“Heart to Heart” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from the essay, “Heart to Heart: Reading Melvin Dixon in an age of AIDS,” by Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14), published at Poetry Foundation:

 

Heart to Heart

2010: Short Breath. Fatigue.
It’s early on a Sunday morning in January of 2010. I sit on the edge of the bed, already dressed, with my hand on my partner’s foot as he sleeps. The night before, I couldn’t catch my breath, and I told myself that if I felt the same in the morning, I’d go to the hospital. I feel the same. My lungs are constricted. I pause a moment before waking my partner. I know that going to the ER means saying that this is real, this is an emergency. I thought it would all go away if I just waited. But it hasn’t, so I wake him up and say we need to go, and we do.

Heartbeats
The lines about breathing are what first draw me to Melvin Dixon’s “Heartbeats”:

Mouth wide. Drink this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

No air. Breathe in.
Breathe in. No air.

The poem, included in Dixon’s posthumous collection Love’s Instruments(1995), comprises 20 couplets of four-beat lines that enact the regular rhythm of a heartbeat.  […continue reading here]

 

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“Your Hysterical Wife” by Genanne Walsh

An excerpt from the story “Your Hysterical Wife” by Genanne Walsh (fiction, ’04), published at Catamaran Literary Journal:

Your Hysterical Wife

Your hysterical wife is twerking in a nightclub, look at her go. Now she’s sitting outside of Safe – way with a backpack and a pit bull. In point of fact, your hysterical wife is standing in line for artisanal ice cream; she is planting carrots; she’s replacing the register tape and clocking the hours. No, she’s kicking drunks out of a dive bar. Your hysterical wife is picking through the recycling bins on Polk Street in the middle of the night. There she is, taking up two seats on the 22 to Life bus. Your hysterical wife was last seen walking toward the Golden Gate Bridge: alert the authorities.

Let’s be honest, your hysterical wife is good at making things but not so good at taking care—she has been known, to paraphrase the incoherent pop hit from the sixties, to leave the cake out in the rain. Really, she is just trying to BART home after a shitty day at the office. She is teaching, diagnosing, emailing, snorting, sorting, shooting, defend – ing, organizing, embezzling, talking talking talking. Your hysterical wife wants you to learn everything about her and then fix it. Your hysterical wife wants you to fuck off and leave her alone.

Your hysterical wife is exhausted by her perpetual state of bewilderment. Equally, she is depleted by her endless capacity to bewilder you. […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14)

An excerpt from the poem “Homing,” by Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14), one of two published at Four Way Review.

Additionally, Kerrin has two poems, “Killeter Forest: Father McLaughlin’s Well” and “When My Brother Dies,” in the winter 2017 issue of Prairie Schooner, unavailable on line.

 

HOMING

The sky is at the feeder again.
I mean the indigo bunting
with no bearings for home.
A man pulls into the driveway

after work—crunching stones,
hallooing up the stairs—
wanting to know about my day.
All the days are wranglers,

I say. I am not able to cite
my sources, but I make a list.
A woman at lunch said we do not 
plan to live two hundred years,

and so I think to tell him
—well, I do not plan to live
two hundred years! In my hands,
pillowcases I bought, embroidery […continue reading here]

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“Brave? Me? Nah.” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction, ’02)

An excerpt from “Brave? Me? Nah.” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction, ’02) published at Medium:

Brave? Me? Nah.

“So you’re traveling by yourself?” the woman asked me as we wrapped up a tour of Dexter Avenue King Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, this past April. When I answered yes, she said, “Wow, that’s brave.”

The woman — about my age, late forties — was part of a Friendship Forcegroup of about a dozen Americans and Brits that had swelled the 12 p.m. tour now wrapping up. For the past hour our exuberant docent, Wanda, had led us around Dexter Baptist, discussing its significance in the civil rights movement.

In the basement, we’d seen the paneled office where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had worked during his tenure as pastor, 1954 to 1960. We’d all had our pictures snapped at the lectern from which King had delivered his “How long? Not long” speech at the state Capitol, one block away, after the 1965 march from Selma. We learned that the organist King hired, Althea Thomas, plays at the church to this day. Upstairs in the sanctuary, Wanda had us hold hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.” (It didn’t sound remotely like this, but for mostly middle-aged-and-up white people, we weren’t half bad.) Now, as sunlight streamed in through stained-glass windows, casting colorful rectangles on the floor, we milled around the pews and altar, snapping photos, chatting, absorbing the history that seeped from the walls. […continue reading here]

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Wally MFA Alumni Reading Series Survey — From the LA Group

The newly formed SoCal Wally MFA Alumni chapter, based in Greater Los Angeles, is launching a reading series for local alums and current students. To benefit from community wisdom and experience, Dinah Berland (poetry, ’95) and her cohorts would appreciate hearing from other Wally alums who run similar reading series elsewhere who might be willing to share their experiences, as follows:
  • How often are your readings held?
  • How many readers are invited?
  • By what rationale are they selected (e.g., to feature those with new books or publications, to give voice to emerging writers, to achieve gender/ethnic diversity, or by using some random means for fairness)?
  • Do you also attempt to contact Wally alums who may be passing through town?
  • How long does each reading last, and how many writers are featured each time?
  • Are readings held in a public venue (such as a library or art gallery) or a private home; or if in various locations, which has been most successful and why?
  • Are poets and fictioners featured together or at separate events?
  • Are refreshments served?
  • Any other advice you might offer for establishing a successful reading series, besides making full use of social media, word of mouth, and institutional contacts?
Please send your responses to Dinah:  [email protected]
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“Economy and Endings” by Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18)

An excerpt from the essay, “Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women,”  Christina Ward-Niven (fiction, ’18), published at Fiction Writers’ Review:

Economy and Endings in Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women

As a writer, I spend considerable time revising toward compression. I cut, I condense, I push my reluctant self to get rid of unnecessary modifiers and wordy exposition. My goal is to transform each (often-sprawling) first draft into something tighter, more energized, more powerful.

Similarly, I focus ample revision attention on endings. As a reader, I love a strong, surprising short-story ending—final lines that are often, paradoxically, a kind of opening-out. I strive for that kind of closure in my own stories.

Lucia Berlin’s stories in A Manual for Cleaning Women serve as a model in both of these arenas. Each piece features a remarkable combination of compression and intensity. How is she able to pack so much—a distinct voice, vivid details, understated but palpable emotion—into such short, deceptively simple-seeming stories? A close examination of economy and endings in this collection reveals several craft choices made by the author that consistently bolster efficiency and surprise.

One way Berlin is economic is in her characterization. She is somehow able to evoke full, distinct characters with minimal words. An example is the dentist grandfather in “Dr. H. A. Moynihan.” The first-person narrator of this story is remembering a summer during her childhood when she was required to work in her grandfather’s dental office. Over the course of the 7.5-page story, the author gives us a thorough picture of “Grandpa”—both as a physical being and a personality. One tool she uses is direct, straightforward reporting; the narrator acknowledges the complex mixed emotions she has about Grandpa (so true-to-life, these forever-complicated feelings about family), along with conveying how her mother feels about him, and there’s a matter-of-factness to the tone.

[…continue reading here]

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“If Only I Didn’t Love You” by Susan Jo Russell (poetry, ’17)

An excerpt from the poem, “If Only I Didn’t Love You,” by Susan Jo Russell (poetry, ’17), published at Mass Poetry:

If Only I Didn’t Love You

I knew where to dig
to reach the well of wet sand
where the sand crab, barrel-shaped, sandy pale,

burrowed down fast
while I dug faster, with both hands, the sand falling in
and falling in. It was ancient,

shy, eating
the world from underneath.
Those hard tickling claws,

too alien to hold for long,
scrabbled on my palm—
when I, sad, had to let it go, […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “The Theft of Eid” by Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09), one of two poems published at Tuck Magazine:

The Theft of Eid

(for Marilyn Hacker)

The theft of Eid did not happen on Eid or on the eve of Eid when I asked the children to switch on the party lights before evening prayer on the patio by the calla lilies under the darkening purple damask sky nor did it happen the day before I bought dried dates & sweetened condensed milk for Eid pudding but it happened five thousand four hundred and seventy five days ago when the towers fell on us and everyone but us was given a burial while we were left burning and were called names and made to pay for bombs that crack the fields that had fed us their wheat in childhood made to watch the earth shudder before the camera made to watch the orphaning of millions in real time & the shredded pleas of mothers & the cavernous eyes of fathers made to watch the agony of last looks at loved ones and lost cities and the desperate rafts to unknown lands passports sewn into plastic bags lips shivering around the name of the same bullet passing through past and future

[…continue reading here]

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“Domestic” by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15)

An excerpt from the poem “Domestic” by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15), published at The Adroit Journal:

Domestic

18

When the boy I loved enough to sponge the reddened kelp bed

of my uterus had a baby with another girl           I pointed blame

like darts into my throat until            I emptied again               I

was working as domestic help blocks from where his baby’s

mama lived in a trailer with her mama          me pretending the

kids I watched were mine though they called me names for

Mexican & fat & they missed their white mother     I was

instructed to lock from the house if she came round with her

boyfriend      I mean I was that lonely & scrubbing toilets felt

like home   […continue reading here]

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“Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07)

An excerpt from “Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07), published at TransAtlantic Panorama:

Scandal

When I was eight, the nuns told me to pray for my enemies. Knees against wooden kneeler, I prayed for Julio Gonzalez, the Puerto Rican boy who taunted me about my tip-toe walk and my pot belly. Three years later, all my fat gone, Julio snapped the back of my training bra like a slingshot against my shoulder blades. Another year, and he put his arm around me in the back of the school bus.

I liked it.

It was a sin to like it.

That arm around the shoulders – the gesture, the implication – opened an ineludible door. Or maybe, the lid to the treasure chest we all find secreted in the attic, or buried out back, the hinge well oiled, silently opening to the touch.

The nuns were still there. Dressed all in black like the black-lipstick Punks at the public high school. Like beatniks. Like bouncers. When I was thirteen, they called my father in because they’d seen a boy put his arm around my waist.

“Your waist, Evelina, your waist!” my father yelled that night.

I wasn’t allowed to go to the dance party.

So I rebelled. I went out with Eldrian Ocampo, the eighteen-year-old cousin of a Filipino classmate. Parachute pants. Hairspray. Forty neon spaghetti bracelets on each wrist. Yes. The certified, vinyl-scratching DJ of a back-spinning, moon-walking, boombox-carrying crew of break-dancers. Catholic break-dancers, it’s true. But as rebellions go, it satisfied.

I thought of Eldrian today for the first time in years, here in my high school room, and the room of college summers, where Flashdance posters and torn up toe shoes have been busy collecting dust. Keep-sake boxes stuffed with photographs and love letters are scattered across the floor, open among the trash bags and the cardboard box designated for things I cannot part with.

The other boyfriends are still here: The First Writer of Notes, The Under-Confident Gazer from Behind the Pillars of the Cafeteria, The Earnest Jock, The Frog Dissection Partner, The Verbal Abuser, The Only Other Cuban. […continue reading here]

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