Anthony Doerr on NPR’s “All Things Considered”

An interview with faculty member Anthony Doerr, discussing his new novel All The Light We Cannot See, is featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”:

On the very first source of inspiration for the novel

I was on a train heading into Penn Station from Princeton, N.J., and we started going underground. The man in front of me was on his cellphone call — this was in 2004 — and the call dropped. And he got kind of angry, a little embarrassingly angry, unreasonably angry.

And I just remember thinking, what he’s forgetting — really what we’re all forgetting all the time — is that this is a miracle. He’s using this little receiver and transmitter, this little radio in his pocket, to send messages at the speed of light rebounding between towers to somebody maybe thousands of miles away. He might have been talking to someone in Madagascar for all I knew. For me, that’s a miracle.

So … originally, the real central motivation for the book was to try and conjure up a time when hearing the voice of a stranger in your home was a miracle.

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Continue reading the interview highlights or listen to the full radio story online.

 

 

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“The Literature of the Standing Desk” by Dominic Smith

A new essay by faculty member Dominic Smith appears online at The Millions:

In an 1883 article from Popular Science, Dr. Felix Oswald expounds on the remedies of nature. Mingled with imperatives about taking cold baths before dinner and opening bedroom windows at the night is this pearl: “At the first symptoms of indigestion, book-keepers, entry-clerks, authors, and editors should get a telescope-desk. Literary occupations need not necessarily involve sedentary habits, though, as the alternative of a standing-desk, I should prefer a Turkish writing-tablet and a square yard of carpet-cloth to squat upon.”

The Turkish writing tablet never quite took off, but the standing desk, over a century later, has entered its heyday. It’s changing the cubicle skyline of corporate America, the open-plan shared workspaces of the startup world, and the studios and work nooks of thousands of writers across the country.

Facebook reportedly has about 350 standing desks, with another 10-15 requests coming in each week from employees. The desk manufacturer Steelcase began selling height-adjustable desks in 2004. Since then, sales have increased fivefold. Its clients include Apple, Google, Intel, Boeing, and Allstate.

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Continue reading online. 

 

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C. Dale Young Awarded the 2014 Stanley Lindberg Award for Literary Editing

Faculty member C. Dale Young has been awarded the 2014 Stanley Lindberg Award for Literary Editing. The press release details the award:

Dr. C. Dale Young, Poetry Editor of New England Review, is the recipient of the 2014 Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing. This award is presented by the Rainier Writers’ Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University to someone who has labored to uphold the highest literary standards in a magazine or small press. It is given in honor of the late Stanley Lindberg, a well-known man of letters who brought The Georgia Review to national eminence. The award will be conferred at the annual residency of the Program in August.

Young works full-time as a physician and has been editing poetry at the New England Review for 19 years. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, he is the author of four collections of poetry, including Torn (2011) and The Halo, forthcoming from Four Way Books in
2016. Young teaches part-time in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and lives in San Francisco. Poets published by Young very early in their careers include: Nick Flynn, Jennifer Grotz, Cate Marvin, Patrick Phillips, and the Poet Laureate of the United States Natasha Trethewey.

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“The Fourtunate” by C. Dale Young

New fiction by faculty member C. Dale Young appears online in Blackbird:

Some are good at digging up the past, and some are gifted with the ability to divine the future. Most people live squarely in the present without even the slightest knowledge that all of time coexists, that each era is simply a thin rind circling the current moment. Rosa Blanco was one of those people who lived in the present, but she was always obsessing about the past. In her small kitchen, she would, sometimes for hours, replay a moment in the past ten, maybe fifteen, times. Each time, she checked and rechecked what she had said, how she had said it, what she had done. But the old woman who lived a few doors away was a different type of woman. She lived in the present, but she lived for the future.

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Continue reading online. 

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Martha Rhodes Featured on Poetry Daily

A poem by faculty member Martha Rhodes appears online at Poetry Daily for May 2, 2014:

I Was in the Commons Kissing, and Lucy Next to Me Kissing, Too 

Both of us under one boy or another.
That’s how we spent our senior year,
Beacon Hill, Harvard Square,
Coolidge Corner, anywhere
but Belmont, or Westwood Center.
Boylston Street for bongs—Reefer
Madness, incense, Yardley’s makeovers,
buffalo leather toe sandals—her baby was born
with encephalocele. While I held her,
I hoped she’d die, though tried to love her,
four months, she didn’t grow—Lucy rocking her,
cooing, passers-by smiled at the handsome mother,
then frowned—small gasps—when they looked closer—

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Continue reading online at Poetry Daily. 

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“Vantage” by Alan Shapiro

A poem by faculty member Alan Shapiro is the featured “Poem-A-Day” for Monday, April 21, 2014, at Poets.org:

Vantage

From where I watch, there are no highest leaves,
no leaves that don’t have over them more leaves
impeding what they open up and out for,

darkening downward as they feed on green
diminishments, as if dark, if it still
can darken, could be itself the light

the darker leaves beneath are hungry for.
From where I watch even the shade hungers
And is hungered after—all along the chain

past bark, root, leaf, ghost speck of leaf,
microbial scrapings, and beyond them, flakes
chipped off of flakes off of a now-

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Finish reading online at Poets.org.

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New Work by Caitlin Horrocks

A new story by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks appears online at Salon:

You’re the kids who robbed us: Our strange online encounter with our burglars

When the calls came, we didn’t receive them. We were 800 miles from home, at a friend’s place too deep in the Vermont woods for cell reception. It wasn’t until the drive back into civilization the following morning that the voice mails chirped into view on my phone. “What is it?” my husband Todd asked, watching my face as I listened to the messages from our neighbor.

“The house got robbed,” I said, although it was the wrong word. There’d been no force involved, just a sliced-through screen, the back window pried open or carelessly left unlocked. We’d been burglarized, burgled, a cheerful, gurgling word like a cartoon character had snuck in to eat Cheetos and watch cable. Our house too, the neighbors’ message said. They couldn’t tell us what was missing, what the inside of our house looked like.

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Continue reading online at Salon.

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Daniel Tobin Featured on Poetry Daily

Two poems from faculty member Daniel Tobin’s new book The Net are featured on Poetry Daily for Friday, April 18, 2014:

BB

Bright grit, pellet, bead of summeriest bronze
Broken off the string of a furled necklace,
Pearl of my anger’s petrifying slough,
I loaded the like of it one by one
One afternoon into the barrel’s craw,
Then went for those boys and their mocking names
With my father’s tree-target gun, my aim
Honed to the moment when the pupil narrows—

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Continue reading online. 

 

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Rodney Jones featured on The Kenyon Review’s Weekend Reads

A poem by faculty member Rodney Jones appears online as a part of Kenyon Review‘s Weekend Reads:

The Art of Heaven

 

In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood,
the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards.
Not deep depression. The nice Hell of suburbs.
Speed bumps. The way things aren’t quite paradise.
Nights I read Speer’s Inside the Third Reich. He made
Hitler so amiable. It seemed important to see that.
There had been a murder in town. The victim
was Lucia’s student, a naturalist and promising poet.

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Continue reading online at The Kenyon Review.

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“The World Beyond the Glass: A New Interview with Mary Szybist”

A new interview with faculty member Mary Szybist appears online in The Paris Review:

Alex Dueben: Incarnadine deals with the Annunciation—the visitation of Mary by the angel Gabriel, who tells her that she will have God’s son—and the implications and meaning of such an event. It’s an encounter between the human and something beyond human understanding. Your book is an attempt to describe the indescribable through poetry—which is something that prayer can do, also.

Mary Szybist: Prayer is one way to do this—and yes, I have thought about the connections between poetry and prayer for a long time, and sometimes I am even tempted to believe that they are similar engagements. When I was young, I reached a point where I found myself unable to pray. I was devastated by it. I missed being able to say words in my head that I believed could be heard by a being, a consciousness outside me. That is when I turned to poetry.

I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level—it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. Still, some kinds of articulations can get us closer to such connections—connections between very different consciousnesses—and I think the linguistic ranges in poetry can enable that.

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Continue reading the rest of the interview online at The Paris Review.

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