-lingual environment deeply shaped my cultural identity—my lived experiences spanned more than the small towns where I grew up, and I was keenly aware of my parents’ “ghost homeland” that seemed to exist just out of reach. My bilingual upbringing also heightened my awareness of language, I think—I discovered early that a very funny story relayed by my mother in Bangla sometimes failed to have the same richness and deliciousness in English, for example; or that certain English words had no counterpart in Bangla. I learned, too, that languages could provide access and power as much as they could create barriers to communication and belonging.

[Read More]

/by

FOW FORUM

Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

VIEW ALL POSTS  |  SUBMIT YOUR WORK