Excerpts & Contributors: Spring 2001

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary and biographical notes for our Spring 2001 contributors.  If you wish to read the author’s 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

Lisa Albers, Excerpt from “Tethered”

He rooted around in one of the trash bags in the trunk until his hand grasped a model jet.  Stanley saw it and made a face.  “Hey, how come Ryan got to bring his planes?” 

Ryan grinned at Stanley.  “Because I’m smart.”

“Damn it, Ryan,” his father said, overhearing.  “We told you not to bring your models.”

His mother put her hands on her hips.  “Ryan, your father said only books and small toys in the car.  You were supposed to pack that in the trailer.”

“I didn’t bring anything else.  Just my planes.  Elvis has his dumb motorcycle magazines, and Stanley has his thumb-sucking blanket.  So I brought this.”

“Well fine,” his father said.  “Maybe you’ll stay quiet back there now that you have something to do.”

His mother took her ponytail out so she could doze against the headrest.  Ryan nudged the back of her elbow.  “Can I play with that?”  She passed her thick, fabric-coated rubber band to him.  He untangled the strands of blonde hair from it and blew them from his fingers in the air rushing by outside. 

He held the model up over his head and stretched the rubber band around the landing gear.  “Look, Dad,” he whispered.  “Just like what you did.”  His father glanced back and smiled.

Ryan played with it for a while, imagining how he could build a tailhook by gluing spare model parts to the bottom.  He made jet noises with his mouth all wet from the second piece of hard candy. 

He pulled the jet back like a slingshot, and saw it leave his hand.  Then he heard it smack into Stanley’s head.  His little brother opened his mouth wide and let out a loud scream.  Blood dripped down his face bright red.  His mother spun around.  “Stanley,” she said.  “My baby.”

Biographical Note

Lisa Albers’ fiction and poetry have appeared in Conversely.com, Eads Bridge, and Intermission Magazine.  She is currently a James A. Michener Fellow in the MFA program at University of Miami in Florida and enjoys living where mangoes grow.  Air Force Brats, a collection of short stories, is her latest project.

Heidi Shayla, Excerpt from and Commentary on “Home Ground”

Uncle Reb ran the butchering. He took the neighbor men, a rifle, and a six pack of beer out into the field with the cattle. He gave each man a can and they stood there in the middle of the pasture, making small talk and drinking while they watched the cows. The cows eyed the men from a distance and lowed at their calves to come close, circling them together. The big red bull stood apart from them and watched the men also. He snorted as he slowly swung his head back and forth like a pendulum. He stamped his front hooves and swatted at his haunches with his tail, which made his enormous hanging balls swing in time to the rhythm of his head. Then the men laughed and grabbed at their own crotches, comparing their heft to his.

 Commentary:  When asked about the genesis of “Home Ground,” Shayla wrote, “A teacher once told me to  ‘write my soul,’ which was just a poetic way of saying ‘write what you know.’ Everything I know comes out of growing up in Deadwood, Oregon, in the heart of the logging regions of the Coast Range. Raised by a single father who made our living as a catskinner and woods boss, my most primal understanding of the world comes from having first seen it through the thick underbrush and tall timber, from being a girl raised in a man's world, a girl whose Papa taught her to drive a D7 Cat and set chokers when she was eleven. My view is still clouded by images of those green mountains. And yet, as much as my father was a logger, my mother has the heart of an artist and environmentalist. Mama taught me to see the way the evening light falls on the river, to notice the way cattle loom out of the early morning fog, and, when the world is too fast, to retreat into the stillness of an old growth forest.   I am the uneasy place between these two people - the logger and the artist. It is no wonder that I became a writer.  My writing hails from this odd vantage point; it is full of motherless or fatherless children, loggers' daughters, the rural poor, people of heart and integrity, and most of all a deep and abiding love of the mountains. As I have developed as a writer, I have struggled to keep this voice, to represent these people and this region. These mountains—Chickahominy, Hawk Ridge, Low Pass, Windy Peak, Prairie Mountain—have drawn me home again and again, no matter where in the world I've wandered. They are the soul of my work. The red clay of the Oregon Coast Range grows big timber and a tangle of underbrush. But it is also the fertile soil that grows my stories.”

Biographical Note

Heidi Shayla was born and raised in rural Oregon, in the subtropical rainforests of the Coast Range. She left the Pacific Northwest long enough to earn an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College, but has always been drawn home again by the green mountains and the big timber. She continues to live in western Oregon with her husband and three children. Heidi's fiction has been published in the Mississippi Review, South Dakota Review, Writers' Forum, and Georgetown Review. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Denali Literary Journal and was recently anthologized in Writing Work: Writers on Working Class Writing published by Bottom Dog Press.   She is currently a recipient of an Individual Artists Award from the Oregon Arts Commission, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Melanie Rae Thon, “Testimony”

“Testimony” is excerpted from Sweethearts, Thon’s latest novel.

Biographical Note

Melanie Rae Thon is the author of three novels, Sweethearts, Meteors in August, and Iona Moon, and two story collections, Girls in the Grass and  First, Body.  Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Paris Review, Story, Granta, and many other fine journals.  Originally from Montana, Thon has taught at Emerson College, Syracuse University, University of Massachusetts, and Ohio State University.  She now teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Simon Van Booy, Excerpt from and Commentary on “Snow Falls and Then Disappears”

            We slept naked that night in the hotel, a bundle of limbs, an arrangement of muscle and bone held together by fear and newness.  Although I knew she would have invited the waiter up to her room, had he been sitting where I was and looking at her as I was, I didn’t care.  I wanted to stretch into the ridge of her spine and complete her back, as water freezes in the crevice of a rock.  The next morning it was snowing and she asked me.  I thought of my mother and said “yes.”  I wanted to carry her deafness away from the restaurant and lay its marvel in the snow.  That night I went to her performance.  She played Bach’s Suites for solo violin, and I pictured my mother changing her name at Ellis Island and then sleepily making her way to my birthplace.

            I learned her language and taught my fingers to dance; we never spent one day apart until she disappeared.  And now the bakery is open again, its lights spilling out into the cold street, below the windows of children’s bedrooms.  My father was killed by a seventeen-year-old boy in the Free French Forces in fall of 1943.  He was younger than I am now.  My mother never spoke much of Europe, though I could picture it through her stories of her father, who sold bicycles until his shop was closed down.  Once, I brought a friend home from school.  He was born in Switzerland but spoke fluent German.  I remember presenting him to her, and as his mouth pressed into language, my mother began to cry and the boy stopped what he had not yet begun.

            Sometimes, language is the sound of longing.  The small Boeing will be my ship from Liverpool.  The violin will be my paper’s.

Commentary:  Van Booy says “Snow Falls Then Disappears” came with the first snowfall of last winter: “I wanted to somehow demonstrate how vulnerable we become when we love—it is a mysterious openness. The deafness of the speaker’s wife is an objective correlative for the communicative difficulty sometimes felt between two people—the inability of language to convey anything but miscommunication. While watching the snow and sitting at my computer, I began to feel as though there was a relationship between the way snow falls and disappears, and the development of love. The story was not particularly planned; it just seemed to write itself.”

Biographical Note

Simon Van Booy is 26 years old and from Britain.  He lives on the east end of Long Island where he is enrolled in a MFA program at Southampton College.  He publishes regularly in the East Hampton Star and is fond of sculpting, classical music and the New York Giants.

Poetry

Mary Crow, Commentary on “That’s What You Get”

            Mary Crow says her story began “with an anecdote told to me years ago and which suddenly reappeared in my consciousness.  I felt identified with the child and the impact on the child of his parents’ conflict.  In her passion the wife does not think of her cruelty to her son but her cruelty thinks for her.  Humpty Dumpty seemed the appropriate metaphor with its man in an egg shattered past repair and its eggshell shards resembling the story scraps.  The irony in the poem is that what the child is made to suffer is played out in the suffering he eventually metes out for his parents.”

Biographical Note

            Mary Crow is the author of nine collections of poetry – four volumes of her own poems and five volumes of translated poems.  The most recent book of her own poems is I Have Tased the Apple (BOA, 1996).  Her translations of Olga Orozco’s and of Enrique Lihn’s poems are forthcoming next year.  Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, American Voice, New Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southern Poetry Review, Field, and Prairie Schooner.  Poet Laureate of Colorado, she teaches in the creative writing program of Colorado State University.

William Virgil Davis, Commentary on “Upon a Time”

On the genesis of his poem, Davis states, “I have, on several occasions, lived for extended periods of time in Austria.  Therefore, Austria is as much of a presence as anywhere for me.  This poem was written there, in the midst of that sense of place where so much of the future is the past and where it isn’t difficult to imagine back to earlier times and to think how the past and the present presciently meet and merge in such movements, such mixes of memory and imagination, which magically seem able to maneuver around in time.  This, in part, accounts for the repetitions that run throughout the poem and which serve to link the lines and stanzas together mnemonically in the same way that the mind works.”

Biographical Note

William Virgil Davis has published poetry and short fiction in a wide variety of journals.  His books of poetry are: One Way to Reconstruct the Scene, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; The Dark Hours, which won the Calliope Press Chapbook Prize; and Winter Light.  In addition, he has published scores of critical essays, primarily on twentieth-century American and British literature, as well as several books of criticism, including Understanding Robert Bly, Critical Essays on Robert Bly, Miraculous Simplicity: Essays on R. S. Thomas, and Robert Bly: The Poet and His Critics.  He is a Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at Baylor University.

Stephanie Dickinson, Commentary on “This is Not Times Square” and “Love Pony”

About her two poems, Dickinson says:  “The poem, ‘This is Not Times Square,’ flows from years of walking to work on 45^th Street, from 10^th Avenue to 5^th Avenue, straight through Times Square.  This is showy real estate, one of the most visited spots in the world, and hard to face first thing in the morning.  After a few years, the walk, with its neon, asphalt and agitation, had entered my interior world.  It was a three-mile deep rut under my feet; it was what Lorca railed against in his Poet in New York, observing the commuters on their way to work as ‘sleepers staggering as if awakened from a shipwreck of blood.’  It was the Death March to the post-modernist workplace; it was an Inferno.  The crowd I moved in raced, but we were enslaved.  I went after this poem again and again, trying to capture the lurid monotony of Times Square and its denizens, the racing sameness and its ability to drain humanity.  The speaker is using up her life here, and hardly knows where she is.”

            “’Love Pony’ explores the triangle of pony-girl-father, the nature of love and protection and rebellion.  When I was a young girl and wanting a horse, my mother told me the story of her horse.  The high-spirited pony who knocked her off his back was shot by my grandfather.  The dead pony, as well as my grandfather’s act, has always haunted me.”

Biographical Note

Stephanie Dickinson was raised in rural Iowa and now lives in the Bowery.  She has published in Mudfish, Cream City Review, Washington Square, Pearl, Reed Magazine, among others.  Her work has received numerous Pushcart Prize nominations.

Robert Fink, Excerpt from “Aunt May”

            Each night, she stood naked in the tub and lifted water

            in her cupped palms, let it trickle down her body.

            Later she allowed her husband to draw clean water

            from the well, carry it balanced in a dish pan

            to the porch and, standing at her back as she squatted

            in the tub, pour the rinse water over her head,

            her shoulders--a kind of anointing.

Biographical Note

Robert Fink is the W. D. Bond Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Hardin-Simmons University.  His poetry has appeared in recent issues of Gulf Coast, The Texas Review, The Texas Observer, and Descant.  A poem is forthcoming in Poetry.  A creative non-fiction essay is forthcoming in The Cortland Review.

Li-Young Lee, “Nativity,” “Out of Hiding,” “Night Mirror,” “From Another Room” and “That’s What You Get”

Biographical Note

Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, of Chinese parents.  In 1959, his father fled Indonesia with his family.  Afterward, Lee’s family traveled in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, until arriving in America.  Lee has studies at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Arizona, and SUNY Brockport.  He has published several books:  The City in Which I Love You, Rose, and that other one.  His poems have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart anthologies.  The poems published in this issue of Iron Horse will be included in his new book, Book of My Nights, which is due in 2002 from BOA Editions, Ltd.

Donald Levering, Commentary on “Man Leads Whooping Cranes Through Lost Migration Route”

 “Man Leads Whooping Cranes Through Lost Migration Route” came about, Levering says, “after a visit to the Bosque Del Apache Wildlife Refuge and after reading on the Internet the diary accounts of Kent Clegg, the man chiefly responsible for restoring the migration of the nearly extinct whooping cranes between their summer site in Idaho to the Bosque Del Apache in New Mexico.”

Biographical Note

Donald Levering’s most recent poetry book, Horsetail, is from Woodley Press.  His previous books include Outcroppings From Navajoland (Navajo Community College Press), The Jack of Spring (Swamp Press), Carpool (Tellus), and Mister Ubiquity (Pudding House Press).  Also forthcoming from Pudding House is a chapbook, The Fast of Thoth.  Mr. Levering holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and was a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.  He works as a human services administrator in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Also by Donald Levering:

“Walking the Nickel-Plate Railroad”

In memory of Fred Eckman

The iron horses have rolled away

to the night fires of slagheaps

Their wheels have been melted and recast

into girders for tire factories

The rails are burning orange

The semaphores are woven with morning glories

Sowing yarrow from my cuffs

in a clinker bed

Counting ghosts of boxcars like sheep

Sprouting daydreams like cotton seed

between Dayton and Cincinnati

Plumes of mullein pull me down the line

From the cinders of hobos rise

chicory’s blue fireworks

Here’s a brakeman’s button

with N-P R-R embossed

A lump of coal has fallen from

his heart among wild strawberries.

(Originally published in Black River Review; reprinted in Horsetail, Woodley Memorial Press, 2000.)

Suzanne Paola, “Rosette (St. Therese of Lisieux)

Biographical Note

Suzanne Paola's book, Glass, came out in the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award Series. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Willow Springs, Southern Humanities Review. Poems have also or soon will appear in upcoming issues of Partisan Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, Shenandoah, as well as in two anthologies: Dancing Music: Music Sad (Eastern Washington University Press) and Manoa: A Pacific Journal. Suzanne is also the author of the award-winning poetry collection, Bardo. She is Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University.

Allan Peterson, Commentary on “The Book on Water”

About “The Book on Water,” Peterson says he composed it “while writing poolside at a motel when traveling.  The chairs and tables for guests not yet awake seemed to be meeting on their own.  The water, wind-ruffled and agitated by its recirculation, suggested aspects of its book-length capabilities.  It became for the poem what is as a substance, a nearly universal solvent.”

Biographical Note

Allan Peterson has recently published work in Green Mountains Review, Rhino 2001, Montserrat Review, and The Marlboro Review.  He has work forthcoming in Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, Slant, Mudfish, and Curious Rooms. He has received fellowships from the NEA and the State of Florida.

Reg Saner, Commentary on “Iowa Wedding” and “Day Book”

On “Iowa Wedding,” Saner states, “As may be self-evident, “Iowa Wedding” derives from my impressions of an actual wedding whose bride and groom had already produced the child mentioned in the poem.  Between that jubilee of the soul which weddings ought to evoke and the realities of marriage, a certain dissonance occurs.  Yet families gather round, their generations become visible, and children—whose possibility is the biological impulse behind the whole thing—are usually present. So you get the full spectrum.  Nonetheless, dissonance between the ideal and the real creates in everyone at least a twinge of pathos, and the occasion underlying the poem generated more than a twinge.”

            On “Day Book,” Saner writes, it “isn’t a transcript of journal entries, though phrases in the poem were taken verbatim from it.  I had run across notes made during the implied mountain hike.  Reading my own enthusiasm about an outing I’d forgotten entirely left me a bit tottered.  Mircea Eliade, the historian of religion, wrote an autobiography called No Souvenirs.  His published memoirs make that title a misnomer, but maybe—applied to happy souvenirs—its concept is a good idea.  In contrast, painful times recalled after we’re past them often give us a pleasurable sense of relief.”

Biographical Note

Reg Saner is a longtime Coloradan whose nature poetry and essays have appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and anthologies.  His most recent nonfiction, Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo and the Anasazi (University of Utah Press), is now in its second printing.  He lives in Boulder with his wife and two sons.

Floyd Skloot, Commentary on “Biopsy”

On the genesis of “Biopsy,” Skloot writes, “Contemporary medical tests and diagnostic procedures, with their hi-tech tools and managed care efficiencies, tend to dehumanize patients and create distance between the doctor and the sick person.  This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what good diagnosis requires.  Of all the many procedures I’ve been through during the 13 years I have been sick, none was eerier than a muscle biopsy I underwent last year.  In the poem, I can see the frantic effort on the speaker’s part to hold himself together, even as he is being cut apart, an effort mirrored in the use of formal structure, rhyme and ragged pentameter.  It is a sonnet that doesn’t stop where it should, like the surgery itself, a little longer and a little more harrowing than what might have been expected as the thing began.  It is very strange to hear the chatter outside, and feel the various changes going on inside, to be numbed against certain kinds of pain but to feel other kinds, to be there and not be there, all at the same time.  This isn’t a test, and that wasn’t a doctor I ever want to face again.”

Biographical Note

Floyd Skloot’s most recent book of poetry is The Evening Light (Story Line Press, 2001).  In the fall, Bucknell University Press will publish his next collection, The Fiddler’s Trance.  Some of his recent poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review and he received the 2000 Emily Clark Balch Prize in Poetry from Virginia Quarterly Review.

Essays

Lee Martin, Excerpt from and Commentary on “Not Responsible for Debts Other Than My Own”

One night, when I was fifteen, I stole my father’s car.  We had argued, as we often did in those days, about the length of my hair.  Only this time, the argument had turned monstrous, escalating from our usual shouting to physical force.  My father shoved at me, and I shoved back.  He had lost both hands in a farming accident shortly after I was born; he had tried to unclog the shucking box on his corn picker without first shutting down the power take off, and the rollers had pulled in his hands and mangled them.  After that, he wore prostheses, or, as he called them, his hooks.  Each hook consisted of two steel prongs that met and curved like a question mark.  A harness of cables and bands and levers settled over his shoulders, and, when he contracted the muscles in those shoulders, the prongs opened.  On the night I am recalling now, he got so angry that he pressed the point of one of his hooks into my throat; he pinned me to the wall and held me there while I struggled for breath.  Finally, he backed away, leaving me bent over and gasping.  Both of us were stunned.  Our house had suddenly become like the ones we saw on television police shows, a place of ugly living, a place where people might go too far with their anger and kill someone.

Commentary:  Lee Martin states that he wrote this piece “in an attempt to find connections between bits of the past and the present.  I’ve tried to reclaim something of my own past and reconstruct it to the point that it provides an entry into not only the present but also into whatever lies beyond.  Along the way, I’ve been interested in finding out what’s at stake for me in the writing of the essay and in the living I face beyond its end.  The important question I face in all my work is this: how much of the self am I willing to risk.  So in this essay, I gather my father’s hooks, his anger and mine as well, a neighbor with an alcoholic wife, a boy my friend whose father deserts him, and I try to come to a point where these elements cohere in a way that opens up the future.  So reclamation becomes construction; a door opens at the essay’s end, and I step through to the other side.”

Biographical Note

            Lee Martin is the author of a story collection, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande 1996); a memoir, From Our House (Dutton 2000); and a novel, Quakertown (forthcoming from Dutton in June 2001).  His stories and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Glimmer Train, Creative Nonfiction, Double Take, and elsewhere.  He has received fellowships recently from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.  He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Texas where he also edits the American Literary Review.

Arthur Saltzman, Commentary on “Standing on Fishes”

Saltzman says, “The genesis of this piece, as is often the case, was a serendipitous conspiracy of encounters.  I was interested in how the mundane and the magical, understanding and wonder, contextualize and potentially oppose one another, and I found those complements and tensions operating in magic sets and venues, computer games and Rilke’s poetry.  A strange combination, perhaps, but the saving grace of strangeness is part of what I meant to extol here.”

Biographical Note

            Arthur Saltzman teaches at Missouri Southern State College and is the author of seven books, most recently This Mad Instead: Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction and Objects and Empathy.  The latter is a collection of creative nonfiction due out in the next month to six weeks from Mid-List Press, and it won their First Series Creative Nonfiction Award.

Interviews

Ellen Cooney, Commentary on The White Palazzo

Ellen Cooney suggests that The White Palazzo fits into the tradition of road novels:  “My main character, Tara Barlow, runs away from home just before her wedding, for very good reasons. She jumps into her car—a new black stick-shift Mustang—and hits the road. She is never going to go all that far; she never leaves her own state, in fact, but it is an adventure novel all the same. She’s out there finding herself and a new career and a new love life (that most of all!). But I do very much see it as enlarging a tradition. Tara Barlow is a character with a strong ego, and unlike many (or most) female characters in this sort of novel, you don’t see her in a role in which she is positioned in reaction to a male character. She’s on her own. She is dealing with life and the world directly. She has money, she has youth—she’s 24—she has this car she adores, she has herself, and she has opened herself up very bravely to whatever comes her way.”

Biographical Note

Ellen Cooney was born in 1952 in Clinton, Massachusetts.  She is the author of Small-Town Girl, All the Way Home, and The Old Ballerina.  Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Literary Review, Story, Glimmer Train, and many other fine journals.  She has taught creative writing at Harvard, Boston College, the Seminars at Radcliffe, and the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at MIT.

Photography

Amber Gray,  “Flirting with Transgression,” with text by LindaAnn Loschiavo

Biographical Note on Amber Gray

Born in February 1976, Amber Gray grew up in the suburban doldrums of San Jose, California.  It was there, among mini-malls and tract houses that she developed a rich imagination and an aspiration to record and share the characters and places that existed in her mind with the rest of the world.  She initially aimed her efforts toward cinematography, but soon found her obsession with detail would prove too immense for her limited financial resources.  It was during her studies at The San Francisco Art Institute that she turned more serious attention to her photography.  She designed and built sets, created costumes, and cast her friends in order to create a small portfolio of images.  It was after creating her first promotional piece that Amber landed her first commercial job shooting a billboard for ad agency, Ammirati Puris Lintas.  Afterward, she soon moved to New York to pursue her career more rigorously.  Her work has been featured in galleries, magazines, and commercial ads including, Leviticus, San Francisco Art Institute’s Diego Rivera Gallery, Abeir, Fashion Institute of Technology’s permanent photographic collection, Shout magazine, Women’s Wear Daily, SoWear online fashion collection, and Seeger Mont Blanc winter ad campaign 1999.

Biographical Note on LindaAnn Loschiavo

            A native New Yorker, LindaAnn Loschiavo is an award-winning journalist, arts reviewer, short story writer, and poet.  She has developed writing programs for New York University and Hunter College, and has organized many high-profile benefits and events raising money to support the arts and promoting the work of artists and authors in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and abroad.

            She has been a “Featured Poet” on “First Night Out in New Jersey,” and also in the journal, Italian Americana, and her work has drawn acclaim from P.E.N. American Women, and many others.  Her novel set during the disco era, Sex When She Was, is a modern version of the Divine Comedy.

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