Alumni Updates

Alison Moore (fiction, ’90): Alison’s new novel Riders on the Orphan Train is now available from Roadworthy Press.

Fourteen years ago I “jumped the tenure track for the orphan train.” I’ve never regretted the decision. I left my assistant professor post at the University of Arizona MFA creative writing program to become an itinerant performer in collaboration with my husband, songwriter Phil Lancaster.  Since 1998 we have been presenting a multi-media program about the Orphan Trains in museums, libraries, and universities. Between 1854 and 1929, over 250,000 orphans and half-orphans were put on trains in New York and sent to every state in the US to be given away at train stations. I met many survivors at national reunions when I first started; now there are so few left. The historical novel is the result of research, travel, encounters, and a continuing passion for this little-known part of American history.

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Interview with Matt Hart

Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) recently interviewed Matt Hart (poetry, ’02) for the American Literary Review.

JB:  And so then I feel torn: I want to keep reading your poems, but part of me wants to throw your book off the balcony and go write my own poems.  I don’t have a question here, I suppose.  But you can respond however you like.

MH: Well, as with the first question, I’m really flattered that you would say this.  If somehow the poems make you want to throw them off the balcony and do your own writing that’s perfect.  That’s a necessary part of all this.  Writing for me is always an extension of reading/listening, and the idea that something I’ve written might, even in some small way, spur someone to do his or her own work is incredibly gratifying.  I would say that that’s true of my intentions for this book in particular: Sermons and Lectures is my call for your response.  I mean, my actual address is even written out in one of the poems in hopes that someone might write back, thus making their own response a call that I would then respond to, etc...[Keep Reading]…
Matt’s book Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless is available from Typecast Publishing.

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Alumni Updates

Joanne Green (fiction, ’93): Joanne’s new book Peach is coming soon from Gemma Open Door.

Everyone has a prom story – the culmination of the vibrant and painful years of high school.

Throw in the sexual revolution, a stuttering cousin for a date, and a parking valet dressed like Abraham Lincoln, and looking cool is an impossible dream. Edith, the fierce and vibrant narrator, tries to leave nuns snapping prom pictures and her painful past behind, and find a way to be both the free spirit her friends require and to be herself.
You can also check out Joanne’s blog, including:
S**t Peach Says

“Everything my mother says would look good printed on a dishtowel.”
“We have a big fight about wearing a bra.  My mother is the Jean Paul Sartre of underwear.”
“Albert Camus wouldn’t laugh at an exploited worker with underwear caught in his ass crack, I know it. “
“All the guys look like Easter eggs.  All the chicks look like toaster dolls. “
“The bathrooms are labeled ‘Abes’ and ‘Babes.’”
“He can do it for one hour forty-five.  Which is really beautiful, but pretty uncomfortable.”

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Alumni Updates

“Three Thousand Lunches,” a new essay by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12) was recently published in The Boston Globe:

I’VE LEARNED NOT TO MENTION them in social settings. “You don’t do that for me,” a woman says to her suddenly defensive husband. “I wish someone would make mine,” remarks another woman, as her partner glares at me. “Boy, you must worship your wife,” a man suggests, as if that’s a crime. These folks assume that pure, unselfish love is why I pack my wife’s lunch nearly every working day. And they’re wrong.

I started preparing her lunches for as unromantic a reason as there is: I’m cheap. I noticed my wife was buying her midday meal, and at around six bucks a pop, this added up to serious cash. As the cook in our home, I knew I could feed her just as well and for a fraction of the cost. Fifteen years and 3,000 lunches later, just thinking about the savings makes me smile...[Keep Reading]…

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My Father’s Glasses

“My Father’s Glasses,” a new essay by Geoff Kronik (fiction, ’12) is up at The Good Men Project:

I took my father’s glasses with me when I left the hospital that day, but five years later, I still have not put them on. Holding the glasses starts a movie in my memory, a biography of my father, but if I imagine wearing them a stranger appears on the screen.

That morning, my sister and I each boarded Los Angeles-bound flights, she from Philadelphia and I from Boston. Our plan was to meet at the airport, rent a car, and drive to the UCLA Medical Center.

We both landed ahead of schedule, as if time itself sensed an urgency we did not. Freeway traffic was light, and I could have gone faster; but having left New England’s winter gloom behind me, I enjoyed the drive under California sunshine and briefly forgot the mental chill of why we had come—my father had pneumonia again...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Elisabeth Lewis Corley (poetry, ’10) and Mark Prudowsky (poetry, ’08) both have poems online at the Magazine of Arts and Humanities.

First Person Plural
by Elisabeth Lewis Corley

A woman falling—the rest goes by too fast.
The rest go by the fallen, on the pavement.
We breathe a little faster. We try not to see
the rise and fall. Or we recreate
the cavity as it emptied and filled.
We must not pause, it might be still...[Keep Reading]…

Neighbors
by Mark Prudowsky

Each April, a black rat snake emerges from the thaw,
make its way through the fresh and green timothy grass
to an old barn and climbs a creosote pole

twenty feet to a swallowtail’s nest under the roof...[Keep Reading]…

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Alumni Updates

Maya Janson (poetry, ’06): Maya’s debut poetry collection Murmur & Crush  is now available from Levellers Press.

Murmur
This is for the woman in pigtails on the median strip
holding a hand-lettered sign: Find what you love
and follow it. It’s the day before the vernal equinox
and there’s so much standing about in sandals
amidst mounds of discouraged snow, so much
refraction in the cathedral that it’s hard to hear
the inner sparrow. The birds come in
on the in-tide and then they’re trapped.
There’s a man wearing a tee-shirt, logo of
boots and spurs on his chest. Emblazoned.
Like the slash of white
across the muzzle of your favorite horse.
And the couple at the corner table, whispering
into each other’s mouth, stroking each other’s hands
and cheekbones like there’s something hidden there.
There is always something hidden there.
Think of your past as the study of plate tectonics.
Once in the Upper Peninsula in the car of a stranger.
Once beneath a train trestle.
Certain truths abide.
Nobody wants to be the poor in spirit.
Everyone loves a good downpour.
Visit the publisher’s website for more information or to purchase.
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Alumni Updates

Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10): Rose’s poem “Story with a Real Beast and a Little Blood in it” is online at Slate:

The night the bull broke loose,
there was much to learn. Like,
when a bull lowers his head to charge,|
step close. This is when you can
slip a rope around his neck. Or,
when the men, butted and bruised
with rope burned  hands, give up,
make a path of sweet feed...[Keep Reading]…

Rose is the author of The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (2012, Four Way).

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Alumni Updates

Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12): Corey’s story “Introduction to Airborne Radar” appears in the latest issue of Conte:

In October—or if you listen to the local DJs, Rocktober—Delia, her mom, this snooty ski-society woman Peg, and I sit in a Chinese restaurant in Vail. Lunchtime on a Friday. Parent-teacher conferences are this week, so the high school gave us the day off. I’m sixteen. I was supposed to spend the day with Ernie, but he decided to take an extra shift down at Bowles Crossing Cineplex instead. He told me this in voicemail—said he needed gas money—and I had no way to talk back. I left him my own message filled with my dumb enthusiasm, cringing even before I put the phone down, though I still meant it.

Delia and her mom drove us up here from Littleton this morning. I’m staying with them while my parents are in Glenwood with this weird religious couple they met online. They go on retreats every so often—“to bullet-proof their marriage,” they say—and finally I’m old enough to be left behind.

In fall and winter, the Rocky Mountains wear their name—dark, jagged, and iceberg-like. And though I hate driving on ice, and would have been fine staying home alone with my CD player and some movies, I know that traveling in them, even for a few hours, always feels like a massive, head-clearing journey, only broken by the return to the suburbs hours later...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Another & Another

Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series, edited by Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) and Ross White (poetry, ’08), is now available from Bull City Press.

The anthology celebrates finished poems the first two years of The Grind Daily Writing Series, a loose community of writers who write a new draft each day.  The volume features a number of Warren Wilson poetry grads, including: Dilruba Ahmed (’09), Larissa Vidal Amir (’07), Reginald Dwayne Betts (’10), Jonathan Bennett Bonilla (’10), Chiyuma Elliott (’10), Jenny Johnson (’11), Henry Kearney IV (’08), Karen Llagas (’07), Chloe Martinez (’09), Jamaal May (’11), Sally Molini (’04), Victoria Bosch Murray (’08), David Ruekberg (’04), Mary Jo Thompson (’09), Angela Narciso Torres (’09), Rosalynde Vas Dias (’06), W. Vandoren Wheeler (’02), and Laurie Saurborn Young (’08).

The book is available for order at bullcitypress.com
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