“Real Fine China” by Ryan Burden

A new story by alumni Ryan Burden (fiction, ’13) appears online at JMWW:

Trevor, staring through the green film on the apartment window, watched two boys play on slick chromed skateboards. The boards flipped and hovered in blurring spirals between their feet as they tried to beat gravity. They were much older than Trevor, who was only seven, and they wouldn’t have let him play with them. But that was all right because he didn’t want to flip skateboards. He didn’t even want to go outside. In summer the cracks in the sidewalk gushed heat like the air that poured from his mother’s oven on Sundays when she baked bread. He preferred to stay indoors, away from the sun and the sour stink of water in the gutters.

“Trevor,” said his mother. “Come and say goodbye to Mr. Gorman.”

Trevor opened his mouth wide because it hurt in the back where he had clenched his teeth shut whenever one of the boys fell. He cringed at the gristly crackle of bones in his jaw.

Mr. Gorman’s hands were puffed up like the red leather cushions on their couch. “Always a pleasure,” he said.

Trevor’s mother smiled and Trevor went back to the window. For a time the two adults stood whispering by the door. Mr. Gorman’s voice was like the muffled rumble of a cement truck in an underground tunnel. Trevor heard the apartment door open with a rubbery sucking sound. Then it closed again and he could tell that Mr. Gorman had not left. Outside, the older boys took their shirts off and hung them like limp, wrinkled snakes around their sunburned necks.

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New Work by Andy Young

A new essay, “Before the Inevitable Ending: Time, Nâzım Hikmet, and the Sweet Potato Boy of Tahrir Square,” by alumna Andy Young (poetry, ’11), appears online in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

SINCE 2011, one of the mainstays of Tahrir Square, and the advent of its on-and-off occupation, is the presence of sweet potato sellers. Among the flags and protest banners, the throngs of citizens, and the hawkers of gas masks and cotton candy, the black metal potato stoves puff like small train engines. Twelve-year-old Omar Salah had been selling sweet potatoes for two years when he died in early February this year. He was shot twice by an Egyptian army conscript, “accidentally,” outside the gates of the US Embassy.

In Egypt, over the last two and a half years, thousands of people been killed by some type of authority attempting to contain protests — the police, the Central Security Forces, the Ministry of Interior, or, in Omar’s case, the army.

Regardless of who does the killing or holds the power, each death represents a stopped narrative, a ripple of grief, a person. As the deaths and their implications accumulate, as the blame is (or, in most cases, is not) assigned, the names blur and are replaced with numbers. Living in Egypt, I am constantly aware of, constantly overwhelmed by, the number or protests, the number of arrests, and especially the mounting number of the dead. Still, there was something about Omar’s death that stopped me, that made me want to know who he was. To remember his name.

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Aggie Zilvaljevic’s “Dog Days In Vilnius”

A new story by alumna Aggie Zilvaljevic (fiction, ’05) appears online in Grey Sparrow Journal:

Late afternoon that Sunday the two brothers, Vaidas and Jonas, had run after a speeding train, pretending they were wild horses. They’d rested in an empty courtyard near their apartment block, eating boiled corn on the cob. Vaidas nibbled his around, and Jonas ate it across. After that they smoked unfiltered cigarettes stolen from their father. But the lull only made them more restless and more tired, at the same time. They chased crows in the linden trees, swinging long wooden swords, clicking their tongues at the blackbirds and calling, “Caw-caw!”

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New Work by Rebecca Foust

Alumna Rebecca Foust’s (poetry, ’10) poems, “Click,” “Dark Ecology,” “spec house foundation cut into hillside,” “Rebuke,” and “To N., Serving Curried Rice for Food-Not-Bombs,” appear online in Mudlark Flash:

Click

Your cat curled at the door, tongue like a dark liver 
thrust through her teeth, 

poisoned by eating a mouse that had eaten d-CON, 
click—your son’s testicular lump 

overnight has tripled-in-size—whirr-click. The kid 
who tossed your morning paper? 

Blown up, his third tour in Iraq, and what is that click-
whirr-click, like-a-dry-insect sound?  

Where the world was intact now grins a wound, 
there’s a hole in the hull and you list. 

Click-whir-click—below your feet, fracked bedrock 
shifts. Click—the pixels pull in—whirr-click.

Now you can see them resolve, the pixeled years,
inside the framed sum of your fears.

He’s come. There’s a boy in the hall with a Glock 
and crossed bandoliers.

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James Franco’s “Film Sonnet 3”

Alumni James Franco’s (poetry, ’12) poem “Film Sonnet 3” appears online in The American Poetry Review: 

He walks mindlessly, maniacally
Across the desert, like a Sam Shepard man,
A man who has been down to Mexico to die
Of a broken heart but didn’t die,
So he comes back to Texas, and then to Los Angeles,
Because all the cowboys retired to the movies.
Now they don’t even make Westerns anymore.
Paris, Texas, the name of the place
Where he bought some land, like a slice of Paradise,
But only in his mind. The real place
Is just a deserted plain in the middle of nowhere,
And his wife is working in a peepshow palace,
And you never think, but you should,
He was too old and ugly for her in the first place.

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Colleen Abel on Writing Lessons

Alumna and current Joan Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College, Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04), discussing her approach to teaching poetry at a service-oriented institution is featured in the blog series “Writing Lessons” at Ploughshares: 

colleenabelRecently, poet and scholar Seth Abramson released a list on The Huffington Post called “The Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry.” The list included writers, teachers, publishers, founders of listservs and writing centers, and celebrity Friends of Poetry like Bill Murray and Patti Smith. Abramson didn’t define what he meant by advocacy, but I imagine he meant things like word-spreading, cheerleading, and trying to make poetry reach a wider audience—which most of us agree that poetry needs.

On the same day that Abramson published his list, I was participating in orientation activities at the school where I’ll be teaching this fall, Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC. As I’ve heard a dozen times over the course of orientation, WWC is the only school in the country with an integrated work/service/learning program. In other words, students here spend 15 hours a week on a work crew. They are the college’s janitors, cooks, constructions workers, landscapers, foresters. On top of the work crew—and, of course, their studies—students have many, many hours of required service volunteering in the community, taking service classes, and attending issues workshops. (The other day my son tumbled through an intricate Asheville playground built in five days by WWC students).

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Jamaal May on Giving a Not Terrible Reading

Alumni Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) is featured on the Poets & Writers blog discussing how to give a not terrible reading:

jamaal_may-494x394Writers frequently ask me how to get more readings. I’ve said for years I don’t know why people give me money and sit still to hear me recite poems. But now that this bizarre phenomenon has occurred more than 600 times in the last nine years (three funded by P&W), I have to admit I do know why I get so many readings, and only part of it is luck. The truth is people like to hear me read. So the better question to ask is “How can I give better readings of my work?” Below are my top five tips.

Use Your Everyday Inflection

It’s remarkable to watch a poet charismatically engage an audience with banter then slip into a monotone drone when the poem starts. I suspect part of the reason for the “monotone drone” or the equally disheartening “poet voice” is a fear of performing. Writers tell me they don’t want to perform or be seen as performative. I would argue that an overly dry, disengaged reading is in fact a performance. No one speaks that way. Conversely, our daily conversations are full of varied inflection and shifts in tone. Rather than try to perform a poem, practice reading it in your own voice as if you’re telling those lines to a friend.

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Margaree Little Wins Rona Jaffe Award

Alumna Margaree Little (poetry, ’12) is a recipient of a 2013 Writers’ Award from The Rona Jaffe Foundation:

“In recognition of the special contributions women writers make to our culture and society, The Rona Jaffe Foundation is giving its nineteenth annual Writers’ Awards under a program that identifies and supports women writers of exceptional talent. The emphasis is on those in the early stages of their writing careers. This unique program offers grants to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to make writing time available and provide assistance for such specific purposes as child care, research and related travel costs.

Six emerging women writers have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $30,000 each.”

Molly is the seventh alumna of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College to receive this honor since the Writers’ Awards were established in 1995.  Previous recipients include  Karen Whalley (poetry, ’00) and  Constance Merritt (poetry, ’00) in 2001, Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) in 2002, Joanne Dominique Dwyer (poetry, ’09) in 2008,  Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00)  in 2009, and Laura Newbern (poetry, ’94) in 2010.

In addition, five Warren Wilson MFA faculty have been honored with this award:  Mary Szybist in 1996, Lan Samantha Chang in 1998, Gabrielle Calvocoressi in 2002, Dana Levin in 2004, and Jennifer Grotz in 2007.

MargareeLittle-webMargaree Little received her B.A. from Brown University in 2009 and her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in 2012. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and American Poetry Review. She was a Peter Taylor Fellow at The Kenyon ReviewWriters Workshop in 2013. She teaches writing at Pima Community College and tutors at Pima County Public Library in Tucson. In 2010, while working for a humanitarian aid organization on the U.S.-Mexico border, she found the remains of an unidentified man; her first collection of poems, Rest, came out of this experience and attempts to explore it from a variety of perspectives. Her nominator writes, “Margaree’s insistence on honoring this one specific death speaks to her great soul, but so does the lyric intensity, deft craft, and encompassing reach with which she contemplates this lost life—the fact and unknowns of it, its presence and what is missing—as an emblem.” Ms. Little is also beginning work on a second collection. “I plan to write a series of poems exploring the relationship between two sisters and other aspects of childhood, as well as the landscape—the woods and coastline of southern Rhode Island—in which these experiences were shaped.” Her Writer’s Award will allow her to take a one-year leave from her work at the library to devote more time to her poems. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.

On Friday, September 20, 2013 at 7 p.m.,  the winners will read in New York University’s Creative Writing Program Reading Series at the Vernon Writers House (58 West 10th Street).

Read more about the 2013 Award Winners online. 

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Alumni John Gribble on the Japan Writer’s Conference

Alumni John Gribble (poetry, ’98) was recently featured in the The Japan Times discussing the Japan Writer”s Conference:

Organizer of annual writers’ workshop helps others find artistic way

Poet John Gribble aims to spend a part of each day doing something creative

by Kris Kosaka

John Gribble gives a part of every day to creating. Whether it’s pinpointing the perfect word for a poem or plucking out a ditty on a guitar, his life and livelihood in some way proves creative. As a poet and teacher, Gribble has spent the last 20 years in Japan organizing others to find their artistic way.

An active member of the Tokyo Writer’s Workshop, Gribble took over as organizer in 2009. He also currently organizes the Japan Writer’s Conference.

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“Exotica” by Rose McLarney

A new poem by Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) appears online in Mudlark:

Exotica

You don’t want the story about the soft clutch
of monkey’s toes, how monkeys swung

languorous from limbs, showering down fruit.
But rather, the one about how 

the blue-eyed Abando boy’s body hung 
after he was lynched for robbing our house,

for robbing any place ever left empty. 
You are not as interested in fruit—

hearing how it was heavy and pendulous
through the forest, a forest hung 

with bunches of bananas, zapotes that fell
erupting orange custard among rambutans—

as in the way thieves ripped jewelry from women’s
ears, hooks pulled through the lobes, so they hung 

with rubies of blood. You listen more closely 
when I tell of how I clung

to the reins when a drunk whipped my horse
into a frenzy and out, swimming, to sea, 

than of the tame iguana I hung
in a bird cage, fine wire formed into a palace.  

Even though I fed him on hibiscus, 
and could describe so many lush, red flowers,

folding from the mouth.
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