Hoagland and Young at Plume

New work by faculty members Tony Hoagland and C. Dale Young appears online at Plume magazine.

Writing Under the Influence of Me
~Tony Hoagland

It means I drop things, and I keep turning

around while I forget what I am looking for.

Writing under the influence of me

means that I touch my paintbrush to my face unconsciously,

that I break something that belongs to someone else,

then hide the pieces under the couch.  …[Keep Reading]…

 

Annunciation
~C. Dale Young

I learned to hide the wings, almost immediately,

learned to tuck and bandage them down.

Long before the accident, before the glass shattering

and the scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark,

before the three fractures at the axis, the three cracks

 

in the bone, it had already begun.  …[Keep Reading]…

 

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Interview with Dana Levin

Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) interviews faculty member Dana Levin at The American Literary Review:

Dana at UNT Levin at University of North Texas

It’s not that I think that poetry “needs” to be fictive—it’s that it is fictive: it’s a form of art, which is not life, no matter how closely an artist may feel compelled to adhere to fact. The minute you’re moved to turn life into art, you enter a fictive space—which is to say a space for making, inventing, which demands flexibility, in terms of seeing and following where composition may be directing you. And the drive to bend, blur, or ignore factual truth was crucial to me personally, in terms of writing myself out from under the crush of grief.

I always think of Ted Hughes saying about Sylvia Plath, “If she couldn’t get a table out of it, she was quite happy to get a chair.” Abandoning the table for the developing chair often involves two primary things: listening to the poem (it only converses in what the poet receives as hunches, obsessions, epiphanies, and all other manner of telepathic communiques from the Muse) and (thus) relinquishing initial intent or spark for a poem, autobiographically, structurally. Plath’s famous poem, ‘Tulips,’ is often read as a poem about being carted off to the psych ward, but in fact she was on the verge of a burst appendix! I like the psych ward narrative: it’s so dramatic! It’s so Plath! Factual truth can be very deflating...[Keep Reading]…

Dana is the author of Sky Burial (2011, Copper Canyon Press).

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How We Stay Good Girls

“How We Stay Good Girls,” a short story by alumna Christine Fadden, appears online at Painted Bride Quarterly.

I told my stepmother I was spending the night at Carla’s house and Carla told her parents she was spending the night at mine. Then we went with the boys up the mountain.

The boys were brothers and—for a while—Carla and I were like sisters. Neither of us wanted to have sex, which is contrary to every parent-of-a-teenager’s first assumption. It’s an assumption that says a lot about parents, and its wrongness became the impetus to our lie. If we went up the mountain with the boys and did not behave badly, our mission would prove we were good girls. We would deserve merits—possibly in the form of more freedom! We knew if we got caught we’d get punished, but we fantasized about telling our parents: “You see! We faced and resisted temptation.” Of course, there was no way we could win.

Before we took off for the mountain, Carla and I made a pact: neither would stick the other with the boy she didn’t want to mess around with. It would be she with the younger brother and me with the older one—or Backgammon.

Read more

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“Go On and Hate Me”

“Go On and Hate Me: The Remarkable Handling of Pity in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark,” by alumna Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09) appears online at Fiction Writers Review.

My violent objection to the notion of “unlikeable characters” began in fall 1996, in a UC Santa Barbara literature seminar. I was 20 years old and on the edge of a near-suicidal breakdown, having thrown myself for a full year at Eric, my elusive not-quite-boyfriend, while also fighting repressed childhood memories of my father’s sudden death. The professor for “Readings in the Novel” was an avuncular, brandy-voiced novelist from the Caribbean–what a lovely, safe escape from my obsessions this class would be. Then, on the second day of class, in walked Eric. Painful honesty compels me to report that I hoped this marked a fateful new chapter for us, and I adjusted the strap of my tank top to reveal more shoulder.

Fortunately, Eric was a lazy, mostly absent student. Did he show up the day we discussed Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark? I feel like he did, but back in those days I lived with an illicitly thrilling and demented sensation that Eric was always with me, so it’s hard to remember.

What I remember best is the other students’ reaction to Voyage in the Dark’s narrator, Anna Morgan, a stand-in for Jean Rhys’s younger self, and a girl who, ahem, throws herself shamelessly at her lover and longs to die, while fighting repressed childhood memories of her father’s sudden death. “She’s pathetic,” the other students said. “She’s just a victim.” “There’s nothing you can like about her. She just seems like a waste of time.”  …[Keep Reading]…

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“The Shadow of the Valley”

“The Shadow of the Valley” and Other Poems by alumni Matt Hart (poetry, ’02) appear online at The American Reader.

The Shadow of the Valley

The shadow of the valley
is a placeholder for the valley,
a reminder that a body stands
between those stands of bleachers,
or this stand of trees or the neighborhood
watchers standing around watching
birds fly back and forth from their nests
to the gardens in every Westwood
neighborhood, all the while casting shadows
that somehow don’t look like birds
but like people wondering
what’s going on, like Marvin Gaye
in his song “What’s Going On”
from his album of the same name.
On the cover he’s wearing
a red wool hat, an image my friend
used in something he wrote and then
later read in front of an audience
in Iowa to get them to participate...[Keep Reading]…

Matt is the author of the poetry collection Who’s Who Vivid (2006, Slope Editions).

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Weighing the End of Life

“Weighing the End of Life,” an opinion piece by Louise Aronson (fiction, ’06) appears online at The New York Times.

Louise

ONE weekend last year, we asked our vet how we would know when it was time to put down Byron, our elderly dog. Byron was 14, half blind, partly deaf, with dementia, arthritis and an enlarged prostate. He often walked into walls, stood staring vacantly with his tail down, and had begun wandering and whining for reasons we could not always decipher.

Attentive to Byron’s needs, we softened his food with water and sprinkled it with meat; we cuddled him when he whimpered and took him outside to relieve himself seven, even eight times a night. We couldn’t take a vacation because we couldn’t imagine asking anyone, friend or dog sitter, to do what we were doing. Nor could we fully trust anyone to provide the care we thought Byron required...[Keep Reading]…

Louise is the author of the story collection A History of the Present Illness (2013, Bloomsbury USA).

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“The White Guy’s Guide to Marrying a Black Woman”

“The White Guy’s Guide to Marrying a Black Woman,” a short story by alumni Ed Porter (fiction, ’07) appears in the latest issue of Barrelhouse.

edporter

The first rule is, never mention she’s black to your white friends, or your family. After all, why would that matter? Race is the last thing on anyone’s mind. In fact, they didn’t even notice. Who would notice a thing like that? Not them. Not you. It’s the 21st century, and we’re all past that. Anyway, they already know…

Read an interview with Ed about this story at Barrelhousemag.com:

The story is an entry in what is now almost a tradition of how-to second person stories. It’s my homage/riposte to Junot Diaz’s homage/riposte to Lorrie Moore. The unwieldy but very funny titles of those stories, as you may remember are, “How to Be an Other Woman,” (Moore) and “How to Date a Brown Girl (White Girl, Black Girl or Halfie)” (Diaz). It’s also a nod to Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. The title is me saying, “Hey, I wanna play this game too,” and with luck, it’s also a first clue to the reader about what kind of business the story is going to conduct. I think I started writing the story, and had the title in mind by the end of the first paragraph. I was daunted by the idea of replying to two writers I greatly admired, but that kind of fear is healthy. In that sense, the title is an act of commitment, a way of jumping off the diving board...[Keep Reading]…

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Kathryn Schwille on the Columbia Shuttle Crash

A piece by alumna Kathryn Schwille (fiction, ’99), on the 10th anniversary of the Columbia shuttle disaster, appears online at The Charlotte Observer.

Friday marks the 10th anniversary of the Columbia shuttle disaster, when seven astronauts died and a broken spacecraft scattered from Dallas to Shreveport.

For most of us that story, remarkable as it was, faded in a couple of weeks as the national reporters left Texas and our attention turned to the run-up for the Iraq war. The people in East Texas, however, were having a very different experience.

On that clear Saturday morning when the shuttle came apart, the sound of its re-entry was frightening. “Horrible,” was the word people used, time and again, when I traveled there to research a book of fiction set against the backdrop of the disaster. The noise was a crashing, thunderous boom that went on and on. People thought of pipeline explosions and terrorist attacks.

Near Hemphill, the ground shook as the nose cone slammed into the woods. Some residents heard a whirring sound and a whoosh like the noise of a big fire. A few minutes later, all over East Texas, the pieces began to fall...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Claremont Graduate University Award Finalists

Faculty member Marianne Boruch has been named a finalist for Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for her book The Book of Hours (2011, Copper Canyon Press).

images

The $100,000 Award is given annually for a book by a poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. Past winners include current and former faculty members Rodney Jones (2007), Michael Ryan (2005), Linda Gregerson (2003), Carl Phillips (2002), Alan Shapiro (2001), and Tom Lux (1995).

Alumna Heidy Steidlmayer (poetry, ’00), recent winner of the Zacharis Award and of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, has been named one of three finalists for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, for her first book Fowling Piece: Poems (Triquarterly) (2012, Triquarterly).

Steidlmayer-448

The $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise. Past winners include alumna Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02).

“Winners will be announced in March and recognized during a ceremony at Claremont Graduate University in April.” For more information, visit the University’s website.

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“Ashes, Ashes”

“Ashes, Ashes,” a short story by alumna Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13), appears in the spring 2013 issue of The Gettysburg Review.

[The city] was burning with the slow implacable fires of human desperation.—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Her mother used to walk the subdivision in the cool early mornings of summer, before the heat and humidity descended and trapped everybody in air-conditioned exile. She stopped walking mornings because of Dave Fletcher and O.J. Simpson. Dave was a county police officer who lived across the street from the mother. His wife left him in April, driving away from their house in Three Creeks. The summer of O.J. Simpson’s criminal trial for murder, as her mother walked in and out of the neighborhood cul-de-sacs, she saw Dave Fletcher in his dark blue police uniform walking too. Dave didn’t walk on the sidewalks or even in the street. Dave walked between peoples’ houses, across their lawns, through the common ground. At first, her mother said, she thought he was patrolling the subdivision, looking out for his neighbors.

This much of the story seemed reasonable to the daughter. But you never knew. She didn’t live there anymore, and the mother was prone to exaggeration, depression, and a dependence on cleaning products and box blush wines. So was the daughter. About the same things and different things too. They talked on the phone almost every day and the daughter made the ten hour drive to visit her mother once a month or as often as she could. She had Fridays off and that was her driving day. She’d leave in the morning and get to her mother’s house in time for dinner. No matter what time it was when she got there, her mother would be looking out the dining room window. No matter how long she planned to stay, the first thing her mother always said was, “Our time is so short.”

Read more

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