An excerpt from the short story, “The Fall Zone,” by Laura Moretz (fiction, ’15), published at Cleaver Magazine:

The Fall Zone

First thing that morning, a woman told Henry his crew must not cut her tree’s branches. She looked as though she wouldn’t survive if he cut the thinnest twig from the huge willow oaks in front of her house. Fully dressed and made up before eight a.m., she clutched the notice that his crew had hung on her door knob a few days before. She argued for the integrity of the tree as though he had suggested cutting the arms off her grandchildren. A branch as large as a trunk had shot over the power lines. He gave her his supervisor’s phone number. Her hands shook as she dialed the number on her flip phone, murmuring, “murder, murder, murder.” They moved their trucks to the next house—on this road, almost all the properties had tree limbs extending over the wires.

There, a woman came across the lawn in her pajamas and a loose sweater, her arms crossed like a shelf under her breasts so he wouldn’t see them shaky and unsupported. I’ll be damned, if this isn’t the day from hell. He knew what she would say: “you can’t cut our tree” and “it will fall over backward if you take off the front” and “it has never knocked out power,” and he would have to give her his boss’s number and hold off cutting, screwing up the work flow all down the road.

But she smiled, looked right in his eyes as though he were her equal and not the angel of death, and said, “I just wondered if you might cut one of our dead limbs, too,” and she pointed, so they walked together and she showed him where a major limb jutted out, silver and leafless, on the other side of the massive trunk. “My husband wanted me to ask.” […continue reading here]

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]

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]

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]

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]