“Patriotism”

“Patriotism,” a short story by Nan Cuba (fiction, ’89) appears online at storySouth.

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Cheryl was so mad, she thought she’d explode. She sat in front of the fireplace reading the paper. The elections were only a month away, and she was scared. How did her country get in this mess? Even though Gerald was still in bed, she talked as though he were sitting beside her.

“Oh, God,” she said, crumpling the paper into her lap. She sipped coffee, leaned back, closed her eyes, pressed her lids. “What’s wrong with those assholes in Congress? The more they scream, the less they get done.” Somebody, she thought, should do something.

One article described a local rally. The accompanying picture, she noticed, showed people carrying signs with hideous messages and grotesque cartoon images. “Self-righteous radicals,” she grumbled. She hit the photo with the back of her hand. If only she could knock some sense into them. If only they’d listen.

She jerked past the front page, snapping the paper into place. She read more headlines: Mexico’s drug wars, kidnappings, journalists murdered. Iran could launch a nuclear attack. Palestine and Israel, infinite hatred. Oh no, a baby abandoned in an airplane bathroom. Suffering, stupidity, violence, but what could one person do? Candidates promised to fix everything before elections. Then did nothing. Or worse, they created bigger problems. Maybe she should write her own manifesto. …[Keep Reading]…

Nan is the author of the novel Body and Bread (2013, Engine Books).

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The Writing on the Wall

“The Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Poetry, and Protest in Egypt,” an essay by Andy Young (poetry, ’11) appears online at The Los Angeles Review of Books.

THE FACE OF 19-year-old Khaled Said, the catalyst for Egypt’s January 25 uprising, is stenciled all over Egypt. But if you walked down Mohamed Mahmoud Street, which ends in Tahrir Square, you would see his mutilated face after he was beaten to death by cop thugs. Beside his face, the artist Ammar Abo Bakr also depicts the disfigured images of other victims, including the young Shenouda Noshi Atteya, one of the 28 killed in the Maspero Massacre of October 2011, in which peaceful protesters, mostly Coptic Christians, were killed by the army.

The faces depict the fallen of Egypt’s revolution, a revolution that continues two years after Hosni Mubarak’s departure in February 2011. Mubarak’s regime was first replaced by the regime of the armed forces, and then by the current, increasingly repressive Muslim Brotherhood. These are the faces of the moment.

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An Interview with Jamaal May

Alumni Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) was recently interviewed for Michigan State University Public Radio.  Listen to the recording here.

Other-Author-Jamaal

Jamaal is the author of the poetry collection Hum, forthcoming in 2013 from Alice James Books.

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“A New Measure of Value”

In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell (poetry, ’12) urges colleges to pay more attention to their graduates’ civic engagement.

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Many leaders of liberal arts colleges and some other institutions are disappointed by the new College Scorecard from the Obama administration, observing that its measures leave out much of the true value of a higher education. But it’s not enough for us to say we think our model of education produces value. We need to start to analyze and measure outcomes beyond income if we are to challenge the idea that institutions should be judged primarily by how much their graduates earn one year after graduation.

Our democracy is threatened today by lack of participation by all segments of our society, including our optimistic and energetic young people. Corporate and secret money looms over our elections. The narrowing of media outlets means that it’s harder to find the tough investigative journalism and information that shine light on government policies and elected officials’ behaviors.

At a time when we must reanimate our democracy, let’s cooperate on a Civic Scale that shows the profound value of educating our future citizens. We want our students to thrive in their lives; that means finding jobs and supporting families. It must also, however, include finding meaning in life in service to others and to the country.

We must redefine “return on investment” to include civic behaviors that support our diverse and participatory democracy. As Thomas Jefferson said, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”  …[Read the Full Article]…

 

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Hoagland and Young at Plume

New work by faculty members Tony Hoagland and C. Dale Young appears online at Plume magazine.

Writing Under the Influence of Me
~Tony Hoagland

It means I drop things, and I keep turning

around while I forget what I am looking for.

Writing under the influence of me

means that I touch my paintbrush to my face unconsciously,

that I break something that belongs to someone else,

then hide the pieces under the couch.  …[Keep Reading]…

 

Annunciation
~C. Dale Young

I learned to hide the wings, almost immediately,

learned to tuck and bandage them down.

Long before the accident, before the glass shattering

and the scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark,

before the three fractures at the axis, the three cracks

 

in the bone, it had already begun.  …[Keep Reading]…

 

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Interview with Dana Levin

Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) interviews faculty member Dana Levin at The American Literary Review:

Dana at UNT Levin at University of North Texas

It’s not that I think that poetry “needs” to be fictive—it’s that it is fictive: it’s a form of art, which is not life, no matter how closely an artist may feel compelled to adhere to fact. The minute you’re moved to turn life into art, you enter a fictive space—which is to say a space for making, inventing, which demands flexibility, in terms of seeing and following where composition may be directing you. And the drive to bend, blur, or ignore factual truth was crucial to me personally, in terms of writing myself out from under the crush of grief.

I always think of Ted Hughes saying about Sylvia Plath, “If she couldn’t get a table out of it, she was quite happy to get a chair.” Abandoning the table for the developing chair often involves two primary things: listening to the poem (it only converses in what the poet receives as hunches, obsessions, epiphanies, and all other manner of telepathic communiques from the Muse) and (thus) relinquishing initial intent or spark for a poem, autobiographically, structurally. Plath’s famous poem, ‘Tulips,’ is often read as a poem about being carted off to the psych ward, but in fact she was on the verge of a burst appendix! I like the psych ward narrative: it’s so dramatic! It’s so Plath! Factual truth can be very deflating...[Keep Reading]…

Dana is the author of Sky Burial (2011, Copper Canyon Press).

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How We Stay Good Girls

“How We Stay Good Girls,” a short story by alumna Christine Fadden, appears online at Painted Bride Quarterly.

I told my stepmother I was spending the night at Carla’s house and Carla told her parents she was spending the night at mine. Then we went with the boys up the mountain.

The boys were brothers and—for a while—Carla and I were like sisters. Neither of us wanted to have sex, which is contrary to every parent-of-a-teenager’s first assumption. It’s an assumption that says a lot about parents, and its wrongness became the impetus to our lie. If we went up the mountain with the boys and did not behave badly, our mission would prove we were good girls. We would deserve merits—possibly in the form of more freedom! We knew if we got caught we’d get punished, but we fantasized about telling our parents: “You see! We faced and resisted temptation.” Of course, there was no way we could win.

Before we took off for the mountain, Carla and I made a pact: neither would stick the other with the boy she didn’t want to mess around with. It would be she with the younger brother and me with the older one—or Backgammon.

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“Go On and Hate Me”

“Go On and Hate Me: The Remarkable Handling of Pity in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark,” by alumna Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09) appears online at Fiction Writers Review.

My violent objection to the notion of “unlikeable characters” began in fall 1996, in a UC Santa Barbara literature seminar. I was 20 years old and on the edge of a near-suicidal breakdown, having thrown myself for a full year at Eric, my elusive not-quite-boyfriend, while also fighting repressed childhood memories of my father’s sudden death. The professor for “Readings in the Novel” was an avuncular, brandy-voiced novelist from the Caribbean–what a lovely, safe escape from my obsessions this class would be. Then, on the second day of class, in walked Eric. Painful honesty compels me to report that I hoped this marked a fateful new chapter for us, and I adjusted the strap of my tank top to reveal more shoulder.

Fortunately, Eric was a lazy, mostly absent student. Did he show up the day we discussed Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark? I feel like he did, but back in those days I lived with an illicitly thrilling and demented sensation that Eric was always with me, so it’s hard to remember.

What I remember best is the other students’ reaction to Voyage in the Dark’s narrator, Anna Morgan, a stand-in for Jean Rhys’s younger self, and a girl who, ahem, throws herself shamelessly at her lover and longs to die, while fighting repressed childhood memories of her father’s sudden death. “She’s pathetic,” the other students said. “She’s just a victim.” “There’s nothing you can like about her. She just seems like a waste of time.”  …[Keep Reading]…

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“The Shadow of the Valley”

“The Shadow of the Valley” and Other Poems by alumni Matt Hart (poetry, ’02) appear online at The American Reader.

The Shadow of the Valley

The shadow of the valley
is a placeholder for the valley,
a reminder that a body stands
between those stands of bleachers,
or this stand of trees or the neighborhood
watchers standing around watching
birds fly back and forth from their nests
to the gardens in every Westwood
neighborhood, all the while casting shadows
that somehow don’t look like birds
but like people wondering
what’s going on, like Marvin Gaye
in his song “What’s Going On”
from his album of the same name.
On the cover he’s wearing
a red wool hat, an image my friend
used in something he wrote and then
later read in front of an audience
in Iowa to get them to participate...[Keep Reading]…

Matt is the author of the poetry collection Who’s Who Vivid (2006, Slope Editions).

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Weighing the End of Life

“Weighing the End of Life,” an opinion piece by Louise Aronson (fiction, ’06) appears online at The New York Times.

Louise

ONE weekend last year, we asked our vet how we would know when it was time to put down Byron, our elderly dog. Byron was 14, half blind, partly deaf, with dementia, arthritis and an enlarged prostate. He often walked into walls, stood staring vacantly with his tail down, and had begun wandering and whining for reasons we could not always decipher.

Attentive to Byron’s needs, we softened his food with water and sprinkled it with meat; we cuddled him when he whimpered and took him outside to relieve himself seven, even eight times a night. We couldn’t take a vacation because we couldn’t imagine asking anyone, friend or dog sitter, to do what we were doing. Nor could we fully trust anyone to provide the care we thought Byron required...[Keep Reading]…

Louise is the author of the story collection A History of the Present Illness (2013, Bloomsbury USA).

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