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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Alumni Reading

Alumni Gabriel Blackwell (fiction, ’09) will read December 13th at the Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series in Sausalito, CA.  The event begins at 7pm at 333 Caledonia St., Studio 333.  For more information, visit Why There Are Words.

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Gabriel is the author of Critique of Pure Reason, a collection of essays and fiction forthcoming January 2013 from Noemi Press.

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Rolf Yngve in WLA

“Three Tips for Those Returning from Deployments,” a memoir by Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears in the latest issue of War, Literature, and the Arts.

First tip: don’t die.

Of course, in our profession, the battlefield has its accidents and errors, blunders and bad luck. Your timing can be off. You can get caught up with the wrong crowd. There are things that happen. Sometimes fate. We know this. But, blunder or bad luck aside, there are some people, always, who think dying might be preferable to return.

My point; not so. There are always better alternatives.

Returning from deployment, once, I told my pal (let’s call him Dwarf) I was so depressed about my wife leaving me that I was thinking of shooting myself. As luck would have it, the tool I was thinking of using was in hand. We were shooting skeet, Dwarf having picked this up as his new pastime after leaving the Naval Academy for real life at sea. Dwarf had an unconventional gene in him, one focused on offsets. He was so short, he had to offset that issue standing on a box to see properly over a destroyer’s bridge wing. He was smaller than everyone else, so he benched pressed three hundred pounds. I always thought skeet offset golf for him in some way. He was a great wing shot, not so good a golfer. He had that sort of pragmatic sense of balance...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Not Knowing

Fiction 2010 alumna Stacy Patton’s story “Not Knowing” appears online at Hunger Mountain.

On her way through the gate onto the levee she passed three loud-talking boys coming out, sun-washed and maybe a little drunk, two of them shirtless. They were all a head taller than she was, as boys of that age are, and their bodies filled her vision as they came, flat nipples and thin muscle, ribs and skin so close she side-stepped to avoid brushing against them. She flicked her wrist and wrapped the leash another turn around the back of her hand, pulled her dog close to her hip.

The boys passed behind her, and one of them whistled low. She pretended not to hear. She knew who he was whistling at, but she was alone, and they were boys, more than two. She tried to be flattered instead of afraid. She’d worn a new athletic skirt with quick-dry fabric and shorts underneath, and the summer heat rose from the asphalt, warming her legs, strong and tan from daily runs. The boys were laughing, the doors on their pickup thudding shut as she passed through the gate, remembering days when rowdy boys whistled more often—days when she might have gone swimming all afternoon with boys like that, instead of stealing a quick run before spaghetti night with her husband and two kids. A low-slung camp chair in the shallows near the shore, the current flowing round her calves, bikini straps slipped off her carefully oiled shoulders. And a beer, of course. A cold bottled beer sluicing the back of her throat, watching boys show off on a rope swing nearby...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Diana C. Lambert (fiction, ’01): Diana’s short story “There’s More to Life Than Love” appears in Volume 10 of Stand Magazine.

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Alumni Updates

Sara Quinn Rivara (poetry, ’02): Sara’s poem “Bible Study” appears online at the Cortland Review.

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Behind the Red Lobster, the sky leveled off into lake: static
from the radio. Late model Pontiac Body glitter. Hade’s hot
hand on my thigh. Why not, Lenten Rose? he cried. How high
Orion leaped above the waves! Something burned, something
trembled between us: was me at once, singing. No, was
the cotton shirt tearing...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12): Jeff’s short story “A Second Bowl of Jook” recently won Litro Magazine and Sheffield University’s “China” Flash Fiction Competition.

Befriend your future father-in-law, Choong says. She drives off to slurp noodles with childhood friends.

Jason’s body feels porous, his neurons balkanized. Splurge on first class and still this jet lag. But he’ll come to Guangzhou annually for Choong. Lack of money has kept her away from home for years. He has given her this. He always will.

Breakfast, Mr. Tan announces. Jason shuffles through air dense as gelatin. Mr. Tan ladles out the rice porridge called jook...[Keep Reading]…

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Alumni Updates

Lucy Anderton (poetry, ’05): Lucy’s poetry chapbook the flung you, a finalist for the 2012 DIAGRAM chapbook contest, has just been released from New Michigan Press.

“Sutured with strange, glittering sentences, fat with music and intelligence, the flung you negotiates the kinetic, violent, vigorous dance of existence. Anderton writes with both exuberance and ferocity, conceiving poetry “Stung with nocturne, shy /And savage.” ~ Simone Muench

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