Excerpts & Contributors: Spring 2002

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary and biographical notes for our Spring 2002 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

Peter LaSalle, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "The Actor's Face"

Excerpt:

          The Actor's Face hovers over the cemetery out on the edge of the city of Big Spring, Texas, where his father will soon be buried.  And somehow it really is his face, or it only is his face, untethered and floating like the Man in the Moon, very low.  And in Big Spring by that cemetery, it is darkly fluorescent, the orange sands of the veritable desert flatness all around, the simple white stone slabs upright.

          There are the big gates, black-painted, that all such cemeteries out in West Texas seem to have, to announce with an arching band across the top "Pilgrim's Rest" or "Elysian Fields"; they are always constructed gratis by still another out-of-work oil-patch welder who has found Jesus and wants to show the world his faith.  There are tall cedars everywhere, and above the grave where the actor's father, the Judge, is already buried, the Actor's Face hovers in the still desert night.  Just stays suspended there, altogether too large, altogether totally unreal.

Artist's Commentary:

          When we asked about the genesis of "The Actor's Face," LaSalle replied that "characters and plot get made up, but what you try to be ultimately true to (in realistic fiction, anyway) is the place.  For me this story has a lot to do with place, and I hope I am true to the two main poles of geography presented here, each growing out of some firsthand experience.  There is New York City, where I have spent time over the years, and whenever I go back there for a week or so, the whole ongoing show of it never ceases to do a most pleasant number on me.  And there is West Texas, which I know somewhat from a wonderful year spent there as a young man, teaching at the campus of a brand new university almost smack on the New Mexico border.  Also, thematically, I suppose what haunts this story (or what I hope does so) is that essential idea of the unreality involved in an actor's life, in the constant inhabiting of the lives and plights of others, in a sort of ghostly way, to the point that one loses altogether his or her own sense of corporeality--not a lot different than being a fiction writer, now that I think of it."

Biographical Note

          Peter LaSalle is the author, most recently, of a short story collection entitled Hockey Sur Glace (Breakaway Books/The Lyons Press).  His stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The Paris Review, The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.  He is Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Blair Oliver, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "Snow Globe"

Excerpt:

          Before going home, they stopped back at the house Peter grew up in.  He wasn't sure why, but he now wanted to show the place to his son.  He wanted to as if his life depended upon it.  No cars were in the driveway, so he led Emil around back.

          The field was smaller than he remembered--narrow, and a mere forty yards from the mongrel back porch to the far end at the fence.  the woods that formed the borders where he and his friends, with sticks and garbage-lid shields, once patrolled for signs of an attack from the bullies on Colorado Avenue were now only a thin, apologetic gathering of stunted trees that seemed to shy from the snow.  Come spring, Peter imagined those trees would allow the sun to expose, in bright merciless pools, his old hiding places.  Embarrassed, he struggled to think of something important, even memorable, to say to his son.

Artist's Statement:

          Oliver writes of "Snow Globe" that "I was working in a bookstore, shelving the mysteries, when I overheard someone among the romances say she knew a guy who wanted to pay back a store he'd shoplifted from when he was a kid.  That struck me as a misguided, if well-meaning, thing to do, and I tried to imagine what might motivate someone to follow through with the gesture.  It's a slightly desperate attempt to repair the past, but that's not something we're easily granted.  What if the 'sinner' can't find the right sin to confess?  He wants to confess and repent, but he isn't confronting the entire wrong-ness of his life.  Still, we try to be better than ourselves.  The specifics are fiction, but the needs are mine."

Biographical Note

          Blair Oliver teaches literature and creative writing at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins, where he also serves as editor of Front Range Review.  His stories have appeared in CutBank, Talking River Review, Dickinson Review, and elsewhere.

Peter Walpole, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "Half"

Excerpt:

          Outside, a three-quarter moon loomed over the avenue.  Against the black curtain of night, it looked to Mule like a profile of a pregnant belly.  A soon-to-be mother arching her back.  The naked fingertips of two magnolias reached up to it.  The arrangement would have pleased his mother, Mule decided--she was very fond of tsuki mi.  Moon-gazing.  "In the year you were born," she used to whisper to him, always out of earshot of his father, "I say the Americans land and walk."  She didn't mean she'd seen it on television.

          Mule felt drawn to the moon's striking paleness as if it was his mother's very own face.  "Give me wings and I'll reach it," he said to no one in particular.  For the moment, he felt connected to the beautiful designs of the universe, and he was confident he'd been heard.

Artist's Statement:

          About "Half," Walpole writes that "I raided an old incomplete novel manuscript to come up with it.  I liked a scene in which a perfectly sane man sits in his apartment feeling so friendless that he has a conversation with the walls.  Though the dialogue has changed here, certain elements from the original scene remain--the illogical participant, the matter-of-fact tone, and the man's ease in accepting the conversation as ordinary.  Could a reader accept it?  That was this story's main challenge for me.  All of the other elements in the piece--the mother's death, her son's subsequent descent into a desperate world, his racial identity, his powers of hearing, the mother's powers of sight, the hoodlums' brutality, etc.--these, I suppose, came out of an impulse to explain how a man could arrive at this moment in his life, in this particular state of mind."

Biographical Note

          Peter Walpole's work has appeared or is scheduled to appear in The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, and others.  He is a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Award Finalist.

Poetry

Deborah Bogen, Artist's Statement on "We Were Born in 1950"

           When we asked about the origins of "We Were Born in 1950," Bogen said that "it must be hard for kids today to imagine that once upon a time we thought the world's problems were not only solvable, but nearly solved.  In 1958, World War II as the last war was believable.  It was unthinkable that bacteria would eventually outsmart penicillin.  The future seemed curiously custom-designed for smart, middle-class, white kids and even the proliferation of family-sized bomb shelters didn't disturb us.  In the dark of the multi-purpose room, science and social studies films explained that technology and new inventions were our salvation.  We believed it."

Biographical Note

            Deborah Bogen's work has been published in Field, Poetry International, Mudfish, Lyric, Poet Lore, and others.  She moved to Pittsburgh from Southern California in 2000.

Stephen Cushman, Artist's Statement on "If Augustine Could Ride the Hammersmith and City Line" & "One for the Scrapbook"

           Cushman writes that in "If Augustine Could Ride the Hammersmith and City Line," he is trying "to imagine how the author of Confessions, who in Book X examines his own trials under the triple division of temptation, 'lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and pride,' would manage his eyes in a train car crowded with attractive people." "One for the Scrapbook," Cushman writes, "began by looking at a photograph of my older son, then a young boy, after he had been playing dress-up in women's clothes at a friend's house.  The photograph, or at least the poem about it, took on a new dimension after a rereading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 20."

Biographical Note

            Stephen Cushman is the author of William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (1985), Fictions of Form in American Poetry (1993), and Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (1999).  His first volume of poems, Blue Pajamas, was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1998, and his second, Cussing Lesson, was released by LSU Press in January 2002.  He teaches at the University of Virginia. 

Chad Davidson, Artist's Statement on "The Contents of Abraham Lincoln's Pockets"

           When we asked about the genesis of "The Contents of Abraham Lincoln's Pockets," Davidson replied that the poem was "a response to Frederick Seidel's poem, 'The Complete Works of Anton Webern,' from his wonderful book, My Tokyo.  In the poem, Seidel never explicitly gestures at Webern or his music; rather the poem is colored by the sense that there should be a connection.  Both Seidel's poem and mine reside in the tension between title and content, naming and named."

Biographical Note

            Chad Davidson's poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, and others.  He has recently returned from a year-long Rotary scholarship at the University of Perugia in Italy and is presently a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University.  Nominated for a Pushcart Prize last 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, New York.

Also by Chad Davidson:

"The Yawn"

Boredom.  Yet science does nothing for me,

no consolation.  I'm tired of poetry,

though I know the fear a yawn

once inspired, like the swan

at the edge of the lake by our house:

how it darts away from us

just as we're close enough to grab

it, how the yawn used to stab

us in the back that way, the soul

rising right after birth.  The old

science of the yawn as phantasm:

like Greek myth or orgasm,

somehow too fulfilling to be

painful.  Yet the jaw falls,

Icarine, tragic.  The call

Orphic, out of a need to see

down the throat the two frail balloon

lungs paired off and abloom.

Or how I through myself out

from sleep.  Opening a stout

night's end with one squeeze

of my eyes, I look in the mirror

to witness myself eating air,

agasp, my daily chance to gaze

into this face's oldest pain,

more than some mute renegade

wail: this empty, no-hand grenade

thrown into a well of rain.

Peter Desy, Artist's Statement on "These Days, You'd Have to Say. . ."

           About "These Days, You'd Have to Say. . ." Desy says that "looking back, the poem arose from several sources: that what were once called revelations or sudden conversations, etc., are increasingly explained physiologically, regardless of intensity of content; that such experiences can happen in the most ordinary of places or circumstances; that they disappear as quickly as they appeared; that we're 'stuck' with all of the above, even if they hobble us, so we 'drop' the whole thing.  And yet. . . ."

Biographical Note

            Peter Desy's poems have appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, Flint Hills Review, Quarterly West, Virginia Quarterly West, Onthebus, and others.  His poetry collection, Driving from Columbus, was published by Mellen in 1992.

Also by Peter Desy:

"BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION, CARL'S CHOP HOUSE, DETROIT"

The waiters there wear tuxedos and have hushed

attitudes, as if feeding

were a formal affair, something

we do once a year that needs exactitude and

supervision.  August 23, the table formally

arranged, my mother at the head.

"I'm eighty today," she announces

and we clap and clank our glasses

with our knives.

                             She looks so small

cutting her thick lamb chops--the thin

architecture of her hands showing through

paper skin--excising the meat neatly,

chewing, satisfying desire, being there,

wholly, with the family busy with their meat,

and the silverware tinkling and flashing

in the artificial light.  Outside, dark now,

and everything moving--stars, moon, clouds,

wind and cars.  We go single file toward

the door, finished with the sharp, curved bones

of animals left on our plates.  We almost

feel the earth move as we step into

the night, the leaves spangled silver

as the light breeze takes them and moves on.

Greg Dyer, Artist's Statement on "The Second Day"

           "The Second Day," Dyer says, "grew out of the epigraph from 'A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,' by Gabriel García Marquez.  After equating Tuesday with the second day of creation, the water motif began to emerge alongside a preoccupation with triple point--the condition at which water is simultaneously present n each of the three states: gas, liquid, solid.  The poem echoes, I believe, Paul's exploration of his own dual nature in Romans 8, but with perhaps more bitterness and frustration.  The split couplets provided a formal element that both forced me to relinquish some control over the language and reinforced the thematic elements of the poem."

Biographical Note

            Greg Dyer received his Ph.D. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the University of North Texas.  He currently serves on the faculty at the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota. 

Gabriel Gudding, Artist's Statement on "Bail"

           Gudding writes of "Bail" that the "poem arose after my natural father nearly punched me during a family reunion.  I had not spoken to him in years, because he had alienated most of his children.  I thought briefly of doing Kung Fu, at which I am very proficient, but as he is forty-two years older than I, I felt such action would be unwarranted and possibly illegal.  I tolerated this substantial abuse without resorting to violence.  I feel it is important to say he is a very handsome man.  And that I am not."

Biographical Note

            Gabriel Gudding's first book won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for 2001 and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the fall of 2002.  He is a recipient of The Nation Discovery Award and a Constance Saltonstall Grant, and his work has appeared in The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, Conduit, Fence, and elsewhere.  He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi.

James Hoggard, "Shifting Seasons in Chihuahua"

Biographical Note

            James Hoggard, who was the Texas Poet Laureate for 2000, is the author of fifteen books, including six collections of poems, two novels, six collections of translations, and a collection of stories.  Former president of The Texas Institute of Letters, he has won numerous awards for his poetry, fiction, and translations.  He is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls.  His latest book, due to be published in May 2002, is Patterns of Illusion: Stories & a Novella.

Mimmo Iasiello, Artist's Statement on "Fisherman's Daughter"

           When we inquired about the genesis of "Fisherman's Daughter," Iasiello said that the poem grew out of "a painting by an unknown Italian artist that depicts an old fisherman on a beach at dusk putting away his nets from a long day of work.  In the background, a small girl (presumably his daughter) races toward him, her arms outstretched in anticipation of his return.  I was immediately struck by the simplicity of the brush strokes, the mood conveyed with the dark, meditative hues, and more significantly, the incredible impression that it left on me.  I literally couldn't get this work out of my head.  The poem is an attempt to honor this wonderful piece of artwork.  I tried not only to capture a seemingly routine and minor moment in this man's life--the daily difficulty of his work, his love of the sea--but more importantly, to show how his relationship with his daughter and the natural world are very much connected."

Biographical Note

            Mimmo Iasiello received his M.F.A. from George Mason University.  He has published his poetry and fiction in several literary and academic journals, including The New York Quarterly, Voices West, The Wilshire Review, and California Quarterly. 

John Jenkinson, "Lullaby"

Biographical Note

            John Jenkinson earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Texas and his M.F.A at Wichita State University. Author of two chapbooks, Jenkinson recently served as Milton Center Fellow in Poetry at Newman University.  Winner of an AWP Intro/Journals Award, Jenkinson's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a wide variety of journals, including American Literary Review, The Georgia Review, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, Portland Review, Quarterly West, and Visions.  A collection, The History of Sleep, is forthcoming from Basilisk Press.  He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Butler College. 

Janet Krauss, Artist's Statement on "A Lesson from Chardin"

           Of "A Lesson from Chardin," Krauss writes, "I have long been an admirer of Chardin's art.  At an exhibit of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I was so enthralled by the effect of his still lifes, I felt the need to write a poem honoring the message he conveyed to me about balance, order, and tranquility.  The spell of his domestic sanctity was intensified amidst the crowd of viewers."

Biographical Note

            Janet Krauss' poems have appeared in Plainsongs, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, American Goat, Midstream, Jewish Currents, Judaism, Slant, College English, Spoon River Quarterly, and others.  Recent poems will soon appear in South Carolina Review, Offerings, and Chaffin Journal.

Also by Janet Krauss:

"I wish to be"

Noguchi's fountain,

its water emerging

from a constant

source rising unseen

as if eyes were shut,

thoughts on one focus:

to form the flawless,

liquid cloth across

the surface of the stone

and to fall, fully draping

its sides, unceasing,

sure of its calm.

Drops of rain do not disturb

but silver point their way

and join the stillness

of the flowing, join in

the ongoingness

as if life could go on

like this forever

with imperceptible erosion,

and one's purpose,

never stopped, shining

in its triumph,

grounded by support,

as dependable as basalt.

Andrew Miller, "Swallows"

Biographical Note

            Andrew Miller attended California State University at Fresno, where he received his B.A. in English.  He later attended Virginia Commonwealth University, where he received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing.  He now lives abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark.  His poems have appeared in Yemassee, Shenandoah, Laurel Review, Massachusetts Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Spoon River Review. 

Pattiann Rogers, "Into the Wind's Castle" & "Seeing What Is Seen"

Biographical Note

            Pattiann Rogers has published nine books of poetry.  The most recent is Song of the World Becoming: Poems New and Collected, 1981-2001 (Milkweed, 2001).  The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation appeared in Milkweed's Credo Series in 1999.  A Covenant of Seasons, a collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry, was published by Hudson Hills Press in 1998.  Rogers was awarded a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation's International Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in May 2000.  She has 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.  New poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Field, The Paris Review, Georgia Review, Orion, Poetry, and The Antioch Review. 

Brent Royster, Artist's Statement on "Modelbuilding"

           Of "Modelbuilding," Royster writes that "as an adolescent, I spent hours on end crouched beneath the halo of a telescoping desk lamp, assembling plastic replicas of WWII aircraft.  Eyes glazed from glue vapors, fingers scored by the trimming knife and blotched with drab enamels, I was the epitome of the isolated geek kid who spent too much time in his own head.  The crux of this period in my life was when I built a 1/48 scale B23 Liberator.  I mail-ordered authentic decals.  I researched the specific aircraft, got in-air photos and a facismile of its docking papers from the national archives, even contacted the 283rd Bomb Group to learn more about the plane and its crew.  The plane, dubbed 'Marian,' became a true obsession, so much so that my father worried aloud to my mother when he came home to find me tearing around the room, shouting bombardier commands, and aping the sound of the four enormous engines, enrapt and totally delusional, the fantastic, still unpainted fuselage in hand.  By the time the plane was finished, every single piece--from the micro-etched ailerons, to the Norden bombsight no larger than an apple seed--had passed under my scrutiny.  That airplane was an object of beauty, a thing I grew to love, but I later came to realize that in its grace and power, it was also the instrument for something unimaginably horrible."

Biographical Note

            Brent Royster's poems have appeared in Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Green Mountains Review, Quarterly West, and many other journals.  He is also the recipient of an AWP Intro/Journals Award.

Leslie Ullman, Artist's Statement on "Via Altior," "Via Altior," "The Current," & "Water Music"

           When we asked about "Via Altior," Ullman replied that the piece, whose title "translates from Latin to 'The Higher Way,' is part of a series of poems I started a few years ago, wishing to experiment with a conversational, seemingly careless voice, and then to anchor it all, maybe give it ironic weight, with a Latin title (I really wanted to call the poem 'The Way of Chastity,' but the Latin word castitatus connoted something more violent than chastity, so I had to find another route).  As I worked on 'Via Altior,' I enjoyed reconnecting with my identity as a product of the '60s, a fact I occasionally have to apologize for when I say something lat shocks my Latino students (yes, I know how dangerous drugs are, and if I had kids I'd probably lock them up until they were in their 30s, but I can't help it, I do remember when drugs were at once fun and incidental)."

            "The Current," Ullman said, "is anohter story.  I have a dear friend, the poet Louis Skipper, who has an uncanny way of simultaneously supporting my poems and nudging me to push them farther than I initially might have felt comfortable doing.  This one started out as a rendition of how another friend, a successful businessman, seemed to experience his world crumbling when his octogenarian mother, a spunky woman, suffered a series of strokes.  Louis suggested that I do more than just render the son's point of view, that I render the mother's as well.  By this time, she was in a nursing home and no longer able to communicate anything about her feelings of life.  'The Current' became a journey that pulled me into its own landscape, its own momentum, and left me changed at the end.  I discovered I knew more than I thought I did about this woman, and that invention could come easily when I needed to resort to it.  I even threw in a couple of things that had happened to me, and by the time I was finished, I was convinced they had happened to her instead."

            "Later," Ullman said, "my stretched and limbered psyche may have needed diversion, as I found myself taking lessons in ballroom dancing in some of my spare time.  There I encountered a whole different character to track, and poems like 'Water Music' arose from some of the dance images."

Biographical Note

            Leslie Ullman is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Slow Work through Sand, winner of the 1997 Iowa poetry prize and published by that press in 1998.  She directs the bilingual M.F.A. Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and is also on the faculty of the Vermont College M.F.A. Program. 

Essays

Lee Martin, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "Crows"

Excerpt:

When I was a boy on our farm, I used to stand outside and watch the white plumes of jet fuel exhaust trailing across the sky like lines stretching across my Etch-a-Sketch, and though I couldn't see the planes, I knew they were there.  Often, as we sat in our farmhouse eating supper or watching television, we heard percussive blasts.  Our windows rattled in their frames.  We were hearing sonic booms, shock waves from fighter jets traveling faster than the sound of speed.  "Nothing to be scared of," my father said the first time we heard one.  "It's just a little ripple of air."

Artist's Statement:

           When we asked how "Crows" came about, Martin replied that "on the day of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, my wife and I were driving from our home in Ohio to Illinois.  Because we didn't have our car radio on, it was late in the day before we knew what had happened.  Unlike many others who gathered around televisions and radios, we didn't experience this tragedy as it unfolded but rather continued our drive west not knowing that the story would catch up with us at day's end.  When I finally wrote about that day, I used a similar indirect approach, beginning with the crows that had woken me that morning and then trusting memory and association to find the images that could form a response to this horrible event."

Biographical Note

            Lee Martin is the author of a novel, Quakertown (Dutton, 2001); a memoir, From Our House (Dutton, 2000); and a story collection, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande, 1996).  He teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Michelle Valois, Excerpt & Artist's Statement on "Useful"

Excerpt:

          Cluette and Peabody.  Mémé retired from this mill the year I was born, after fifty years of stitching together other people's dress shirts.  The foremen didn't let us, she whispered, as if they could still hear, as if the mill were still making men's dress shirts--impeccably inspected for every thread and weave, arrow-sharp in their angled crispness--the empty mill three streets down from her elderly high-rise.  I pictured Mémé  nudging rejected shirt pockets with the toes of her high-laced shoes, until they were close enough that she could bend over and snatch them, stuff them into her own pockets, day after day, until she had gathered enough.

Artist's Statement:

           When we asked the genesis of "Useful," Valois replied that "I set out to write about my grandmother's quilt and ended up trying to connect the lives of all three of my grandmothers to my own.  What is our common ground?  I am a college-educated lesbian, and they were factory workers who gave birth to and/or raised large families.  I guess 'Useful,' like most of my writing, is about making these connections with my past."

Biographical Note

            Michelle Valois received her M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  Her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Larcom Review, Faultline, Fourth Genre, and other journals.  She recently received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund to work on her book. 

Interview

Bill Tydeman, "New Directions: An Interview with Scott Russell Sanders"

Biographical Notes

Bill Tydeman is Director of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library which houses the James Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural world.

Scott Russell Sanders has published several books: his novels include The Invisible Company, Bad Man Ballad, Terrarium, and The Engineer of Beasts; his short story collections included Wilderness Plots and Fetching the Dead; his collections of essays include Writing from the Center, The Paradise of Bombs, Secrets of the Universe, and In Limestone Country; his books for children include Here Comes the Mystery Man, Warm as Wool, Aurora Means Dawn, and Hear the Wind Blow.  Sanders' most recent books are Hunting for Hope (Beacon, 1998), The Country of Language (Milkweed, 1999) and The Force of Spirit (Beacon, 2000).  His writing appears regularly in Georgia Review, Orion, Audubon, and numerous anthologies.  He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lilly Endowment.  Sanders' work has also received the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction.  Sanders has recently been the subject of a video from the Lannan Foundation and of interviews in The Fourth Genre, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Photography

Cheryl Merrill, Excerpt and Artist's Statement from "Large Imaginations"

Excerpt:

"Virtual Wilderness"

            I lie asleep across several seats at Heathrow in London, dreaming of elephants, my body suspended at its origin, ten time zones away.  It is neither night nor day in my dreams.  I can see fluorescent lights through the lids of my eyes, can hear polite announcements for flights; I can smell the faint barnyard dust of Africa, can sense a great presence looming toward me.

            Step by step she comes closer.  She is confident, unafraid; she looks me directly in the eye.  Her eyelashes are long and straight.  Her deep brown eyes are almost black.  she stops less than five feet away, just beyond the reach of an outstretched arm, should I be foolish enough to extend mine.  She is wild, in charge.  I am on her terms, and she knows it.  She is familiar with people sitting motionless on rocks.  She expects the small sneezing sounds of the devices they carry in their hands and point at her.  She stares into my eyes, then shakes her head sideways in a movement that would say, "No," in my language.  Her ears flap once, twice, and clouds of dust rise from them.  She looks down the top of her long trunk at me.  It's an imperious, don't-mess-with-me look, but that again is my language, not hers.  A rumble like a promise of distant rain fills my ears.  Then she sidesteps, turns, and vanishes into a thicket of brush without another sound, her great presence subtracted, a void of air where she once stood.

            I am on a pilgrimage to that place.  I am waiting for my flight, asleep at Heathrow.  I am nearly, virtually, there in my dreams.

Artist's Statement:

            "Larger Imaginations," Miller says, "can literally be summed up in the words of another Genesis: 'Let there be light.'  First there was the light bulb above my head when I read the Fall 2000 issue of Iron Horse Literary Review and looked at the photo essay by John Hodges.  Working on the book-length manuscript of Virtual Wilderness produces an I-still-can't-see-the-end-of-this mindset, so it was illuminating to realize I could hone a voice and a concept into a smaller project with a beginning and an end.  Too, there are twenty minutes each morning and twenty minutes each evening in Africa when the light is absolutely perfect, when all of us animals are bathed in a glow that promises the creation of another day, when every photograph is exceptional and when words are no longer necessary, when we just are, moment by moment, until the light fades."

Biographical Note

Cheryl Merrill spends most of her waking moments in the world of the internet, both at her office and when working on her creative nonfiction book, Virtual Wilderness:  Migrations of the Mind, a book about both elephants and about the mind's need to connect to the natural world.  She has written travel articles for magazines, newspapers and the Internet; a chapbook of poems, Cheat Grass, from Copper Canyon Press; and short stories.  When she goes to Africa, she returns with hundreds of photographs.

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