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

 

 

 

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

floss. Everywhere I go I think
about what is impossible.
Can homing pigeons carry
their nth letter and still get lost? […continue reading here]

An excerpt from Blood Moon by Joseph Bathanti (poetry, ’91), published at storySouth:

Blood Moon

Lorraine Venoble had insisted on driving home from the country club. She was angry and a little drunk, though not a whit drunk as her husband, Charles, known as Pink because of his complexion, who functioned well drunk, never speeding the way his wife sped, that night, along Cashion Store Road.

Beneath the sanguine moon, spreading ruby light over the heaving cropland, she welcomed the hot wind in her clipped hair, gone silver prematurely, something else she blamed Pink for. She flicked off her headlights. The gaudy moonlight washed the land incarnadine. Pink grinned like an idiot, threatening some boyish platitude to placate her: how beautiful she looked, an entreaty to pull over so they might undress and make love in a field of dying chiggers and beggar lice—his notion of romance.

Deep in the woods, at intervals, flame spurted in long skirmishes along the earth. Fire, more suggestion than fact—dream, even. But real fire, nonetheless, set by the county in controlled burns—an ironic way of appeasing the conflagration that threatened St. Joan’s County each drought-ravaged Indian Summer. The season when skunks, led from their lairs by the harvest moonscurried often in pairs through the fields and flirted with the road. Was the blood moon, however, that bewitched them to tarry that extra moment on the white line that spelled their ends. They lay like totems at intervals along the roadbed: elegant little muffs of plush black and white, fur ruffing as the gold sedan whooshed by. Their unmistakable yeasty smell like strong stout that Pink found stirring and Lorraine abhorred. […continue reading here]

An excerpt from the poem “Sycorax” by A. Van Jordan (poetry, ’98) published at The Cortland Review

 

 

Sycorax

Young, Pregnant, on the Run
March 5, 2012

One might call my fleeing an expatriation, but it simply was a psychic escape, a way to free the mind to allow the body to follow suit. Then, just as I came to feel good about myself, my seducer said, You won’t make it out there, as I waved goodbye, already beyond his reach. With no confusion about what I felt, his words rang discordant: As a distant observer, I wonder, how does one perceive a hand waving goodbye? One of those gestures read, from a distant gaze, as either a great sadness or quiet ecstasy, the goodbye; either the tearful end or a fresh beginning. From a distance, one never knows whether one simply needs a bit of time away or if they are, in fact, escaping some oppression. All of these can be true within the waver of the hand. In that sense, a good goodbye should begin with a yearning. Even at the outset, the desire to return to, or, just as easily, of getting beyond the grasp of another can come from within us—springing from the same neuroscience of the mind. Escaping can be as intoxicating as the initial longing to couple with another.

[…continue reading here]

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!  http://friendsofwriters.org/the-2018-alumni-conference/

A FEW REASONS TO ATTEND FROM FELLOW WALLIES

The prospect of the afterlife is a unsettling one. Though we are told numerous times that we will be given all we will need, that what we learn within the current-student-Wally cocoon will be enough, that what comes after is merely a less bureaucratic version of what is coming now, I for one believed precisely none of it. Not a damn word. Why should I? How can you know if a thing is good until that thing is upon you? Which suddenly the afterlife is, and there you are, a writer reborn, raw and on your own again. But here is the tremendous, singular gift of the Warren Wilson education: you really are given all, or at least most, of what you need. This is lonely, unforgiving work and thankfully, we need not do it alone for 365 days a year. There is a span of seven golden haloed days we may spend with our tribe and remember why we do what we do. Last year was my first at an alumni conference and the prospect of missing another is difficult to conceive as the handful of days I spent with people who took my writer-ness as a given and never for granted, who delivered me back to the self I treasure most, the private self from which I write—this is a communion I imagine doing without. —Jen Funk

I went to my first conference three years after graduation, knowing nobody and feeling like a general writing failure. What I found that summer was the most supportive, smart, generous community of writers I’ve ever known. At each Wally Camp I get good work done—new pieces, deep dives into work-in-progress with friends—but the real reason I return is all the friendships I’ve made over the years. —Annie Kim

For me the best part of the conference is connecting across generations, those both before and after my time at Wally, and also those in different genres. In particular, one year in California, we did a cold reading of “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” and a bit of improv. I’ve yet to experience anything in a reunion or conference format that matched that! —George Higgins

The alumni conferences have been great experiences for me. I’ve gone to half a dozen since I graduated in 2002, and the most valuable thing about them is the deep and lasting friendships I’ve made, as well as the friendships I’ve deepened with people I was in the program with. I recommend doing a workshop or manuscript critique because you really get to know the people in your workshop—in a good way! And the food! Okay, the food has never been a highlight. But I am very excited about this year’s conference at Dominican University in San Rafael because I think the quality of the venue will be a quantum leap improvement over the previous Bay Area conferences at St. Mary’s in Moraga—which were good too! And the readings are fantastic and inspiring. If you’ve ever read at a reading where the barista just wishes you’d shut up and the people waiting to read at the open mike just want you to stop so they can do their thing (which they may well be writing during your reading), you know how valuable it is to have a group of extraordinary listeners as well as writers to hang with.

—Robert Thomas