Excerpts & Contributors: Fall 2002

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary, and biographical notes for our Fall 2003 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

M. C. Allan, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "The Colonization of Helen Capezi"

Excerpt:

          Thinking about her father made Helena's throat swell with hurt.  She feared her father had the same world-view as casting agents in Hollywood, who would see Helena--with her wild hair, smart mouth and big tits--as the spunky friend of the heroine.  In a comedy, she would be the one getting married to the funny fat guy, while the heroine was pursued by some dark-eyed, passionate Romeo.  In a thriller, her body would be left in a dumpster and then spread on a slab for the coroner to take semen samples from.  Women like Helena didn't go anywhere.  She felt it in her father's criticism; someone with her laugh would be kept out of central roles because she didn't test well.  Too loud.  Too abrasive.  Cast her as the hooker.  She imagined herself sitting in the casting lounge with a black Julliard grad, and maybe with her fucking mook uncles, and they'd all bitch about how they never got to be the heroes, they were always the buddies--or worse.

          "At least you're not always the rapper or the gangbanger," the Julliard grad would say.

          "At least you're not always the Mafioso," Tony would say.

          "At least you're not always the hooker in the dumpster," she would say, and hush them to silence, for yes, they would have to admit, though their roles were loaded with problematic racial overtones, at least they were not always the hooker in the dumpster.

Artist's Statement:

          "The Colonization of Helena Capesi" Allan writes, was inspired by time spent at Oxford.  "Oxford is one of the most beautiful cities I've ever seen, but all the tiny walled passageways between the colleges and libraries and pubs make it a real maze. The year I lived there, I wondered whether the physical walls helped to buttress the psychology of exclusion that seemed inextricable from the city, or whether the walls simply reflected a mentality that predated them. I assumed that the usual (often justified) distrust of Americans created many of the subtler barriers between the British students and their Yankee interlopers, but an offhand remark by my favorite tutor about the difference between an Oxford wall and a typical English wall made me think it was more complicated, and that the old hobgoblins of money and class were at the root of it. One of my housemates was embroiled in a relationship that seemed to embody some of these complications--Jameson is the least fictional of the characters in this piece. This story was a little riff of vengeance on her behalf."

Biographical Note

          M.C. Allan was born in Pakistan and has lived in Taiwan, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Her work has appeared most recently in the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Potomac Review. She is a graduate of Hollins University's writing program and lives in Maryland.

H. E. Francis, Artist's Statement on "Love, and After"

          Francis says of the inspiration for "Love, and After," that "for decades I spent most of my summers on Eastern Long Island, where my mother's family had lived since Methuselah. In many of my stories Aphrodite is always springing from the Sound or bay or crick in her scallop shell...I am always intrigued by how a word, a sign, an event can veer us into the unexpected life-and how the denial causes the event to assume a permanent and valued sense of sometimes the terrible, sometimes the beautiful, most often both, the richness of which we may never have known or realized otherwise; and how that very denial, the sacrifice, keeps present the vision of the unlived life."

Biographical Note

          H. E. Francis's first collection, The Itinerary of Beggars, won the Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction. Several collections and two novels have appeared since (the latest, The Invisible Country, in 2002). Numerous stories have appeared in magazines and anthologies, notably in the O. Henry, Best American, and Pushcart Prize collections. He is a four-time Fullbright Fellow--one to Oxford, three to Argentina. He shuttles back and forth between Madrid, Spain and Huntsville, Alabama.

Aimee LaBrie, Artist's Statement on "Snowball"

          LaBrie says of the inspiration for "Snowball" that "As kids, my friends and I played a game called, 'Would you rather?' The objective was to offer two equally horrifying choices (would you rather eat ten live cockroaches or twenty maggots?). You had to pick one or your entire family would be killed. 'Snowball' began as a would-you-rather scenario: would you rather learn that a missing loved one has died or never know what happened to him? On one hand, his death erases all hope of his ever coming home. On the other hand, the not-knowing might be harder. This story is an attempt not only to discover which choice is worse, but also to determine if it's better to have an answer for the inexplicable or better not to know."

Biographical Note

          Aimee LaBrie is a lecturer at Penn State University and a graduate of their MFA program in fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, The Minnesota Review, Pleides, Quarter After Eight, Permafrost, and other literary journals. She has also co-written a play, Words with 'C' which ran at The Reasonable Facsimile Theatre in Chicago through the month of November, 2001. She is currently at work on a novel.

Amos A. Magliocco, Artist's Statement on "Flooded Timber"

          "Flooded Timber," Magliocco writes, "began with an image from a friend's life. As a boy, my friend's family built a new house in the Cross Timbers region of North Texas. Their home burned shortly after they'd built it, and, without insurance, they brought a trailer to their land. They parked within sight of the fire-scorched shell of their house, the old dwelling visible each day. North Texas was in the midst of a prolonged drought then, the lakes falling quick, vegetation fading to shades of yellow and white. I considered what sort of things are revealed under those circumstances, both in nature and in human beings, when the instinct to move away from such conditions—to find water, literally and figuratively—is thwarted by the modern rationale of plumbing or convenience or property ownership. Florida and Otis appeared in this setting, and as life around them withered and the lake gave up old secrets, it seemed to me as if they would, too. Having found these decent resilient people, the writing then became an act of revelation. The more I wrote the more I learned about everything they'd hidden in their own lives. Like my friend's family, their situation is difficult to accept or change, and a natural tension arises."

Biographical Note

          Amos Magliocco is an MFA student at Indiana University in Bloomington.  His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Oxford Magazine and Iron Horse Literary Review.

Poetry

Mitch Cullin, "Safe Places to Die"

Biographical Note

          Mitch Cullin is the author of five highly acclaimed books: Whompyjawed (Simon & Schuster), Branches (The Permanent Press), Tideland (Dufour Editions), The Cosmology of Bing (The Permanent Press), and the story collection From the Place in the Valley Deep in the Forest (Dufour Editions). His poetry has appeared in various magazines and reviews, including Flyway, The Texas Review, and Phoenix Home & Garden. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, most recently in Little, Brown's Best American Gay Fiction 2 and Alyson's Gay Fiction at the Millennium, and his novels will soon be published internationally in forthcoming editions from England, the Netherlands, and Japan. With his writing described by The New York Times as "brilliant and beautiful...rhythmic and telling," he has also been the recipient of many awards and honors, including a Dodge Jones Foundation grant, writing sponsorship from Recursos De Santa Fe; the Stony Brook Short Fiction Prize; a poetry fellowship from The Arizona Commission on the Arts; and a nomination for inclusion in the American Library Association 's "Notable Book List, 1999."

Chip Dameron, Artist's Statement on "On a Hike along the Purgatoire River"

          About the genesis of "On a Hike along the Purgatoire River," Dameron writes that "I have spent a number of summer vacations in the mountains of Southern Colorado, far from the flat delta world of my home in South Texas. The contrasts in landscape, temperature, vegetation, and daily activities are striking and have provided the terms for a series of poems in that setting, including "On a Hike along the Purgatoire River." In this poem there is also the presence of my son, moving through his adolescence. The correspondences and ironies of the original experience struck me vividly and led me to construct the poem that you find here."

Biographical Note

          Chip Dameron has published four collections of poems, including Greatest Hits (2001) and Hook & Bloodline (2000). Individual poems have recently appeared in New Texas 2001, Red River Review, Mesquite Review, and Illuminations.

Diane Glancy, Artist's Statement on "Comet"

           "In my Native American Literature course," Glancy writes, "we read Native American Testimonies by Peter Nabakov. I was struck by the native prophecies of the coming of a new people and a change in the way of life for the Native American. 'Comet' came from a feeling I had after reading the book. It came from wherever poetry comes from, in its own form and way. Comet as something falling from the sky. Comet as Santa's reindeer. Comet as something unconnected, yet holding together at the helm."

Biographical Note

            Diane Glancy is a Professor at Macalester College in St. Paul where she teaches Native American Literature and Creative Writing. New poetry collections are The Relief of America, Tia Chucha Press, and The Stones for a Pillow, National Federation of State Poetry Societies Press. Her most recent novels are The Man Who Heard the Land, Minnesota Historical Society Press, and The Mask Maker, University of Oklahoma Press. A forthcoming novel is Designs of the Night Sky, University of Nebraska Press. A collection of six plays, American Gypsy, also is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. She received the 2001 Pablo Neruda Poetry Award from Nimrod Journal. Glancy is of Cherokee and German/English heritage. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.

George Looney, Artist's Statement on "Not About Time or Ending"

           "Not About Time or Ending," Looney writes, "began as a response to the sentence included as the epigraph to the poem. I heard Archie Loss read a section of his novel-in-progress (which is now finished and with an agent) and that sentence just wouldn't let go of me. I jotted it down and a couple of weeks later I started the poem which begins by envisioning the streets of Rome under a kind of light that drowns everything. The more I entered that scene, the more the poem began to lead me. Why it led me to the figure of an old professor who is now retired and lives in Malaga, Spain, is a mystery to me, one I admit into the poem itself. But it then became clear the poem was a kind of elegy for an absence, not a death. The poem also contains, in its progression, a kind of false scaffolding of its process-false because it was put up after the structure of the poem was actually finished, to draw attention to the fact that it was constructed, and how it was constructed. This is a poem whose artifice is an essential element of whatever it is that it does."

Biographical Note

            George Looney's first book, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, won the 1995 Bluestem Award. His second, Attendant Ghosts, was published by Cleveland State University Press in 2000. Pudding House Press published his Greatest Hits chapbook in 2001. He teaches creative writing at Penn State Erie, and serves as Translation editor for Mid-American Review.

Bob Rogers, "Quiet"

Biographical Note

            Bob Rogers grew up in McKenzie, Tennessee and was educated at Union University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and the University of Virginia, where he held a Henry Hoyns Fellowship in Creative Writing. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Tar River Poetry, Meridian, The Widener Review, The Greensboro Review, ZONE 3, Puerto del Sol, Timbuktu, Raccoon, and other magazines. His poem "The Road to Robert Penn Warren's Homeplace in Guthrie, Kentucky," which originally appeared in Appalachian Life, has just been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He recently was awarded The Greensboro Review Literary Prize for Poetry. His essay "Imagining the Unicorn: Poetic Sequence in May Sarton's 'Letters From Maine"' comprises a chapter of A House of Gathering: Poets on May Sarton's Poetry in the Tennessee Studies in Literature Series from The University of Tennessee Press. An essay on the work of Denise Levertov is forthcoming in a casebook on process theology and literature from Ashgate. He has been awarded a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts for the purpose of writing a long poem. Currently, he is Associate Professor of English at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He lives in Memphis with his wife and son and daughter.

Reg Saner, Artist's Statement on "Utah River Trip with Son Nick"

           Of "Utah River Trip with Son Nick," Saner writes that the poem "encapsulates a 120-mile canoe trip through astonishing red rock terrain accessible only by water. Though we shared an unforced accord which--as many sons confided to Nick afterward--they and their own fathers could never have managed, any writing set in such terrain is bound to feature the land itself as main character. Minuscule humans can only respond to its sheer cliffs and monoliths with an awed sense of ephemerality, a precious brevity felt all the more keenly by a father/son canoe riding time's flow as it carries them toward, then beyond, each bend of the river."

Biographical Note

            Reg Saner's latest book, Reaching Keet Seel (Univ. of Utah Press) on ancestral Pueblo people called the Anasazi is in its second printing. Though he refers to himself as "famously unknown," his poetry and prose have appeared in nearly fifty anthologies.

Also by Reg Saner:

"Anthropology"

Men hunt and women gather.  If she loved you

like wheat pouring into both hands

how would you move? Where

would you go?

Why

Anthony Seidman, Artist's Statement on "Labor"

           "Labor," Seidman writes, "is a part of a sequence of prose poems crafted after the snap-shot vividness of fragments in Tomas Rivera's ...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Juan Rulfo's epic prose poem Pedro Páramo, in the attempt to create a literary locus between the real and the fantastic, yet geographically & economically located in a Mexican border town. Some of the poems, like 'Labor,' are sketches of people and quotidian affairs in a poorer colonia--things I would see on a daily basis--other poems are surreal It's also my endeavor to balance a foreigner's desire to romanticize a region, or turn the disenfranchised and destitute into pawns of narrative games, thus 'Labor,' as well as other prose poems, try to describe both the rot and actual labor of life there, as well as hint at the community."

Biographical Note

            Anthony Seidman is a Los Angeles native, and grew up in the San Fernando Valley before studying at Syracuse University. He spent four years traveling through Mexico and living in the border town, Ciudad Juarez, working and writing before returning to California with my wife and son. He makes his living as a teacher, and hones his craft, poetry, whenever there is time. His work has been published in The Bloomsbury Review, Luna, Hunger, Sulphur River Literary Review, and others, and has also been translated and published in Códice (Mexico), Tierra Adentro (Mexico), Steaua (Romania); recently, a poem he wrote on a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo was published in a special feature on the artist in the newspaper La Reforma (Mexico City). The Bitter Oleander published his first collection, On Carbon-Dating Hunger (2000).

John E. Smelcer, "Dandelions in Full Bloom" and "The Price of Leaving Indian Country"

Biographical Note

            John E. Smelcer's poetry books include his two Pulitzer Prize Nominated collections Riversongs (2001) and Songs From an Outcast (UCLA 2000, Edited by Denise Levertov and X. J. Kennedy) and Elvis in Bear Country, Kesugi Ridge, and Changing Seasons. In 1994, he edited Durable Breath: Contemporary Native American Poetry (selected by David Ignatow for the 1995 National Poetry Book Award). His autobiographical essay appears in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Random House, 2000). His nonfiction book, In the Shadows of Mountains, features an introduction by Gary Snyder and The Raven and the Totem features a foreword by the late mythologist Joseph Campbell. His poetry has appeared in over 200 periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, The American Voice, The Amicus, Antioch Review, Chariton Review, Connecticut Review, High Plains Literary Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Nimrod, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Puerto Del Sol, Prairie Schooner, The Georgetown Review, Gray's Sporting Journal, Rosebud, Witness, and Zyzzyva. He is Editor-at-Large at Rosebud and English faculty at Texas A&M University.

Larry D. Thomas, Artist's Statement on "Crow with Red Sky"

           About "Crow with Red Sky," Thomas writes, "I am a strong admirer of the visual arts and enjoy the challenging demands of ekphrastic poetry.  In writing an ekphrastic poem, I never attempt to 'enhance' the power of a work of visual art.  I strive instead to capture with words my individual reaction to a work of art rendered in another medium.  I first encountered the drawings and watercolors of Leonard Baskin in the books of Ted Hughes, whose poetry I have long admired.  Baskin's Crow with Red Sky, at leas for me, possesses a tensile, primordial strength somehow appropriate to the terror of our times."

Biographical Note

            Larry D. Thomas has recently published poems or has them forthcoming in The Christian Science Monitor, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.  He has published three volumes of verse: The Lighthouse Keeper (2001, Timberline Press); Amazing Grace (2001, Texas Review Press), and The Woodlanders (2002, Pecan Grove Press).  His books have been awarded the 2001 Texas Review Poetry Prize, the 2002 Spur Award Finalist, and the 2002 Violet Crown Book Award Finalist.

Interview

Jacqueline McLean, "The Fiery Core:  An Interview with Margaret Gibson"

Biographical Notes

Jacqueline McLean teaches creative writing and literature in the English department at Texas Tech, and she is on the faculty of the Honors College. Her own poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, The Cimarron Review, The Malahat Review, The Texas Review, and Smartish Pace. She is currently at work on two poetry manuscripts. One is "Modigliani's Muse" and focuses on the life and art of Amedeo Modigliani. With Leslie Ullman, she is editing an anthology of poetry of the contemporary American Southwest to be published by the University of Iowa Press. She is also co-editing an anthology of West Texas women's writings about place. Also a writer of fiction and nonfiction, Jacqueline's young adult novel, Grace from China, is due out this spring. When she isn't writing or teaching literature, Jacqueline is a yoga teacher.

Margaret Gibson is the author of eight books of poetry: Autumn Grasses (forthcoming 2003); Icon and Evidence (2001); Earth Elegy, New and Selected Poems (1997); The Vigil, A Poem in Four Voices, a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1993; Out in the Open (1989); Memories of the Future, The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, co-winner of the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986-87; Long Walks in the Afternoon, the 1982 Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Signs (1979). Four of her books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she has published poems in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, such as Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and Iowa Review. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut since 1993. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Lila Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship, and Grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. "Earth Elegy", the title poem of her her work of the same name, won the James Boatright Poetry Prize. "Archaeology," was awarded a Pushcart Prize for 2001 and "House of Stone and Song" won a Pushcart for 2002. She lives in Preston, Connecticut.

Photography

From "Where Time Stands Still"

Photos by Roger Moore

Artist's Statement:

          About his photography, Moore says, "I make photographs.  To be more precise, I record my reactions to the scene before me at a particular moment in time.  Then, after my film has been developed and scanned, I further modify the representation of my reactions in my digital darkroom.  My images are not intended to document or represent that which can be seen by one's naked eye.  The finished images are my personal expressions."

Haiku by John Millar

Artist's Statement:

          Recently, the poetry and photography that Millar enjoys has served to reconnect him with the simple love that he felt as a child for the sounds and the smells and the feel of life along the British Columbia coastline.  Millar says, "I was particularly drawn to the ocean where sea life seemed mostly hidden behind a magician's cape.  Once in a while, we would be offered a glimpse of it, when something would wash up on the beach.  A bird, a whale, a shark or a starfish from the deep left on the beach behind a retreating tide like a child's jacket or lunchbox forgotten at the baseball field after play was over.  I wanted to learn it all.  What a wonderful classroom I was given."

Excerpt:

Biographical Notes

Roger Moore has served as Principal Investigator on two National Science Foundation grants involving the design and use of what has now evolved into the Internet; has photographed a 1,900 year-old "house of ill repute" in Ephesus, Turkey, the city of Antony and Cleopatra's honeymoon; has photographed the bowels of the medinas of ancient Moroccan cities; has designed and made boomerangs; has written and published numerous scholarly papers regarding the managerial economic issues of computer networking; has written poetry; and has discovered in this wonderful and varied life that the things that have been most pleasurable have come as a by-product of things done for someone else.

John Millar grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia.  He graduated with a degree in Zoology from the University of British Columbia in 1976 and has worked as a consulting biologist in British Columbia for the past 21 years.  He presently owns and operates his own company, Coast River Environmental Services Ltd., specializing in fisheries and aquatic habitat assessment.

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

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