Fiction faculty member Laura van den Berg was recently interviewed for LitHub. Read an excerpt below:

Karolina Waclawiak: In reading your stories, I get a sense that a lot of your characters are women who feel like they’re ghosts in their own lives. They haven’t quite found their way into their own lives, they haven’t taken traditional paths. It feels in conversation with my character Evelyn’s own journey to navigate alternative life paths and being unsuccessful. I’m curious why you find these kinds of characters interesting to write about? These sort of never-do-wells.

Laura van den Berg: A straight-forward answer would be to say I’m drawn to sources of tension. For a lot of these characters, the story is finding them at moments where they have misperceived something pretty significant about their own reality.

I think we all have moments where something we’ve perceived is revealed as false. And that can be a very destabilizing experience. I was interested in looking at that with these women—in some cases, the misapprehension is destabilizing in a way that is not destructive. In other ways, the misapprehension is more serious or more destructive. What happens when a foundational perspective is upended or disrupted?

KW: It feels like it’s almost an investigation into the ways that we cope. And the lies we construct for ourselves. And not necessarily lies, again, I feel like there are negative connotations to that, but looking at our coping mechanisms and what works for us until it doesn’t is a really interesting way to look at how people move through the world.

Evelyn’s reaching this critical age where she’s constructed ways of coping and moving through her life that felt like, “OK, I can do this. This is functional.” But so much of the way we function is dysfunctional at a certain point. Having an about-face in your life to find healthier coping mechanisms is really difficult. A lot of people don’t do it. This book is about Evelyn facing herself and facing her coping mechanisms and saying, “How do I want to move forward in the next phase of my life, if the ways I’ve moved through the world are really unsustainable in the long-term?”

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/on-writing-a-character-who-confronts-middle-age-and-the-necessity-of-change/

Faculty member Margot Livesey was recently interviewed for LitHub. Read an excerpt below:

SW: Across your work there’s also a great deal of lying about what’s been hidden—characters nesting lies within lies as if testing their consequences. In this novel, one of the lies is a forced one: the police tell the Lang children not to tell anyone about finding the injured boy. What interests you about lies and the people who tell them? 

ML: As a child growing up in Scotland, my Sunday school teacher, Mr. Chisolm, taught me that telling a lie was a terrible sin which would, inevitably, be punished. As an adult, I discovered to my amazement that people could lie with impunity and nothing terrible happened. This did—and does—bewilder me (although, given the current regime, I should have got used to it).  

At the same time, I believe there are essential lies, heroic lies. And I’m very interested in the relationship between secrets and lies. Keeping a secret, however innocent, often seems to require lying.

SW: Finding the boy in the field sets off something for all three Lang siblings—not a bomb but a flower, a desire to solve other mysteries in their lives. Duncan wants to find his birth mother; Matthew wants to find the boy’s assailant; Zoe is searching for someone who truly sees her. Why does proximity to misfortune and death bring such searching to your characters? 

ML: I wanted to explore a central trope of detective fiction—the discovery of the body—from a different angle. In my version the boy recovers but each of the siblings is jolted into a new awareness. A few years ago, I reencountered an old schoolfriend. He described coming home from school one sunny afternoon and finding the body of a woman at the bottom of the garden. Those few moments changed his life, and his account of them made a deep impression on me. Perhaps not everyone would respond this way but my three characters do.  

Read the interview in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/connected-at-the-roots-a-conversation-with-margot-livesey/

“On Interstate 89 North,” a poem by 2014 poetry graduate Kerrin McCadden, was recently featured in Four Way Review. Read an excerpt below:

On Interstate 89 North

I don’t know how close I was. 
I was not paying attention to him

or his raised middle finger, which
he was tired of holding up,

his face lowered out the window at me,
glass down, even though the air 

was freezing in upstate Vermont.
I have sped past, unthinking, it’s true.

I have sped past so many things.
How many miles until I know what I have done

is always the question. For a minute, 
I thought I should be afraid

and watched him in my mirror in case
he sped to catch me. I have sped past and have been 

unthinking so many times I want 
the world to know. Once, a man leaned out 

a passenger window and fired his gun at the sky
as I sped past. One time, a deer jumped 

across my hood, which was accelerating, 
while my son and I belted out, 

Why do you build me up (build me up) 
Buttercup, baby 

just to let me down.
And nothing was the same afterward.

Read the poem in its entirety here: https://fourwayreview.com/on-interstate-89-north-by-kerrin-mccadden/

Mary Bonina, a 1985 poetry graduate, recently wrote an essay for Ovunque Siamo. Read an excerpt of “These Days” below:

These Days

Many things we enjoy and which enrich our lives have been taken away in the last months of stay-at-home orders. Like others, I lament not being able to dine out at new restaurants with best friends and colleagues, not seeing newly released films at the cinema, and viewing featured exhibits or perusing the permanent collection at the MFA and other museums. I am also missing dinners shared with family and friends around our table or theirs, the trip my husband and I were finally going to take to Sicily in June, the hugs from my son when he visits and we have to speak to each other from a distance of yard to porch. And recently, I’ve learned that there is a strong possibility that our August Maine vacation will also be cancelled, since my husband and I would be crossing State lines into the Pine Tree State, and therefore required to quarantine for 14 days in our rented house—definitely not why we head to down east Maine for two weeks every summer.

Because of necessary limitations on social gatherings, I missed the funeral and the comfort of my father’s family, when his sister, my Aunt Marguerite died in a nursing home, after contracting Covid-19, which complicated her already existing health issues.

I miss, too, the writing studio where I diligently work in downtown Boston—much more diligently than I work at home with distractions. I even miss taking the unreliable and crowded MBTA Red Line train over the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston and back several days a week, when I go to work at that  silent communal space, where I can schmooze with other writers at lunchtime in the kitchen, or on a stone bench down the street at Long Wharf on sunny, warm days. I miss the social aspect and the inspiration of going to readings of poetry and prose and celebrating my friends when their new books are released—Zoom readings aren’t the same, although I’m glad some people offer them.

My freelance coaching of writing students has been limited during the days of confinement, but my husband is teaching his university students online two afternoons each week until the semester’s end. When he is not online, he has planning to do and tests and exams to correct, and I try to sit in my home office at my desk researching publishing possibilities for my finished novel, working (rather half-heartedly, to be honest) on editing my new poetry manuscript, or catching up on reading from the pile of books my friends have published in the last couple of years. I go for a run on most warm or warmish days.

But there is one thing I am not missing, something I used to do much more frequently in the past. I have—happily—been going for hikes on trails in the towns  neighboring Cambridge—in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Waltham, Belmont, and venturing to Cape Ann on the North Shore. I love to hike, and it seems that in recent years, my hikes have become fewer and rarely take place in winter or spring. I’ve blamed the New England weather, my husband’s recovery from a knee replacement, and my busy life, for keeping me from hiking, especially in spring. We generally get more social in spring after our dark winters, and so, there are parties, events, and fairs, and shopping for warm weather clothes, and planting gardens, rushing the beach season, or going to baseball games—so much else to take up our time. So hiking has been of late, put off until summer, hiking Maine’s Bold Coast and trails in New Brunswick, Canada, or foraging with my husband for mushrooms in the woods around Concord or in Gloucester.

 

Read the full piece here: https://ovunquesiamoweb.com/covid-19-issue-2/mary-bonina/

Poetry faculty member Daisy Fried recently had a translation featured in Zocalo. Read an excerpt of Baudelaire’s “Paysage” below:

Baudelaire’s “Paysage“

To compose my sexless eclogues, I will
Bed down near the sky like the astrologers
And, neighbor to bell-towers, listen dreamily
To the somber wind-carried hymns.
Chin in hand, high up under the slant roof,
I’ll see the factories’ chatter and singsong,
Their chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city,
And the giant sky dreaming of eternity.

Read the rest of this poem here:

To compose my sexless eclogues, I will
Bed down near the sky like the astrologers
And, neighbor to bell-towers, listen dreamily
To the somber wind-carried hymns.
Chin in hand, high up under the slant roof,
I’ll see the factories’ chatter and singsong,
Their chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city,
And the giant sky dreaming of eternity.

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/07/24/baudelaires-paysage-translation-daisy-fried-poem/