Holsaert Wins Press 53 Novella Award

Faith S. Holsaert has won the Press 53 Open Award for her novella, Chosen Girl.

From Judge David Abrams:

…This is a full-bodied portrait of a full life, lived between World War Two and Vietnam, between Jim Crow and McCarthyism, between the innocence of a four-year-old girl and the resonant memories of a thirty-year-old woman…. The best compliment I can pay this novella of a few dozen pages is that when I arrived at the end, I felt like I’d just emerged from the richly built world of a thick novel. I would gladly spend many more hours inside Deborah’s life.

From Chosen Girl:

In the beginning were my parents, shoulder to shoulder, the baby floating within their massed outline.

I sat close, in either lap, during their disputes.

My father said, “Oliver Twist. It’s a wretched book, Deirdre. You like it because you read it as a child.”

“I like it because it’s about people. Not like your Eliot, who writes about things.”

“Deirdre, Fagan’s a sentimental abomination.”

She held me tight against her bosom, and I learned how her muscles tightened when she clenched her teeth. “Well I love that book.”

“Fagan’s an anti-Semitic stereotype,” said my WASP father.

She struck quickly. “Are you Virginia Woolf to my Leonard?” My Jewish mother.

Silence.

Keep Reading at Outhistory.org

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Losing the Horizon

Losing the Horizon, a collection by Priscilla Orr (poetry, ’93), was recently published by Hannacroix Creek Books.

In Losing the Horizon, award-winning poet Priscilla Orr’s second collection, whose first anthology was Jugglers and Tides, shares her feelings on love, aging, loss and death, as well as the comfort and courage we find in the natural cycle of the seasons — spring, summer, winter and fall. What they’re saying about Losing the Horizon: “This is a moving, poignant collection from a mature voice at the top of her craft.” —Paul Genega

Read more at HannacroixCreekBooks.com

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Corey Campbell on Prison Teaching

Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12) recently spoke with Arizona State University about her experiences teaching fiction to prisoners.

Friday mornings start with the 63-plus mile drive across Phoenix, past Apache Junction, and into the desert. “Usually I’m nervous before class,” she says. Then she hastens to add, “But not because they’re prisoners, and not even because they’re sex offenders” (that detail she learned the week before her first class). No, what Campbell worries about is whether her lessons will encompass all their interests and needs! “I try,” she notes modestly.

Campbell’s regard for what the prisoners themselves are trying to do is very clear in some of the following stories she shares about them: “Marcus writes a fantasy trilogy about an ancient fighter named O.M.A. (One Man Army). Bobby’s poem, ‘The Birth of Hope,’ describes an inmate’s desire for a rainbow, the only lover who dares visit him in prison. Then there is Notso, initially the most confrontational—writing a monologue from my point of view for the first assignment—who has become my biggest supporter, submitting an encyclopedic history of elderly war veterans on a park bench remembering. Notso’s last name is Smart, so he calls himself ‘Notso,’ and asks that we do the same: Notso Smart.”

“Then there’s Wesley, missing his front teeth, who told me once that everyone appears to be friends in workshop but on the yard are only acquaintances. His first submission described a beaming couple planning their wedding while on a Caribbean vacation. In detail he described the succulent jerk chicken they ate, how the sand gloriously rubbed their feet, where they planned to snorkel the next day.” Reading the rich description of this imaginative journey, Campbell realized that Wes was writing to take a vacation. “He didn’t care when we demanded he add tension and conflict; the piece had already served its purpose for him. He wanted to get away!”

Read the full article at ASU’s “The Teaching Zone”

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Patrick Donnelly Wins U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award

Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03) has won a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award. The $22,000 award will fund a 3-month residency in Japan during 2014.

With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. Their most recent book is The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (2013, Cornell East Asia Series).

Donnelly’s most recent book of poems, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin, (2012, Four Way Books), interwove translations of Japanese poems with his own sequences. During his residency in Japan, Donnelly “hopes to amplify the influence of Japanese poetics on his own poems, extending a literary influence to an experiential one, and to explore conversations between Japan’s classical past and its unsentimental present in person and in his writing.”

Read more about the award at the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission’s website.

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Changing Time

“Changing Time,” a piece by Michelle Collins Anderson (fiction, ’13) appears online at Literary Mama, as part of their ongoing series, “After Page One.”

This is not a post about diapers. Not exactly.

You see, it’s been six years since Literary Mama published my story Your Mama’s a Llama. What a thrill! An acknowledgment that I was truly a writer, even when a cursory examination of my life would have indicated otherwise.

I was in the thick of things then — those sweet, gelatinous days of motherhood when the clock read 9:15 a.m. and I had already lived a lifetime, with an early-rising toddler and a regimen that would have read something like “Feed. Change. Play. Placate. Repeat.” Days full of precious snuggle time, but also a fair amount of weeping (usually the toddler’s, although I had my moments) — and that did not always include a shower for me or a real meal for my family. Certainly my days did not include a regular writing schedule. …[Keep Reading]…

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Dorset Prize Finalists

Chiyuma Elliott and Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) were finalists for Tupelo Press’ 2012 Dorset Prize.

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Chiyuma was recognized for her poetry collection, Still Life with Game, Champagne, and Vegetables. 

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Rebecca was recognized for her collection, Otherwise, Everything Was Brilliant.

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Everything You Put in Your Mouth

“Everything You Put in Your Mouth,” a story by Paul Michel (fiction, ’98) appears online at Writing Tomorrow.

The darkness at night was complete. Martin dreaded it every winter evening when he made the drive between Homer, where he owned a natural foods store, and the outskirts of Eureka, where he lived with his wife. Beth begged him to relax. Only eighty miles, she said. Hardly further than your old commute in Seattle, and in half the time. No more I-5 gridlock. No more stop lights and diesel fumes. No more road-rage. No more stress. The darkness, she said, is why we came out here. This is the life we always dreamed of. It’s something we’ve worked for. Earned, even. Think of it as our darkness, she told him. Then it won’t be so intimidating. …[Keep Reading]…

Paul is the author of the novel Houdini Pie (2010, Bennett & Hastings).

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“Survivors”

“Survivors,” a piece by Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appeared recently at The Common, as part of their “Dispatches” feature.

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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]…

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“Gesture Writing”

“Gesture Writing,” a discussion of craft by Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09; 2011 Beebe Fellow) recently appeared in the New York Times.

Five years ago, I walked into a third-floor art studio on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, climbed atop a wooden stage covered in stained padding and dropped my ratty yellow bathrobe. A panel of strangers asked me to pose, and then to freeze. I had never modeled for artists, and had no idea how I would feel standing naked as people I had just met stared at me. The idea held some bohemian appeal, but more urgently, I needed to supplement my income as a freelance writer while I worked on a novel.

I made the cut, and became a member of the Bay Area Models Guild. I had hoped this gig might earn me grocery money. I soon grew to love the freedom and strange relinquishment of status that comes from offering your nude presence to artists. What surprised me the most, though, was how profoundly it changed my writing life.

Soon I was sent out on bookings, mostly to introductory college drawing classes. The professor’s approach was always the same. I was asked to do many sets of active one- or two-minute poses.

“Find the gesture!” the instructor would shout, as the would-be artists sketched. “What is the essence of that pose? How does that pose feel to the model? The whole pose — quick, quick! No, not the arm or the leg. The line of the energy. What is that pose about? Step back and see it — really see it — whole.” And then, my timer beeped, I moved to a new pose and the students furiously flipped to a clean page.

This “gesture” idea was fundamental. In painting classes, where I held the same pose for three hours (with frequent five-minute breaks, thank God), the paintings that looked most alive were built on top of a good gesture sketch, a first-step, quick-and-dirty drawing in which many crucial decisions about placement, perspective and emphasis were made intuitively. …[Keep Reading]…

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“Service Animals”

“Service Animals,” a short story by James Robert Herndon (fiction, ’11) appears online at Halfway Down the Stairs.

“Do you know why the Americans with Disabilities Act used to let you register a snake? A snake’s belly can sense subterranean vibrations like a Richter scale, and if you let a snake rest around your neck, it’ll know what’s going on inside you. Everything that moves: every pump, every secretion, every rise and fall, every clench and release. All of you. Spend enough time with a snake, learn how to listen, and the snake will tell you things about your own body that you’d have to pay another person $5,000 to tell you.”

JoAnn held eye contact with me as I spoke, and she made silent judgments I hoped were positive. Her line of sight dropped now and then to appraise Bruce, a rust brown rock snake hanging from my shoulders like a marbled leather scarf. I hadn’t been on a date in nine years because I’d rather be alone than be evaluated by a stranger. The dropping sun coated Bruce, JoAnn, and all of the other guests in Piedmont Park with a supernatural glow, not unlike the one I saw before a seizure.

JoAnn said, “I don’t know much about snakes. But I do know how it feels to value an animal that much. We’re lucky, Walt.”

…[Keep Reading]…

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