Excerpts & Contributors: Fall 2001

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary and biographical notes for our Fall 2001 contributors.  If you wish to read the authors' entire work and their comments about their work, please purchase a copy of this issue.  Order forms are available by clicking here or by clicking the “Subscribe” link at the bottom of this page.

Fiction

Robert Earle, Artist's Statement on "Animal Abuse"

          This story was born one day when I saw a teenage girl smile and reveal the same unhealthy kind of ‘swollen and cherry red’ gums I give Marlise. A little detail like that stays with me and makes me uneasy. Next I heard her voice—not her real voice, but the voice I imagined for her. It was a worried, plaintive voice, and I began to respond to it, self-protectively, from a certain clinical distance. Terry the Vet emerged. There’s a rule about short stories: you’re not supposed to switch points of view. Well, I broke it. Not only did I have Marlise and Terry the Vet speaking to one another in my head, but a third voice announced itself, objecting to their relationship: this was Lenny speaking. He was the abused abuser, more animal-like than Roger, the dog. Now the gang was all there, and I wrote down what they were saying.

Biographical Note

          Robert Earle has published stories and essays in journals throughout the US and abroad.  He graduated from Princeton and Johns Hopkins and then spent twenty years overseas (Europe and Latin America) in the Foreign Service.  He now lives and writes full-time in Virginia.  He and his wife, Mary Azoy, have two teenage sons, Nick and Rob.

John Oliver Hodges, "Crying Babies in Heaven"

Biographical Note

         John Oliver Hodges has a master's degree in creative writing from Florida State University.  He currently teaches writing at the University of Alaska Southeast, in Juneau.

Bruce Machart, Excerpt from and Artist's Statement on "Monuments"

          Excerpt - This was all in 1979, and Patty's long gone now.  Just before junior high, when the bottom fell out of the Houston oil business, her father lost his job at Exxon and moved the family up north.  Detroit, I think.  After working my way through college, I landed a good job as an outside salesman, driving from one refinery to the next pitching high-dollar hose and couplings to men who wear tool belts and turn wrenches for a living, men like my father.  Coming up fast on thirty, I'm a long haul from childhood, but still the memories come.  Sometimes when I'm on the road making sales calls, I'll find myself at the wheel of my truck, ten miles past my exit on the highway, nothing but steaming asphalt and thoughts of Patty in my wake, thoughts of the girl with sad black eyes and a tiny, upturned nose.  The girl who loved me after Mom left.

          Artist's Statement - My stories usually stem from single images.  In the case of "Monuments," the image in question was that of moonlight as seen through miniblinds, the strictly delineated bands of shadow and light that slice up a nighttime room.  It might have made more thematic sense, then, to have characters whose lives were more akin to that image, whose psychological darknesses were distinct from their still-kindled hopes, but--well, hell with that.  People, to my mind, aren't that cut and dry.  The darkness may never overtake the light; childhood tragedies may never fully extinguish the curious and hopeful assertions of youth; thank God for that.  Still, the shadows are ever encroaching.

Biographical Note

          Bruce Machart is a graduate of the MFA program at Ohio State University.  His stories have appeared in Story, Glimmer Train, and Zoetrope:  All-Story, and he is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council.  He now lives in Massachusetts, where he is at work on a collection of stories and a novel.

Poetry  

Jackie Bartley, Artist's Statement on "You Ask Me Again If I Can Tell What You've Added to the Coffee"

           As for an artist's statement,  I suppose that this poem reflects the process that keeps me writing poetry: the desire to be faithful to image--both in memory and in the present—in a way that embodies the interconnectedness of all things.  In the process, if I'm faithful to the world as I perceive it, I live more fully, and, hopefully, the poems—these "biographical artifacts," as Winston Fuller calls them—give others pause as well, allow them to hover, hummingbird-like, at the flowers while still conscious of themselves and the flower of time.

Biographical Note

           Jackie Bartley's poems have appeared most recently in Ellipsis, Phoebe, and The Spoon River Review.  She lives on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan where she teaches writing and makes poems, sculptures, photographs, and other assemblages.

Philip Dacey, Artist's Statement on "The New Skylight"

          I'm a great believer in fictiveness in poetry.  The notion of poetry as exclusively lyrical/personal/confessional and short stories and novels as fictive/inventive/fabricated seems to be both wrongheaded and naive.  I love it when the verisimilitude of a poem of mine convinces readers it happened to me.  Nevertheless, "The New Skylight" is one based on literal truth, even down to the slant of the ceiling.  I live in the countryside, which certainly enhances the view of stars through the roof.

Biographical Note

          Philip Dacey's sixth and seventh books of poems, The Deathbed Playboy (Eastern Washington UP) and The Paramour of the Moving Air (Quarterly Review of Literature), both appeared in 1999.  He lives in Minnesota, where he teaches four months a year at Southwest State University (Marshall) and writes eight.  With David Jauss, he co-edited Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms (Harper/Collins, 1986).

William Doreski, Artist's Statement on "Eggemoggin Reach"

           Eggemoggin Reach is a stretch of water in Maine lying between the Deer Isles and the mainland.  It's yachting water, a shortcut from North Haven and Castine to Bar Harbor, but is rough, undeveloped (for the most part) blueberry country, with steep bluffs on the mainland side, vacant gravelly beaches on Little Deer Isle.  When I was thinking about John Berryman's dream song in which he's staying with the Blackmurs in Maine (in Blue Hill, only a few miles from the scene of this poem) and imagines himself walking underwater, out to the island (a wonderful, if that's the word, suicide dream), I think of this wild narrow straight with its old-fashioned-looking suspension bridge, barely wide enough for two cars to pass.  I suppose the spider in some conventional way embodies death or morality, as the sea does in Berryman's dream, but I'm terrified of large spiders, and finding one in a berry patch would stop me from picking berries for that day.  Despite that fear, the poem chooses between two moral visions and elects the land-based one as more available to the imagination and more amenable to survival.

Biographical Note

           William Doreski, Professor of English, Keene State College (New Hampshire), teaches creative writing, literary theory, and modern poetry.  Born in Connecticut, he lived in Boston for many years, attended various colleges, and eventually received a Ph.D. from Boston University.  After teaching at Goddard, Harvard, and Emerson colleges, he came to Keene State in 1982.  He has published three critical studies—The Years of Our Friendship: Robert Lowell and Allen Tate (University Press of Mississippi, 1990), and The Modern Voice in American Poetry (University Press of Florida, 1995), Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors (Ohio University Press, 1999)—and a best-selling textbook entitled How to Read and Interpret Poetry (Prentice-Hall).  His critical essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many academic and literary journals.  His most recent collection of poetry is Suburban Light (Cedar Hill, 1999).

Michael Hettich, Artist's Statement on "The Middle Stanza"

           Though I've lived in Miami for close to twenty years now, the climate and landscape of this place still astonish me.  Many of my best images and ideas come to me on walks around my neighborhood: manatees lolling in the trash-clogged river in the Little Haiti neighborhood just south of my house; parrots squawking at us as they fly overhead; the fragrances that seem to color the air after the first heavy spring rains; the palm-sized frogs that jump against our bedroom windows after those rains—for me, who grew up in a very different landscape, this place is teeming with such images.  But most of the time, I use these images in a non-documentary manner, in poems I "make up."  "The Middle Stanza" came about quite differently: it is a faithful presentation of the facts.  Up until a year or so ago, our neighborhood was populated by a number of families of foxes, rarely seen by most people, often seen by those of us who take walks in the evening.  They'd often let us get quite close, and then they'd leap into the other side of the air.  Once, though, my daughter and I stood so still the fox we were watching seemed to forget us; when my daughter finally took a step, that fox let out a bark that echoed in both of our ears for days: it was small, and intelligent, and wild—right in the midst of this teeming city.  The realization thrilled both of us.  I wrote down what happened, trying to catch my daughter's voice, that vivid moment in our relationship.  It seemed part of a longer poem I hadn't written, about family and children and wild things, things that were implied and did not need to be fleshed out.

           Though I didn't see it yet, the poem was unfinished when I sent it in to Iron Horse.  The editors' suggestion for revision revealed the poem I'd been working toward.  I am grateful for their attention and intelligence, for that all-too-rare kind of relationship.

Biographical Note

           Michael Hettich has published two full-length books and a number of chapbooks, most recently Sleeping With The Lights On (Pudding House, 2000).  Two new chapbooks are forthcoming, as well as one online.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including Witness, TriQuarterly, Poetry East, Rhino, and The Saint Anne's Review.  He teaches English and Creative Writing at Miami-Dade Community College and lives in Miami with his wife and children.

Gray Jacobik, Artist's Statements on "Sweeping Sorrows" and "Crows"

          "Sweeping Sorrows" - This poem took me years to revise and is, as I remember, a marriage of two or three fragments, perhaps still detectable to the detective-reader.  Certainly the experience of a warm evening listening to the rain is the triggering event that weaves the disparate elements of this poem together.  The daring part for me occurs when the poem becomes self-consciously poetical, and begins to comment on the words that got in and the worlds that were left "out in the rain" as it were:  "how many more wait for whom there is no room" (in this poem?).  I was pleased with that turn in the poem's events, but several times came close to writing-out what I'd written-in.  So I suppose the process of writing is akin to the process of memory—the subject here.

          "Crows" - I must say that this is the first pantoum I've ever written and it grew out of a desire to try the form.  The material suggested itself in the process of writing, but even as it was evolving I felt the slightly mad insistence the repetitions force upon the mind of the writer, and perhaps the reader as well.  There is a touch of personal biography behind this: a former love paying me a visit years and years later, a walk through a woodland that skirted a swamp.  I must admit the form heightened the drama and made it easy to exaggerate feelings that were rather nascent at the time: the wonder of artifice.

Biographical Note

          Gray Jacobik's most recent collection is The Surface of Last Scattering, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (Texas Review Press, 1999); The Double Task received the Juniper Prize and was published in 1998 (UMASS Press).  A new book, Brave Disguises, received the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001 and will be published by Pittsburgh University Press late in 2002.  Recent work appears in Antioch Review, Ontario Review, and The Connecticut Review.

Stephen Knauth, Artist Statement on "Tenderly" and "Returning to a Cove of the Yadkin"

          "Tenderly" - The poem "Tenderly" is based on an actual event.  In addition to slippers shaped like trout, my wife actually does own a pair of shoes equipped with three-inch steel spikes on the bottom, for the purpose of aerating the soil manually.  It had been too dry to use them until one summer night a rain shower passed over and softened up the ground.  She jumped up and ran outside, wearing a skimpy robe, and went to it.  This strange and lovely moment, unlikely to come again, compelled me to drag myself out of bed, find my glasses, my pen, and do my part.

          "Returning to a Cove of the Yadkin" - I'm not quite sure where "Returning to a Cove of the Yadkin" came from.  My parents, both nearing eighty, live in the mountains of North Carolina, and I guess the poem is a response to their predicament.  Although they would never dip a toe in the muddy Yadkin River, I took the liberty to place them there, in nature's knowing hands.

Biographical Note

           Stephen Knauth is the author of The River I Know You By (Four Way Books, 1999) and four other collections of poetry.  His work has appeared in North American Review, Pacific Review, Prairie Schooner, Seneca Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and The Cortland Review.  He has held two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two creative writing grants from the North Carolina Arts Council.  A graduate of Ohio University, he lives in Charlotte with his wife and two children and works as a senior writer for a software firm.

Miriam N. Kotzin, "New"

Biographical Note

Miriam N. Kotzin’s work has appeared in The Painted Bride Quarterly, Pulp, The Mid-American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, and in Boulevard, of which she is a contributing editor. She teaches at Drexel University.

Michael D. Riley, Artist's Statements on "One Body" and "Shell Game—for Ray"

           "One Body" - Grandma is my beloved mother-in-law (yes, you read that correctly) who believes equally in God and doctors, and whose poor burdened body seemed to me a noble, and slightly comic, stand-in for the rest of us broken vessels who make up the Body of Christ.  We're all as comic; we should be so noble.

           "Shell Game" - As I watched the scene described in the poem, along with a slew of other gawkers, I marveled at the size and obvious expense of the house.  But what really fascinated all of us was the skill and daring of the workers, none of whom—like us—could have begun to afford the behemoth in front of us. Money and Art combined in my mind, I guess, to arouse my usually dormant working-class class-consciousness.

Biographical Note

            Michael D. Riley's first book of poems, Scrimshaw:  Citizens of Bone, was published by The Lightning Tree Press in Santa Fe, NM. A second book, Circling the Stones (Poems From Ireland), is scheduled for publication this year from Creighton University Press. His poems have appeared in many periodicals, including Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, The Fiddlehead, Arizona Quarterly, and Southern Humanities Review.  He is Associate Professor of English at Penn State's Berks-Lehigh Valley College.

Also by Michael D. Riley:

"Vaudeville"

In the stink of the stage—sweat, garlic,

cigar smoke, old clothes, and sawdust—

I was born. And there was blood enough.

Little June more than once rinsed it

from her toe shoes and the Nicholas Brothers

swabbed it from their taps.  Quiet never

happened long. Everything wooden buckled

and split. All the rest fell around our ears.

Memory killed vaudeville. Our ten minutes down

cold in the hot lights town to town and sea

to shining sea.  All the rest hurtling around

our still center, the act.  Our unstill center:

claps, whistles, even the dead silence some nights

filled up with everything we knew.  Then the films

perfected our imitation. At last we could rest.

We counted on the lights and distance

to cover the sweat stains and frays,

our own smells we danced and joked in.

The act surrounded us, defined us everywhere.

Slips and garbled lines, the night Kitty sneezed

through it all, only kept the center whole.

We sang or wheezed the same, paper suitcases

packed with everything we needed, but always leaving.

"You kids got a good act," Mr. Rosenfeld said.

"Don't change a thing.  I'll get you on the circuit."

We practiced even harder, tightening our cues,

our identities, tap and tune a single seam,

even while our tights pinched and our bodies bloomed.

Some nights I danced and seemed to watch myself

as if I sat alone in the balcony,

studying the act through the smoke, lamplight,

shifting chairs, coughs, trolleys rattling by outside.

What new still center now?  I thought, hovering

between what I realized, and did.

Once the movies flattened us against the wall,

drained all our color, mimicked the act

too perfectly, only a few of us stayed on

or made it big. It was too late to love change.

We threw away the old trunks, costumes, props

and took our grown-up selves back home to wonder

on it all.  It seemed to me that all I ever

knew hung weightless in a beam of yellow light.

Once, as the old woman I am now,

Kitty dead before the war, I watched TV

one night and saw on PBS a show on Vaudeville.

And there we were.  Fifteen seconds

in our Maryjanes and shiny frocks,

Kitty and I going all out across the scratched film

in faded black and white to a sound track.

I never knew it existed. I watched

in a dream.   Seventy years just another

flat stage for me to dance over.

I have the tape now and must have watched

forty times.  I still don't know where we were

or when it was, exactly.  I know the curtain

was orange like our bows.  That's about all.

It's the middle of our number and each time 

the clip ends my mind follows right through

to the end.  The opening is gone.

Kitty I can never see enough of,

though I do not believe in her

any more than I do in myself.

I my little garden I watch the lupins dance,

see in the woods beyond a set from behind,

the sun a spot going out, the house not empty

yet because you had to stay to see the last act.

Near the end, we closed for almost two months.

Our outfits clung with sweat and the men

whistled and stamped.  But the act never changed.

That was the strangest thing, when everything

around it came and went.  Right there in the middle.

And still is.  I just wish they'd have caught

Kitty's full smile.

                       But that never came till we took our bow.

Pattiann Rogers, "The Knocking" and Artist's Statement on "Symbols and Signs"

           I believe I can remember and state fairly cogently how the poem "Symbols and Signs" began.  I had been on a trip to Florida.  While there I visited a state park, the preserve of a swamp and marshy area thick with vegetation and animal life and saw an old board house being swallowed up by the encroaching swamp forest.  I was struck by the distinct human nature of that structure, so identifiably human.  I wondered about the people who had lived there, the hardships and struggles they might have faced.  It made me realize anew a connection with our species.  I felt something like nostalgia.  I wanted to say something about who we are in the midst of so many other forms of life, who we are in the place on earth where we are.  I wanted to think again of what essentially distinguishes us from other life forms and to express something about the community of human beings that is home.  Home.  I had been hearing at the time many criticisms of human beings and human culture.  Oddly enough, these criticisms had made me love human beings all the more.  All of these vague feelings were the beginning of the poem.  Other forces entered as the poem was written, and I believe it began to speak to more than I had originally intended.  I don't know how the poem was written.

Biographical Note

           Pattiann Rogers has published nine books of poetry, the most recent of which is Song of the World Becoming, Poems New and Collected, 1981 - 2001 (Milkweed Editions, April 2001).  Another, The Dream of the Marsh Wren, Writing as Reciprocal Creation (Milkweed Editions, 1999), appeared in their Credo Series.  A Covenant of Seasons, a collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry, was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1998.  She was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's International Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy in May 2000.  She's received two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award from the Lannan Foundation, five Pushcart Prizes, three prizes from Poetry, two from Prairie Schooner, and two from Poetry Northwest.  Some new poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in Field, The Paris Review, Georgia Review, Orion, Poetry, and The Antioch Review.

William Snyder, Jr., Artist's Statement on "The Sky Blue Now"

          It was the first or second new-summer after moving here to ND, and I sat in my study with the windows open, facing north, watching the sky grow darker and darker—it grows dark late and slowly up here.  I heard a man walk down the street.  I was lonely and thinking about one particular (failed) relationship, and how, for me, it seems impossible to really know someone.  And I tried to work all of that into the poem.  The poem has become part of a longer series about moving to ND from FL.

Biographical Note

           William Snyder, Jr. has poems published or forthcoming in Puerto Del Sol, Apalachee Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Fine Madness, The Boston Phoenix, and The Midwest Quarterly.  He teaches writing and literature at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN.

Michael Steffen, Artist's Statement on “Limbo”

            "Limbo" is from a book-length manuscript that explores, as one of its primary concerns, humankind's enduring impulse to question religious and spiritual tradition.  The genesis for this poem, and many like it, is personal:  the need to resolve my spiritual ambivalence and my longstanding debate with religious doctrine and its function as a medium for engagement with the mystical world, to see it clearly with all of its routine ambiguities.

Biographical Note

            Michael Steffen is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Vermont College.  He is currently the host of the Riverside Reading Series in Easton, PA. His work has most recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Touchstone, Ellipsis, Two Rivers Review, The Ledge, Poetry, and Poet Love.

Also by Michael Steffen:

"If Not God" (Excerpt)

Even physicists believe in

a "subtle bias"—

how the universe became

the universe, and the earth

all that it is.  Not through divine

prestidigitation, but something more than

random collisions, the void

coagulating into rocky spheres,

and then some planet

just far enough from a star

just hot enough to make its vapors rise

in precise, atmospheric balance.

A blind man has a better chance

of solving Rubik's Cube

than the first "Big Bang" atoms had

of merely morphing

into protoplasm, a crapshoot

of proteins, fish and lizards

crawling from the sludge of chaos

to munch the first trees that sheltered

the apes of the apes who first thought

to rub two twigs together and coax

the first flame into comfort,

language into fuel

to feed the intellect, that sketched

the walls at Lascaux, birthplace

of the first question,

the first answer,

the inkling of a purpose

to every begotten cell

in the first galaxy to form beneath

the microscope's beholding eye.

Essays

Herman Asarnow, Artist's Statement on "All in War with Time"

          When asked what brought about “All in War with Time,” Asarnow has said, “Sex, if you must know. Just hanging around my wife, for whom shoes are a third language after English and French. Over time I began to take her shoes seriously. First I wrote a poem about some of them (which is now embedded in this piece). Later, as I began to write the essay, I realized that—every bit as obsessed with words as my wife is with her shoes—language itself was for me the quintessential element even in the world of women’s shoes. When I look at shoes off a woman, I don’t first see design or decoration, but grammar and a lexicon.  So my writing project became tying together these disparate subjects, my goal to avoid my reader thinking of it, as Dr. Johnson wrote of the Metaphysical poets, that ‘the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.’ Instead, I hope the piece reminds my readers just a little of Montaigne’s, whose Essais so often exhilarate as they gallop wildly across the hills and thickets of Bordeaux.”

Biographical Note

           Herman Asarnow's essays, poems, and translations have appeared or will soon appear in such places as Southern Humanities Review, The Seattle Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, The Marlboro Review, High Plains Literary Review, The Denver Quarterly, Chariton Review, The Antigonish Review, Poet Lore, South Dakota Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and many other journals.  He lives in Portland, Oregon, where he serves on the English faculty at the University of Portland.

Paul Graham, Excerpt from and Artist's Statement on "Full of Grace"

          Excerpt - ...I like to think I began to explore the disjunct between facts and truths very young, as an oral storyteller, which is another way of saying that I was an accomplished liar.  I know the first lie I ever told, or, if not that, then the first time I told a lie and realized the awesome power of story.

          Artist's Statement - The event at the heart of "Full of Grace" is one I originally tried to fictionalize.  I was attracted to the questions the lie raised as well as the dramatic potential yet at the same time, I wanted the anonymity that combing it with other elements—which is how my fiction tends to gestate—would provide.  But I quickly found that the story resisted fictionalization.  After a while, I grew frustrated and gave up on it.  When I first began to write this essay, I wasn't consciously writing about these events; I'd been watching the helicopters for several weeks and I wanted to write about them.  The paragraph on helicopters turned out to be the first in a series of things taking flight: automobiles, imaginations, lies in the ambient air, prayers.

          Once I'd finished "Full of Grace" I knew why it had refused to be a story.  Telling this particular story any other way would have been the equivalent of creating a smoke screen, obscuring the events and their motivations, which is not what I feel fiction or any literary genre is about.  Stories and essays are about getting an incident or a series of incidents and their meanings right.  They're about somehow making the world in which we live clearer—or at least attempting to—often at a high cost.

Biographical Note

          Paul Graham received his MFA from the University of Michigan, where he currently teaches composition and creative writing.  He has fiction forthcoming from Water-Stone and The Bridge.

Interviews

Chad Davidson, "In the Stone Galaxy:  An Interview with Ruth Stone"

Biographical Note

Chad Davidson's poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, and others.  He has recently returned from a year scholarship at the University of Perugia in Italy, and is presently a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University.  Nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year, he was also a finalist for the Breadloaf and Saltonstall residencies.  In addition, he is coordinator of Writing by Degrees, the annual national graduate writing conference held in Binghamton.  He lives in Binghamton, New York.

Ruth Stone, "The Cave," Today, through Black Floaters," "Limbo," "Translations," "The Professor Cries," and "In the Next Galaxy"

Biographical Note

          Ruth Stone was born in 1915 in Roanoke, Virginia.  Among her numerous books are Ordinary Words (Paris Press, 1999)—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000—Simplicity (Paris Press, 1995), and Second-Hand Coat:  Poems New and Selected (Yellow Moon Press, 1991).  Recently retired from her teaching post in the Creative Writing faculty at Binghamton University in New York, Stone now resides in a 19th century farmhouse, in the Green Mountains of Vermont.  Due to experimental corrective laser surgery last year, she has lost most of her vision.

Photography

"Heart Work"

Roger Moore

Biographical Note

          Roger Moore is a photographer who lives in Dallas with his wife of thirty-seven years.  He has ridden camels across the Thar Desert in India, pin-striped hot rod cars; has been Principal Investigator on two National Science Foundation grants involving the design and use of what has now become the Internet; has been certified in both Neurolinguistic Programming and Eriksonian Hypnosis; and was the first American ever seen by many villagers near the Amur River in the Russian Far East.  In October, he embarked on a photo expedition of the Canadian Wilderness.

Jacqueline McLean

Biographical Note

          Jacqueline McLean teaches in the English Department at Texas Tech University.  She is also on the adjunct faculty of the Honors College and the Women's Studies Program.  She has never ridden a camel across the desert, but she walked the Camino of Santiago, a pilgrimage going back to the Middle Ages.  She has published poems, stories, critical essays, and two biographies for young adults.  Along with Leslie Ullman, she is co-editing an anthology on poetry of the Southwest to be published by the University of Iowa Press.

Brian Thornton

Biographical Note

          Brian Thornton is a senior majoring in English at Texas Tech University.  In January 2002, he will begin Tech's masters program in English.  He has spent the last three years of his life engaged to a wonderful woman whom he has known since the age of seven.  They are both planning careers in teaching.

George Bybee, III

Biographical Note

          George Bybee, III is a senior at Texas Tech University.  After gaining some experience in the field, he plans to go on for a masters degree in social work.  He grew up in a military family and has spent time in several states, including California and Texas.

Tanya Washington

Biographical Note

          Tanya Washington was born in Plainview, Texas in 1967.  After high school, she attended Frank Phillips Junior College, Angelo State University, and Texas Tech University.  During a break from school, she lost her vision.  After surviving all of the ups and downs that came with vision loss, Tanya returned to Texas Tech.  She will graduate in December 2001 with a bachelors degree in public relations.  Tanya's philosophy: "You can get to anywhere from anywhere."

Click here to see excerpts from this issue's book reviews.