2017 poetry grad Tiana Nobile was recently interviewed for Apogee. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

Tender Excavations: Retelling Origin Stories in Adoption Narratives

Leslie Sainz: Cleave is no stranger to poetic erasure—the poem “The Stolen Generation” features an erasure of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869 and the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886, and the book presents and manipulates documents that pertain to your transnational adoption, including a letter requesting that you, as an infant, be baptized. In reading and rereading these poems, I was reminded of Solmaz Sharif’s essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure” and her discussion of erasure as “obliteration,” as assuming the role of the state. In the context of transracial and transnational adoption—a system built on abandonment, separation, and trauma that is hallmarked by not only the removal from one’s birth country but oftentimes one’s birth culture and language—I’m curious about how you arrived at the decision to employ erasure on actual source materials. How did your sense of agency shift when you applied your adult hand to documents that blatantly pointed to your inability to consent?

Tiana Nobile: Historically and politically, it’s true that erasure most frequently equates some form of violence on behalf of the state. What, then, does it mean to enact an erasure in the opposite direction? “The Stolen Generation” is named after the countless aboriginal children who were forcibly removed, in some cases literally kidnapped, from their families and given to white Australian families for adoption. This horrific practice is not unique throughout history (you might have heard about the mass grave of Native children, some as young as three years old, that was recently discovered at a former “residential school” in Canada), and its purpose was to essentially erase aboriginal life and culture from Australia. This is genocide, possibly the most egregious form of erasure. Reading the legislation that made these acts legal was illuminating and appalling; they’re called the Aboriginal PROTECTION Acts for fuck’s sake! It felt necessary to call attention to that hypocrisy in the poem.

I’ve been a student of erasure for a while, and I’ve learned so much about the power of subversion. Solmaz Sharif’s Look and Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager are two groundbreaking examples of this. To manipulate the language of the oppressor in order to disrupt that version of the truth and uplift a previously silenced perspective is a powerful political act and one that really spoke to me as I began working through my own archive of records.

Erasure is particularly special because it points to so many layers: the original text, what is missing from the original, and the newly constructed, unearthed narrative. To be simultaneously immersed in a white family, stripped of any cultural ties to my country of origin, and for the reflection in the mirror to be an ever-present reminder of this migration and loss—I think of my body as a physical manifestation of palimpsest. In Cleave, erasure provides me with a poetic space to reckon with the erasure that happens as a result of adoption. It enables me to re-frame the stories I was told. I can finally uncover what is submerged within the language of my paperwork, give it a voice, and demand visibility.

Read the rest of this interview here: https://apogeejournal.org/2021/08/03/tender-excavations-retelling-origin-stories-in-adoption-narratives/

2020 poetry grad Eric Cruz was recently featured in Zocalo: Public Square. Read an excerpt of Cruz’s poem “Missing Church Again” below:

Missing Church Again

Today, no song, God, repentance
ringing as words flute up through rafters.

What remains: a bird feeder heavy
with seed, like a soon-to-be

mother swaying. And finches,
cardinals, away from heaven,

as black seeds slide down their throats.
Nothing survives

this world without faith,
without rising out of oneself

into the dream of shared need.
It’s because I’m done kneeling

that I walk beneath the sky’s blue
vein as the pulse of my own

sadness widens there, until at last
it is enough to cut open

a bag of seed and drift. Please grant
me peace of mind and calm

my troubled heart. And what I mean is wings.
I mean singing and for small bodies

to shadow the yard. Funny, I can imagine
them falling through the temple

of silence, early morning burning
orange along the lip of the horizon.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2021/08/06/eric-james-cruz-poem-missing-church-again/chronicles/poetry/

Fiction faculty member Carolyn Ferrell was recently interviewed for Scoundrel Time. Read an excerpt of this conversation below:

Dear Miss Metropolitan: An Interview with Carolyn Ferrell

The girls’ experience in captivity has parallels to the real-life abductions and years of torture experienced by Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus in the so-called “Cleveland House of Horrors.” But this story also contains echoes of so many other stories, fictional and factual, of “victim-girls.” What do you think is the root of our cultural obsession with missing girls, taken girls, victim-girls? Why does this particular narrative remain so powerful? 

In Edward P. Jones’s story, “Adam Robinson acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister,” a Black mother, impatient with the tepid response of the white police, turns to a group of ex-convicts from a local halfway house to help find her missing son. The convicts do indeed find the boy—he’d been kidnapped and held captive in the woods, and clearly would not have, as the police condescendingly told his mother, “found his own way back home.” The story’s protagonist goes on to make the following observation:  “That was Washington now…that was the world now—people forced to get criminals to do police work.”

I was inspired by this scene when I first began Dear Miss Metropolitan. I was struck by the obvious: why weren’t people doing what they were supposed to be doing? Why was this missing Black boy not a priority for those public servants meant to protect him? Let me start out by saying that NO GIRL (or boy or human being) deserves the fate of abduction, abuse, or captivity. My heart hurts when I think about what these crimes do to not only the victim but their families and communities. But what is also painful is the lack of mainstream attention when it comes to missing people of color. There is a “missing white girl narrative” in popular culture that can exist at the expense of Black and Brown children. The missing white girl is young, innocent, and undeserving of any type of evil. She is the one society wants to see brought home safely. Rarely is the missing Black or Brown girl—often described as a runaway or delinquent—viewed through the same lens or with the same urgency. The Women’s Media Center observes that African American girls make up over 40% of the missing children in America, and yet are absent from any collective outrage.

I once watched a true crime program about a young Black sex worker who’d been kidnapped and tortured for months by a man who forced her to become his “wife” (she considered herself luckier than the other women chained in his basement). This Black woman managed to free herself and, finding a pair of white police detectives at a gas station, begged them for help. They laughed, thinking her a strung-out addict. It took more than ten minutes for this Black woman to make them see she was indeed a victim of a kidnapping. Watching her try to convince these white men of her authenticity as a Black victim—as a viable human being deserving of care and safety—broke my heart. The program never followed up on details of race and class, but this Black woman’s lack of being seen and heard stayed with me. It informed Dear Miss Metropolitan as much as any other story of kidnapping and abuse.

I wasn’t interested in writing about actual events in my novel, but I was certainly moved by them. Like many others, I was caught up in the news story of the Ariel Castro kidnappings. How could these girls go missing for so long, I wondered? How can girls, women simply be overlooked, misplaced, forgotten? And for weeks, months, years? This erasure commanded my attention. When I began Dear Miss Metropolitan, I wasn’t thinking true crime or statistics; but I was thinking of the ways race, class, gender and sexuality figure in these stories of abduction and abuse. I considered what communities do (or neglect to do) to recover their missing girls. I thought about the life that is begun after liberation, the emotional aftermath of all involved, and the debt owed to those who are recovered. For Dear Miss Metropolitan, I imagined three disappeared Black and Brown girls and I didn’t want them relegated to some cold case file, some faded missing posters, some tenderly held photo albums.

Read the rest of this interview here: https://scoundreltime.com/dear-miss-metropolitan-an-interview-with-carolyn-ferrell/

Steve Lane, a 2020 fiction grad, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of Lane’s story below:

In a Small, Square Woodland

  The apartment thing was weighing on the man. The dog went on yanking him down the dim path, veering into the woods first one way then the other, per some plan of her own. There was no getting away from anything; the back decks of the nearest houses were too near, and from where the path doubled over the shoulder of a hill, the lighted shopping centers by the highway stood out in clear, crisp miniature against the twilight. He could hear but no longer see the stream that split the preserve’s handful of November beech-woods in two. He let himself be pulled along, risking a stumble.
       Finding a new roommate — that would be a bother. Lissa had been bothersome too, no question. She had found him two years ago, from an ad he’d put in coffee shops, with the little strips you could tear off. She’d brought the little strip to their first meeting; in a burst of enthusiasm, he’d written her into the lease, which they now both more or less regretted. She worked two jobs, one at a Whole Foods, the other at a pottery co-op, and always paid the rent on time. Sundays she slept till noon. She left hair in the shower, and buttery knives on the countertop, but nothing worse. So where had her odd, unappeasable grievances come from? That he’d drunk her milk (he hadn’t), that he’d been hostile about the use of shared space (he had asked her to pick up some magazines in the TV room once). That his habits were stressful. A headlamp moved along the trail below, whether toward him or away from him he could not tell.

Read the rest of this story here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-9-steve-lane/

Fiction faculty member Debra Spark was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “The Ten Commandments” below:

The Ten Commandments

  This was his city, but DP had only so many ways through it.  He’d taken one path this morning—from his apartment building to Preble Street.  That was a route.  Back was another.  To the supermarket yet another.  And the AA meeting at St. Angelo’s.  That was mostly it, though it wasn’t like he never strayed.  DP liked to stray.
            He liked to think about straying.
            Tomorrow, the first day of the month, he’d have to walk, but for now he still had his bus voucher.  He could go anywhere on public transportation.  He could visit the beach, just to see the waves.  Hello and how you doing water?  Only today it was too cold for any activity that wasn’t absolutely necessary.  They were fixing to take away his SNAP and his Mainecare, so he had come to Preble Street to figure out what to do.  Last week, he’d seen Nancy, but she said he’d missed an appointment the previous month when he was supposed to fill out paperwork and that was the problem.  But how was he supposed to show up for an appointment that he didn’t even know he had?  And how was he supposed to get to an appointment without money for the bus?  A lady at the supermarket had given him a voucher for this month, but last month he hadn’t had one.  He lived four miles outside of town.  First apartment in … he didn’t know how many years. 
             Sometimes he hoofed it in.  He didn’t mind going for a walk.  Kind of liked a stroll actually.  It took exactly two hours to get to Preble Street, but that was when it was a good day, not when it was five degrees, not when he had a bum leg.  It had always been a little off, but now it was red and swollen.  “Ham hock,” he thought, when he looked at it, which wasn’t something you wanted to think about your own body.  He must have fallen down, but he didn’t remember falling down.  There was a lot of black ice out there, this time of year.  You had to be careful.

Read the rest of “The Ten Commandments” here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-9-debra-spark/