Faculty member C.J. Hribal reads his Milwaukee Magazine essay “Buying Time” for Milwaukee Public Radio. You can listen online…
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A poem by faculty member Monica Youn appears in The New Yorker:
Goldacre
digitize
from the Latin “to finger
or handle” as if
to sink your fingers
deeply
into this
flood of light
Continue reading online…
An essay by faculty member Debra Spark appears at AGNI online:
Her boyfriend was very intense. I know, because he’d been my boyfriend before he’d been hers. This was at Yale in the early eighties. Bob and Debra Spark, then Bob and Robin Kornegay, though Robin was with Bob far longer and more seriously than I had been. Bob wanted to marry Robin, but Robin wasn’t sure. They were young, after all. She didn’t want to be with one person all her life, to marry before she experienced anything else, so she broke up with him.
Continue reading online…
Faculty member Liam Callanan writes about Adam Haslett’s “Notes to my Biographer” for Stories We Love at Fiction Writer’s Review:
I’m haunted by fire. Not that kind. The kind that forms the harrowing core of Adam Haslett’s “Notes to my Biographer,” which examines the very large life led by its protagonist, Franklin Caldwell Singer, and the metaphor that comes to consume him.
Singer is loud, tendentious company—and thus an incredibly risky character to anchor this story. But the result is marvelous [or: But the risk more than pays off], even if (or especially because) Haslett’s success requires him to break almost every rule there is about writing stories, starting with “show, don’t tell,” starting with the story’s very first lines.
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A story by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks appears at The Kenyon Review:
Ed. Note: Fiction Editor Caitlin Horrocks wrote the following story for the “New Voices at the Kenyon Review” panel presented at AWP last month. The story is composed entirely of lines from published or soon-to-be-published KR pieces.
Even before she said anything, I knew she wasn’t my actual mother.[1] She had her bags out the door by morning, monumental in the sun.[2] I was more dead than alive, she explained. They had no choice but to send me home.[3] Her mouth fit like a clasp, and was as small as the rest of her.[4] Her fake blue contacts held and twisted light like gemstones.[5] Who is to say we must see all of a woman to acknowledge her as whole? Who is to say we should look away?[6]
Continue reading online…
Friends of Writers wishes to congratulate faculty member Anthony Doerr, who has been awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel All the Light We Cannot See.
Congratulations, also, to faculty member Alan Shapiro whose book Reel to Reel was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
We also congratulate faculty member Martha Rhodes, founder, publisher and editor of Four Way books, which is the proud publisher of Digest by Gregory Pardlo, the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
A piece by faculty member Daniel Tobin appears at Berfrois:
In one of my albums of old family photographs there is a picture of my brother and I standing on either side of Babe Ruth’s locker in the Baseball Hall of Fame. I am eleven, my brother two years older, and we look the part for the time: 1969, the sons of stolid Irish Catholic parents who had us in the late 1950s, still button-down and Bryl-creamed that summer of Civil Rights and Woodstock and kill counts from Vietnam before our tepid teenage rebelliousness kicked in, incongruously, in the era of the Hustle and the platform shoe. In another photograph we are joined by our mother’s childhood friend, Connie, a nun in full regalia, her rosary a beaded lasso looped at her side, her face crimped but smiling broadly under her snood’s high white façade—her habit’s equally constricted and flowing architecture preserved now in the photograph beside the uniforms of some of the game’s greats. By then I had memorized the batting averages, home runs, and other salient statistics of the all-time leaders as well as the dimensions of every major league ballpark, past and present. I kept my current baseball cards in a special plastic case designed to look like a miniature locker complete with swinging doors.
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An interview with faculty member Gabrielle Calvocoressi appears at Divedapper:
A few months ago, Gabrielle Calvocoressi posted online that she needed a ride from North Carolina to Virginia to give a reading. I sent her a note offering to drive and when she happily agreed, I set off through the night from Indianapolis to Carrboro. The next twenty-four hours saw us conducting this interview (while wandering around University Lake near her home), swirling through the Blue Ridge Mountains (with NC State MFA extraordinaire Elizabeth Purvis in tow), and participating in a truly singular reading with Rita Dove and the VQR all-stars (complete with complimentary oysters on the half shell). The interview that follows took place at the start of our day, with the exception of the bonus ghost story (!!!), which was recorded in the car after the reading as we drove back to North Carolina.
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Friends of Writers wishes to congratulate faculty member Christopher Castellani on his receipt of a Writers for Writers Award. From the website:
“Established in 1996, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards celebrate authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. Nominations are solicited from past winners, other prominent writers, members of the publishing community, and Poets & Writers’ Board and staff. Nominations are reviewed and winners selected by a committee comprised of current and past members of the Board of Directors. Title of the award has been given to Barnes & Noble in appreciation of their extraordinary support of Poets & Writers.”
You can find the announcement online…
An interview with faculty member Laura van den Berg appears online at The Rumpus:
Things I will never forget about Find Me: the website on which you learn whether your loved ones are alive or dead is WeAreSorryForYourLoss.com; a plastic rabbit mask and the defeated, injured eye beneath it; the world’s most sinister cardboard toilet paper roll.
Find Me, Laura van den Berg’s first novel, follows Joy Jones, a cough syrup-addicted Stop & Shop cashier, in the face of a widespread epidemic, known only as “the sickness,” which leads to memory loss and death. A small number of people seem to be somehow immune to the sickness (including our protagonist Joy) and are routed to a hospital in isolated, frozen Kansas to have their genetic makeup studied by scientists who are hoping to find a cure. The first half of the novel takes place entirely inside the hospital. In the second half, Joy embarks on a journey to find her mother, who abandoned her as a baby, and to uncover the events of a year repressed entirely from her memory. Along the way, she recovers her humanity vis-à-vis her relationships with key players from her past and with mysterious strangers in the new, dystopian America.
Continue reading online…