Helena Fox’s novel HOW IT FEELS TO FLOAT was selected as the winner in the Young Adult Fiction category for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award. The awards celebrate outstanding literary talent in Australia and the valuable contribution Australian writing makes to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life.
Look at Pictures, Illustrations, Charts, and Graphs 1 Projected on the wall, a map, each school a dot. Colored in codes of the standardized test: there’s basic, taxi-yellowed; proficient, advanced, the colors of wealth. But not my school nor each nearby. In our neighbor- hoods, fire burns, blood pools: below basic, far below basic. 2 At year’s start, the principal talks of who we serve, and who we fail. As always, numbers: far below basic, below, below the tip of the iceberg, metaphorical, blue, in her PowerPoint. This is not, unlike half our staff, new. But then she tapes up photographs on a blank, white board. Shows: This boy, jail. This, expelled. This boy just gone, to where, don’t know. So by the end, it’s nearly half our Black male students. They gaze at us from shadowed portraits, flattened to grainy gray. 3 The young white man presenting has a passion I could squeeze into a drinking glass. He says, For Black students, this is the worst place in the state to get an education. Now I need that drink, its sunshine wedge, to squeeze into the low and fizzing whisper of a G & T, to touch, to eye nothing but glass between my hands, here, where color decides. 4 Some smile, but most practice the shape of hardened mouths and eyes. These boys are gone. We let them down. It’s quick: I start to cry and by the end, I’m shaking, sobs while paisley tissue packs pass round to my sweating hands. How deep, I wonder (don’t ask), will this water get? Far below the iceberg’s metaphor, far past the clink of ice, I see films of the ocean floor I showed my kids, who tried to love nothing, but loved the glow of creatures alive at ocean’s depths. The water’s color, though really none, can reflect blue, brown, or green. If you go deep, its hue looks black. In science, they learn black’s no color. Seep of color’s absence. These boys, lost, are failed and failing. What shade is this disaster, then, what color our failure’s cost?
Poetry faculty member Matthew Olzmann was recently featured in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt of “Fine. I give up. There’s no such thing as trees.” below:
Fine. I give up. There’s no such thing as trees.
You make the two-hour drive back to Marquette for the holiday. At dinner, grandpa asks, “Have you heard the truth about trees?” And you say, “What truth about trees?” And he says, “There’s no such thing as trees; the government replaced them with surveillance machines that look like elms and poplars, but they’re actually highly advanced reconnaissance systems put in place to monitor our thoughts.” And you say, “That’s ridiculous.” And he says, “That’s what they want you to believe.” And you say, “Not everything on the internet is true.” And he says, “That’s what they want you to believe.” And you say, “Not everything is a conspiracy.” And he says, “Just keep on swallowing what they’re feeding you, my dumb little child.” And you say, “I don’t have to listen to this bullshit.” And he says, “Spoken like a loyal pawn of the establishment!” Aunt Beatrice stabs the honey baked ham with her fork but doesn’t eat anything. Uncle Nathan pushes the mashed potatoes from one side of the plate to the other. Buddy asks, “Is it cool if I go check the score of the Packers’ game?” Everyone just stares at him. The dog whimpers under the table. Then grandpa says, “They’re probably listening to us right now.” Buddy says, “Who’s listening to us, the Packers?” Grandpa looks at your mom, and says, “You sure didn’t raise a very bright one here, did you?” And you leap to Buddy’s defense, like you always have, and say, “That is uncalled for, Grandpa. You need to apologize.” And mom says, “Let’s all just calm down a little.” And grandpa says, “How can I be calm when they’ve stolen my liberty?” And you say, “Who has stolen your liberty?” And he says, “Don’t even pretend you don’t know about Obama and what he’s doing to the trees.” And you say, “Obama isn’t even president anymore.” And he says, “That’s what they want you to believe.” And you say, “I’m going outside to smoke.” And mom says, “You’re not going anywhere. We’re not finished with dinner. Can we please just have one nice dinner together? Just one normal dinner as a normal family?” but you push away from the table and head for the door without even grabbing your coat. And grandpa says, “Let him go. The deep state has gotten to him. We’ll have to knock him out later if we want to extract the microchip.” And you close the door behind you, but not before hearing Aunt Bethany saying, “What the fuck?” and Uncle Joseph saying, “This family, I swear to God,” and mom saying, “I spent all day on this casserole,” and grandpa saying, “That’s what they want you to believe.” The door closes. It’s colder outside than you imagined.
Read this piece in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-5-matthew-olzmann/
Fiction alum Candace Walsh was recently featured in Entropy Magazine. Read an excerpt of “The Birds: Little Birds” below:
The Birds: Little Birds
Before we were told to avoid air travel, but after the lines at Costco were thirty people deep, the house finches chose our ledge.
Through the window I saw one brindled dun and gray, cream-rimed at her wing’s scallops and striped breast, her mate the same but red-capped and cloaked. Tightly-locused hopping on their splinter-fine feet. Heads domed and darting. My hands washed the dishes with acorn-scented soap. My winter ears drank in their susurrating chirps.
We’d lived in the house less than a year. I thought, it’s lovely to be doing the dishes with a view of a little side porch with a pitched roof, boards painted gray and white with birds to match, our narrow muddy driveway, and beyond that, a grassy field.
* * *
Before there were cases in more than eight states, but after I mixed up a batch of aloe and vodka hand sanitizer because Purell was sold out, I flew to a conference after Helen said, I’m only gonna say it once. I think you should stay home.
Of course I went anyway. She’s the cautious one, I’m the queen of cockamamie schemes. I am the gas and she is the brake. Sometimes I get to bring us someplace far and fast. Sometimes she shuts it all down. Mostly we glide and lurch and rev our way through.
I returned on a Sunday morning red-eye. As always, my absence had sparked Helen’s drive for home improvement in ways my presence dulled.
I painted the mailbox, she said, as if she’d merely cloaked the metal thing with spray paint instead of applying her trompe l’oeil talent and toil to it. She transformed the flat-bottomed metal canister into a mini version of our house: white siding, smoke-gray shutters and window boxes, charcoal-shingled roof.
I imagined her standing out beside it last week in the tall ochre nudged by spring green shoots, as intermittent cars drove by too fast, wearing a baseball hat to thwart the wind’s reckless quest to flop her pewter hair over squinting blue eyes, paint brush in one of her sturdy-fingered hands, palette in the other.
“I love it.” I hugged her. “I’m sorry you stood out in the cold, though.”
“Silly. I unscrewed it from the post and painted it in my studio.”
“So handy,” I said, and she smiled, sun glinting off her right canine.
I went to bed without showering off the air travel taint. When she got in our bed beside me, our lungs quickened and our blood warmed and fluxed. Our bodies were quick to notch us together, slow and then fast, bringing me the last lengths home.
Read this piece in its entirety here: https://entropymag.org/the-birds-little-birds/
Leah De Forest, a 2020 fiction graduate, was recently featured in Bodega. Read an excerpt of “Gifts” below:
Gifts
Sit up straight. Chew carefully. Today is the day you’re meeting them—the family who read about you on a bulletin board and offered to help. They have a long low house designed by an architect (him). Angular windows and muted colors. She, the mother, has styled gray hair and namelessly expensive clothes.
Natural fibers.
Steam-crisp vegetables.
Multigrain bread.
You are eating a salad sandwich, full of crunchy things and juices that gather in the corners of your mouth. Don’t worry, they say. The mayo is homemade.
Today you’re meeting two of them—the mother, Laura, and the youngest daughter, Fi (pronounced fee, short for Aoife, which they pronounce ay-oh-fee). Fi is 14, a year younger than you. You sit in the open-plan promontory of their dining room, which is just off the kitchen, which looks out to the block of nearly-rural land that they live on. Low white-tape fences line the driveway. On the way in your social worker explained that these were electrified, to keep the horses out.
Horses. This close to the suburbs.
They ask you about nothing much. School (you’re good at it). Where you’re living right now (a group home). You swallow hard and dab your mouth and chew the best you can. They are kind. Their house is beautiful, the light clean in a way you’ve never lived before. Laura works at a school and Fi’s three older siblings all have, or are working towards, college degrees. Fi is funny and friendly and has a quick compact smile.
You’re excited by them—by the prospect of them. Life there feels peaceful and settled and smart. No more wrong-brand-name T-shirts or sweaters. In the car afterwards the social worker asks you how it went and you say it was good (you don’t know yet that you’re supposed to say it went well).
At night in your bunk bed you imagine yourself living a shiny life with this new family, the Gardners.
Read the story in its entirety here: http://www.bodegamag.com/articles/509-gifts
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)
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/
Poetry faculty member Martha Rhodes was recently featured in the Kenyon Review Online. Read an excerpt of “Banishment” below:
Banishment
From the house barely,
nakedly, burningly driven
into pasture beyond—
bad daughter thrown across acres
without even her mother’s shawls
and pillows. Where to sleep where
hopping things won’t hop and nest
in her hair—why thrown out,
why not him too? All we did
was kiss—a small shallow kiss.
Read the poem in its entirety (and an additional poem, “Inconsolable”) here: https://kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2020-novdec/selections/martha-rhodes-763879/
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/
“Tangible,” a short story by 2018 fiction alum Gerry Stanek, recently appeared in the LEON Literary Review. Read an excerpt below:
Tangible
There was no light at the tracks behind the A&P, and a distant thud compressed and pulsed in predawn air. His glasses were spotted with mist but made the world clearer for cobalt eyes. Strained eyes, bloodshot. A flask hid corn whiskey in his jacket, a container filled from a paint spattered toolshed bucket. He brewed the corn’s offspring himself—just a sharp wince in the glass now, its purpose as clear as the liquid itself.
Some coal train howled in the distance, a discordant burst contorted by the night. The footbridge at the West Branch was oxidized, suspended over a current of burnt-orange sulfur-laden water—dark water, mysterious, like the nameless thud that assaulted his ears. After the bridge, a gravel outlay around the tracks, where he stepped between the rails and turned northward.
The railroad ties were equidistant, and he found a rhythm, an assured cadence. His father’s house was only a hundred yards or so from these tracks, and in younger years he waited to see pennies crushed by the passing heft of steel, oil, coal, and steam, trains from the Peacock & Bellefonte coal yard on the south end of town.
Across the West Branch, the Taylors had a bakery. Four brown and cream-colored trucks were lined up and silent for another hour or so, though the smell of fresh bread beckoned him like the misty streetlights that stood as distant sentries. Even here, beyond the roof of the shirt factory, over blocks and streets that twisted around the building, the atmosphere held the bread’s odor like a vice, so that it might not diffuse. Something resembling warm homes and filled bellies covered that section of town like a comfortable blanket.
Except for a crescent wrench and rag in the back pocket, his jeans were free of any encumbrance that might hold value or buy fresh bread. There were flour and lard at home, but his own bread was not so pungent. The thought poked him, but he breathed and emptied his mind to consider his pace; at some point years ago, he’d determined that tangible things like distance were easy to ponder.
With all the steps he might count in twenty minutes, the town was behind him.
In five minutes more, he saw the Goat Farm in quiet fog. The roadside tavern, which was not a farm at all, had shouted at the mountains a few hours before. The same bodies that hollered and fought and cursed at the bar might have moved on these same tracks, then, in a staggered homeward journey.
Another gravel outlay, this one higher and steeper than what was nearer to the town, bordered the tracks, and his boots crunched on the stone. The tracks climbed and twisted—lost altitude and rose again—to the north of Barnesboro, so that the Goat Farm lay below him, next to the Barnesboro-Emeigh road and on a lower ridge a quarter mile away. Hills rolled to the east so that one might see for fifty miles, but that would require daylight and clear skies. Sunshine was a rare commodity, and he had once tallied two-hundred and forty-seven cloudy days in a notebook, though he couldn’t remember the year in which he had counted those gray domes.
Dead goldenrod rustled and pulsed as a tumultuous sea below the tracks; the field would leave burrs on his jeans, and the dust of rotted milkweed would fall beneath him in this season before the snow starts. Sparrows slept and dreamt of daylight and a writhing breakfast. A startled deer sprinted at his left with the first step off the railroad bed, but he only glimpsed a white tail—he listened to the animal’s hurried, muddy exit. The deer startled him, and yet he had expected it as a matter of memory. The loud flutter of a grouse’s wings would do the same; the grouse were bound to leave hemlock perches, and the speedy hammer of wing against air always rendered a shock, even as he anticipated it.
The field gave way behind the bar, to hardened uneven clay, to frozen tire tracks and the muted glare of the Goat Farm’s rear windows. Long before, he had guessed that the structure was just over fifty-five feet long—he trusted his own power in estimating such things. A window waited on each end of the bar, and glass exploded as he hammered the crescent wrench through the one on the right. An oily rag around the wrench muted the noise, though he didn’t expect that anyone was on the premises.
The same instrument cleared shards from the window frame, so that he might pull himself into a cramped space that held a toilet and rusty sink. He set his hands on the back of the crusty commode and climbed down to the urine-soaked floor. A door that would cover a man’s midsection swung between the toilet and the bar, and a lightbulb, strung lifeless on brown lampcord, would, during business hours, advertise place and purpose to the Goat Farm’s yammering patrons.
Behind the bar he lifted a bottle of beer from a case on a shelf, searched for the shape of the opener with his hand and found it nailed near the money drawer. Its Coca-Cola logo was clear to his fingertips. Foam spilled over the top of the bottle after a short hiss. He wiped his hand on the jeans and perched on the bartender’s stool. The beer pinched and soaked and took his breath away to drowning, but he guzzled it quickly. A loud belch rumbled, and he dropped the empty bottle at his feet to contemplate the black room. He reached for a second bottle.
In another hour, he walked back to the toilet’s window and pulled himself toward hedging daylight. A gray hue glowed and made the fog thicker so that it hovered with odd shadows. His tongue felt heavy and he spat at the ground before reentering the goldenrod. The tracks were above him, but he pushed downward into woods and underbrush that lay beyond the field. The road was close to him, then. If a car passed, he would hear the shimmer of tires, but there was only his breath and the crack of branches beneath ferns in the damp ravine. He would not risk the road, though his own reasons for avoiding it were vague.
Read the story in its entirety here: http://leonliteraryreview.com/issue-5-gerry-stanek/
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:
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/
Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.