What made the angels cough— the thick cloud of dust— was once our bodies. In the dust were our lepers, tanning addicts, tornado chasers, fakirs, pearl divers, nuns, organ smugglers, cosmeticians, in it were Olympians with prosthetics, in it were serial killers, chocolatiers, day laborers, stringers of prayer beads, muralists and miniaturists, in it were wombs that had once held tiny gardens gushing with nectars and fountains run to the rhythms of the mother’s heart, in it were what were once uncountable hearts, each with its piercing cry, in it were minds, which, when all unfurled at once, formed a loosely-seamed tent as big as the universe, singing with sparks along the edges.
[… continue reading at “Angels Coughing” at MoonPark Review.]
I have called, in my wasted youth, the concrete slabs Of prison home. Awakened to guards keeping tabs On my breath. Bartered with every kind of madness, The state’s mandatory minimums & my own callus. I’ve never called a man daddy; & while sleep, twice Wrecked cars; drank whiskey straight; nothing suffices— I fell in love with sons I wouldn’t give my name. Once Swam at midnight in the Atlantic’s violence, Under the water, rattling broke the silence. I cussed Men with fists like hambones & got beaten to dust.
[… continue reading at “November 5, 1980” at the Boston Review.]
“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.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-25 15:12:442022-02-25 17:14:27“Withholding Information in Nathan Englander’s ‘Reunion'” by David Saltzman (fiction ’17)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-24 15:07:162022-02-25 17:14:26“Extractions” by Shannon K. Winston (poetry ’18)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-24 13:56:212022-02-25 17:14:20“The Kitchen” from the new collection WHAT SWEETNESS FROM SALT, by Francine Conley (poetry, ’14)
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.
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.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-22 15:30:122022-02-25 17:14:24Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19) is currently a Stegner Fellow (2019-2021)
“Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts,” an article byMeghan 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.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-21 14:00:002022-02-25 17:14:23“Lyme Disease is Baffling, Even to Experts” by Meghan O’Rourke (poetry ’05)
“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.]
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2019-10-19 14:00:122022-02-25 17:14:21“Human Technology” by Nomi Stone (poetry ’17)
