Claremont Graduate University Award Finalists

Faculty member Marianne Boruch has been named a finalist for Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for her book The Book of Hours (2011, Copper Canyon Press).

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The $100,000 Award is given annually for a book by a poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. Past winners include current and former faculty members Rodney Jones (2007), Michael Ryan (2005), Linda Gregerson (2003), Carl Phillips (2002), Alan Shapiro (2001), and Tom Lux (1995).

Alumna Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00), recent winner of the Zacharis Award and of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, has been named one of three finalists for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, for her first book Fowling Piece: Poems (Triquarterly) (2012, Triquarterly).

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The $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise. Past winners include alumna Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02).

“Winners will be announced in March and recognized during a ceremony at Claremont Graduate University in April.” For more information, visit the University’s website.

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“Ashes, Ashes”

“Ashes, Ashes,” a short story by alumna Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13), appears in the spring 2013 issue of The Gettysburg Review.

[The city] was burning with the slow implacable fires of human desperation.—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Her mother used to walk the subdivision in the cool early mornings of summer, before the heat and humidity descended and trapped everybody in air-conditioned exile. She stopped walking mornings because of Dave Fletcher and O.J. Simpson. Dave was a county police officer who lived across the street from the mother. His wife left him in April, driving away from their house in Three Creeks. The summer of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murder, as her mother walked in and out of the neighborhood cul-de-sacs, she saw Dave Fletcher in his dark blue police uniform walking too. Dave didn’t walk on the sidewalks or even in the street. Dave walked between peoples’ houses, across their lawns, through the common ground. At first, her mother said, she thought he was patrolling the subdivision, looking out for his neighbors.

This much of the story seemed reasonable to the daughter. But you never knew. She didn’t live there anymore, and the mother was prone to exaggeration, depression, and a dependence on cleaning products and box blush wines. So was the daughter. About the same things and different things too. They talked on the phone almost every day and the daughter made the ten hour drive to visit her mother once a month or as often as she could. She had Fridays off and that was her driving day. She’d leave in the morning and get to her mother’s house in time for dinner. No matter what time it was when she got there, her mother would be looking out the dining room window. No matter how long she planned to stay, the first thing her mother always said was, “Our time is so short.”

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“Inaugural Absence”

“Inaugural Absence,” by alumni Evan Cleveland (fiction, ’12) appears online at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place:

  In spite of the thousands that wait on the national mall, in spite of the over-coated dignitaries lining the stage, and in spite of the aging poet reviewing her lines as the icy wind lifts her white hair, her parting lips hidden behind a tartan scarf, the president-elect has vanished. Already a slight man, he had appeared diminished lately. Not simply sapped of gravitas by the long campaign, no, he’d seemed—somehow—less present, less there, and now, undiscoverable. Televisions first revealed the change, albeit slight. Excited crowds streamed over more space on those screens, the candidate a handshaking flurry isolated at the frame’s edge, until the cheering throngs, placards and voices lifted, swelled across even the widest of flat screens, their high definition exuberance clear, their candidate invisible, somewhere off camera perhaps. No more than an American-flag cuff-linked wrist appeared. But few noticed. The frantic news crawl flowed below, the steady undercurrent to market gains and losses. Pundits engaged in split screen debates to the side on strategy, tactics, polling, or projected electoral counts. Soon those debates unequally split the screen, accommodating larger round tables that accommodated more opinions that broke like tributaries into more commentary on the former opinions and more opinions on that commentary...[Keep Reading]…

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Angela Narciso Torres Finalist for Willow Books Lit Award

Alumna Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09) has been named a finalist for the Willow Books Literature Award for her book, Night Jasmine.

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The Willow Books Literature Awards recognize literary excellence in prose and poetry by writers from culturally diverse backgrounds. A Finalists’ Reading & Awards Ceremony will be held April 6, 2013 in Chicago at Chicago State University during the 2nd Annual Willow Books LifFest. The Grand Prize winners’ books will be published by Willow Book, along with an ebook anthology of selections by Finalists.

Visit the Willow Books website for more information.

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How to Do Things with Words

Three poems by alumni Matt Hart (poetry, ’02) appear online at The Good Men Project.

How to Do Things with Words

The sound of the train and the breeze
take me whistling. I walk down the street
and greenish light floods the world,
but only for a second. I am wrestling

with how green isn’t really green here,
and wondering if green is ever really green
anywhere? And could this line of thinking,
by virtue of its subject, be pastoral?

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Blow the House Down

An excerpt from Blow the House Down & Other Stories, by alumna Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96) appears online at Joyland:

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“Blow the house down!” Tommy says. He’s in his pajamas, thin at the knees, too short. His ankles and wrists jut, pale angles. Her brother drops onto the couch beside Shelly, bounces up and down, his cropped hair sticking up every which way, mouth stretched wide.

Sounds good to her. She’s in. She doesn’t know what it means.

“Wait,” he says and goes into the kitchen.

The only light is the TV, flickering shadows on the walls.

He comes back with the carton of chocolate-covered malt balls, his cheeks gorged already.

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“What to Do When It Happens”

“What to Do When It Happens,” a poem by alumni Erick Piller (poetry, ’12) appears online at TriQuarterly.

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Let’s leave our living rooms for the wolves.
When the sky opens into whiteness
and comes down over us, why not go out into it?
Why not go out into that Great Change?
We’ll leave our houses. Why stay?
The world outside will lope and gallop
indoors at the first opportunity...[Keep Reading]…

Listen to Erick read “What to Do When It Happens” at TriQuarterly.org

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“Failing to Fall”

“Failing to Fall,” “Her Walk” and “Souvenir,” three short-shorts by alumna Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) appear online at Prime Number Magazine.

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Failing to Fall

Midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1973 turning 1974, I stand in an open window on the top floor of a small hotel in Heidelberg, Germany, assessing whether and how to kill myself. The window stretches floor to ceiling: French doors, flung wide, with long dusty curtains swept aside to let in the frigid, gusting night air, and a cacophony of pealing church bells. In the room behind me are some number of my college student companions—I have no memory of how many or which ones—on this winter-break junket to Europe.

My boy husband Hen is surely among them. It’s inarguable that much hashish is being smoked to see in the New Year. We’ve all been toking as often as possible for five or six days, ever since some daredevil cool-fool among us scored big in our port of entry, Amsterdam. I am eighteen, almost nineteen, a stoner among stoners to whom I have no other connection. I’ve had great affection since high school for any form of downer drug, but I’ve never had hash before this trip, and instantly I am enamored of the aromatic honey taste on my palate, and the sticky-sweet resinous smoke in my hair, and the languorous drone to which it reduces my twitchy consciousness...[Keep Reading]…
Christine is the author of the novel Basil’s Dream (2009, Livingston Press).
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“Dumb Animals”

“Dumb Animals,” a short story by alumni Ryan Burden (fiction, ’13) appears online at Gulf Stream Magazine.

The March house sits on a rise at the head of the nameless peninsula that lifts the towns of Cavalcade, Mania, and Oshokten from the sea. It’s a Victorian, tall, with a wrap-around porch and seven peaked slate roofs. No effort was spared in its construction. Joints and joists were painstakingly squared until they were considered unassailable. It’s a house tight as a ship. In life, March’s father cared for it as for a living thing, painting and shingling, clipping and mowing, until it seemed a sleek breathing consciousness on the rise, watching the land dispassionately and pondering the sea beyond. He built it with the money from his factory, which made nails. He was a man who knew nails – those with strong steel and heads that won’t buckle, those thin enough to finish fine wood and those heavy enough to run through anything.

Behind the house runs a deep bend of the Oshokten River, where March’s father loved to fish for the dark, bullet-headed trout that laze year-round, gorged on minnows and eel. This is where he drowned, drunk, trying to clear a snagged line during one of the river’s frequent floods...[Keep Reading]…

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“Swing Low Sweet Chicken Baby”

“Swing Low Sweet Chicken Baby,” a short story by alumni Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) appears online at Nat. Brut.

When one of the summer hands let a bucket of roofing nails get away—not yet learned enough to yell out as it hissed down the rake and disappeared over the collar beam—Bates was standing directly beneath, thinking about his sperm count and how he might get his wife to move back in.

The impact brought him down hard to his knees and left the taste of iron in his mouth. He moved his fingers gently up his bald scalp, creeping along the gash. It started at the very top of his head and widened in the center as it slanted towards his right eye. He brought the hand back in front of his face and rubbed the blood between his thumb and forefinger like he would anti-freeze, testing the viscosity. The blood went thin with sweat and ran off the tip of his nose into the dust where each drop formed a small crater between his knees. Bates wondered if he could form his initials. He aimed the drops into the dirt with one eye closed, sighting off the end of his nose. He formed the L quickly, almost effortlessly, but found the B more difficult. The curves, they would be harder to get right...[Keep Reading]…

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