Fiction ’96 alumna Joan Frank‘s new essay collection Because You Have To: A Writing Life
My interest . . . is in the emotional and physical and dream-life of writing (and reading) as an inescapable calling, and in ways of inhabiting that life . . . topics that have often struck me as screened off from the general dialogue, treated as unsavory—like that hidden little back room where the car salesman ducks away, to discuss your proposed purchase price with his “boss.”
Lauren Alwan (Fiction 08): Lauren will be serving as a prose editor for a new online literary journal, The Museum of Americana. The journal is dedicated to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and visual art that revives or re-purposes forgotten or unknown aspects of Americana.
‘The Museum of Americana…is published purely out of fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is our nation’s cultural history,’ says Justin Hamm, the quarterly’s founder and editor. ‘We live in an era when it is fashionable to express either apathy or outright disdain for all things American. The museum of Americana was founded on two core beliefs. The first is that there is much to love and celebrate in historical American culture. The second is that, while certainly not all aspects of Americana ought to be praised or celebrated, there is still great value in holding even that which is embarrassing or difficult up to the light to see what it is made of — and what could possibly be made of it.’
The journal will appear four times a year, in February/March, June/July, September/October, and December/January. The first reading period is currently open through September 20th.
To learn more, visit the journal’s website.
Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03): Patrick’s diptych, “One and a Half Poems,” appears in the current issue of Plume:
In Which I Explain Why I Set the Fire
AAAWell it began with a microburst from the North when the moon
was hot and bright on the Twenty-Sixth of the Fifth Month.
AAAThe first obstacle that wind met was the top of a White Pine
in the Neighbor of the Right’s yard, which it shoved aslant
AAAthe transformer with a flash, killing the a/c for three days
and spoiling the fish. The Other White Pine, its mate,
AAAthe one I think of as male, didn’t break. But afterward every time
I walked to the mailbox I had to say “One Broken, One Whole,”
AAAand lift my hands over my head, whether I liked it or not...[Keep Reading]…
Susan Sterling (fiction, ’92): Susan’s essay “El Pocito” appears in the summer 2012 issue of Under the Sun, a “national literary journal exclusively dedicated to the publication of creative non-fiction.”
To order copies, please visit the magazine’s website.
Seth Pollins’ (fiction, ’09) article, “The Short Swimsuit: A Personal & Historical Account” is up at The Rumpus:
I: Nostalgia
My father wore a short swimsuit. I have a goofy picture of him, circa 1970: he’s on the beach holding his infant son (my brother, Scott), and he’s wearing a short blue swimsuit with white piping and a nifty snap at the waist. This was the Golden Age of short swimsuits—an epoch that lasted into the eighties. As a child, I experienced the end of this epoch. I have a picture of myself, circa 1983: I’m on the beach in Stone Harbor, and I’m wearing a short red swimsuit with a white and blue stripe down the side.
Every summer, my family spent a good two weeks in Stone Harbor—a tradition that spanned my own, and my mother’s childhood. The tradition ended in 1987, the year my parents divorced. That fall, I moved into a small apartment in East Petersburg, PA with my mother and younger sister, Katie. I spent my afternoons, after school, locked in my room, listening to my mother’s Beach Boys albums, and dreaming about summer. My greatest, and only hope, was that my parents might get back together, and this hope was imagined as a return to Stone Harbor.
Even now, as an adult, I comfort myself with Stone Harbor nostalgia. I remember a post-beach meal at Green Cuisine. I was flanked by my mother, my father, and my brother who was holding our baby sister, and before me sat a giant blueberry smoothie. I desperately had to pee, but I just couldn’t bring myself to abandon the table—so I sat, fidgeting, unspeakably happy in my short swimsuit...[Keep Reading]…
Warren Wilson MFA Program alumni Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09) and Ross White (poetry, ’08) have been selected by Matthew Dickman for the Best New Poets 2012 Anthology.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., “Albania” (nominated by Beloit Poetry Journal)
Ross White, “Ocean Quahog”
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Ross White
Alumni RJ Gibson (poetry, ’11) and Mike Puican (poetry, ’09) both have poems appearing in Issue 56 of The Cortland Review, complete with audio recordings:
Immersion Method
RJ Gibson
Now that your wife’s moved out
you’ve papered your house, downstairs and up
with yellow Post-It Notes. Each object’s tag bears
its name in French. You’re living in the world
you know, yes, but also the world you don’t know yet.
Aren’t we all.
Yours is a world where the kitchen range
is powered by gaz. Your cabinets, drawers are full
of fourchettes, couteaux, cups, et cuillères...[Keep Reading]…When He’s Dead
Mike Puican
he can finally stop wondering whether God exists or if
he’ll ever have the nerve to hug his father. He no longer
has to say, “A part of me feels uncomfortable with the Democrats.”
Finally he can stop thinking about what he should have said
in the custody hearing, how he shouldn’t have been so flip
to the court-ordered psychologist. He can stop daydreaming
about the tree of heaven that grows 15 feet each year
even though the Polish lady cuts it to the ground each spring, …[Keep Reading]…
Faith S. Holsaert (fiction ’82): Faith’s poem “The Flood” appears in the Women Writing Nature issue of Sugar Mule:
The Flood
after Lucille Clifton
We said
it was the tree of lifewe thought
rising the new way was not lucifer but venus in the morning caught like a star
in the branchesno …
coiled into the shadow at the trunk’s foot scales
shine like kaddishand even the
solitary child
the hope of our mornings
is drawn from her book
is walking in the dog hot day
her hair smoothed as if ironed
the hum of cicadas
the two eyes under the foot bridge the corn silk limp
heat lightning
hell sulfur
just as the gob pile gives
the water fills the holler
from enclosing ridge
to enclosing ridge
Catherine Barnett (poetry, ’02): Catherine’s poem “Categories of Understanding” appears as the August 6th edition of Poetry Daily:
I’m studying the unspoken.
“What?” my son asks.
“What are you looking at?”
But there is no explaining,
I can only speak the way light
falls, the way the cotton sheet
lays itself over his sleeping or resting
or dissolving body, touching him with
its ephemera, its oblivion.
Catherine is the author of The Game of Boxes (2012, Graywolf).
Laurie Saurborn Young (poetry, ’08): Laurie was recently interviewed in The Collagist:
“Draught” was the product of cabin fever and fantasies of rain, during a long, hot Texas summer. There are no day trips out of the heat—no way to escape—so I spent much of those four months inside. It’s like deep winter but in a bright and sunny hell. Rain was a memory. What it sounded like on the roof, I no longer knew. All I could hear were bells. Though that may have been an air-conditioning-induced hallucination.
As well, the poem is about dreaming—it could be read as an Ode to Dreams I Would Rather Have. Most of my dreams are about falling from nervous heights. I’d rather dream about Nietzsche and rabbits and leaves. And water...[Keep Reading]…
Laurie is the author of Carnavoria
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