Stranger Jelly

Go for a jar of jam at the market and realize days later when you pull
it from your fridge that in fact it’s something you never in a million years
would have ever thought to even try much less buy and there you are

in your kitchen ready for toast with butter and jelly holding a jar of never
thought of, never knew it, never thought to know it even existed in all
the world, jam…

[… continue reading at The Rupture.]

Alecto

because a woman scorned.

because there is precedence for such a thing.

                                                        such a thing being the man                                                                                                                   and the woman
                                                to which he was sworn                        (scorned)
                                                                                                                        now wed
                                                                      to this matter of things             being

[… continue reading at The Missouri Review.]

Sarah Stone: So many of these stories center around family configurations, especially, though not only, dyads: mother/daughter, daughter/mother, siblings, couples, spouses. There are so many beautiful passages of the characters observing each other, reflecting on each other. Here’s a moment from “Daylilies”: “When she visited her mother last, she stood in the shadows at the door of the den and watched her mother sleep, the dream gently waving through her body, fluttering her fingers near her face. In the close room, a tart odor pervaded like an opaque mist, as if she were standing in her own backyard next to the lime tree, enveloped in the morning fog./ Please put off dying until I no longer disappoint you, she thought. Her mother’s blue eyes opened, and her mother looked at her the way little girls do when you tell them the truth.” How do you complicate and layer the characters and relationships in these dyads?

Peg Alford Pursell: Thanks so much, Sarah. When it comes to characters and the very short story, flash, it’s difficult to have many characters. There’s not enough space, generally speaking, to develop characters in 500 words or less. It only takes two characters to produce sufficient dramatic tension or conflict. When it comes to the use of family configurations, Flannery O’Connor said that anyone who’s survived beyond the age of twelve has enough fictional material for the rest of her life. Likewise, it doesn’t take long before we understand that people, family members, have an exterior and an interior, as we do ourselves. With all the complications inherent in our human makeup, the miracle is that we manage to somehow get along in our family systems, which I attribute to biological imperatives. Where does love come from, really? What is its primal nature, it’s purpose? Our first experiences with love, to varying degrees, is maternal, even if only pre-birth, so there’s an endless fount of source material in that dyad of mother and child. I’m probably most interested in mother/daughter since it’s what I know best, and it’s not as easy for me to inhabit a male’s perspective, although that doesn’t prevent me from trying. When writing, I inhabit my characters, with their contradictory ideas of the world, desires, situations, “lives lived” off the page. Usually that part comes easily to me, though if a story gives me trouble—doesn’t quite work—I can often trace the issue to a need to more completely immerse myself in a character’s interiority and behaviors.

[… continue reading at Full Stop.]

Dear Francine du Plessix Gray

Dear Francine du Plessix Gray:

           I am writing to inform you that The New Yorker search field’s autocorrect changed Plessix to Pelisse before my very eyes. Dictionary.com definitions for pelisse describe “an outer garment lined or trimmed with fur” or “a woman’s long cloak with slits for the arms.” Contextually, I thought a pelisse was a bit like a camisole, or maybe even a plimsoll, which is a fancy British word for a sneaker. I need to know this, or one third of me needs to know this, as I have applied as a graduate student to one British university, one university in Ohio, and I’ve also applied for a teaching position at a university in New York. Then again, in all of those potential fates, knowing what plimsoll means is better than the alternative. 

[… continue reading at New Limestone Review.]

It’s that time of year again: the Program is seeking your updates to the Alumni Bibliography—which currently lists 800+ alum publications! In addition to being a point of pride and a source for your reading pleasure, the MFA Program uses the list for accreditation purposes and for recruitment. You can always view the alumni list here: http://www.wwcmfa.org/alumni/alumni-bibliography/

Please help us keep this list as complete as possible by uploading your new publication information through a form on the site:

https://docs.google.com/a/smith.edu/forms/d/1YazT-pftQh3Syg9q34Iesy26vqqsQDWAP11dFdeos1U/viewform

The form will ask for your:

• first name, last name,
• the year in which you graduated,
• the genre in which you graduated, fiction or poetry,
• whether you graduated from Warren Wilson or Goddard,
• the title of your book, 
• the name of your publisher,
• year of publication, and 
• specify novel, short fiction, novella, book of poems, chapbook, anthology (of which you were editor), translated poetry, translated fiction, or “other” (explain).

Please also share any additional information regarding awards the publication received.

Thanking you in advance,

Patrick Donnelly

Poetry 2003