A New Story by Leslie Blanco (fiction ’07) Appears in SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW

A Sane Person Doesn’t Do Something Like That

Guanajay, Cuba Late 1957

“HOW MUCH?” Hector said.

In the foyer of their apartment, Yvelis hesitated. It was a delicate thing, to ask her husband for money. Hector never set foot in the bodega, never paid ten centavos to the baker for a loaf of bread, but Hector knew what things cost. If Yvelis asked for too much, he might get suspicious, not enough and Hector would reprimand her later. He liked to go to the bank only once a week. And they had no children. Nothing at all to soften him.

Yvelis calculated avocados, eggs, the milk bill paid weekly to the delivery man, fish if it looked good. “Six,” she said. “Six pesos.”

Hector’s eyes flipped down to the bankbook. He frowned, wrote the amount down, did his own calculations.

They played this game every Tuesday. More often if she wanted something unnecessary: shoes, a dress, a new hat. They’d lived in the one-­bedroom apartment overlooking the square since their wedding almost four years ago, but Yvelis knew Hector had money to buy a house. He was a lawyer for some of Batista’s people. For Batistianos. Who were building high-rises on every street corner in Vedado so air conditioned you could catch influenza just by standing outside and looking in.

Read the rest of the story at this link: http://www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/542-leslie-blanco-a-sane-person-doesnt-do-something-like-that.html

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A conversation with Amanda Newell (Poetry ’17) and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (Poetry ’15)

Poetry alums Amanda Newell and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth were recently featured in Plume. Read an excerpt of their discussion of Steinorth’s collection Her Read below:

Jen Sperry Steinorth: On Creating and Claiming Space with Her Read, by Amanda Newell

AN:  You have described Her Read as a graphic poem, a first-person female lyric that you “excavated” from its source text, Herbert Read’s The Meaning of Art—and I’m going to come back to the idea of excavation—but first, I wonder if you might speak to the popularity of Her Read, which has garnered a tremendous amount of attention in the months prior to its publication.

JSS: Oh, goodness. Well, firstly, thank you. In truth I have been quite surprised by this!

But you have me thinking about a phrase I’ve heard when describing feminist work born in the last few years, something along the lines of, that came out of the Me Too Movement, or that was born of the Me Too Movement, and they mean that it came up during the Trump Presidency, in the time of pussy hats and prosecution of dozens of high ranking men, some who were penalized, others who were not. But of course the use of the phrase Me Too to express solidarity with women articulating their abuse was begun by Tarana Burke a full decade before, and the issues are ancient. The disparity is woven into the fibers of our consciousness, into binary identities going all the way back. We have no history  otherwise.

What I mean is, Me Too was just a symptom—a rash—a sudden disturbance that broke the skin of an already diseased body.

I think this work has garnered attention because the rage I was attempting to channel is not only my own.  It was born out of my own experience, but that experience as shaped by our collective inheritance.  It just so happens that in this moment, people are more attuned to listen.

Likewise, the marvelous proliferation of hybrid work by so many others in this moment has created space for my own work to be received.

But also, and I want to mention this for others who have a secret project they are shepherding, there is a way in which I may have talked this book into existence.  I began it the summer of 2016 and was soon attached to it.  I had it most anytime I left the house.  If opportunity arose to talk about what I was making with a kindred spirit, I would.  Sometimes I took the object out of my bag and showed them. It travelled with me to the Sewanee Writers Conference and Vermont Studio Center.  Because it did not (then) seem to fit the molds, I was on a mission to discover who might be open to publishing the book—or excerpts—and how to package it.  I let people know I was making a thing and listened to how they responded.  These engagements deeply impacted not only the process of publication, but also the crafting of the work—techniques I used, arguments that played out.  I also posted images of the work in progress on social media—Instagram and Facebook.  It was all a way of breaking my own silences and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was a way of fueling the conversation that is this book.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://plumepoetry.com/jen-sperry-steinorth-on-creating-and-claiming-space-with-her-read-by-amanda-newell/

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“Subject Position as Craft Tool: An Investigation,” by Leah De Forest (Fiction ’20)

2020 fiction graduate Leah De Forest was recently featured in Fiction Writers Review. Read an excerpt of De Forest’s craft essay below:

Subject Position as Craft Tool: An Investigation

First, a story.

At my primary school in Australia there was a boy who had the misfortune to be French. Laurent spoke funny. He’d been to Disneyland, a far-off fantasy land to us 1980s suburban kids, and often wore a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. The shirt had a squeaker stitched into it, part of the 3D protrusion of Mickey’s head.

We pronounced Laurent in a mean sing-song twang, with a sharp landing on the “t.”

One day we were playing on an arrangement of five upright treated pine poles, each of them about kid-height, arranged like the dots on a five-dice. The game involved jumping from one pole to another. When it was Laurent’s turn to leap he fell, belly first, onto one of the poles. It must have winded him terribly.

When he landed on the pole, Laurent’s Mickey Mouse shirt squeaked.

I told that story for quite a while afterwards.

Thought it was pretty funny.

Lor-rent.

Squeak.

Read the rest of this essay excerpt at Fiction Writers Review, as well as part two of the essay.

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“X,” by Lane Osborne (Fiction ’18)

Lane Osborne, a 2018 fiction alum, was recently featured in SmokeLong Quarterly. Read an excerpt of Osborne’s story “X” below:

X

Forget this place. Forget the shoreline, an oil-on-canvas landscape with broad brush strokes of beachgrass-tufted dunes, and gulls gliding above the blue-gray water. Forget the beachcomber sifting through sand; the couple—honeymooners, maybe—sloshing shin-deep in the spring tide; the boy trenching a moat around sand towers, turrets, and crenelated walls that crumble under the weight of water.

Forget your condo, the walk to clear your head. Forget how four right turns would’ve brought you back to where you began, and how you drifted onward, straying past vinyl-sided homes, vacant lots, and storefronts—a deli, a drugstore, a barbershop called Suitcase Ray’s where, maybe, you once got a shave and haircut. Where, maybe, you once talked sports, politics, women, and weather. Forget Suitcase Ray’s.

Forget how you reached here, the water’s edge, just past the stilted cottages that border this stretch of beach. Forget that all who wander are not lost. Forget whether it took you ten minutes or two hours to make the journey. Forget the tan line where your watch isn’t fastened, the empty pocket where you keep your keys, the note for your wife you didn’t leave.

Forget the people you passed, the ones you didn’t. Forget Ben, your best friend who hasn’t returned the book he borrowed. Or DVD? Forget the DVD. Forget the book. Forget your parents, long departed—your father’s honey-rich baritone, your mother in her flour-dusted apron. Forget your sister. No, sisters. Forget them both. Forget Mary, your wife.

Damn.

Read the rest of this story here: http://www.smokelong.com/x/

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“Cataract,” by Daisy Fried

Poetry faculty member Daisy Fried was recently featured in The Summerset Review. Read an excerpt of “Cataract” below:

Cataract

How like steam escaping the boil
Were your blurry eyes—what color are they?
By turns tender, dreamy, and cruel
With the pallor and indolence of the sky.

I remember white days of long haze
When, ravished and twisted by nerves,
I wept, my melting mind split in two;
My waking and sleeping mocked each other.

Read the rest of this poem here: http://www.summersetreview.org/21summer/fried01.html

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A conversation with Karen Tucker (Fiction ’10) and Matthew Zanoni Müller (Fiction ’10)

This week in the Missouri Review, fiction alum Matthew Zanoni Müller interviewed fellow alum Karen Tucker about Tucker’s debut novel Bewilderness. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

Following Each Dangling Thread: An Interview with Karen Tucker about Her Debut Novel Bewilderness, and Writing about the Restaurant Industry, Friendship, and Addiction

Matthew Zanoni Müller: Your two main characters, Irene and Luce, both work restaurant jobs. This is how they make their money, where they meet, and where they forge their friendship. It is also where they encounter a host of challenges, from sexual harassment, to low pay, to difficult customers. Your book seems very interested in exploring this industry that you worked in yourself for years. What was it like mining this territory? Were there specific things you hoped readers would take from Irene and Luce’s experiences?

Karen Tucker: It’s funny: back when I was mired neck-deep in the restaurant industry, the absolute last thing I wanted to do was write about it. Imagine working so hard your legs shake as you walk to your car at midnight, going home and having yet another waiter nightmare that leaves you stressed-out and exhausted, and then waking up to spend even more time in that world by writing a story about a couple of food servers? No, thanks. But at some point after those twenty-plus years had passed, my ruined legs and I decided to allow ourselves to be exploited in a different fashion, and together we finagled our way into grad school. In Florida, with a sizeable pay cut, I taught writing to undergrads in exchange for time to work on a novel. Of course I deeply missed my restaurant colleagues––the funniest, most creative bunch of humans you could ever assemble––and at last I was ready to tie myself into an imaginary apron and write about the lean and hungry experience of waiting tables. One thing I wanted readers who haven’t been on the other side of the table to understand is that it’s not the romanticized version of low-income work we see so often in various stories. Forget the popular customer-as-savior trope––harassment is a million times more likely. No one theatrically quits midshift in protest over harassment; you can’t afford to. Your manager probably won’t defend you if you complain, but you also won’t get fired on the spot if you say something rude to Mr. Harasser. Your manager will instead wait for you to finish out your tables, do your sidework, turn in the cash and credit card slips you’ve collected, and leave the building. Only after you’ve shown up for work the following day, hoping to earn a few more crucial dollars, will they give you the axe.

MM: This is foremost a book about addiction. We follow Luce and Irene as they score drugs, go to meetings, and experience the highs and lows of pills. How did you approach balancing the very real and specific characteristics of both Irene and Luce’s addiction with the larger and more universal workings of this world that so many experience?

KT: By no means did I set out to scrutinize the pharmaceutical industry, the rehab industry, the health insurance industry, or any other for-profit systems that routinely fail people with substance use disorder. I have no experience in that kind of reportage. My only goal was to take a close-up look at two characters: Irene and Luce. As I came to discover, peering through a magnifying lens tends to reveal something unexpected, and you can’t tell the full story about food servers in a former mill town unless you’re willing to follow each dangling thread. In the end I spent as much time researching the circumstances of these characters’ lives as I did imagining them. In this way, I often felt more like the novel’s reader than its writer. Some days it felt as though the story were being told to me. Not in a spooky mystical sense––no characters were channeled in the drafting of this story––but I learned so much about my novel and those who inhabit it by reading numerous accounts of shady pain management centers, criminal rehab centers, doctors who accept payments from pharmaceutical reps in exchange for overprescribing opioid medication, and doctors who refuse to prescribe meds to patients with real pain.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://www.missourireview.com/karen-tucker-on-her-debut-novel-bewilderness/

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An Excerpt from BEWILDERNESS, the New Novel by Karen Tucker (fiction ’10 )

BEWILDERNESS is the first novel from fiction Alum Karen Tucker. It is new in June from Catapult. Below is an excerpt:

As soon as Luce’s going-away party wound down enough for me to slip off unnoticed, I went outside and sat on the little wooden bench across from the restaurant. I guess I’d always known she was going to leave. Even before that first instant-release summer, when she was nothing more to me than a fellow cocktail server, alone and drifting, you could tell she was the kind of person who needed to scrape more out of life than most. 

            But Luce was also someone who liked to drag stuff out as long as possible, so of course she wanted to give one final hug to every last co-worker, from the waiters who always skipped out on their closing duties to the hosts who made sure to give you all the worst customers until you snuck them a coffee mug of wine. I figured I had time for a cigarette before she came out and caught me. I hadn’t smoked in months but the past couple days had been more stressful than usual and in a moment of panic I’d bought a pack off one of the dishwashers. It wasn’t my brand, but that didn’t matter. Times like this were when all the old urges came swooping back in. I dug around in my bag for my lighter and though it took a few tries, I got the flame going. Once that first hit of nicotine roared into my bloodstream it felt like some broken-off part of me finally righted itself and slid into place. 

            By the time Luce came outside, all bundled up in her giant green parka, I’d burned through three Marb Reds and part of a fourth and my head was swimming way up above me. She called to me from the door. “He’s still not answering. You didn’t hear from him, did you?” 

            I dropped my cigarette in the snow before she could see it. “Wilky?” 

            She ran her eyes over me. “Who else? Said he’d pick us up by eleven at the latest.”

            I hoisted my purse over my shoulder and trudged back toward her. “He’s just caught up in his own going-away deal. Bet he’s standing on a chair and making a big speech or something. You know how he is.” 

            That earned me a faint smile, but you could tell by the stiffness in Luce’s jaw that she didn’t believe it. She got out her phone and called him again. When Wilky still didn’t answer, her cheeks went splotchy with anger. “Dude better have a good explanation.” 

            “It’s okay. I don’t mind walking,” I said. 

            Luce and I rented a tiny clapboard bungalow a little less than a mile from the restaurant. Neither of us had a car. Or actually Luce did: an old Chevy Impala that needed at least a thousand bucks in repairs before she could drive it and which was busy decomposing in the side lot, next to the skeletal remains of a tractor the previous tenants had wisely abandoned. When the weather was halfway decent we rode bikes to work. But it had been snowing on and off since morning, so even if we’d been able to make it uphill to Broad Street during daylight, biking back down on slick roads wasn’t our idea of a choice evening, not after the night last winter when Luce hit a patch of ice, tumbled over her handlebars, and fractured her elbow. She lost almost a month of shifts and even then she had to learn how to carry trays left-handed. 

            At least she had Wilky. They’d been together over two years and lately he’d been working nights at a nearby bar, the kind with painted-over windows and the stink of urinal cakes wafting out of the bathroom. Although me and Luce always started our shifts a couple hours before him, if it was raining or snowing or we just didn’t feel like biking, all we had to do was shoot him a quick text and he’d come give us a lift. Wilky was a sweet, low-key guy who’d gotten himself bounced out of the army for an incident that wasn’t his fault, not really. Which is to say that in some ways he was also incredibly dumb. Don’t get me wrong, Wilky had a head packed full of brains and a college education to go along with it and that’s more than you can say for anyone else in our circle, myself included. But at the same time he was someone who always went around trusting everybody on the planet—no matter how little they might have deserved it. 

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“As Though the Narrative Went Out for a Smoke,” by Mike Puican (Poetry ’09)

2009 poetry alum Mike Puican was recently featured in OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Read an excerpt of Puican’s poem “As Though the Narrative Went Out for a Smoke” below:

As Though the Narrative Went Out for a Smoke

As though the narrative went out for a smoke and never returned, and now
the cruel waitress
the afternoon sun warming the shoulders of a runaway daughter
the teenagers in loud cars who will not live much longer
the baby on a ledge
the hand gun in the freezer under a pork roast
the upright piano approaching on the ice
the key that fell into the cuff of her rolled-up jeans…

Read the rest of this poem here: https://ojalart.com/poetry-all-forms-stylesmike-puicanas-though-the-narrative-went-out-for-a-smoke/

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“Weed in a French Garden,” by Madison Mainwaring (Poetry ’19)

Madison Mainwaring, a 2019 poetry alum, was recently featured in Bracken. Read an excerpt of Mainwaring’s poem “Weed in a French Garden” below:

Weed in a French Garden

The horticulturalists, astronauts
with clippers, shape the hedges
in straight lines, their hands firm 

with a blade. In this stilled pool
of beauty, there’s no “outside,”
no nature at all, really. 

Even the sun here
is in fact not the sun,
harnessed like a cheetah in a cage 

as elaborate metaphor
for the absolute power of the king. 
Don’t be tricked by the lack of a fence, 

the eighteen signs saying bienvenu.
You are not meant to be
in this world. The light is deigned. 

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.brackenmagazine.com/issue-viii/weed-in-a-french-garden-by-madison-mainwaring

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“Little Starts,” by Rose Skelton (Fiction ’17)

Fiction alum Rose Skelton (along with Skelton’s spouse and poetry alum Nomi Stone) was recently featured in Ecotone. Read an excerpt of Skelton’s essay “Little Starts” below:

Little Starts

When my wife and I marry in autumn, the seasons are all wrong. On our Philadelphia rooftop, spinach sprouts in the heat of late September and in early October, basil flourishes in pots. Summer flowers—petunias, fuchsias, geraniums—gush from other people’s window ledges. Tomatoes, fat and misshapen, line the counter of the vegetable shop across the street.

On the island in Scotland, where I am from, at this time of year I sleep under one, two, thick quilts, and rain slants sideways across the windows. The shops are void of all summer fruit. There, it is the season I gather mushrooms from the woods, when the cool wet weather pulses black trumpets from the loam. Horn of plenty, birch bolete, chicken of the woods, cep.

But in Philadelphia, the days are a humid stench that won’t let up. The woods, though I scour them, give up nothing to me.

The night before our City Hall wedding, we sleep with the windows thrown open. At 5 a.m., the bin lorry wakes us as it thunders past our bedroom. My wife, to-be, throws a leg into my sprawled crook, insists her body into the shape of mine so that her beating heart, tiny, hot, thrums against my scapula. I know I should use the American terms for things—trash, truck, fall—but it isn’t a reflex yet. Only my wife understands me in this new strange country where I didn’t mean to end up.

I hadn’t dreamed of getting married either—I had watched my parents suffer their own twenty-four years before divorcing—and by the morning of our wedding I am forty. N., a poet, and I met in a writing program at grad school two years before, and were within days talking of a life together. She captivated me, the way she seemed to be one thing, but also another. She was brought to tears by blossoming trees, and by Marx. She complained of feeling cold, but her body burned with a heat that felt electric to touch. She had spent two years researching in a military special-forces training site, but she only wore cowboy boots, didn’t own a rain jacket. She had published two books of poetry, but her poem tattoo had a punctuation error, something she showed me the first time we met, both of us laughing as she pulled up her T-shirt to show me her slender naked back. She didn’t give a damn for convention, actively sought out the other. I had spent my life being bored by people, but of N., I never tired.

In time, I noticed that a change had come over me, a softness that grew as she burrowed into my life. People said I was nicer when I was with N. I started to like dogs, and children. I began to believe in myself, I wrote more. I learned to fight away the harsh words I had always tormented myself with.

Read the rest of Skelton’s essay here: https://ecotonemagazine.org/nonfiction/little-starts/

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