“Transept” by C. Dale Young

An excerpt from the poem “Transept” by C. Dale Young, published at Scoundrel Time:

Transept

Unlike me, she made a choice, chose
Indian over Chinese, because she felt
she looked more Indian than Chinese.

It “takes strength” to choose. At age five,
while playing near her feet, my grandmother
knitted sweaters for me because she was

always convinced I was cold. You smile
too much. You are too pretty for a boy, too pretty.
You will bring yourself trouble. I smiled

and laughed the way only small children do
when teased. Pretty boy with an English heart,
cold cold heart that needs warming. […continue reading here]

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“Facts That Turn Out to Be Fiction” by Ann Cummins and Sarah Stone

An excerpt from “Facts That Turn Out to Be Fiction: Ann Cummins and Sarah Stone on Writing, Landscape, and Family,” published at The Millions:

Facts That Turn Out to Be Fiction

We met in 2002, when we were teaching at Pima Writers Workshop. Later that summer, we were fellows, and roommates, at Bread Loaf Writers Conference. For nearly a decade and a half, we’ve been friends and in the same writers’ group, reading each other’s stories, plays, novels, and nonfiction, including Ann’s novel Yellowcake, the family memoir she’s working on, and Sarah’s new novel, Hungry Ghost Theater.

Our conversations usually take place as we walk by the San Francisco Bay, discussing our families and lives, but this time we sat down in Sarah’s living room with a couple of tape recorders and a pile of pastries Ann had brought over. Our initial conversation was full of those moments between old friends where you say about a third of a sentence, see full comprehension in the other person, and immediately tack to a new thought. So we followed up and added to the conversation via email.

covercover

Ann Cummins: Your characters in Hungry Ghost Theater have the authenticity and intimate appeal of people struggling with real-life issues. I mean, the family at the center of this book pulses with believable complexity. Did you draw from your own family as prototypes for your characters?

Sarah Stone: Like the family in the book, members of my own family have wrestled with mental illness, addiction, and alcohol, though in very different ways than these characters. I love to read books that come from the poetic or memoiristic urge to write down what happened, to make sense of it. But I feel an internal prohibition about doing that. Also, I’m interested in making up stories. I can’t help it. If I say to myself, I would like to try to tell the truth about this, I just start turning it into a story. In my life I feel—and this may be a lie I tell myself—that I’m truthful to a fault, truthful to the point of potentially putting people’s backs up.

[…continue reading here]

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“Let us draw near” by Kevin McIlvoy

An excerpt from “Let us draw near” by Kevin McIlvoy, published at Scoundrel Time:

Let us draw near

“No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” Virgil, The Aeneid,
National September 11 Memorial Museum

Ten days after 9/11 my father’s heart exploded, his life collapsing in a matter of moments. We could not find each other in our own familiar streets. We could not ask now how to meet him in the ash. Old-school Catholics, we prayed, “Adiemus. Adiemus.”

There were two of me, one loving, one late in loving. I set aside the national mourning, which I could not withstand. When you said he can rest now, asked how you could help, that brought no calm, and no peace came when you recalled your own lost ones.

No new perspective came when news returned again, again to the three thousand gone, to acts of heroism, to horrors visited upon survivors, to tender personal interviews news cycle after news cycle that I took in while ignoring, ignoring the entire wrecked nation.

 

Today my sister, youngest of the five children, has died before her turn. She has ended her participation in our grim middle-age sibling tag game of electronic messaging, burning each other with teasing grief, our way to touch but not be done with familial anniversaries of mistaking one obliterated story for another. […continue reading here]

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“Mystery vs. Confusion” by Sarah Stone

An excerpt from “Mystery vs. Confusion” by Sarah Stone, published at Craft:

Mystery vs. Confusion

In writing fiction, we’re always looking for ways to manage the release and restraint of information, introducing our characters and situations while avoiding the dreaded exposition junk pile at the beginning (many of us do have a great fondness for exposition junk piles when they’re intriguingly full of bright objects). When we’re writing the first draft of a story or novel, the process can feel like an unsettling dream: we’re attending a party in the dark. Is it a funeral? A wedding? The birthday party of an old friend or enemy? What are we doing and why? We fumble around trying to figure out who else is in the room as we trip over the furniture and bump into walls.

When we finally find the light switches, we feel such joy in discovering who the characters are and what they’re up to that we may be tempted to try to recreate for our readers this sense of being utterly lost, followed by the delight of figuring out what’s happening.

We may also fear that we’ll lose our readers’ fragile attention if we don’t create enough of a sense of mystery. Sometimes we fear this so much that we make every element of a beginning mysterious, so that readers have no idea who the characters are, what’s happening, what matters, or what they should be focusing on. […continue reading here]

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“The Cure For Racism Is Cancer” by Tony Hoagland

An excerpt from the essay, “The Cure For Racism Is Cancer,” by Tony Hoagland, published at The Sun:

The Cure For Racism Is Cancer

The woman sitting next to me in the waiting room is wearing a blue dashiki, a sterile paper face mask to protect her from infection, and a black leather Oakland Raiders baseball cap. I look down at her brown, sandaled feet and see that her toenails are the color of green papaya, glossy and enameled.

This room at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, is full of people of different ages, body types, skin colors, religious preferences, mother tongues, and cultural backgrounds. Standing along one wall, in work boots, denim overalls, and a hunter’s camouflage hat, is a white rancher in his forties. Nervously, he shifts from foot to foot, a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hand. An elderly Chinese couple sit side by side, silently studying their phones. The husband is watching a video. The wife is the sick one, pale and gaunt. Her head droops as if she is fighting sleep. An African American family occupies a corner. They are wearing church clothes; the older kids are supervising the younger ones while two grown women lean into their conversation and a man — fiftyish, in a gray sports coat — stares into space.

America, that old problem of yours? Racism? I have a cure for it: Get cancer. Come into these waiting rooms and clinics, the cold radiology units and the ICUcubicles. Take a walk down Leukemia Lane with a strange pain in your lower back and an uneasy sense of foreboding. Make an appointment for your CATscan. Wonder what you are doing here among all these sick people: the retired telephone lineman, the grandmother, the junior-high-school soccer coach, the mother of three.

[…continue reading here]

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An Interview with Jeremy Gavron

Here is an interview with Jeremy Gavron on Soundcloud. Jeremy discusses his new book, Felix Culpa, as well as his many of the relationships that have informed his work, including those with agents and editors and also with his mother, whose story he tells in A Woman on the Edge of Time. The interview is also available on iTunes.

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“The Truly Screaming Baby” by Heather McHugh

An excerpt from the poem, “The Truly Screaming Baby,” by Heather McHugh, published at Scoundrel Time:

The Truly Screaming Baby

Thank God says the woman in 13E
we’re not back there she means
back there with the mom
with the truly screaming baby
and the two toddlers to boot (by God she’d never
boot these two) these other two who didn’t once
between them (sourly now my row-mate feels
it is important to inform me) listen to a word
she said.  The baby sounds to be
in agony.  We haven’t yet

entirely taxi’d out to take-off.
None of the passengers appears
remotely sympathetic and I can’t help
wincing on the mom’s behalf:  what if
the baby’s sick what if she’s always
like this and mother’s feeling
permanently miserable since given this
one hoped-for getaway she cannot get away
what is a flight if not an escapade and yet
her fellow passengers are blaming her
for what she can’t escape or even manage to
ameliorate what if they’re penniless and this

is her one chance to visit relatives who might
relieve if not relate what if the father’s
always off carousing and comes home
an hour or two to get her
pregnant once again then take
her just as much to task as these more
pampered people on the airplane do
what makes this baby’s life so utterly

[…continue reading here]

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Three Works by Karen Brennan

An excerpt from “C’est moi,” one of three works by Karen Brennan published at The Collagist:

C’est moi

As a child, I’d been the victim of various unkindnesses, no doubt brought on by my own difficult personality, a kind of failure to fit in coupled with disdain for others, even though I had very little self-awareness. To me the world existed inside of books, in the caves of my own imagination, so beautifully fed by books, and eventually, having cultivated the habit of imagination that embellished those dramas and visions and ethical appeals, I fell naturally into a habit of daydreaming, of insinuating myself in the center of those daydreams, in some heroic light or other. Had I only read Madame Bovary I would have perhaps recoiled from my own vanity and superficiality, but I was too lazy for Flaubert. […continue reading here]

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Lauren Groff in the New York Times

In anticipation of the publication of her new book, ˆFlorida, Lauren Groff sat for an interview with The New York Times:

Lauren Groff, author most recently of the story collection “Florida,” sees Mr. Rochester as a villain: “He’s a sociopath who keeps his grieving wife locked in the attic and tries to gaslight poor, plain, abused Jane Eyre then marry her bigamously.”

What books are on your nightstand?

I don’t know if I have a nightstand anymore. I do have an avalanche of books with a reading light sticking out of it. From across the room, I can see the autobiography of Lili’uokalani, the Hawaiian queen and songwriter who composed “Aloha ‘Oe,” Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend” and two novels by Marie-Claire Blais, a Québécoise writer who now lives in Key West: “La Belle Bête” and “Soifs.”

What’s the last great book you read?

I just read two great books at the same time: I reread Jean Stafford’s “The Mountain Lion,” which is one of the strangest and angriest novels of the 20th century, and for the first time I read Morgan Parker’s “There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé,” a brilliant poetry collection playing so cunningly with pop culture that it reminded me that pop culture is astonishingly deep and fascinating and is only considered frivolous because it — like caretaking careers and the domestic sphere — is devalued for being considered primarily feminine. […continue reading here]

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Lauren Groff Awarded Radcliffe Institute Fellowship

Congratulations to Lauren Groff on being awarded a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship.

More than 50 individuals from 11 countries make up Radcliffe’s new fellowship cohort. All will be in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018–2019, pursuing work across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts. This year’s fellows represent just under 3.5 percent of the applicant pool.

Lauren has been awarded the Suzanne Young Murray Fellowship. The author of Fates and Furies and the soon-to-be-published Florida, will work on a novel based on early American captivity narratives by women.

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