An excerpt from “Alecto” by Maya Phillips (poetry ’17), published by The Missouri Review.

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.]

An excerpt from “The Stone Menagerie” by Daniel Jenkins (poetry ’18), published by Maryland Literary Review.

The Stone Menagerie

In Tanzania,
a thesaurus of birds
perch stiffly, petrified
by the alkaline slime
of Lake Natron.

These avian stones,
these strands of hide and rough-twine
wide-fanning feathers:
Calcified cranes, sparrows
chewed to paste, finches hardened
to chalk, a hawk’s ghostly wing.

[… continue reading at Maryland Literary Review.]

An excerpt from an interview with Peg Alford Pursell (fiction ’96), published by Full Stop.

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.]

An excerpt from “Those First Days” by Fay Dillof (poetry ’15), published by Frontier Poetry.

Those First Days

Those first days, crows—
more than I’d ever seen, hundreds—cawed,
circling the ice-shocked trees, while we ate
small blue pills to sleep and waited
for the thaw. The world, from inside his coat,
shimmered. A field of snow—the clouds.

[… continue reading at Frontier Poetry.]

headshot of Candace Walsh (fiction '19) gazing at the camera wearing a blue cardigan.

An excerpt from “Dear Francine du Plessix Gray” by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published by New Limestone Review.

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.]

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.]

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

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 “Field Survey” by Matthew Zanoni Muller (fiction ’10), published by The Southeast Review.

Field Survey

His name was Michael and he was looking up at something outside of the frame of the picture and his grinning white teeth were visible through the darkness of his beard. She scrolled down.

Body type: Athletic.

Pets: Dog.

Occupation: Field of Education.

Political leanings: I’ll tell you once I know you.

Well, that wasn’t very helpful. She opened the messenger function, clicked on the text box and watched the cursor blink on and off under the message he had sent:

Hey, you seem like a nice person. It’s hard to find good people nowadays. Meet up to see if you feel the same?

This seemed very quick. She had read that you were supposed to have four distinct exchanges before planning to meet. She looked over the top of her monitor at the counter with the spider plant spilling over it and the bank of computers beyond.

[… continue reading “Field Survey” at The Southeast Review.]

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.]