https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-03 22:39:002022-02-25 17:19:40“Lexicon,” by Anne McCrary Sullivan (Poetry ’92)
As a boy, my brother Steve would play the same 15 seconds of “A Day in the Life” by the Beatles 50 times in a row. Today, he sometimes has to touch a doorjamb with the edge of his foot five times before entering a room. Our phone conversations must occur at the same time on the same day each week, and they follow a strict template for what I ask and how he responds.
Some of Steve’s repetition is for fun. The passage in “A Day in the Life” that he used to repeat is the accelerating sound collage toward the end of the song. The effect is really cool, and who wouldn’t want to listen to it multiple times?
Some of Steve’s repetition is for comfort. He used to do what we called “bounce.” When he sat, he bounced forward, fell back into the seat, bounced forward, fell back, bounced forward. As a boy, I tried to bounce. It felt good, like sleeping in motion. This type of repetition, in the autism world, is called self-stimulation and has an addictive quality. I don’t know about Steve, but I wanted to bounce forever.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-08-02 22:32:002022-02-25 17:19:40“Autism, Writing, and the Necessity of Repetition,” by alum Robert Fromberg
Fulfilled, we stripped the bed and washed it all— the sheets and pillow cases, the pretty dresses we wore while dancing, yours the bronze orange, mine the dappled pink you say I look sexy in—plus the blue cape you swung last night like a lasso, doing your theatrical cha-cha. We let all that cotton
mix in the machine, hummed to the tune of slosh and spin. It was so hot, even the early morning air said Morocco. Half-naked, we made iced coffee, ate the remaining mangos. Later, when we headed out to the line, I said you might at least put on shorts, and you
answered, let the neighbors enjoy. Who couldn’t love a woman like that?
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-07-26 15:37:002022-02-25 17:19:38“In Heaven There Will Be No Bodies,” by Megan Pinto (Poetry ’18)
It’s dark when we arrive at the doorway where I spoke my long-ago goodbye as the rooster was singing one of his epics. The door’s locked. I call out and there’s no answer.
The stone bench beside the door where Mamá brought my big brother into this bright world so he would saddle backs for me. But I would later ride them bare, rambling through narrow streets and out beyond—village boy that I was. This very bench of stone is where I left my hard childhood to yellow in the sun. And this doorway framed by grief?
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-07-23 15:33:002022-02-25 17:19:37“Back to the Village,” by Reginald Gibbons
Leslie Blanco, a 2007 fiction alum, was recently featured in Hunger Mountain. Read an excerpt of Blanco’s story below:
My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: a Cuban Sandwich
See what things have come to? See? Yesterday, I very nearly fell asleep in the grocery line while waiting to buy you a ham.*
You don’t like ham.
Neither do I.
But it’s the tradition.
Every year, the ham “provokes” you. “Como me provoca!” Every year you say: “It’s just not right without the ham.” Pink. Shiny. Glazed. You like to add pineapples to it, affixed helter-skelter with the kind of tooth picks that have red plastic fringes on the ends. “There. Now it looks like Chiquita Banana.” You say that every time. Also: “Poor Carmen Miranda. Dead of heart attack at forty-seven. She wore herself out.”
Without the ham, you tell me, the side dishes don’t look right. “A flower with no center,” you say. “The petals are pretty, but …” Shrug.
There are doilies, of course. To make the home-made food look prettier, and the store-bought food look home-made. A little trickery of yours. A little brujeria, your every-day sorcery.
And the easy-to-wash polyester tablecloth, that’s there too, off-white with a border of embroidered flowers in every neon color of the rainbow. More Chiquita Banana.
None of this ever varies. The pineapple slices must be Dole. No other brand. “No se te ocura!” Don’t let it occur to you! As if the pineapples will be second rate. Imported from the wrong place. Unreliable. “Niña! There’s enough insecurity in the world without having to go and try new brands,” you say. “Not that they aren’t capable of changing what goes in the can without so much as changing the label.” They. You say that a lot. Who’s they? “The scoundrels. The sinverguenzas. You know they mess with the sugar in this country, don’t you? In Cuba, I can tell you for a fact, the sugar was sweeter.”
I never believed you, about the sugar, until that year I visited a friend in Mexico. My standard two spoonfuls in my coffee, and I had to pour it down the drain. Too sweet. And a few years back I met a lobbyist, or a regulator, some politically inclined person who worked for the sugar industry. You are right. You are right! They mess with the sugar. They alter the volume chemically. “So we’ll have to use more and pay again,” you say, “for what should have been enough for the recipe the first time.”
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-07-22 15:24:212022-02-25 17:19:36“My Wish for You in the Land of the Dead: a Cuban Sandwich,” by Leslie Blanco (Fiction ’07)
Commencement Speech, Delivered at the Buncombe County Institute for Elevator Inspectors
I’ve been thinking about things lifted into the sky. Szymborska gets lung cancer and is whisked into the clouds. Muhammad Ali floats the way he always said he would, but this time, doesn’t return to the ground. Stephen Hawking shuts his eyes and merges with one of the black holes he so adored while on Earth.
Each year, this is more frequent. David Bowie. Toni Morrison. Stan Lee. Onto the platform. The doors close. Up they go. Meteor showers. Sun halos. Occultations. There’ve been others, less publicized, less luminous figures, but absences I feel nonetheless. I’ve been told they’re up there as well.
My uncle. My mother-in-law. Blair. Jason. Stephanie. Chris. Dark matter. Moon dust. A haze across the firmament. The work behind the scenes to get them from here to there is invisible and precise:
You must examine the endless chain, the lifting drum, the tension pulley, the counterweight. Double and triple check the sling, the governor, the buffer, the sheave.
Ascension is harrowing. Grief is heavy. The hoist cable must never waver. It must bear the unbearable.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-07-16 20:37:002022-02-25 17:19:35“Commencement Speech, Delivered at the Buncombe County Institute for Elevator Inspectors,” by Matthew Olzmann
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.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-07-12 18:36:082022-02-25 17:19:34A New Story by Leslie Blanco (fiction ’07) Appears in SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW
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.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-06-29 18:23:002022-02-25 17:19:24A conversation with Amanda Newell (Poetry ’17) and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (Poetry ’15)
