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.

Bible Study

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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Where Writers Write: Nan Cuba

Fiction ’89 alumna Nan Cuba was recently featured on TNBBC’s Next Best Book Blog, as part of their “Where Writers Write” series.

(Photo from TNBBC)

I’m sixty-five, and I’ve reverted to the womb.  When I converted a bedroom into my office, I consciously filled it with memorabilia and art, surrounding myself with artifacts that stimulate and nourish.  Everywhere I look: faces, scenes, chatter.  Stuck for a piece of dialogue: glance at the bookshelf to the left.  Need an image: look inside the glass-fronted cabinet above the desk.  If nothing else works, check the window on one wall.

 

I’m a phenomenon of self-discipline, a holdover from my Bible-belt upbringing.  When I sit at my desk, I have no trouble getting to work.  So once, I tried writing according to a specific schedule.  Fitting time around my day job, I rose at 4:00 a.m., read the previous day’s product, then pounded out a pledged three pages.  I loved being in the world when everyone else seemed out of it.  The dark, the quiet, the stillness invigorated, sending me straight to my subconscious.  Like an automaton, I stuck to my schedule because I’d been trained that failing to meet a commitment meant irresponsibility, flawed character, and worse, a father’s disappointment.  I was proud, productive, and finally, exhausted.  After five months, I went to bed with the flu, sleeping almost continually for a week...[Keep Reading]…
Nan is the author of Body and Bread, arriving in 2013 from Engine Books.
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“Showing But Not Telling”

“Showing But Not Telling: On Putting Our House Up For Sale,” a new piece by Robin Black (fiction, ’05) is online at Beyond the Margins.

After eighteen years, we are moving, my husband and I, selling the home in which we raised our three children, the home in which we unimaginably slipped from being young to being members of AARP, from having four parents to having two, from believing we would raise four children, to grieving the one who was stillborn. It is the home in which I made birthday cakes decorated as maps of family vacations and designed Halloween costumes to do Martha Stewart proud, the home in which we all punched down the Rosh Hashanah challah dough each year because I, the nonbeliever, believed this was a way for us to pray. It is the home in which I grew panicky as my youngest child failed to crawl, month after month, the home in which I learned the meaning of words like hypotonic and dyspraxia. It is the home in which my husband and I have both lived the longest in our lives, a home in which I’ve heard almost all of my local writer friends read from their work, at one or another of our “salons.” And it is – we believe – a work of art, an eighteen year long collaboration between us, two very different people who share a quirky sensibility and a desire to have a home unlike any other. And so, no two knobs on our kitchen cabinets match, and the walls are dotted with hanging, miniature chairs. And then there is the mess. This is the home in which I have waged an eighteen year battle against my own inability to keep a house clean or anything close, the home in which I have unhappily faced the certainty that my chaos sometimes embarrasses my children in front of their friends...[Keep Reading]…

Robin is the author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, 2011).

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Rolf Yngve in The Common

Fiction 2012 alum Rolf Yngve‘s new piece “Their Names” is up at The Common, as part of their “Dispatches” feature:

Their Names

I told Christopher, the wall passed through here. We stood on the sidewalk and looked down at a plaque set into chic, new cobblestones.

Berliner Mauer 1961–1989.

We had walked down from the Brandenburg gate in the late fall with the linden trees bare, the citizens well-cloaked. A granular snow pricked our cheeks and sifted over the streets. Christopher had been two years old when the East German border guards shrugged their shoulders and opened the gates. Now he was eighteen and bored.

I told him, this is where the open field ran along the wall to give them a clear area to shoot people. He asked me, where were you? I was here in Germany. I studied at their war college, I told him. I saw this. I remember...[Keep Reading]…

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Julie Bruck Wins Canadian Governor General’s Award

Aluma Julie Bruck (poetry, ’86) has won the 2012 Canada Council for the Arts Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, for her collection Monkey Ranch (Brick Books, 2012).

   

Monkey Ranch by Julie Bruck leaps about the ordinary world with a deft detachment and flexible artistry – guiding us with its offbeat, caring and companionable sensibility. “There’s enough light to see by,” says Julie Bruck, even though the children turn their eyes away. This humane voice, quirky and patient, will see you through a world stripped of miracles.

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