“Spy,” a poem by poetry alum Noah Stetzer, recently appeared in Waxwing. Read an excerpt below:
Spy
This is the love poem for the boys I knew in seventh grade who I watched close enough to measure the exact amount of wet on their slightly open lips — close enough to count eyelashes as they took secret looks at Playboy magazines I smuggled into school just so I could watch them peek at what we were all supposed to look at…
…My housekeeper when I was old was banished by my friend, the new Prince-Bishop, who alleged that she was more to me than I would say. Devotion, meanwhile, to the loving mind of God made unacceptable the nest of calibrated rings with Earth at the center and a tiny sun in orbit. This, the science of a thousand years, I took in hand to measure by its rule my thought: to set aside the old, ungainly universe, and leave God’s body true to its own motion naked.
I wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha by tattooing the word WRONG across my heart to help me muster the strength I’d need to argue with a world that wanted me to say “hey, y’all!” in a hill-country accent sipping tea under a dogwood in a pink smock smattered with etchings of ivy.
It was wrong of me to stop writing poetry as a second-year college student and to start writing fiction instead. It was wrong of me not to notice that the fiction I was writing was so bad it was blather disguised as essays disguised as fiction.
It was wrong of me to have a baby two years later as a senior in college totally on purpose.
It was not wrong of me to become a waitress in a Greek restaurant to make money to help feed my baby or to work nights and weekends serving middle-aged men vodka martinis with a fat slab of cow. It wasn’t wrong of me to live near my mom and sister so they could help with the baby, and it isn’t wrong of me now to tell you that one night a man in the restaurant offered to fly me to Florida for a weekend getaway. I’ve got a baby, I told him. Bring the baby, he said. I’ve got a husband, I said. Leave the husband at home, the man said.
It was not wrong of me to apply to graduate school after this little incident showed me the extent to which I was wasting my life, though it probably was wrong of me to apply to just to one program because it was near my house. It was wrong of me to try to use writing as a form of escape. It may have been wrong of me to get pregnant with Baby No. 2 before I could accept the program’s offer, and it could have been wrong of me to keep on writing all that bad fiction I was telling you about earlier rather than the poems I really wanted to write…
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-20 19:05:002022-02-25 17:16:45“How I Wrote ‘The Brass Girl Brouhaha,'” by Adrian Blevins (Poetry ’02)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-16 19:55:002022-02-25 17:16:41“The Art of Juggling,” by Dinah Berland (Poetry ’95)
“Wolfy,” a short story by 2018 fiction graduate Andrew Joseph Kane, was recently featured in Grist. Read an excerpt below:
Wolfy
They used to stay on Dune Street when Dani was little, before Wolfy came around, but they were on Ocean now. Farther from the beach. Farther from the fun. Even so, summers in LeFay were mostly normal and good, even if they couldn’t always go out like Dani wanted. Sometimes Gabe would pick them up a pizza at Pizza Fredo, or they’d get some fudge from Jim & Jack’s. But they couldn’t go to the Sea City boardwalk to get frozen custard or funnel cake or cotton candy or anything really. Wolfy wouldn’t last long out there with the flashing lights and the loud sounds and the crazy people from New York City who didn’t understand personal space bubbles and would bump right up to you pushing a stroller or yelling at their cousin. Or their kids would act nasty in line like they’d never waited their turn to go down a waterslide before. Before Wolfy showed up, Dani loved riding the rides and running the boards and hitting the mini-golf through the gorilla’s legs. But now they never left LeFay which didn’t have a boardwalk or motels or other noisy fun like Sea City. Just a couple of roads and some food places and bicycles. But sometimes Dani felt guilty because she liked it wild.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-15 19:42:002022-02-25 17:16:40“Wolfy,” by Andrew Joseph Kane (Fiction ’18)
MY FATHER has collected the most substantial body of fish-based Index of Biotic Integrity data for a watershed of its size anywhere in the world. This is an accomplishment he can claim.
Though there are too many dull, qualifying words inserted between those superlatives — or at least that’s what I think.
He conducts his study in one North Carolina county (the county that’s our home). Every summer, he returns to the same sites he’s visited for decades. He sinks an electroshocker’s probes into the streams and nets the dozens of fish that float from the bottom, stunned.
But I want to describe this as spectacularly as the real thing. He conjures metallic, alchemical slivers. Their upturned bellies flash, surprising — the white of revelation.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-11 17:28:002022-02-25 17:16:39“The Poet and the Scientist,” by Rose McLarney (Poetry ’10)
Mitzi Rapkin: There are some lines in there about mothering and about specifically mothering daughters, and that there are a lot of mothers or mother figures who are scarred by their daughters. There’s a line in there, which is very simple but it’s so powerful, and it says, “Girls are unnerving.”
Anna Solomon: Oh right, I think Vee says that, right? Yes, I think it’s true. I mean, having been a girl and and I think, you know, again, this comes back to power and is it true that girls themselves are scary? I think no, like that they’re out to unnerve? No. I think that is the way we experience girls, even when we’ve been one and believe in them and believe in their power. Still, do we perceive them as scary? I think, yeah.
I mean, think about The Crucible and the ways in which girls have been written and performed across centuries. I don’t feel proud of, but I have felt as a mother now of a daughter and having been a daughter to a mother, like, Oh, yeah, there’s a lot of power in this young woman, and it doesn’t always feel safe. It’s interesting even as I want her to come into her power. It’s really tricky.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-09 13:13:002022-02-25 17:16:38GIRLS CAN BE SCARY: a LitHub interview with Anna Solomon
AN: I’ve been thinking a lot about the title of your latest book, Felon, which was just published last fall. You’ve written a memoir and two previous books of poetry, all of which explore, in their own ways, what it means to be convicted of a felony, what it means to have been incarcerated at a young age and for a long time, and what it means to live in the aftermath of all that—and to have to keep answering for your mistake despite your many professional and creative successes.
In a 2018 essay for The New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/magazine/felon-attorney-crime-yale-law.html], you wrote about coming home from prison and trying to keep quiet about it, “as if,” you wrote, “muteness could save me.” Instead, you found yourself having to tell and retell the very story you said you wanted to erase. What does it mean to you now, to be able to claim that word, “felon,” as the title of your book?
RDB: I’m not sure. The title of the book works with the artwork and the poetry. Juxtaposed with the art, the word felon says something about erasure, about loss, racism. There are levels that I’m hoping to explore.
And then, the poems in the book, the crimes and tragedy and loss and love and all that other stuff, that’s me hoping to reveal the lie of a word like felon. We imagine it characterizes people fully, but it fails. And if people recognize their life in moments of this work, their loves in moments of this work, their family and neighbors, then I’ve succeeded. If you read this work and it all still feels so much like the account of the other, I’ve failed.
CM: Somewhat unintentionally and somewhat intentionally. I always wrote these weird little books as a kid. A family friend and a colleague of my mom was a writer, Susan Ito, who invited me to read a poem I had written as a school assignment at a poetry reading. I think I was nine or 10 and being treated as a legitimate serious writer at that age was a pretty magical thing and I think I was kind of hooked from there. I didn’t take my writing super seriously until I was an undergrad. In my senior year, there was this poetry workshop that I had always wanted to take but was too scared to apply for and finally it was like, I’m goingto graduate…I have nothing left to lose so I’m going to submit some poems and see if I get into it, and I did. I had an opportunity to work with Eleanor Wilner, an incredible poet and teacher, and from there it kept me connected with the work and I continue to do it.
EW: What sort of things were you writing about?
CM: The poem I wrote as a kid was about the Japanese American internment. In the workshop in college, the main text we were reading that semester was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, so like, Greek myth and tragedy, but always I think my poetry has been a lot about identity. It’s something I think about a lot as a person and something I think about as a writer.
EW: Did you Journal as a young person?
CM: I did. I journaled a lot. There are many, many, many diaries sitting on my bookshelf. I journal less now probably because I’m writing in other ways, but yeah, I was sort of a compulsive journaler as an only child with big, big feelings, and yeah, I gotta tell somebody all this stuff and it sure is not going to be my mom and dad.
EW: It’s a really good tool. As a kid, I would journal and I would also ride the bus just to journal; it’s kind of an observational thing.
CM: Yeah, the bus, you see good things on the bus. I have a poem about all the good shit I saw on the bus one day.
EW: You mentioned that identity is a big issue for you. How do you describe your family background?
CM: Well the easiest way to describe me in terms of racial identity is the term Hapa, which is a little fraught and problematic in terms of whether it’s been appropriated from native Hawaiian folks. It’s a term I stopped using over the years, but I’m mixed-race Chinese and Irish. My father is ABC, American Born Chinese, born and raised in Chinatown San Francisco, and my mom’s family background is almost entirely Irish American going back several generations all the way back to Ireland. My mom and I are actually planning to go to Ireland next summer, a trip to the motherland.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2020-06-02 13:57:002022-02-25 17:16:35Carrie Mar (poetry ’13) Interviewed in Eastwind
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