Poetry faculty member and alumnus Daniel Tobin was recently featured in Berfrois. Read an excerpt from “At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin” below:

At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin

Let the inhabitants of the rock sing…
Isaiah, 42:1

(Current)

In this river’s perpetual haste I am already always
arrived, always already departed, the constant
wanderer among the hosts of different worlds,

arrow and mark, the course through which I make
things to make themselves, everything irreversible,
the syntax in the enzyme’s shape, the atom’s charges

composing from within into a grammar of things—
autocatalysis of particle into molecule into cell
until the eyes form the way swirls form in water,

patterns risen out of patterns, until the patterns
desire to know. This sweeping out of savannahs,
over continents, across steppes—their driven waves—

attests the spur: my own long indigent venture on.
Take this one with his kit-box, his tools, the pressed
moons of bread he keeps to offer Mass, he’s shuttled

from Auvergne to Egypt, Sussex to Belgacoum,
has barged the Huang-ho, mule-trained the Gobi,
yet he knows all of space “is a veil without a seam.”

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.berfrois.com/2021/01/from-at-the-grave-of-teilhard-de-chardin-by-daniel-tobin/

2019 fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in Craft Literary. Read an excerpt of Candace’s essay below:

Blood and Agency in Raven Leilani’s LUSTER

Raven Leilani’s Luster is a craft and theme kaleidoscope, every turned page yielding a new configuration of angles and juxtapositions. What happens in this novel—twenty-three year old Edie, a Black woman artist manquée working slackly in low-level publishing, meets art conservator Eric, a middle-aged married white man from Milwaukee, who is in a newly open marriage; this leads to an enduring collision between Edie, Eric’s staggeringly competent coroner wife (also white) Rebecca, and their adopted Black tween daughter, Akila—is certainly compelling, but the plot is spun within a holographic and deeply palpable complexity of craft.

The phrase craft kaleidoscope refers not just to aesthetic pleasure for the reader, but to the novel’s interrelatedness of elements: how they work together to set the story in its societal, intersectional moment.

Blood runs through these pages, and is also an elemental commonality of the human condition. Leilani’s repeated motif/extended metaphor of blood is also an insistence of the bodily sovereignty and integrity of African Americans, who are surrounded by a culture that refuses to acknowledge and effectively dismantle systemic racism. Black people die every day from structural racism as carried out by police who mistake shower heads for guns and health practitioners who minimize and dismiss Black people’s symptoms. Racism suppresses Black people’s opportunities to succeed in realms of education, the workplace, media representation, and housing, to name a few.

I could have written about the use of vocation as a tool for characterization and character arc, because Luster is a novel about first-person narrator Edie’s struggle to come into herself as an artist, in a world with a dearth of Black women artists; or about the ways she interrogates being mothered and mothering inside but mostly outside of biological connections, because Luster interrogates mothering (and to a lesser degree, fathering) through various lenses as a verb. I could have focused on the novel’s intersections of sex, violence, consent, and race as a twain-fest of both the depiction of the Jungian shadow of characters and society, and an obdurate middle finger to respectability politics; or about Edie’s enduring difficulty with straightforwardly seeing herself in reflective surfaces as a metaphor for the ways people are seen or unseen in society based on levels of privilege, and the way humans internalize that. I could have analyzed the way Leilani deploys the run-on sentence as a way to strap the reader into various roller coasters of intensity; transitions between current action and retrospective, gimlet-eyed paeans to Edie’s parents and first lover; or her depictions of women’s bodies gleefully inclusive of bowel disorders, rabid horniness, miscarriage, bad breath, and tauntingly unsating masturbation.

This turning of Luster’s various facets to the light reveals the novel as a rare Hope Diamond–level thing, wrought of the earth’s pressures, cut and polished with precision, talent, and confident, merciless aplomb. And it’s most definitely a blood diamond. Not because Leilani produced it immorally, but because the immorality is not optional. It is inextricable from the world her characters are born into, our world, latticed with systems that cosset white people and torture and kill people of color.

And still, we humans love, desire, ache, and bleed across the lines that seek to pen us apart.

Read this piece in its entirety here: https://www.craftliterary.com/2021/01/26/blood-agency-luster-candace-walsh/

“Self-Therapy,” a poem by 2015 graduate Fay Dillof, was recently featured in Rattle. Read an excerpt below:

Self-Therapy

What is unearned depression? I ask a client who, wishing 
he understood why he’s feeling down, uses the phrase.

Not that he actually wants there to be a reason—
some life-wrecking event—it’s just 

without one, I feel so shallow, he says.
Should I tell him about my friend who, after round three 

of chemo, said I like Sinead O’Connor and Tupac too but not
looking like them? 

Should I ask What’s shallow v. deep?
We’re in my office where a book’s title declares All Parts Are Welcome.

An angry part that spent Saturday in the dark living room, bitching. 
A thin-skinned part, lickety-split at feeling left out.

Read the rest of this poem (and hear Dillof read it) here: https://www.rattle.com/self-therapy-by-fay-dillof/

Katherine Rooks, a 2016 fiction graduate, was recently featured in the Portland Review. Read an excerpt of “Slow Leak” below:

Slow Leak

For the past thirteen days I’ve been sleeping in the canoe hanging in our garage. The canoe is aluminum and wider than it is high, but still a canoe: a raised middle seam, two plank seats, and bars bracing the center. It’s suspended from the ceiling by pulleys, tied off so it dangles about a foot above the cracked cement floor. Our house is only seventeen years old, but it was constructed from shabby materials and so the floor’s cracked prematurely. I’ve confined myself out here to keep from contaminating my children with my sadness, indecision, existential crisis—whatnot.

It’s a harebrained idea, but literally, it’s all I’ve got. At least that’s the case I made to my family for why I’m out here in the garage when our perfectly good house is just steps away. My shrink said that if you can get a person through the first ninety days following a suicide attempt, it’s statistically remote that they’ll try again. 

Of course, our insurance only covered three days of inpatient care, which is why I’m out here on my own recognizance with seventy-four days still to go. 

Eating is one of the many logistical problems this arrangement causes. I don’t want to come inside and put myself back at the table and so my kids have been taking turns bringing me food. Earlier tonight, Zack, my oldest, came out with a glass of milk, gingersnaps he’d baked himself, and his headlamp from camp so I could see what I’m doing out here. Zack’s like that, quiet, so I think he’s zoned out but then he’ll do something unexpected and I’ll see that he’s been paying rapt attention. 

“Are you trying to get me fat?” I said, reaching for the cookies. “Dad help?”

“Made’m myself,” he beamed. He’s always been a good cook. When the boys were little I used to joke that we baked for sport. 

We used to do a lot of things for sport, David and I, before the kids, before the routine of being full-time working parents, mortgage holders, and weekend lawn mowers. Our neighbors, Dahlia and Steve, still come and go with exhausting regularity. Dahlia’s always exhorting us to get out there and keep exploring new things, but we just barely seem to make it to work, school, the grocery store, and home again. David says, “It’s enough.” 

It is enough: two kids, a home, friends, family—it’s everything I thought I wanted—but I didn’t think a life so full would feel so small, so pointless in the larger scheme of things. What’s worse is that David thinks everything is great—fine, at least. “But you’re the assistant manager now,” he said the last time I brought this up, roughly four weeks ago. 

If you’re looking for a cause—I am—his actions and words don’t seem like enough to have pushed me over the edge. 

My fear, and it appears justified, was that there was no one BIG thing. It’s not that I’m suppressing some major psychological issue that caused me to— 

Okay, let’s talk about that for a minute. I mean, yes, I slit my wrists, but—c’mon, I picked the least promising way possible to kill myself. I know the statistics on efficacy. “If I really wanted to kill myself I would have put a shotgun to my head,” I told my doctor. “That’s ninety-nine percent effective.” The way I chose only works roughly six percent of the time. 

Obviously, I didn’t mean it. 

I have always wondered what would push a person right over the edge. 

Read this piece in its entirety here: http://portlandreview.org/slow-leak/

Fiction faculty member Caitlin Horrocks was recently interviewed for LitHub about her new short story collection, Life Among the Terranauts. Read an excerpt of the interview below:

JC: You’ve noted that once you told a former writing instructor you were writing about “People held hostage by the circumstances of their lives.” Are you still inspired by that perspective?

CH:  I suppose I am, but the more I’ve thought about the line, the more meaningless it is. I mean, who isn’t held hostage by the circumstances of their lives? Even when those circumstances are favorable, we’re so shaped by them that they affect our sense of what is and isn’t possible or desirable in life. Even when someone’s material circumstances would allow them to safely pursue a different kind of life, their circumstances might keep them from recognizing that or wanting to.

As a parent, I’m terrifyingly aware of how responsible I am for shaping my child’s sense of what is normal, or desirable, or achievable. Maybe one difference between the stories I was writing when I first said that, and more recent stories, is that those earlier protagonists were struggling to survive, to jump to the next rock in the river and not drown. Currently I’m interested in how people decide what direction to leap in, what blend of imagination or desperation prompts someone to either try to cross the river, or to stay put. Do we stay or go, and how do we imagine what might come next?

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/caitlin-horrocks-on-life-in-michigan-the-love-of-sleep-and-novels-vs-short-stories/