“This I Am Allowed”

Fiction ’09 alumna Vicky Mlyniec’s story “This I Am Allowed” appears in the January issue of Brevity.

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I hold my heavy carry-on in front of me so as not to bump people, brushing shoulders and rustling newspapers as I make my way down the narrow aisle.  I’ll be out of the way soon. I see my seat now, row 24, on the aisle. A well-coiffed silver-haired woman is settled in the window seat. Good. Women are best.

I balance my bag on the armrest a moment and, unaided, hoist it into the overhead with quivering arms. I think of the silver-haired woman as I tuck my raincoat into the bin and wonder how it will go this time...[Keep Reading]…

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Angela NarcisoTorres in Drunken Boat

“Song of the Sea with Three Lines from Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” a poem by alumna Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09) appears in the latest issue of Drunken Boat:

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Why does the deep seem deeper, the sea

wilder this morning? Next to it, life

is a static sun without warmth or light.

Our backs, not bent over papers at a desk, uncoil.

Lungs fill with air. Freed from leather, our feet

leave blurred, disappearing shapes

on the wave-swept bed. Friendships, birthdays,

personal matters don’t count. Everything is relative, …[Keep Reading]…

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RJ Gibson at One Pause Poetry

Alumni RJ Gibson (poetry, ’11) reads three poems, including his own, “Agnosticism” at One Pause Poetry:

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RJ Gibson holds an MFA in Poetry from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  He is the author of the chapbooks Scavenge (co-winner of the 2009 Robin Becker Prize) and You Could Learn a Lot...[Listen Here]…

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Alumni Updates

Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12): Corey’s short story “The Meteor” is this week’s feature at Necessary Fiction:

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Mr. Tibberly found a meteorite on his hike in the desert. He knew straight off it had once been a meteor, but he hadn’t studied geology in school, so he decided to take it to the university meteorite lab to be sure.

His life had become very lonely lately. His failures disappointed him. Possibilities flooded his mind like mudslides.

Feels like everything is potential, he thought, but nothing has become.

If he were a robot, he would have shut himself off.

Mr. Tibberly held the meteorite closely. Everything is potential. But not this...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Christine Hale (fiction, ’96): Christine’s short story “Milk” appears in the latest issue of Spry:

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I held on tight to my baby bottle right up to four years old.  Black-and-white photos from the old Kodak Brownie attest to this: my lanky self lolling on the glossy-waxed linoleum of the kitchen floor, eyes glazed with bliss, head cradled on a favorite plaid-cased pillow, one knee cocked and the other balanced atop its fulcrum, free foot bouncing like Mitch Miller’s sing-along ball.

My father liked milk, too.  He drank more than his share according to my mother, and, worse, he raided the butterfat that topped the un-homogenized milk, using a spoon or even his finger to pop the cream coin from the bottle’s mouth to his. I’d seen him do it, and imagined the greasy bite as repulsive, but what really gave the act its charge was my mother’s response. Control of the milk, especially the cream, made a flashpoint in their mostly cold war...[Keep Reading]…

Christine is the author of the novel Basil’s Dream (Livingston Press, 2009).

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Margaree Little in The Missouri Review

“What Was Missing,” a poem by alumna Margaree Little (poetry, ’12) is this week’s feature at The Missouri Review.

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What Was Missing

The undersides
of the hands. The hair.

 

The eyes. The chin,
the spot where the chin

 

becomes the neck.
Both of the arms.…[Keep Reading]…
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“Valentine’s Day”

“Valentine’s Day,” a poem by Jeremy Bass (poetry, ’10) appears in the December issue of The Collagist.

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This Sunday evening at 7:30pm, Mike O’Malley
Will drive his twenty-foot cherry-red monster truck
Over the blue discarded shells of 1980s Fords
From one end of a pitted sandy arena
To the other, each car beneath his ten-foot rubber wheels
Emptying like the failed hope of a former love
In a spray of glass and sand as the polished scrim
Of each flat roof folds to meet the stacked grid
Of chassis, axle, blown tires and frames beneath...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96): Dawn’s short story “Mom” appears online at Superstition Review:

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Two boys are following as Nina and Mae walk the two palm-lined blocks from the middle school to Mae’s house. One is skinny and his blonde hair hangs limp as Saran Wrap over his head. The other one is dark and shaggy. Nina knows this because she and Mae take turns looking behind them without being too obvious. The girls giggle, and Nina tugs at her pink hip huggers. The boys are flirting with them. “Dogs!” they say, and hurricanes of laughter leave them staggering past as Nina and Mae cut up through the burnt smelling grass to Mae’s door.

The girls scrounge up all the stuff they need – the needle and thread, ice and alcohol – and put it where they can on the crowded dresser Mae shares with her sister, Julie. Mae picks the bald ice cube out of its bowl and squeezes it to Nina’s ear. Nina jerks away and the ice cube clunks on the floor. “Just do it. It couldn’t hurt worse than that.” There is the sound of Mae’s mother, Mrs. C., coming home, the jalousies in the door lift and rattle and fall, the sharp tread of her walk down the hall into her own room, the door shutting...[Keep Reading]…

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Alumni Updates

Shannon Cain (fiction, ’05): Shannon was recently interviewed for Bloom:

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Bloom: You were 39 years old when you started at the Warren Wilson MFA program. What made you decide to enroll in a formal program at that time?

SC: Oh, once I got started writing there was no going back. Writing was home; the path was clear. The workshop, the culture, the conversation. The books, the other writers, the teachers. I started going to conferences and soon enough found myself at Bread Loaf, which happily for me is infested with Warren Wilson people. All the conferencing and workshopping left me hungry for more. An MFA program felt like a necessity to me. I liked the low-residency format for all the reasons I still do, and I liked the people I met from Warren Wilson, and so I applied. The day I started that program is when my education really began. Now I have the astonishing good fortune to serve as faculty for another stellar low-res program, the Bennington Writing Seminars, which feeds me the goodness of the writing life. In Vermont! Plus the continuing education is amazing: the lectures, the guest faculty, the readings, the wine, the dancing.

Read the full interview here.

Shannon is the author of the story collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

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Heidy Steidlmayer Wins 2012 Zacharis Award

Alumna Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00) has won the twenty-second annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection Fowling Piece (Triquarterly Books, 2011). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

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This year’s judge was John Skoyles, Ploughshares’ poetry editor. In choosing the collection, Skoyles said: “Heidy Steidlmayer’s Fowling Piece is marked by fiercely textured language and a humane voice. Its linguistic energy is perfectly matched by its calm and inquisitive tone, making a perfect tandem, an exact balance between writing and speech. The poems talk to the reader intimately while using an unexpected and often jolting diction, resulting in a collection both emotionally moving and formally inventive.”

Visit Ploughshares for more.

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