“Two Autumns, Saint Louis” by Dana Levin

An excerpt from “Two Autumns, Saint Louis” by Dana Levin, published in the Kenyon Review:

Two Autumns, Saint Louis

Now do you know where you are?

—C. D. Wright

Calvary Cemetery
Driving up Union to get there, all the yard signs saying, We Must Stop Killing Each Other—

A sign blaring CRISPY SNOOT—

An abandoned two-story with the windows blown out—a cooler and a bucket on the porch roof outside a second-story window—

At Calvary Cemetery, Groundskeeper Lambert “like the airport”: What are you looking for? Tennessee Williams. Say it again?

We asked to see the graves of Tennessee Williams, Dred Scott, and Kate Chopin; he obliged with the first two but as to the third, he hadn’t heard of her.

On his own he showed us four things:

The hill where all the priests are buried

The large hill empty of markers—
“That’s where the mass graves are, cholera, diphtheria, real
Wrath of God stuff, we don’t dig there—ever.”

A giant wasp nest hanging in the crook of a cross-shaped headstone—house of hearts militant—
“How close do you wanna get?”

The tomb where that old Saint Louisan with the two names is buried—
How she had been in cotton and asked to be buried on the
tallest hill overlooking the river, so she could watch the
loading from on high—

Later, Janet says, “I can’t find any record of that.” […continue reading here]

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Kirstin Valdez Quade and Bennett Sims receive 2018-19 Rome Prize

Congratulations to Kirstin Valdez Quade and Bennett Sims, both faculty members at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, who have been named winners of the 2018-19 Rome Prize in Literature.

These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, 29 Rome Prizes were awarded to 29 artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for a period of five months to two years at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome. The Rome Prize and Italian Fellowship winners were presented on April 12, 2018, during the Arthur and Janet C. Ross Rome Prize Ceremony in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium at Cooper Union in New York.

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars through a national competition. The eleven disciplines supported by the Academy are: Literature, Music Composition, Visual Arts, Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Design, and Historic Preservation and Conservation, as well as Ancient Studies, Medieval Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and Modern Italian Studies.

 

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“‘Cow Crashes Through Roof, Kills Sleeping Man'” by Matthew Olzmann

An excerpt from the poem “‘Cow Crashes Through Roof, Kills Sleeping Man'” by Matthew Olzmann, published at The Cortland Review :

 

“

‘Cow Crashes Through Roof, Kills Sleeping Man’

—Headline, USA Today

There are priests who can protect you
from demonic possession and eternal damnation.
If your house swells with smoke, there are alarms
to alert the fire department; it’s possible not much
will be lost. A vaccine to prevent the virus.
A barking dog to deter the intruder.
You can wear a life jacket.
You can wear sunscreen.
You can wear a helmet, on your bicycle
or while napping on the couch.
Even bullets can be stopped by a fashionable vest.
But a cow falling through the roof?
There is, my friend, no playbook for that.
It’s cloudy tonight.
Above you, the moon recoils
like a witness from a crime scene.  […continue reading here]

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Joan Silber’s ‘Improvement’ wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Congratulations to Joan Silber for winning the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction with her book, Improvement. Last month, Improvement also won the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize.For full article, click here.

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Two Poems by Tony Hoagland

An excerpt from the poem, “Dinner Guest,” by Tony Hoagland, one of two poems published at Scoundrel Time:

 

 

 

DINNER GUEST

The dinner guest goes upstairs to use the ladies room,
and after she has washed her hands, just out of curiosity
takes a peek in the medicine cabinet- where among
the Nyquil and Ativan and dental floss she sees
a bottle labeled Male Enhancement Formula,

—and is puzzled for a moment, and then amused.
Is this the funny little thing, she wonders,
that has caused so many wars? so many
murders and exploded buildings?
so many smashed down doors and refugees?

And in a way, of course, she is correct. The need to
engineer an outcome, the desire to
feel confident that what you want to happen
will happen when you want—
as an explanation it explains so much. […continue reading here]

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Joan Silber Wins NBCC Award for Fiction

Friends of Writers would like to congratulate Joan Silber, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, for her novel, Improvement. The book is her sixth novel. Additionally, she has written two collections of short stories.

Ms. Silber has been a member of the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College since 1983.

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The Stone in the Air – A Suite of Forty Poems from the German of Paul Celan, by Daniel Tobin

An excerpt from the poem “Homecoming” by Daniel Tobin, from his new book, The Stone in the Air – A Suite of Forty Poems from the German of Paul Celan, newly published by Salmon Poetry:

Homecoming

Snow falling, dense as some poems, denser,
like yesterday, dove-colored,
snow falling, as though you still were sleeping,
the whole world piled into whiteness.
And beyond the world, endless—
the sleigh print of the desolate.
There, deep down, sheltered under that mountain:
what so harrows the eye—mound
after mound—burgeons upward invisibly.
From each, hammered home into its
own present, a pole, wooden,
an I that sinks away into muteness. […continue reading here]
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Affliction, Faculty Member C. Dale Young’s New Book, Out Today

(c) William Anthony

An excerpt from faculty member C. Dale Young‘s new book, Affliction, available today:

Affliction

I don’t remember how I had the strength to do it, but I turned from Leenck and made my way on to the dock. I did not turn back. I did not look back. I walked away at a slow and steady pace. And Leenck sat there coughing while seagulls scurried around on the dock fighting and arguing over garbage. And then the wind picked up, the wind suddenly sweeping the crushed plastic cups from the dock into the water. And instead of thunder, all I heard was the sound of palm trees, the hundreds of fronds rustling in the distance, the too-numerous-to-count palm trees tilting their fronds like flags in the wind. Leenck could see me in the distance then, the tiny outline of me. I could feel him watching my outline moving away from him, watching to see if I would turn around to look for him on the boat. I bet he wondered if I was crying. Later I would hear how at that point Leenck felt tired, that he felt odd, that his chest was heaving more than normal. I know he watched my tiny outline get smaller and smaller. And I never turned to look back at him. The only tears were the tears that surprised Leenck’s own face. I am told the tears came quickly and frightened him. But I didn’t care to hear any of this. I am told that not once had he cried in the previous twenty years.

The harbor got darker then. And my own eyes stung. There was not a single rumble of thunder, just the breeze rustling the palm trees and the seagulls going mad over debris. The rain came down. It was forceful, cool and prickly as it hit all of us on our heads and faces. Did Leenck move inside the cabin? No. Supposedly, he sat there in the rain instead. He didn’t move. He was completely wet, the tears on his face indistinguishable then from the rest of his wet face. I want to believe his chest tightened in a way he had never experienced in his life. I want to believe that. What I know clearly is that the rain pelted everything, and the deck, the dock, the very earth between the boat and my father’s small house, suddenly took on the dark stain of rainwater, a stain not quite as dark as the heart, a stain not quite as dark as blood. And the trees in the distance seemed to be blurring into the landscape, everything bleeding together. And again, I thought of turning back to look for the figure of Leenck on his knees, sobbing. There are times when I believe he kept staring into the distance looking for the shape of me, but even if he had he couldn’t have seen me at such distance. Time and distance change everything. Years later, I am still trying to convince myself of that.”

An excerpt from “Between Men” from The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (c) 2018 by C. Dale Young. Appears with the permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved. 

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Faculty Member Debra Spark Interviewed in The Southern Review

Debra Spark’s “Finish It, Finish It: Options for Ending a Story” appears in the winter 2018 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses her writing process, her struggle to balance creative work with her professional life, and her penchant for interviewing writers.

Garrett Hazelwood: I understand that “Finish It, Finish It: Options for Ending a Story” had a former life as a craft talk, and it’s clear that in composing it you’ve drawn from myriad sources: personal relationships, your teaching, conversations with other writers, literary criticism, and quotes. Did you collect these fragments here and there until the connections became apparent? Or did the idea for the piece inspire the bulk of the research and collecting? Can you tell us a bit about your process in that regard?

Debra Spark: I teach in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, so each year I have to give a lecture or offer a class for about a hundred students. It is a low-residency MFA, so the school meets twice a year in intense ten-day sessions of lectures, classes, readings, and meetings. I go once a year, in July, and I typically start to get nervous about what I am going to write around February. I am not entirely sure why I tried to write about endings for the summer of 2017, but I do know that two of the people who often lecture in the same semester that I do—Robert Boswell and Charles Baxter—have the knack of making their craft essays both craft essays and something more. Boswell’s pieces are often also personal essays (he has a lovely one about his mother, another great one about how he met his wife) and Baxter’s are often cultural critiques (he has one about contemporary agendas in communication and the implication for dialogue in fiction). I wanted to try that myself, so pulled personal material into this lecture, since my friend’s death was so much on my mind.

Read the rest of the interview here:  SOUTHERN REVIEW BLOG

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Faculty Member Jeremy Gavron on FRANCE 24

FEATURING A SURPISE FACULTY GUEST!

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