An excerpt from “On Having Children” by Kimberly Kruge (poetry ’15), published by Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.

On Having Children

What I don’t want? I think I know:
I don’t want to become tenuous again, right when
I’d gotten things down, when I could ride

the highway without turning into a bag of bones, right
when I could catapult at 40,000 feet without
incinerating and could look at the woman in the first seat

of the plane bounce up to shuffle her bags and say to myself
she knows she’ll never die, what children she’ll have—
But, I don’t want a world of ladders, of high windows,

[… continue reading and find two more poems by Kimberly Kruge (poetry ’15) at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact.]

An excerpt from “They Said I Was An Alternate,” by Nathan McClain (poetry ’13), published by Foundry.

They Said I Was An Alternate,

so I thought like an alternate
Answered black when asked

where is the nearest bathroom,
guilty

as charged when
the barista called the name

I made up, only
half-expecting judgment

[… continue reading at Foundry.]

An excerpt from “Poemolator, The” by Ian Randall Wilson (poetry ’02), published by High Shelf Press.

Poemolator, The

No Americans suffer more from their inability to understand, or make themselves understood by, non-English speakers than America’s poets in Iraq.  That’s why this year The Poetry Foundation of America (TPFoA) equipped hundreds of them with the Poemolator, a hand-held electronic device that allows the poets to deliver dozens of poems, prerecorded in Arabic, to the Iraqis they encounter.

The gadget, which looks like an larger than usual television remote control — with a speaker and a microphone on top — bursts into Arabic when it hears an equivalent phrase in English spoken by a poet whose voice it recognizes.  But like an electronic parrot, the Poemolator simply repeats what it’s been programmed to repeat. 

[… continue reading “Poemolator, The” at High Shelf Press.]

An excerpt from “Ventrilo” by Greg Rappleye (poetry ’00), published by Prometheus Dreaming.

Ventrilo

Bought in a Saco junk shop and recalled from Captain Marvel, it’s a tin loop, a shattered whelk—beveled by waves so as not to cut—by which I once believed a voice might be thrown at all bodies, living and dead. Sugared in whiskey, against my wintered lips, it throws no voice; merely renders a flutter, a trill, a whirred falsetto song. Listen. St. Stephen’s Feast. The Wren Parade.  A scatter of snow across herring-boned bricks.

[… continue reading “Ventrilo” at Prometheus Dreaming.]

An excerpt from a craft essay by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published by Fiction Writers Review.

Gyre Journeys: How Twains of Theme and Plot Meet in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

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.]