A poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi appears in Lit Hub:
Some Thoughts on Building The Atom Bomb
I would not have been great at it.
Firstly, I was terrible at science.
I got as far as slicing the frog’s abdomen
open. Then I made an excuse
and walked the halls till the bell rang.
I know what you’re thinking.
[. . . continue reading here.]
An excerpt, “at dusk, as always, Bender sang to us,” from 57 Octaves Below Middle C, by Kevin McIlvoy:
At dusk, as always, Bender sang to our congregation, silver hair greasing her blouse, tin on the toes of her boots.
When we were grade-school children, she and I liked duct tape. We liked it like you could never believe. Our favorite thing to steal from the corner store was that silver coil. The way it ripped across, how it stretched over. It gripped!
She stood on the white twenty-gallon empty drum, her boot heels burning the plastic, her tempo uneven. We were a communion of over a dozen church-bums who loved her and were frightened by her hawk-at-the-tree-crown and hawk-on-the-glide shoulders and head, her wings at her sides, her hands palms out, fingers curled up.
Bender and I once duct-taped a picture of our father, who was dying in the Simic State Penitentiary hospital, to a globe sent by our Aunt Horror. On the globe our father clung to the deep South. He spun fast without flying off. When the globe slowed down, his head did a half-turn on his neck, then a turn back by half that. We tore the thing apart, duct-taped the entire planet, kicked it anywhere we wanted. Dented part of Asia, most of Antarctica. Had to re-tape.
57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books, 2017). Order here from Four Way Books.
Four Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi appear in The Kenyon Review Online:
[There’s a point]
There’s a point where it all gets still,
when the Bandleader’s there between the branches
of my fingers. When I cover my eyes
as if to block out. To the left of us,
to the left of the city an hour away,
[. . . continue reading ‘[There’s a point]’ and three other poems here.]
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LXXXIII (Chanterelles)
Black trumpets, whale-colored pamphlets, or shingles, or ears, book-
marks of the netherworld, breakast food of the box turtle.
For a long time, she could not find them, hovering just above them
the way an inanimate lamp will hang blindly above the lucidities
of geometry.
. . . continue reading here.
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How quickly they came to their bodies and never that protean instant of
metamorphosis, only one day both were inexplicably large with the downy,
. . . continue reading here.
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Faculty member Liam Callanan is the 2017 winner of the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters.
According to the announcement in America “Liam’s contributions to the Catholic literary tradition are extraordinary,” said Matt Malone, S.J., president and editor in chief of America Media. “Liam Callanan has continually produced work that leaves the reader wanting more,” Father Malone said. “This prize is awarded in part to recognize future promise,” said the Rev. Robert Beloin, chaplain of Saint Thomas More Chapel & Center at Yale University, “and in the case of Liam, we have no doubt that there is still so much more to come.”
According to its website, The George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters is awarded annually by the trustees of America and The Saint Thomas More Chapel and Center at Yale University. The mission of the Hunt Prize is five-fold:
To promote scholarship, the advancement of learning and the rigor of thoughtful, religious expression;
To support and promote a new generation of journalists, authors and scholars;
To memorialize the life and work of George W. Hunt, S.J.;
To forge a lasting partnership between America and the Saint Thomas More Chapel and Center at Yale University, two places that were central to Father George Hunt’s life and work;
To support the intellectual formation, artistic innovation and civic involvement of young writers.
Read the full prize announcement here.
Work from faculty member Tony Hoagland appears in The American Journal of Poetry:
Supermodel Throwdown
I watch the TV contestants attempt to climb the cliff
and fall off again and again.
When they get to the top they encounter the giant fan
and the whipped cream challenge.
. . . continue reading this poem and “Listening to Men Drinking in the Next Room” here.
Faculty Member C. J. Hribal’s Story “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” was selected by Ha Jin as a winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, 2017. (This is the second year in a row a member of the WWC/MFA community has won this award.)
The Bellevue Literary Review has an interview with C.J. on their website. It includes a link to the winning story.
What inspired you to write “Do I Look Sick To You”?
I was very much in love with someone who’d had a very rare form of cancer before I knew her. It came roaring back—very aggressive, very resistant to treatment—just as we were talking about marriage. I ended up taking two sets of notes. One set was just trying to keep track of the avalanche of information that was bombarding us—about the disease itself, about treatment protocols, about the drugs and their side effects and the drugs they were using to help alleviate the symptoms of the other drugs they were using. Another set of notes was my emotional response to what was happening to her, to me, to us.
Two things came out of that second set of notes. One was that cancer affects everything, every nook and cranny of your life, and I hadn’t seen a lot written about how it affects intimacy. The other was that there’s a weird counter-narrative out there. We use war and battle metaphors when talking about cancer—we “fight” it. And because we love happy endings, one narrative that’s out there unintentionally is that if you fight it and will it hard enough, you can beat cancer, and if cancer “wins,” then you weren’t fighting or trying hard enough. The first part of that narrative is understandable, even necessary. The second part is pernicious. There are many types of cancer, and some offer you essentially zero chance of survival. I’ve had friends and well-meaning people—cancer survivors—who’ve unintentionally conveyed that message, and part of what was behind this story was giving voice to the rage and to all the other complex emotions people feel when they are “fighting” and “losing” a “battle” they had no chance of “winning.” This doesn’t mean you don’t fight, but sometimes cancer does hold all the cards. Eventually what matters is that we treat each other with kindness and with tenderness.
Read the rest of the interview here: INTERVIEW WITH CJ
And read the award winning story here: Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)
A poem from faculty member C. Dale Young appears in the Spring 2017 issue of Blackbird:
Las Palmas Reales
Playa del Carmen, Mexico
1
The palm trees clustered together on this beach,
transplanted here almost fifty years ago,
require not even a single word of praise—
unfortunately, I am not like these palms.
The bluish green Caribbean creates no sense
of urgency for them, no sense of being
. . . continue reading here.
(Photo by William Anthony)
An essay by Peter Orner (fiction) appears in Guernica:
After the Earthquake: Oral Histories on Life, Death & Survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
by Peter Orner
Five years ago Dr. Evan Lyon, a physician who has worked in Haiti since 1996, and I began to conduct interviews with residents of the city of Port-au-Prince. We set out with considerable help from Laura Scott, Jean Pierre Marseille, Katie Kane, Doug Ford, and Edward Loiseau. The project started with a simple notion: What’s life like on the streets of Haiti’s largest city since the cataclysmic earthquake of January 12, 2010? There are number of good books about Haiti, but too many of them, it seemed to us, interpreted life in “the poorest country in the western hemisphere” through the lens of an outsider. We wanted to create a book that, so much as possible, might give a reader an unmitigated view of the struggle to survive–and endure–in, yes, one of the poorest but also, one of the most vibrant cities in our hemisphere.
An interview with faculty member Steven Schwartz appears in The Rumpus:
The Rumpus: Your work, which it’s been a pure pleasure to read again, has a keen psychological insight to it that leaves me nodding my head, “Right… right… that’s just how a person might respond.” But at the same time, the stories are full of surprise. People may do things that make sense from a psychological perspective, but they don’t do or feel or say things that are expected. I am fascinated by the whole project of portraying psychologically logical behaviors while avoiding predictable ones. [… continue reading here.]
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