Fiction alum Anne Elliot was recently featured in TriQuarterly. Read an excerpt of Elliot’s craft essay, “The Beloved ‘You’: Direct Address in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend,” below:

The Beloved “You”: Direct Address in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend

When I encounter direct address in fiction, my first assumption is that the “you” is me—that the narrator uses the second person to create kinship with the “dear reader.” But on a deeper look, the second person has more potential for complexity. “You” could be a single person, or many people, or could change over the course of a story. Or “you” could be specific to one of the story’s characters.

The pronoun “you” has often been used in fiction as a veiled first person, foregrounding a main character’s insecurity by putting the self at arm’s length. In Lorrie Moore’s Self Help, for example, the second person is cast in the imperative, taking the form of flawed instruction, crafting a warm-humored, self-deprecating parody of popular texts that purport to make living easier. In Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the second person has an accusatory feel, as it narrates the self-destruction of its protagonist and implicates the reader at the same time. As veiled first person, “you” is tied up with the ego or with troubles in a character’s relationship with herself. “I” and “you” have trouble coexisting, because they are the same person, and because they each see flaws in the other. As veiled first person, “you” is a being one cannot escape.

But what about an “I” whose “you” is absent—and sorely missed? Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018) offers another approach to the use of “you”: direct address as a focal point for monologue.

Read the rest of this essay here: https://triquarterly.org/craft-essays/beloved-%E2%80%9Cyou%E2%80%9D-direct-address-sigrid-nunez%E2%80%99s-friend

Fiction faculty member Marisa Silver was recently interviewed for Lit Hub regarding her new novel, The Mysteries. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

Marisa Silver Revisits the Golden Dawn of Girlhood: The Author of The Mysteries in Conversation with Jane Ciabattari

Jane Ciabattari: I’m wondering how you’ve been managing during the tumultuous year we’ve had? Where have you been living? Have you been able to write? What have you been doing to maintain some sense of normalcy?

Marisa Silver: I’ve been in Los Angeles and, like everyone, I’ve been riding the waves of everything that’s been coming at us. I’m a person who relies on a certain degree of emotional equilibrium in order to have the mental space to create degrees of emotional unruliness on the page. But this year, equanimity is not the name of the game, is it? I was in a pretty hyper-reactive state for many months as I responded to the daily barrage of pandemic news, the horrific police shootings, the dangers of late-stage Trump, and the anxiety about the election, all of which made writing a challenge.

But at a certain point, I reclaimed some focus and got back into a steady rhythm of work, which created its own kind of solace. Normalcy is an interesting word, and I’ve thought a lot about what it suggests, and what it means to “go back.” I think we all want to go back to patterns we relied on and enjoyed because they were known, but there is also a way in which maybe we should not be looking to recreate a normal that was predicated on intolerance and take-no-prisoners individualism that so much of the upheaval has exposed.

JC: What inspired your new novel, The Mysteries?

MS: My parents are both gone now, and I think a lot about how very little, in the end, I know about their early lives. I think this is true for many people. Parents pass on certain stories but not others—they can’t possibly download their entire experience to their kids, nor should they. I think about what we are trying to communicate about ourselves or the events that formed us through the anecdotes we do tell our kids. Why does one memory feel important enough, even urgent, to relate?

Of the handful of stories my father told me about his childhood, one included an event similar to the one that forms the tragedy at the center of my novel, an event he witnessed as a young boy. He described what happened, but told me nothing about how he felt, or how his mother, who was partially responsible, felt. He did not tell me anything about the aftermath. I understood—not then, but later—that what happened that day was fundamentally important to him because he chose to let me know about it. Writing a novel inspired by what he told me was a way for me to find out why.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://lithub.com/marisa-silver-revisits-the-golden-dawn-of-girlhood

In a Year of Multiple Pandemics, Finding a Parenting Philosophy in the Idea of Black Enchantment

My son has a cold for the first time in his fifteen months of life. The COVID-19 lockdown in our city has coincided with the length of his existence, creating the sort of bubble that has kept us away from daycare, playgrounds, and all other places where viruses make their way to the tiny bodies of children. For these fifteen months, he has passed through his developmental milestones blissfully uninterrupted—or, as much as possible in the hovering presence of the adults who love him.

But despite our precautions, a cold virus found its way in, first hitting my daughter before spreading to me and my son. Ever since its arrival he has stomped around the house with his face scrunched into a frustrated knot. Multiple times throughout the day he toddles over to where I sit working, demanding to be lifted into my lap. If his father scoops him away he dissolves into pissed-off screams. A stuffy nose, sneezing, and a mild fever have interrupted his formerly uninterrupted self: joyful, ever-smiling, and curious. In love with tumbling on the couch and being tossed into the air. The cold follows him like a shadow, something he can’t shake.  

Read the complete essay at this link: https://www.vogue.com/article/parenting-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR29KN0qyna3ssAnlkIIb8AsH-eQD3VTJRuOw8t5OxK8gzHpvHu4IG7XE_w

A bright hello to this beloved creative community!

Registration for this summer’s virtual alumni conference is herewith declared open, and we hope to see all of you there. Registration runs from this very minute through Wednesday, June 16. Things you need to know:

1. This year’s conference will kick off Wednesday, July 14, and conclude the evening of Sunday, July 18. We are starting earlier in the week this year to provide greater flexibility for manuscript review and workshop groups, and to give us all a little more breathing room.

2. Speaking of manuscript reviews and workshop groups—please note that you will receive your group assignment June 18 and will need to provide your crew of readers with the necessary materials by ***June 25.*** So now is the time to start polishing.

3. Interested in reading or offering a class or a panel or a bookshop? Please indicate your interest on the registration form. No need to tell us when you’ll be available (because who knows at the this very moment when they’ll be available in July) or what your proposed class topic is. We will hit you up with a follow-up email.

4. The schedule will be sent to all registrants on July 1. 

5. We’re reviving the auction! This year, instead of asking for a registration donation, we are focusing all of our fundraising efforts on Saturday night’s online event. Do you have a pair of small, sparkly earrings you like to claim Dolly Parton once wore on stage . . . but whose provenance is clearly dubious because of that pesky adjective “small”? Are you a master knitter willing to teach someone the basics over Zoom? Then read this description and check the yes button on the registration form:

“Tiny and Intangible” is the theme of our first-ever live auction. The lovely and talented Janet Thornburg will officiate as auctioneer. More information about how and what to donate (a weekend retreat! workshops and manuscript reviews that you and only you can offer! all manner of tiny things!) will be be forthcoming. Email  Annie Kim if you’re already full of ideas and just can’t wait to hear more.

As always, with love and warm regard,
Jen Funk and Ashley Nissler

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wm4Xs4zU5r7PJKI7sw_ixjwRp7eWUvvLcrYJKGYGo-M/edit?gxids=7628

2011 poetry graduate Leslie Contreras Schwartz was recently featured in Anomaly. Read an excerpt of “Echolocation with Self and Body Parts” below:

Echolocation with Self and Body Parts

It’s the eyes slit into walls, half open lids
that tricks. The lips beneath the eyes blue & frost-bitten. 
Corpse pose. But a crowbar jams against cut and quartered,

clicking tongues to find the jigsaw of other parts.
A foot in the door, a silent wrenching turning beneath the ground.
Nearing exhaustion, slit eyes with lids half closing. Half breathing.

Feeling for the one other body part, a hand, a rib, a foot, 
a labia at a time. Where are you, the inner thigh calls to vastus lateralis.
Furrows of corpse flower, quartered and twinned yet firm against cuts & crowbar.

A jaw’s gotten free and is having dinner with the dandelions. 
Behind the supper party, a knee and a femur knock on the door
with cracked walls, shutters half open. Let us back in.

Read the rest of this poem, as well as another, here: https://anmly.org/ap32/leslie-contreras-schwartz/