Attention Southern California Wallies!

The MFA Program for Writers Southern California Alumni Association has launched a reading series and we are so very excited to hear you read your work! The series is open to all alumni of the Warren Wilson MFA program living in Southern California, as well as all Warren Wilson MFA graduates and faculty passing through. Readers for The Sprawwl will not be judged, but will be lightly curated by the committee for variety, balance and inclusion. Each event will feature two poets and two prose writers. Whether you are a recent grad or a well-established writer, we want to hear from you. We can’t wait to connect and reconnect our awesome community of writers at Warren Wilson!

Our first event will take place at Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena on Sunday, June 9, 2019, from 3-5 p.m. A casual reception will follow the readings, and if we still haven’t gotten enough of each other, we can continue the fun at a local restaurant. A second event is being planned for December 2, 2019 at Beyond Baroque in Venice. We will send out a second call for submissions and more details closer to the date. Meanwhile, if you’d like to read in June, please send us your workl!

Submission Guidelines

If you write fiction, please send 5-10 pages and a short bio to [email protected].

If you write poetry, please send 3–5 poems (no more than 10 pages) and a short bio to the same address.

Your submissions should reflect the kind of work you plan to read and should reach us by March 15, 2019.

It is our hope that writers chosen for The Sprawwl, whether residents of Southern California or passing through, will commit to supporting and growing the Warren Wilson Southern California Alumni Association through attendance at meetings, volunteer work, and/or donations to Friends of Writers.

Looking forward to seeing and hearing you soon!

The Reading Committee

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“Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10)

An excerpt from “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10), published by The Believer.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand

[…continue reading “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Last Stand”]

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“Creation Myth” by Timothy Cook (poetry ’08)

An excerpt from “Creation Myth” by Timothy Cook (poetry ’08), published by Rogue Agent.

Creation Myth

Sunday morning you will not be at Mass
but at the ophthalmologist’s office.

More than the chart, the two foot tall E
you can see clearly when you open

your left eye, you will hate the finger test.
How many fingers am I holding up?

the doctor will ask. How many
now? Monday afternoon

an MRI: the camera clicking will sound like
a lawn mower roaring beside your skull

or techno. You will remember
raves, beach-ball-sized nitrous balloons

carried above the roller rink crowd. Tuesday
the diagnosis— 

                        you will know
the look on your face from the look

on the doctor’s face, a mirror 
                        with a skipping record.  

[…continue reading “Creation Myth”]

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Two poems by faculty member Marianne Boruch

NPS photo by Emily Brouwer

Faculty Member Marianne Boruch has published two poems: “I Saw A House, A Field” in The New Yorker and “Pieces on the Ground” in Poetry.

I Saw A House, A Field 

Most of the rooms muted by cold,
and the furniture there
with its human chill under vast drapes
of plastic for the season—

Because eventually we are
an austerity, walking room to room
enamored and saddened, all the crazy variations
of bed and table, clocks,
books on a shelf, foreign harbors etched
some yesterday, framed for a wall.
And the effrontery of windows assuming
how lovely out, a certainty
of lawn and woods, distance on a road, voices
that in summer drift up and move away.

[…continue reading “I Saw A House, A Field” in The New Yorker]

Pieces on the Ground

I gave up the pencil, the walk in woods, the fog
     at dawn, a keyhole I lost an eye to.

And the habit of early, of acorn into oak—
      bent   tangled   choked because of ache or greed,
      or lousy light deemed it so.

So what. Give up that so what.

O fellow addicts of the arch and the tragic, give up
     the thousand-pound if and when too.
     Give up whatever made the bed or unmade it.

[…continue reading “Pieces on the Ground” in Poetry]

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10 Questions for Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19)

Sarah Audsley (poetry ’19) interviewed by Abby Macgregor in The Massachusetts Review

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I started writing poetry in my childhood bedroom in the log cabin-house my father built. I remember making things up on the page and writing letters to my imagined biological parents in my pink marbled journal. In high school, I wrote poems, looking back on it now, as a way to process my parents’ eventual divorce, and to channel all that teenage angst and rage. It was not until I turned 29 that I started writing again, and taking it seriously. Naively, I had no idea that this literary landscape existed, and I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an MFA.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
My teachers and mentors at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College: Brooks Haxton, Daniel Tobin, C. Dale Young, Christine Kitano, and Sally Keith.

Also: Maudelle Driskell and Martha Rhodes. I would be nothing without Ellen Bryant Voigt and Debra Allbery. And to Mary Oliver, my gateway drug, to whom I’ll always be grateful.

[…continue reading the interview]

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Callas Poems by Patrick Donnelly (poetry ’03)

Two poems by Patrick Donnelly (poetry ’03), published by Plume.

Callas and the First Noble Truth

You critics threw her ashes into the sea
Complaining “She had three discrete voices.”
But how good did you think you deserved things to be?

All life is unsatisfactory,
Buddhism teaches.
You critics threw her ashes into the sea

Just as other critics shot good Jack Kennedy
And left him in pieces.
But how good did you think you deserved things to be?

[…continue reading “Callas and the First Noble Truth” and read “Tombeau: At the grave of Maria Callas” at Plume]

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“/ˈməT͟Hər/” by Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17)

Tiana Nobile (poetry '17)
“/ˈməT͟Hər/” by Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17), published by Guernica.

Tiana Nobile (poetry ’17) reads her poem “/ˈməT͟Hər/”

/ˈməT͟Hər/

We tend to our roles like we tend to a fire,
poking the coals with the blazing tip of an iron.

The head of a woman occasionally produces more heads.
The body of a woman is the source of all our breaths.

See Also: The naming of riverbanks.
See Also: Nature’s tendency to cleave.

[…continue reading “/ˈməT͟Hər/“]

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“Elegy Ending with a Cell Door Closing” by Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10)

“Elegy Ending with a Cell Door Closing” written and spoken by Dwayne Betts (poetry ’10), illustrated and animated by Louisa Bertman

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“The Unseen Shore” by Amy Lin (fiction ’17)

Amy Lin (fiction '17) wears a broad brimmed hat.

An excerpt from “The Unseen Shore” by Amy Lin (fiction ’17), published on Failbetter.

The Unseen Shore

Brie and Sarah were twins, and Brie looked like Sarah but then again she didn’t. Brie had the same dark brown eyes and full cheeks, but she was more muscular and stood straighter. Brie’s nails were bare but carefully shaped. Those were the little things. What everyone saw was the limp, or that Brie did not have one and Sarah did. She never masked the scars ribboning her leg. The marks were almost two decades old, ripped into her right leg when she was fourteen.

She and her sister had attended water ski camp about eighty miles north of San Francisco. Sarah dragged Brie along after hours as she, and a group of other teenagers at the camp, loosed a ski boat from its moorings. At first, it was enough to heist the boat and drive it as fast as possible but then the girl steering slowed the engine to idling. In the quiet, someone suggested truth or dare. When it was Sarah’s turn, she picked dare, and it only took a few taunts—“you scared?”—before she agreed to ski. Silver flew everywhere from the moonlit water, and there was a flood of adrenaline when she cut the dark skin of the lake. Calm, suspended and flattening, folded over her when she raised her fists in the air and dropped the towrope, sinking into the water. The boat looped to pick her up, and it moved so slowly that she saw her sister, her hand outstretched. Brie’s face warped and sagged as she realized the boat was too close, the propeller already tugging Sarah towards it.  

[…continue reading “The Unseen Shore”]

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Two Poems by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17)

“It Has a Wish” and “Once She Was” by Peter Schireson (poetry ’17), published by Connotation Press.

It Has a Wish

It has a wish, she says.
When a skirt has a fold like this,
small and unintended in the hem, it means
it has a wish.
I bend over and straighten it,
trying to conceive what more,
beside brushing against her legs,
her pale green skirt,
sheathed about her, folded,
could be wishing for.

[read the second poem “Once She Was”]

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