An interview with faculty member Marianne Boruch appears at Divedapper:

You describe your approach to writing poetry by saying you simply put out your begging bowl and wait to see what drops in. Can you talk about what this looks like, in practice?

It’s fairly simple really. This has been my method for years, this whole business of the “begging bowl” habit to start a poem. It might be a way to avoid too much self-obsession and navel-gazing, the great danger of the genre, and at least to begin in the world, the not-you, looking out to it with no agenda besides the usual wonder and puzzlement. What you find out there will bring you inward eventually, back and forth between image and idea as the poem moves toward a first line, but there’s also a lot of patience involved, that wait and mystery: what will come into my head, and how will everything proceed up or down from there? Going blank — clearing the mind to zero, no expectations or clear aims — is crucial. Intention is worthless. And then you really do wait, or at least I do. Of course once that first line’s in place, you follow it who knows where, and that’s where the meticulous care begins.

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A poem by alumna Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appears in the Rappahannock Review:

 

Jacinte

We walked through the cemetery,
William Cognat’s grave blasted

by an oak, cement chunks
shoved up the hillsides,

 

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A new story by alumna Elisabeth Hamilton (fiction, ’13) appears at [PANK]:

Here’s a story: he goes out to play soccer with a bunch of boys. Three from his grade, the rest from other grades. The boys are late returning, and the teacher locks them out. This is when hitting a kid with a slat of wood ten times in the ass is no thing. And the Brothers (or was it a priest, that time, in Ecuador?) use the cords of their robes, which burn like crazy, though he won’t know this until he’s 14, when he truly thinks he’s invincible, and doesn’t anticipate how a rope will feel compared with the gentle give of wood against his backside.

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Faculty member Liam Callanan’s travel article “Wisconsin: A Water-Lover’s Wonderland” appears in The Wall Street Journal:

IF WATER IS the new oil, then Wisconsin is looking like the new Dubai.

That’s not only because Wisconsin has so much of this precious resource—the state claims 15,000 lakes to Minnesota’s measly 10,000—but because it has figured out so many ways to exploit its abundance. Wisconsin’s claim to fame as America’s Dairyland can obscure how critical a role water plays here, for business (Milwaukee styles itself as a kind of Silicon Valley of H20) and tourists. Those who prefer their water with salt should look elsewhere. But on a recent trip around the state, my family found that it offered something for every one of us.

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