An excerpt from a poem by Mary Lou Buschi (poetry ’04), published by Thimble Literary Magazine.
Her suitcase was too wide for the aisle, too heavy to lift, so she stood between the train locks, where the breeze angles up, where weeds between the rails cleave to a purchase.
[… continue reading “Train Ride Through Small Towns” at Thimble Literary Magazine.]
An excerpt from a craft essay by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published by Fiction Writers Review.
At the beginning of my second semester at Warren Wilson College’s MFA for Writers, my supervisor Ana Menéndez challenged me to identify the themes of my novel. After some thought, I created a list, including “feeling like you were born into the wrong family,” “the truth, vs. the stories you tell yourself about any given situation,” and “the credit intersectionally marginalized characters deserve, vs. the credit they actually get, from authority figures with more privilege.”
Toward the end of the semester, she asked me how I was going to structure my novel, given that I already had over 100 pages of writing. I made a list of plot points, including: “Lana finds out about Patrick’s infidelity with her best friend Veronica and has a nervous breakdown,” and “Crystal gets a blood test and realizes she’s not a Clancy after all.” My theme list read like the pensées of a theory-glasses-wearing lesbian feminist (if the comfortable shoe fits . . .), and my plot points list smacked of the season bible of an eighties soap opera.
These two lists of themes and plot points sat in separate documents in my computer folder, giving each other the cold shoulder, and when I made them look at each other, the stink eye. It took reading Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Beingto understand how much of an intimate, intertwined, sculptural relationship that even aesthetically discordant plot points and themes can have—and that when they do, a compelling structure is near-inevitable. As my essay supervisor David Haynes wrote, “a novel’s themes… are the real scaffolding that support the plot and give the novel its substance.”
And so I decided to examine how the theme supports the plot, and vice versa, through the use of craft elements in the novel A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. But how would I focus it? I thought about how Ozeki uses gyre both literally and figuratively in the novel. This theme sweeps up in its currents many of the other themes that undergird the novel; I narrowed those many themes down a subset to discuss.
[… continue reading Part I and Part II at Fiction Writers Review.]
An excerpt from “Is Ballet Camp?” by Madison Mainwaring (poetry ’19), published by The New York Times.
Is it the moonbeams? The suicide-for-love finale? Or, perhaps, the extravagant gestures that designate women as birds? For Susan Sontag, writing in 1964 in “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the camp canon included Aubrey Beardsley drawings, Tiffany lamps, women’s clothes from the 1920s, Flash Gordon comics — and also “Swan Lake.”
“Camp: Notes on Fashion,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, uses Sontag’s essay to consider how clothes can turn into costume or performance. A surprising number of its sections refer to ballet through the ages, from its codification at the court of Versailles in the mid-17th century to Edgar Degas’s fin-de-siècle sketches of dancers.
Camp is a notoriously slippery term. But why do discussions about it so consistently evoke ballet as an example?
An excerpt “Reclining Nude (1865)” by Francine Conley (poetry ’14), published by Pink Panther Magazine.
The shape of her is not committed to the bed on which she lounges,
feet crossed, one big toe stretched upward as if in her mind a word
just flared like vigil. Her gaze lingers on an open book set next to her
on the bed. As the one looking I enter her emergent nakedness
as if it is available to me, and yet not. Behind her, a striped duvet,
disheveled by a sleeper who thrashed about in her sleep.
Even in dreams a body grasps for what it can. Her other hand
doesn’t care. It sits slack by her side, stilled by what she reads.
An excerpt from”Chasm” by Hieu Minh Nguyen (poetry ’19), published by Poetry Daily.
Monthly, my family calls from Vietnam
to inform us about the dead.
Their voices amplified through the speakerphone
while my mother sits upright in her bed
& performs a variety of mundane tasks:
sewing, word finds, removing nail polish.
Of course I want to assume things:
dead body, dead butter-yellow lawn—
If I try hard enough, I can gather
each story, like marbles, into my mouth
spit them into the drain & watch
as hair climbs out.
An excerpt from”Lines Writ on the Backside of a Dozer Invoice” by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth (poetry ’15), published by The Boiler.
Squirrel crossed the lawn just now
Where old oak used to be
Before our home’s expanding wings
Made wicker ware of tree.
An excerpt from”August Song of Flight” by Jennifer Funk (poetry ’16), published by The Boiler.
You unshuckable masterpiece of conviction and collapse, I shiver
in the light of your particular eclipse. You have a way
of pickling my tongue and rubbing out all my best
learned lessons: now, is when I walk away, now, is when
I knit my lips together and keep myself clothed, oh,
but the plummy succor of your mouth
and the fractured shadow of your breath
raking hesitation from my limbs: here is how
I ruin in a field and flatten the cornstalks.
An excerpt from”The Problems of Humanity” by Megan Pinto (poetry ’18), published by Four Way Review.
I thought we had solved them all, these problems of humanity:
how we die, and why, and who it is we ought to be.
I’ve learned to count to infinity, to touch my toes, to plug
my nose when I jump off diving boards; I know how to exhale
when waxing my body, how much is too much to drink
at parties, and that, when eating from a buffet
I must be first in line. If there is some part of me
I cannot educate, I’ll compensate with technology:
Google translate has gotten me through dates
with a Frenchman in Prague, an Armenian in Italy.
An excerpt from “Crossing the Jordan” by Matthew Alberswerth (poetry ’17), published by Prometheus Dreaming.
Did the fish hear me when my ankle broke the surface of the water?
They followed your steps with their glassy eyes.
What moved the branch as I walked beneath it?
It was a hungry wind.
When it touched my hair did I feel cold and scared?
Only as scared as you should. Only as cold as you were.
An excerpt from “Voyage of the Beagle” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17), published by Vox Populi.
It’s midnight, and I
am a dotted line.
On the bar tv, there’s news
of another spill, and a cold front
from the Arctic,
because there is still an Arctic,
followed by pictures from Syria—
bony lips, black and green, of children
gassed, eyes staring, blue tongues lolling.
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