A Poem by Maurice Manning

Warren Wilson faculty member Maurice Manning’s poem, “A Blasphemy” is now available on the Poetry Foundation’s website:

A Blasphemy
By Maurice Manning

You wouldn’t have believed it, how
the man, a little touched perhaps,

set his hands together and prayed
for happiness, yet not his own;

he meant his people, by which he meant
not people really, but trees and cows,

the dirty horses, dogs, the fox
who lived at the back of his place with her kits...[Keep Reading]…

Maurice is the author of the poetry collections, Bucolics (2008, Mariner Books) and The Common Man (2010, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).  “A Blasphemy” was originally published in the May 2007 issue of Poetry.

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Alumni Updates

Neil Fischer (fiction, ’12): Neil’s story “Wiles” was among the top 25 finalists in Glimmer Train’s recent “Very Short Fiction Award” contest.

Neil’s work has been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others.

 

 

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Alumni Updates

Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09):  Christine’s short story “Little Rubber Houses” appears in the February issue of PANK.

I didn’t mean to make a habit out of sitting naked on lemon meringue pies—or split watermelons.  I’d watched this soft-core sex show called “Fetishes of the British” and thought food foreplay would make my husband laugh, relieve the four-year itch.

I’m on my way to London now, non-fetish business. Lana is meeting me at our bar in La Guardia, where we fill my layover hours with talk we can have only in person. Lana is my sex girlfriend: we don’t discuss politics, love, or art… [Keep Reading]…

Her story “Downcutting” will appear in Sou’wester‘s Spring 2012 issue.  Her story “Sleeping In” will appear in Corium Magazine in April.

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Alumni Updates

Shannon Cain (fiction, 2005):  Shannon’s short story collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors (2011, University of Pittsburgh Press) has been nominated for the Lamda Literary Award for Lesbian General Fiction.  The awards, now in their twenty-fourth year, celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) writing.

You can catch Shannon reading Thursday, April 12 at Why There Are Words in Sausalito, CA, Saturday, April 14 at UC Irvine, and Tuesday, April 19 at UC Davis.

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Alumni Updates

Erin Stalcup (fiction, 2004):  Erin’s short story “Why Things Fall” appears in the latest issue of PANK Magazine.

Priscilla led Isaac by the hand outside, walked him to a tree, placed his back against the trunk. She pulled an apple from between her breasts and placed it on his head. She told him to stand perfectly still. Priscilla strode twenty paces away, turned, notched an arrow into her bow, pulled it back with muscular yet trim arms—at that point Isaac fell in love—and let it fly: the apple impaled, the arrow quivering in the bark. Isaac stepped from underneath, left the apple thrumming above. They both could imagine a crowd roaring…

The complete story, as well as an audio recording, is available at pankmagazine.com

Erin is currently a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas, where she’s finishing her first collection, Gravity & Other Stories, and starting a novel.

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Alumni Updates

Edward Porter (fiction, 2007):  Edward’s new story “Howard Garfield, Balladeer” is online at Booth Journal:

My troubles began when I was ten and my parents spent the summer traveling in Italy, leaving me with my great-aunt Ethel Patch, in her decrepit gray Prairie School castle, way out past the fairgrounds. This disconcertingly spry octogenarian had a large collection of vinyl records, and out of desperate boredom one rainy afternoon, I took one at random, impaled it on the nub of her old Garrard SP25 and dropped the needle. When Glenn Yarbrough’s honeyed voice came pouring out of the speakers, crooning about a lumberjack drowned while freeing a logjam, I was lost. …[Keep Reading]…

Edward was a fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007-2008, and is currently working on a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, as well as a collection of short stories.

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Alumni Updates

Joe Schuster (fiction, ’91): Joe’s first novel, The Might Have Been, which he began writing at a Warren Wilson MFA residency, will be available March 20 from Ballantine Books.  The St. Louis Riverfront Times ran a profile story detailing the nine-year story of the book’s creation:

For nine years Schuster’s vacation and sabbatical routine went like this: He’d get up in the morning and go to the coffee shop. He’d get coffee while the laptop booted up, then he’d plug in his headphones, turn on some music and start working toward his daily quota of 1,500 words. Sometimes it would take an hour or two. Sometimes it would take all day. The song was always the same: Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “I Say a Little Prayer” on endless repeat. Schuster estimates he has listened to that song 5,000 times. He’s still not sick of it. If he hears it now, it takes him right back into the world of the novel.

You can also read excerpts from the novel on the paper’s website.

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Alumni Update

Marjorie Hudson (fiction, ’00):  Marjorie’s collection of short stories Accidental Birds of the Carolinas (2011, Press 53) received honorable mention in the 2012 PEN Hemingway Awards.  Her stories “document contemporary and historical characters facing love and loss, crossing boundaries between native Southerner and newcomer, and walking a fine line between tragedy and delight.”

You can read the title story from the collection at the Center for Fiction online.

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every day, a century

A new poem by Sara Slaughter (poetry, ’11) at every day, a century, “a curated writing project that challenges writers to create a one-hundred word prose poem every day”:

Untitled

In the South, as elsewhere, fried chicken is called by the bone it’s served on. In the South, any good fried chicken joint will highlight the plates or baskets that include the pulley bone. This is the wishbone we fight over from Thanksgiving’s turkey. Smaller, though. Hollow. Its given name, furcula…[keep reading]

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Matthew Olzmann in Rattle

Alumni Matthew Olzmann’s poem, “Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem” is up at Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century.

MOUNTAIN DEW COMMERCIAL DISGUISED AS A LOVE POEM

Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage
might work: Because you wear pink but write poems
about bullets and gravestones. Because you yell
at your keys when you lose them, and laugh,
loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,
gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercials
from thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming… [Keep Reading]

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