“The Meaning of Air,” an essay by 2016 fiction alum Boyce Upholt, recently appeared in Emergence Magazine. Read an excerpt below:

The Meaning of Air

…THERE ARE PEOPLE, I guess, who regularly regard the air—cloud watchers lying on their backs in the grass, contemplating the meaning of a breeze. I come from a different tradition of nature watching. What I have always wanted is contact. “The solid earth!” as Henry David Thoreau once put it, standing atop a barren mountain. “[T]he actual world!” The material things, the rocks and soils: the dust from which life emerged, to which we will return.

Until recently, the closest I’d come to contemplating the sky was a five-week commitment to sunrise. A few years ago—after the death of my father, after a dismaying US election, amid the final fraying of a six-year relationship—I canoed a thousand miles down the Mississippi River, camping on islands and sandbars. I wanted to be in a landscape that made me feel small, that showed me something bigger. I made it a point to rise before dawn each morning so that I could watch the sky shift from the gray scale of morning twilight to gentle oranges and pinks, until these were overtaken by the spreading blue.

But what was a sunrise? What produced such pastel magic? These were questions I could not answer—questions I did not even think to contemplate.

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://emergencemagazine.org/story/the-meaning-of-air/

2019 fiction alum Lynnette Curtis was recently featured in the High Desert Journal. Read an excerpt of “Lazarus” below:

Mornings that long-ago summer, the sun consumed the sky. The suburban air smelled of hot asphalt and absence. We wore nylon shorts and his-and-her sunhats on our miserable walks. We carried 30-ounce water bottles and our own immeasurable grief.

Along Windmill, the cicadas buzzed. Most of our neighbors remained cocooned inside their cool stucco homes while the two of us sweated and suffered, darting like lizards between patches of shade provided by the occasional palm or purple plum tree.

And then an ancient, stooped man would appear, out on a walk of his own. We would watch in amazement as he drew nearer in his faded dress shoes, shapeless trousers, dark corduroy blazer and derby cap.

This was in July, remember, in Las Vegas.

The old man’s face looked dry as parchment, his expression serene, as though he had acclimated to this harsh desert climate generations ago, or discovered some secret to staying comfortable and eternally alive on this disinterested planet.

We forgot our discomfort—and sometimes even our despair—for a moment, our torsos like overheating engines. We slowed our pace and studied the old man as he shuffled toward us on the sidewalk. His small feet lifted almost imperceptibly with each tiny step, as though he were floating or dancing, without a care in the world.

Read the story in its entirety here: https://highdesertjournal.squarespace.com/lynnette-curtis-lazarus/

2017 poetry alum Amanda Newell recently interviewed fellow 2017 graduate Nomi Stone for Plume. Read an excerpt of their conversation below:

AN: I’m interested in the ways in which your poetry contemplates the relationship between the self and the community and the ways in which community shapes identity. Your first two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (Tupelo Press, 201), both involve a speaker who is welcomed, to some degree, into an “other” community—and in the case of Kill Class, she is observing a military community, but always aware of her difference. This requires a sort of double vision, no?

NS: I love this question of double vision, Amanda. My first two collections of poetry were yes driven by the charge of the insider-outsider position and also questions of identity: in Stranger’s Notebook, although I am Jewish and the daughter of a reform Rabbi, I spent time in a more traditional Jewish community in North Africa to press on the valves of something that I wanted to understand: what is faith, what is ritual, what is belonging, what is relationship to homeland, and why did these questions produce such friction for me? In Kill Class, I was doing my anthropological fieldwork for my dissertation, and I observed some US military pre-deployment training exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages around America to write about war.

Anthropology’s key method for fieldwork is so-called “participant-observation”—and the poems in Kill Class are poems of witness, poems of uneasy participation, and poems of complicity. I am not in the American military (observer) and I write to critique the military (critique); however, I am an American citizen. As such I am entangled (participant). This brings me to your question of  double vision, which paradoxically creates both twofoldness but also sometimes halfness. The so-called “field” was always elsewhere, and I was at its edge, working through self/other, here/there, field/life, work-self/ private-self, where one is perhaps often engaging with both, but sometimes only one at a time, and potentially occluding or sidelining the other.

My new collection of poems in progress, Fieldworkers of the Sublime tries to explode “fieldwork” beyond anthropology, pushing against the binary between Field and Life, and letting being-alive overflow in every direction. It is a book about awe, about fear, and also the ways we are each observers and participants in the sublime (through nature, science, the social world, and intimate life). It is a manuscript about love and my new marriage and queerness and desire and my attempts to overcome my own limits, as well as the thinkers (mostly anthropologists and philosophers) who shape my imagination.

The poems are also populated with marine biologists and octopus dissections, botanists and chanterelle-foragers— and my encounters with scientists and others I’ve become friends with on the island of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland, my wife’s beloved home. But this book is not trying to understand a particular community or a problem the way my other two were: it is instead a bid for an embodied poetics with fewer partitions and more encounters. My poems have become more capacious, letting everything in: the ocean and gooseberries of the island, but also the shopping malls and playgrounds of my suburban childhood—each spangling open through  conversations and memory and dreaming and feeling and loving and reading.

You can read the interview in its entirety here: https://plumepoetry.com/on-queer-poetics-writing-courageously-and-becoming-otherwise-an-interview-with-nomi-stone-by-amanda-newell/

William Burnside, a 2018 poetry graduate, was recently featured in Zocalo Public Square. Read an excerpt of “To Go To Belfast” below:

To Go To Belfast

Whether you’ve boarded from Liverpool or Heysham
or Stranraer, years later the journey is the same
along the Lough at evening, the chimney of the power station

in Kilroot, Carrickfergus Castle, white eiders skimming
the surface of the bay at Carnalea, the oystercatchers at Cultra
piping on the rocks, as you slide past the gantries at the yards

where David and Goliath tower like the spires
of a decayed cathedral. Here’s where I first heard
hexameters of Homer intoned in harsh Ulster accents,

Speak to me, Muse, about the many-sided hero who travelled
far and wide after he sacked the great town of Troy:
many were the cities he visited, the customs he came to know

Here’s where my grandfather built the Titanic.
Here there were two cathedrals rising in opposition
and two stories each told with a certainty dispensed

like a cheap drug, with hatred scribbled on the walls,
King William on his horse, Up the Rebels, to Hell
with the Pope, and one man’s hope was another’s

damnation. How could I not be tempted by the glory
that was Greece, lucidity and sanity, a golden mean between
opposing ills, Athens revered in the words of Pericles?

We are an example to others rather than imitators. Our
administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is
called a democracy. Our laws afford equal justice to all…

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/10/30/william-burnside-belfast-poem/chronicles/poetry/