Fiction faculty member Peter Orner, along with 2020 fiction graduate Alberto Reyes Morgan, recently discussed “Luvina,” by Juan Rulfo, on Texas Public Radio.

Orner also recently wrote for The Believer. Read an excerpt of “Notes in the Margin (Part V)” below:

Notes in the Margin (Part V)

Robinson

It’s another scene at the kitchen table in a book of kitchen-table scenes. Morning after morning, night after night, the three of them gather at the kitchen table. I don’t have the novel here. It’s January 2020 and I’m on a bus in New Hampshire, heading home after a funeral. 

Some books you don’t need to hold to read. 

Marilynne Robinson’s Home. A reader might be forgiven if the kitchen scenes jumble in memory. But the one I am thinking of is unusual because it breaks a certain established pattern and it’s only, if I remember, fifty or sixty pages into the novel. Glory, her brother Jack, and their father, Reverend Boughton, are all at the kitchen table in Gilead. Jack hasn’t been home very long. Maybe a week at this point. 

Yet after twenty years (the amount of time Ulysses was away from Ithaca), heis, finally, home. Jack is no Ulysses. He’s been an ordinary failure, mostly down in St. Louis. I’m not sure calling him “prodigal” would be accurate. In my dim recollection of the parable, the prodigal son squanders his inheritance. Though it depends on how you define inheritance: it’s clear that Jack doesn’t have much to squander, at least in a material sense. Brains and charisma, sure, but these he’s still got, even in his current ragged state. 

Jack is someone—there are so many—who, once he stumbled, wasn’t able to stop falling down. Glory, too, has limped home. She hasn’t done such a bang-up job out in this misnomer of a real world, either. They’re a family of eight children. The other six are scattered throughout the Midwest, enjoying varying degrees of prosperity. They’ve got kids, jobs, busy lives. Teddy’s a doctor. The others, I forget, but they’re doing better than all right. Glory, though a dedicated teacher, is childless. Her engagement has fallen through. The guy turned out to be a cad. We’re in Iowa during the Eisenhower administration. It makes sense, a spinster daughter returning home to care for her aging father. 

So we know why Glory’s come back. But what about Jack? Glory and Jack’s mother died a few years earlier. On the long list of ways in which Jack’s let down the family: he didn’t turn up at her funeral. I can understand it. A funeral’s a tough way to make a reentrance. But why has he now reappeared in Gilead? And after all these years? I’m not sure we ever get an entirely straight answer, and for this I’m grateful. I wonder if there just comes a time, in all our lives, when we wash up at the only door that will open to us. 

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://believermag.com/notes-in-the-margin-part-v/

JOYLAND recently published “Family Ledger,” an excerpt of a novel-in-progress by 2009 fiction graduate Tommy Kim. Read an excerpt of “Family Ledger” below:

Family Ledger

She had not been invited to the wedding, but decorum—which was really nothing more than a mask for frailty and fear—would not stop her from attending. This was her niece after all, her deceased brother’s daughter whose choice in husband, if anyone with common sense examined this misadventure, was made out of grief and panic. It was not so much that he was not Korean—he was American—it was that he had not been vetted through Suk Ja’s scrupulous methods for determining the worthiness of a mate. No matter. This child still inherited the love Suk Ja had for her brother, and she was required to attend this wedding to provide the highest offering of love for the living and the dead. That was how important this wedding was—rotted sapling of a niece notwithstanding.

Suk Ja sat reading her NIV bible at the kitchen table. Her son, who was a groomsman for Janet’s wedding, appeared in the kitchen wearing his suit. 

“I’m going early,” he said. 

“Of course you are going early,” she said. “Being a member of the wedding party is quite the responsibility, especially when trying to corral the Kang women into their pens.”

He sat across from Suk Ja. His leather shoes squeaked.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” he said.

“And I am supposed to supply you with these elusive words?” she said.

Her son looked upon her in his fragile way. How the boy had been lavished with ill-treatment by his father, that coward who was now living in New York with his new bride, although Suk Ja and he had divorced some 15 years ago. It was unfortunate, the tendencies one inherits from one’s parents. In his embarrassingly earnest way, the boy plodded toward the door with his usual preoccupations—what was that boy always thinking about that was not about now?

“Stand up straight,” she said. “The suit makes you look short.”

“Call me if you need anything,” he said.

“Don’t play with such false charity,” she said. 

“Why do you always…” he said, trying in his feeble way to place the perfect word onto his lips. 

“Please, tell me,” she said. “Why do I always what? Tolerate mistreatment from my family?” 

“None of this is my fault,” he said.

“Be specific when you speak. What is ‘this?’ And you are slouching again. Up,” she said, pushing out her chest. “You are now twenty-one. There are no excuses for poor posture or your roundabout talking. You are a man now. Go straight.”

“Do you want me to choose between you and Janet?” he said. “Being offered such a choice really reflects my great upbringing.”

“Again with your refusal to accept responsibility. You are not offered anything. You are supposed to take,” she said. “Just go.”

She said this as if to hurry and immerse herself back in the biblical texts, a tendency to wholly be inside of the moment, ignoring the grievances of the past or the causal nature of the future. According to her sisters, Suk Ja struggled with understanding that this moment actually had a consequence for a time later in life, a habit of disregard which was partly to blame for her ban from the wedding. Oh Janet, her innocent niece—she knew that Suk Ja’s three older sisters would employ lupine tactics to perform properly at the wedding, but Suk Ja would not play such games and would not hesitate to elevate a disagreement on seating arrangements into global nuclear warfare. The glowering of these feckless siblings would not be ignored, and each of their actions would be responded to with fair and equal force. It was not her fault she would not submit to the gaming of her sisters. In any case, Suk Ja would never lose. 

When her son left, she pulled the pictures of her brother’s high school graduation out from the shoebox under her bed. Such handsome cheekbones. The prepossessing face that had been eroded by age and sickness. The last month of his life had been especially difficult as his cheeks, bloated from dialysis, submerged his princely eyes into the yellow folds of jaundice. Oh the sisters and their meddling! It was not Suk Ja’s fault that her brother loved her the most. But of course they poisoned her niece’s thoughts and spread rumors about Suk Ja. When her brother’s wife died ten years before his own death, Janet had been vulnerable to the influence of the sisters, who all vied with one another to take over as Janet’s mother figure. How she missed her lovely brother! The suffering he would have endured knowing his little sister was mistreated by the others.  Hidden at the bottom of the shoebox was a thick envelope. Inside were the green striations of cash she would give to her niece.

She could easily persuade her oldest sister to disclose the location of the wedding. For good measure, Suk Ja revisited her favorite section of Psalms: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”

She quickly changed out of her clothing. She had stopped wearing a bra after her double mastectomy.  These old sutures angled downward like closed, benevolent eyes. By now the scars were just another marker of loss. She had lost count of all that had disappeared in her life. Better to live now than wait for possibilities later, as possibilities were the futile wishes of the foolish. Blink and another thing gone. She threw on the pink and blue hanbok dress she had worn for her son’s dol celebration twenty years ago. In the last moments of her brother’s life, she’d caressed his stubbled cheeks and promised she would take care of his daughter. This promise was a responsibility that none of the sisters would defile with their meddling. She would not allow it. 

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://joylandmagazine.com/fiction/family-ledger/

Sarah Cypher, a 2020 fiction graduate, was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “The Lord’s Tower Had Many Fine Rooms,” a selection from a novel-in-progress, below:

The Lord’s Tower Had Many Fine Rooms (excerpt from the novel The Skin and Its Girl)

       I met my father’s house in the scorching green heart of an Oregon summer.
       This house was a sort of enchantment. It had a gambrel roof that softened the crisp eaves and long porch. Inside, it was full of hardworking windows and honey-colored wooden floors. I’d never seen a place so clean. A weekly housekeeping service left the evidence of their work only in the absences: no crumbs, no smears, no laundry. He’d bring me back from the doctor, where people kept taking long tubes of my blood and little chips of my body, and the house’s very air would feel different, as though it had been shaken out and scrubbed; floorboards giving off an amiable gleam as though these rooms were friendly but kept forgetting who we were.
       Only his furniture was old and personal. Its walnut feet were heavy like wolf paws, and under its patina, the vanity table in my second-story bedroom had a rippling muscularity, as though it might go padding through the house at night. He decorated with the family relics, including a pair of antique cannonballs, and also gave me his mother’s crib, telling me only that the row of tiny punctures along the rail were from her teeth. He put it in my room and told me everything here was mine.
       I stood on the mattress at night, feeling the teeth marks in the wood, tracing with my fingers everything I could reach. The caulking around the bottom windowpane was whiter and rougher than the caulking around the top. This room, in other circles, had achieved a kind of fame. But it didn’t feel like the site where he and my mother had wept and shouted until she’d thrown one of the cannonballs through the glass. No, the room felt serene, even stable, like the surface of a frozen pond.
       What to make of this all-of-a-sudden father?
       He had been to medical school, before an accident that had taken his hand. We spent hundreds of cool hours in his basement office, a room that contained most of his life. The desk lamp was on ten hours at a time throughout his dim autumn workdays, spotlighting a coaster on his desk that always held a mug and drowned teabag. The only other place for adults to sit was a deep chair in the corner whose arm held an open New Yorker. His library took up all the other walls—law books and medical texts that stood in beautiful, soldierly ranks around his desk, giving off the smell of glued leather. Despite the susurration of rain and damp earth around the foundation, the air was warm and dry, incubating what felt like all the knowledge in the world.
       My mother helped often, driving down from the hill to show him what to do with the baby he’d amputated so carefully from her life. Even though the court had agreed to her petition for two days’ custody a week, she came late most evenings to help with dinner and end-of-the-day chores, in the hours when my father’s phantom left hand hurt the worst. She moved between the cutting board and steaming pan, her face a mask I’d never seen before. He sat with his wrist on the granite countertop. Propping a small mirror against the flushed skin of his left inner forearm, he stared hard at the reflection of his right hand in the mirror as it played invisible piano keys, trying to convince his brain that its sinister twin hadn’t been crushed under a falling motorcycle and removed.
       Those evenings, even though my mother never set foot beyond the living room, he always turned on the tall lamp in the basement office, the one that held the New Yorker magazine on the chair. Strange, that magazine was the only item in the house that never got put away; or more truly, it was in its right place already. The fold of its binding was almost gone, and its covers were rippled and stiff with age, showing a pastel map called “New Yorkistan.” Its date was December 10, 2001, the week my mother had thrown the cannonball through the upstairs window and moved out.

Read the passage in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-5-sarah-cypher/

“What I Did on the Moon,” a short story by fiction faculty member Dean Bakopoulos, recently appeared in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:

What I Did on the Moon

Well, I had some drinks. I yearned for you. I dug up my father’s bones and watched them float off into the ether. I ignored my infirm mother. I engaged with various shadows. One night, I saw a light flickering flickering below me. I went to a tower I’d crafted from rocks and climbed it so I could better see the light. It was coming from my house. My children were signaling to me. I went to the special crater I use for listening. I listened. I could hear their voices like so much mewing. I whispered into the whisper-hole I made with a blow torch.
            “Are you mewing for me?” I said.
            I waited to hear their voices but they’d fallen asleep.
            I listened to their sleeping all night.
            I had memorized the sounds of their sleeping.
            I could sing along to the smell of their breaths. I knew the scores of their dreams.
            When I was without them, I found the nearest people. It’s what you do after a divorce. There are some people, you think, I’ll sit next to them. You’re healing from a fracture. People see it when you say, Hi, everybody!
            That’s what I would say, sitting down at, say, the Applebee’s bar? Hi, everybody! What are the app specials? Wow, check this out: Mega Mug of Miller! $4.99!
            The Applebee’s often closed early on the Moon. I had to find other resources to expand my circle of friends.
            On the moon, there is a swiping app that assists with this, with finding people to sit with. To sup with. Lo, I stand at the door and swipe. Swipe swipe swipe.
            One woman made me dinner. She made a pasta dish in an overly lemony sauce. I was thirty-eight and having dinner with a woman I’d just met in her cluttered dining room. I kept thinking to myself how notable it was and how her hair was piled on her head, how her earrings shimmied as she grated the parmesan. What notable earrings! They were handmade, she said. Handmade!
            By an artist!
            An artist in Santa Fe!
            It was also probably notable-feeling because I was on the moon. I was skinny that year. I ate my pasta without self-consciousness. I don’t ever want to be that skinny again. Jesus. Yes I do.
            Afterwards, I helped the woman do the dishes. She started the dishwasher and put on Sade and I went for my keys but she asked me to unzip her dress. This. Is. No. Ordinary Love. I hadn’t dated since college, so I asked for clarification.
            All the way, I asked.
            Mm-hmm, she said.
            Is this a request for practical assistance before I leave for the night, I asked, Or is this an invitation to stay?
            Mm-hmm, she said.
            I see, I said, and started to unzip the dress then stopped.
            I’m sorry, I said, if I am ruining the mood but I need clarification. I didn’t ask a yes/no question but you keep saying, mm-hmm.
            Stop talking, she said.

Read the story in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-5-dean-bakopoulos/

Fiction alum Emily Sinclair was recently featured in Barren Magazine. Read an excerpt of “The Mammogram Industrial Complex” below:

The Mammogram Industrial Complex

The patient sits on the exam table. The doctor says, Seatbelt? Sunscreen? Calcium? Good, good, good. Have you had a mammogram within the last year?

Well, I changed health insurance and we moved and so—

Have a mammogram. 

The patient pushes open the door to the mammography center. She sees that it shares space with a doctor’s office that employs one of her ex-husband’s best friends, a man who luxuriates in his perceived charm. The patient re-considers her appointment, but goes in anyway. There is a Keurig in the waiting room, the scent of vanilla espresso faint but distinct.

The patient states her name.

The receptionist says, I love your hair. That big messy look. Sure wish I had it.

The patient has had a stressful day. She has not showered or even really eaten, except almonds. She hands over her insurance card and license.

I’m here for a cancer screening? 

The receptionist winks, her mascaraed lashes dropping like a crow’s wing. I’d make a terrible bartender. Can’t tell how old anyone is. I’d guess you’re about thirty?

The patient is fifty-one. Her hair is greying and there are lines around her eyes and mouth. She points these things out.

Receptionist: Well, you look GREAT.

The patient ignores her, out of politeness. Why do some women find the dishonesty of flattery comforting? She looks away, like a cat.

Love your bag, the receptionist says.

*

Breast as object: The boys of the patient’s youth, trying to cop a feel. What exactly did they want? To squeeze a breast? To simply touch one? What drives the desire for this ductal network? How odd it seemed that a boy would want to suckle at her breast, like a baby. How erotic. Sex is the most inexplicable and mysterious part of any person. She Googles the first boy who ever touched her breast and he’s on YouTube saying he’s “very intentional about building a great workplace culture” and then she finds an obituary for his wife, who died of a rare cancer just weeks ago.

A tech says, I’ll take you back.

To when, the patient thinks, following the tech.

She is told to remove her shirt and bra and put on a warm pink robe.

Take off your robe. Stand here, next to the machine. Lean forward. Raise your arm. Turn your head to the side. I’m going to compress the breast now. I’m sorry. Are you okay? Take a breath and hold it. Now let it go. 

On the screen are white branching ducts leading from the milk-producing lobes to the nipple. The patient does not know how to read the image. Except that there is a small solid circle among the branches.

Read the piece in its entirety here: https://barrenmagazine.com/the-mammogram-industrial-complex/