“Withholding Information in Nathan Englander’s ‘Reunion'” by David Saltzman (fiction ’17)

“Withholding Information in Nathan Englander’s ‘Reunion'” by David Saltzman (fiction ’17), published by Craft.

Withholding Information in Nathan Englander’s “Reunion”

As students of fiction, we’re often taught that in crafting a story, the writer should rigidly mete out information, ensuring that a reader is always, without exception, situated as to speaker, scene, and story. When Nathan Englander withholds information, however, what would generally lead to unproductive ambiguity in the hands of lesser writers can instead generate mystery, curiosity, and even narrative momentum.

Instead of viewing ambiguity as unequivocally negative, Englander parcels out isolated details such that readers find themselves suspended—for a word or a paragraph or a page—in the absence of crucial information: speaker, scene, setting. The stuff we’re supposed to put up front often, well, isn’t. The technique tends to manifest as a sense of unease in me, but his prose is so confident that, as a reader, I have faith that what I seek will come in time. When it does, placed precisely in the wake of the mystery created by its absence, it carries more weight than it otherwise could, leaving readers constantly grounded less by specific details than in Englander’s authority. He does this throughout his work, but the short story “Reunion,” in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, contains several instructive examples.

[… continue reading at Craft.]

/by

“Extractions” by Shannon K. Winston (poetry ’18)

“Extractions” by Shannon K. Winston (poetry ’18), published by the Cumberland River Review.

Extractions

Picture this:
me and my mother

on our hands and knees
tearing up an orange

shag carpet
in our old apartment.

Peeling back foam
and mold, we groped

our way to wood.
We’re fixing up the place,

my mother said,
but I was already dreaming

of Paris. Of the men
in Gustave Caillebotte’s

painting Les raboteurs de parquet.

[… continue reading “Extractions” at the Cumberland River Review.]

/by

“The Kitchen” from the new collection WHAT SWEETNESS FROM SALT, by Francine Conley (poetry, ’14)

The Kitchen

“A wise woman puts a grain of sugar into everything she says to a man,

and takes a grain of salt with everything he says to her.”

                                                                                                –Helen Rowland

They showed me how to finger wild carrot blunts,

snip flowered kale leaves, tear the terse from sturdier

stems. The kitchens I knew were womanless; full

of men who cooked, silently, mouths riven enough

to sample sauce or graze. I snuck in, helped them

cut, trim, heft handfuls of severed greens into bowls

covered and ready to simmer.  Shaved frozen

butter into flour, a few splashes of water, careful

not to knead too much or you’ll kill it, then

rimmed wily sides of pans with flattened dough

stabbed by a fork so the apples could breathe

sugar.  I peeled and stripped knots of ginger,

gleaned scallions, sliced them into thin rings

stuck to each other.  Stout, bolder onions startled

tears that filmed and blurred everything I saw. 

I guarded myself cutting meat, for how I sliced

through a thumb once.  There was the bled wound

a man mended with the same fat needle and thread

he used to stitch a turkey.  Nights were bottomless,

boiling pots of water; days: pans seared with oil,

peppers sautéed crimson.  Years honeyed into

turnip torment; the past a splash of vinegar

that worried beets from plum to sanguine,

potatoes yellowed into curry, anise clumps. 

To cook with men was to learn how to season

the world into something we’d consume, and we

did.  Quickly.  I loved the exquisite, pinioned forms

of their hostile hands, scarred fingers that pinched

saffron, gripped iron skillets scorched with living. 

I tasted everything.  There was one who handled

lit flames and fired garlic into chords of music I’d

never forget.  A mound of ripe tomatoes we stacked

into a tower leaning crimson, on the verge of falling.

. 

/by

“Insomnia Poem” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09)

“Insomnia Poem” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09), published by Waxwing Literary Journal.

Insomnia Poem

Awake beneath an onyx sky you crack the blinds, inhale
night’s fading ink. The air is your mother’s breath on your skin,
the only steeple is the church of palms in the neighbor’s yard

dropping vermilion fruit on the grass. On another coast,
everyone you know is sleeping except for a boy you love.

[… continue reading “Insomnia Poem” at Waxwing.]

/by

Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19) is currently a Stegner Fellow (2019-2021)

Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19)

Unique among writing programs, Stanford offers ten two-year Wallace Stegner fellowships each year, five in fiction and five in poetry. All the fellows in each genre convene weekly in a 3-hour workshop with faculty For the 2019-2021 Fellowship, Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19) joins a legacy of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson alumni and faculty. Former Stegner Fellows include: Chiyuma Elliott (poetry ’10), Helen Hooper (fiction ’09), Keith Ekiss (poetry ’12) as well as several writers who later became faculty members, including Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Lan Samantha Chang, Stacey D’Erasmo, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Alan Shapiro and Monica Youn.

Congratulations, Hieu!

[Learn more about the 2019-2021 Stegner Fellows.]

/by

“Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts” by Meghan O’Rourke (poetry ’05)

“Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts,” an article by Meghan O’Rourke (poetry ’05), published by The Atlantic.

Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts

In the fall of 1997, after I graduated from college, I began experiencing what I called “electric shocks”—tiny stabbing sensations that flickered over my legs and arms every morning. They were so extreme that as I walked to work from my East Village basement apartment, I often had to stop on Ninth Street and rub my legs against a parking meter, or else my muscles would begin twitching and spasming. My doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong—dry skin, he proposed—and eventually the shocks went away. A year later, they returned for a few months, only to go away again just when I couldn’t bear it anymore.

Over the years, the shocks and other strange symptoms—vertigo, fatigue, joint pain, memory problems, tremors—came and went. In 2002, I began waking up every night drenched in sweat, with hives covering my legs. A doctor I consulted thought, based on a test result, that I might have lupus, but I had few other markers of the autoimmune disease. In 2008, when I was 32, doctors identified arthritis in my hips and neck, for which I had surgery and physical therapy. I was also bizarrely exhausted. Nothing was really wrong, the doctors I visited told me; my tests looked fine.

In 2012, I was diagnosed with a relatively mild autoimmune disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Yet despite eating carefully and sleeping well, I was having difficulty functioning, which didn’t make sense to my doctor—or to me. Recalling basic words was often challenging. Teaching a poetry class at Princeton, I found myself talking to the students about “the season that comes after winter, when flowers grow.” I was in near-constant pain, as I wrote in an essay for The New Yorker at the time about living with chronic illness. Yet some part of me thought that perhaps this was what everyone in her mid-30s felt. Pain, exhaustion, a leaden mind.

One chilly December night in 2012, I drove a few colleagues back to Brooklyn after our department holiday party in New Jersey. I looked over at the man sitting next to me—a novelist I’d known for years—and realized that I had no idea who he was. I pondered the problem. I knew I knew him, but who was he? It took an hour to recover the information that he was a friend. At home, I asked my partner, Jim, whether he had ever experienced anything like this. He shook his head. Something was wrong.

[… continue reading at The Atlantic.]

/by

“Writing Racist Characters” by Sea Stachura (fiction ’19)

“Writing Racist Characters,” a critical essay by Sea Stachura (fiction ’19), published by Ploughshares.

Writing Racist Characters

I believe it’s time that white authors, and I include myself among them, tell the stories of our racism. Increasingly, we have written and dialogued about embedded racism and multicultural dynamics in our fiction. We often serve on panels about the tricky nature of writing from perspectives beyond our own, or featuring tips on cultural sensitivity and expansiveness in our storytelling, and while I appreciate what these conversations have brought about, there are uniquely white stories that all of us know intimately, and that we aren’t telling: stories of white people perpetrating racism.

Sociologist Robin DiAngelo writes in White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism that “white people raised in Western society are conditioned into a white supremacist worldview because it is the bedrock of our society and its institutions.” Additionally, she writes, because white people maintain dominance in our society—operating, for example, all major branches of government and major corporations—we are the only ones who can execute our specific breed of racism. Therefore, the stories of people casually and brutally enacting racism are ours to be familiar with.

Our sensitivity to being called racist or associated with racism is likely what chills any storytelling about it. But Toni Morrison long argued for the importance of this sort of storytelling. In her 1992 book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she suggests that authors and literary critics consider “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.” The narratives of racism’s victims, including slaves, have proved invaluable, “but equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.”

Her call is a daring one, even twenty-seven years later, because telling stories in which a protagonist’s racism is the central tension requires, first, that the white author acknowledge and explore their familiarity with racism. The author is responsible for understanding their character’s motivations and worldview, and if the writer can understand this point-of-view, she can’t declare unfamiliarity with it.

A few writers have already begun to tell these stories, not all of them white. “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” by Eudora Welty and “Boys Go to Jupiter” by Danielle Evans are successful in conveying engaging narratives that reveal the protagonist’s racism while neither damning nor apologizing for it. Welty and Evans give the reader fresh eyes with which to see America’s racism and pique an uncomfortable curiosity about its machinations. This speaks to the deeper purpose of literature and to the motivations of these stories: to reflect facets of our world and thus challenge the reader’s assumptions and prejudices. This is work that more of us should be doing.

[… continue reading “Writing Racist Characters” at Ploughshares.]

/by

“Human Technology” by Nomi Stone (poetry ’17)

“Human Technology” by Nomi Stone (poetry ’17), published by Poetry Daily.

Human Technology

Sunlit and dangerous, this country road.
We are follicle and meat and terror and

the machines leave their shells naked on the ground.
One soldier makes a museum in his basement.

Each mannequin in brass, incombustible coats:
I am walking between their blank faces,

their bullets traveling at the speed of sound.

[… continue reading “Human Technology” at Poetry Daily.]

/by

Behind the Byline: Jenn Givhan (poetry ’15) talks to Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09)

Jenn Givhan (poetry ’15) talks to Angela Narciso Torres (poetry ’09) about overhauling the word “mother,” ideas of empathy poetics, and her new poem, “Lila,” in New England Review 40.2.

Behind the Byline

Angela Narciso Torres: In a recent interview, you talked about developing your own “poetics of motherhood”—something you explore in your first book, Landscape with Headless Mama, and beyond. In “Lila,” the characters are a mother and a daughter coming of age. While the mother is more of a “supporting character,” she is clearly a huge part of this daughter’s identity—her nurturing, her superstitions and religious beliefs, even her loving chiding at the end—providing a kind of protective shell for the daughter to push against as she comes into her own. How has your own daughterhood, and, more recently, your motherhood changed or influenced your poetics?

Jenn Givhan: I’m struggling to find time to answer these questions (let alone work on any of my writing projects) this summer, as both kids have been home with me all day (I teach online classes from home as an adjunct), and it seems the older they get, the more attention they need. Perhaps there’s something about motherhood poetics encompassed within this dilemma, within the chaos of my fuzz-addled and exhausted mother brain. 

In Landscape with Headless Mama, readers might expect that the mother figure is primarily my mom, and that I am primarily the daughter, but this is not the case. Throughout the entire collection there exists blurring of voices and perspectives, and I think that blurring between mother/daughter is what most encapsulates my poetics

[… continue reading “Behind the Byline” as well as “Lila” at the New England Review.]

/by

“Expectancy” in LEVEE, a new collection from faculty member Paul Otremba, published posthumously in September by Four Way Books

He places a pillow across my lap,

then lets loose a joke about saving dignity.

He wants to check my scar, and the whole team

descends from their orbit to watch his cold hand

test a red line the length of my stomach

that closes where the stomach had been.

From their fingernail’s slice of cratered moon

they assemble the daily surgical theater

where I come and go, lifting and dropping my gown.

His fingers probe around the plate, reading auguries.

Then like a held breath retreating from stench,

the team deflates, the demonstration ended.

But today, there’s special providence:

the pathology drops like a winged thing

wounded. Like the one I’d found on the patio,

its feet still curled around some absent branch.

The sparrow had the look of a toppled-over

sleepwalker. My hand stuck in protective layers

of thin plastic grocery bags, I was afraid

that what I touched would spark, would wake and fly,

even though that’s what I should have wanted

for it. No readiness can cure that.

/by

FOW FORUM

Subscribe to the Friends of Writers Forum and receive notifications of new posts by email.

SUBSCRIBE NOW

VIEW ALL POSTS  |  SUBMIT YOUR WORK