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.” 

You are absolutely right.

Read the rest of this story here: https://hungermtn.org/my-wish-for-you-in-the-land-of-the-dead-a-cuban-sandwich-by-leslie-blanco/

2018 poetry graduate Megan Pinto was recently featured in Image. Read an excerpt of “Elegy” below:

Elegy

The body, where does it go? Winter
has come and almost gone. I have not touched
my body in months. If I wash myself

where will you go? Once, my skin held the scent
of you, once your body was warm against mine, once
we were naked and you bit me, your spit

on my skin—yesterday I found your hair
on a pillow. I kept it there. Tonight, like every
night before, the moon comes and cannot sleep.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://imagejournal.org/article/elegy-2/

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/

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/

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/