Excerpts & Contributors: Spring 2003

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

Terence A. Dalrymple, Artist's Statement on "Just One of the Guys"

          Concerning the inspiration for the story, Dalrymple writes, “Because I’m interested in the way personally significant experiences in youth shape the adults that people become, a number of my stories are about—or flash back to—characters in their preteen and/or teen years. ‘Just One of the Guys’ is such a story, and is the first in a three-part series of stories entitled ‘Experiments in Nudity: A Memory in Three Parts.’ Although none of the memories are significantly autobiographical, the kernel of each story derives from personal memory.”

Biographical Note

          Terence A. Dalrymple teaches literature and writing at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. His fiction, articles, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and journals.

Rick DeMarinis, "The Bear Itself"

Biographical Note

          Rick DeMarinis  is the author of seven novels, including The Year of the Zinc Penny, which was a 1989 New York Times Notable Book, and three previous collections of short fiction. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Antaeus, Story, Epoch, Esquire, and Atlantic Monthly, among many others. In 1990, he received a Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is recently retired from teaching creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso, and currently resides in Missoula, Montana. DeMarinis’s latest novel, A Clod of Wayward Marl, was recently published by Dennis McMillan Publications.

Matthew Purdy, Artist's Statement on "The World's Greatest Writer"

          Purdy says that “The World’s Greatest Writer” came about as the result of personal curiosity. “I wondered,” Purdy says, “what it would mean for someone to be the world’s greatest writer.”

Biographical Note

          Matthew Purdy is currently working toward his MA in English at SUNY, Binghamton. He received his BA from Connecticut College, and he worked as a summer intern for The Village Voice Literary Supplement. He is originally from New Jersey, which he insists isn’t all that bad. This is his first published story.

Poetry

Melanie Almeder, "Dumb Luck" and "Pastoral for a Sad River"

Biographical Note

          Melanie Almeder is a professor at Roanoke College. Her works have appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, and Seneca Review. Her manuscript, which includes “Pastoral” and “Dumb Luck,” is entitled On Dream Street.

Dorothy Howe Brooks, Artist's Statement on "Black-Crowned Night Heron at the Peace River Wildlife Center"

          About the poem “Black-Crowned Night Heron at the Peace River Wildlife Center,” Brooks writes, “The Peace River Wildlife Center is a small volunteer center in Punta Gorda, Florida, that takes in injured wildlife, mostly seabirds. Those that can be rehabilitated are, and those that can’t be returned to the wild are kept at the center permanently. They never lose their instinctive habits, however, and in this species of Night Heron, the male builds the nest to attract a female.”

Biographical Note

            Dorothy Howe Brooks writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, numerous journals, including Cumberland Poetry Review, The Hampton-Sydney Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and The Georgia Journal, as well as the anthology, If I Had My Life to Live Over, I Would Pick More Daisies. She is currently at work on a novel.

Scott Cairns, "Against Justice"

Biographical Note

            Scott Cairns teaches poetry writing, American literature, and seminars in poetry and poetics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and is series editor for the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Best Spiritual Writing in 1998 and 2000, Upholding Mystery (Oxford, 1997), Best of Prairie Schooner (University of Nebraska Press, 2001), and The Pushcart Prize XXVI, 2002. His books of poetry include Figures for the Ghost, Translation of Babel, and Recovered Body.

Kelly Cherry, Artist's Statement on "Girls"

          Of “Girls,” Cherry says, “I wrote ‘Girls’ while on Bardsey Island, off the coast of Wales. I was there as the guest of a gentleman whose daughter had invited one of her friends. It was not a happy situation for the gentleman and me, but moments of joy sneaked out like the sun from behind clouds whenever the girls, ages eleven and twelve, were playing one of their games, acting out a fantasy, carrying on conversations that were in something approaching code.  In fact, to salvage some time for myself that would be free of acrimony, I wrote seventeen other poems to compose a sequence of eighteen. A number of them attempt to capture the playful communication between the girls.”

Biographical Note

          Kelly Cherry’s most recent books of poetry include Rising Venus (Louisiana State UP, 2002) and Death and Transfiguration (Louisiana State UP, 1997); her recent books of fiction include We Can Still Be Friends (Soho, 2003), My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers (reprinted by U of Alabama P, 2002), and The Society of Friends (U of Missouri P, 1999). She lives on a small farm in Virginia.

Robert Cooperman, "Highway Construction"

Biographical Note

          Robert Cooperman’s latest collection, The Widow’s Burden (Western Reflections), was a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections) won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry for 2000. His recent work has appeared in Cumberland Poetry Review, Sulphur River Review, and The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

Robert Cording, Artist's Statement on "Sullenness"

          About “Sullenness,” Cording writes, “I think someone told me I looked ‘sullen’ one day, and I began to think how it was a word we apply to the weather, but not very often these days to people. I almost immediately thought of Dante’s Inferno (I had been reading it not long before I began the poem) and those condemned to gurgle in the Styx’s mud. When I took the punishment seriously, I realized—to my dismay—just how right Dante was.”

Biographical Note

            Robert Cording’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Image, and The Paris Review. He teaches at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

James Doyle, Artist's Statement on "At the Racetrack"

          Concerning the inspiration for his poem, Doyle says of “At the Racetrack” that the beauty of “racing thoroughbreds has always touched on the Olympian for me. That mythical quality remains constant, no matter how great the changes over time in the societies around the horses, no matter how tawdry or polished the handlers and bettors.”

Biographical Note

          James Doyle and his wife, the poet Sharon Doyle, are retired, with lots of time to read and write. They have seven grandchildren. He has poems coming out in Green Mountains Review, West Branch, New Orleans Review, Notre Dame Review, and Gulf Coast.

Richard Foerster, Artist's Statement on "In Dream," "Aubade," and "Marionette"

          Foerster describes the genesis of his pieces in Iron Horse: “These three poems, which fall together in my new book manuscript, had their initial impulse in the sudden death due to lung cancer of my partner of fifteen years and in the ensuing months of loss and grief even while I was enjoying a year of living abroad. My challenge in writing about such personal anguish was to find the necessary distance and control to make the poems more than merely private utterances. Thus the use of rhyme and the gymnastics of a curtal sonnet à la Hopkins seemed appropriate. Thus the conscious hints of religious iconography and myth: the angelic banderole so common in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation; Apuleius’ Psyche walking alone and abandoned in the house of Cupid; the ritual bobbing of the Orthodox Jew at synagogue. But puzzlement always, and wonder—these are the spirits presiding over the poems: How is it that a beloved one’s face can be etched so vaguely in our dreams? How does frost on a windowpane manage to work its way into such exquisite shapes? And why sometimes does prayer seem to be forced out of us when we least want it? Who is manipulating the strings? The lover we can no longer see—is this not Emily Dickinson’s God? And heaven, the afterlife, if we must insist on having one—isn’t it glimpsed in the ephemera of frost on my window in Maine and in the providential transit of those flying fish that I saw in the midst of the Indian Ocean?”

Biographical Note

          Richard Foerster is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Double Going (BOA Editions), which was named a notable book for 2002 by the National Book Critics Circle. He was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar for 2000/2001—an honor that took him on a journey around the world. Among his numerous other awards are the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, and the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry. Poems from The Burning of Troy, his manuscript-in-progress, have appeared in Boulevard, New England Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. He lives in York Beach, Maine.

Ryan K. Guth, Artist's Statement on "Sunlight and Moonshine"

           Concerning the inspiration of “Sunlight and Moonshine,” Guth says, “This poem has two sources—Andrew Wyeth’s wonderful painting, The Virgin (in the Collection of the Brandywine River Museum in West Chester, Pennsylvania), and the artist’s account of the picture in Thomas Hoving’s 1976 book, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth. In fact, the line ‘like spring coming through the ground’ is a direct quotation from Wyeth’s commentary. It stuck me that what Wyeth decided to leave out of his picture was as important to our understanding of it as what he left in. Also, I wanted to record how much the painting moved me, as a viewer.”

Biographical Note

          Ryan K. Guth holds the PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Cincinnati. Poems of his have appeared in such journals as Solo, Whirligig, Bryant Literary Review, and Third Coast Review, among others. His full-length poetry collection, Home Truths, is currently on the market, as is his edited selection of Edgar Lee Masters’ shorter poems, tentatively titled Down Into This Land. He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Lambuth University in Jackson, Tennessee.

Austin Hummell, Artist's Statement on "Childcraft"

           Hummel notes that “‘Childcraft’ is an homage to the Childcraft Encyclopedia that was popular when I was young, and which formed the foundation for my understanding of the world. I read the volumes like they were serialized novels, A to Z. I still turn to them when I forget what the sun is made of.”

Biographical Note

            Austin Hummell’s first book, The Fugitive Kind, was published by the University of Georgia Press. His work has been published in Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Wisconsin Review, Denver Quarterly, and a few anthologies. He is poetry editor of Passages North.

Elizabeth McLagan, Artist's Statement on "Goodwill"

           “‘Goodwill,’” says McLagan, “is based on a real experience (how often does a total stranger want a kiss?) although the details have been changed. But I’ve always loved shopping at thrift stores, and for many years it was the only kind of shopping I could afford. The incident happened in March 2000, and I noted in my journal that the stock market seemed bewilderingly wild. I had the sense that there was too much prosperity and too much stuff, though much of it was eventually abandoned and rescued by folks like me. I wrote the poem that fall, under the influences of  Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s book, Never Be the Horse, which includes the poem ‘Refugees,’ also about too much stuff.”

Biographical Note

          Elizabeth McLagan has poems recently published, or forthcoming, in Passages North, Third Coast, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, and American Literary Review. She is a 2001 AWP Intro\Journals Award recipient and currently teaches writing and literature at Portland Community College.

Robert Phillips, "Two for Max Eberts"

Biographical Note

            Robert Phillips is former Director of the Creative Writing Program and John and Rebecca Moore Professor at the University of Houston. Both fiction writer and poet, his sixth collection of poems, Spinach Days, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in Spring 2000. His fifth collection, Breakdown Lane, has just gone into a second printing with Johns Hopkins. His prizes include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Jan Epton Seale, Artist's Statement on "Guerrero Viejo"

          About “Guerrero Viejo,” Seale says, “The epigraphs form a backdrop about the unusual juxtaposition of marine life and brush land after the beautiful old border town, modeled on Mexican colonialism, was emptied of its inhabitants and flooded as part of Falcon Lake. The irony is that recent years of severe drought have uncovered the town, drowned for 40 years, and revealed a surprising stability to its old structure. The Mexican government has built a new road and regularly runs tourist buses to it. Guerrero Viejo testifies to the fickle nature of human-devised plans for ‘progress.’ There are neither people or water in it now. The border lands are suffering for, and quarreling over, what little water there is, and this ghost town stands silent and prideful, a cultural entity of enormous symbolic commentary.”

Biographical Note

          Jan Epton Seale lives in McAllen, Texas, a few miles from the Rio Grande. Her writing about the region has been published in such places as Blue Mesa Review, Texas Short Stories II, and Creatures on the Edge.

A. E. Stallings, "Flags of Convenience"

Biographical Note

            A. E. Stallings grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry series (1994 & 2000) and has received numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize (Pushcart Prize Anthology XXII), the 1997 Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, and the James Dickey Prize from Five Points. She also serves as an editor for The Atlanta Review. A finalist for both the Yale Series of Younger Poets & Walt Whitman Award, her first poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award by Dana Gioia and was published by the University of Evansville Press. She composed the Latin lyrics for the opening music of the Paramount film, Sum of All Fears, and is currently at work on a verse translation of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura for a major publisher. She resides in Athens, Greece, with her husband.

Mary Swander, Artist's Statement on "Pearls before Swine"

           “Pearls Before Swine,” Swander writes of the genesis of her poem, “is a section of a larger narrative poem entitled The Girls on the Roof. The book depicts a mother and daughter (Maggie and Pearl) stuck on top of a roof for three days on the Mississippi River in Missouri during the 1993 flood. They discover that they’ve both had an affair with the same man.”

Biographical Note

          Mary Swander is Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. She grew up on the Mississippi River and now raises ducks, geese, and a large vegetable garden in the middle of an Amish settlement. Her most recent book is The Desert Pilgrim (Viking, 2003).

Daneen Wardrop, Artist's Statement on "History of the French Revolution"

          Wardrop states that her poem came about as “part of a longer series entitled ‘First Sentences,’ incorporating the titles and some of the first sentences of different historians. In ‘History of the French Revolution,’ I have interpolated Jules Michelet’s words.”

Biographical Note

          Daneen Wardrop is a professor at Western Michigan University. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in such magazines as TriQuarterly, Seneca Review, Epoch, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Notre Dame Review. Her work includes two critical books, Emily Dickinson’s Gothic and Word, Birth, and Culture, as well as numerous essays in such journals as Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Emerson Society Quarterly, and African American Review.

Creative Nonfiction

Christopher Cokinos, Artist's Statement on Excerpt from "Beginner's Mind, Beginner's Skin: Sentences, Aphorisms, Paragraphs"

          Cokinos writes about the genesis of “Beginner’s Mind, Beginner’s Skin: Aphorisms, Sentences, Paragraphs” that the work “came together in several different ways. For many years, I have kept close at hand Guy Davenport’s translations of Diogenes and Heraclitus, and I love the compressed quality of those fragments. As well, I admire the aphorisms of Wallace Stevens. So for a few years I had a sense of wanting to work in that compressed form, and then I began to write some of the aphorisms that appear here. In large measure, my attempts were prompted by an invitation to submit work for an anthology on behalf of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wrote a few short sentences—neither poetry, for no line breaks were involved, nor an essay, as the piece was quite short. Aphorisms first by default then, later, from intention. Then I saw that those aphorisms and others, and odd sentences from here and there, could suggest a personal narrative if I combined them with some lyric prose pieces—the paragraphs that I think of as sudden essays, as they are nonfiction. But I suppose they have something of the spirit of a prose poem. I think of the manuscript, then, as creative nonfiction—the pieces are lyric, I hope, but factual, though I admit that memory is subjective.”

Biographical Note

            Christopher Cokinos is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, which won both the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and the Glasgow Prize for an Emerging Writer. As part of the Glasgow Prize, two of his essays appeared in Shenandoah. He also placed a poem recently in Poetry. He is currently working on a new contracted book project, The Fallen Sky: Eccentrics and Scientists in Pursuit of Shooting Stars. Cokinos is an Assistant Professor of English at Utah State University, where he edits Petroglyph: A Journal of Creative Nature and Science Writing.

Christine Gelineau, Artist's Statement on "Foal Watch"

          Concerning the inspiration for “Foal Watch,” the author writes: “My husband and I raise Morgan horses, and I have ‘midwifed’ dozens of foals. I knew I wanted to explore the emotions of that experience, but I had no idea when I began that the essay would travel where it did.”

Biographical Note

            Christine Gelineau lives on a farm in upstate New York.  She is a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in American Literary Review, Connecticut Review, Florida Review, Patterson Literary Review, Seneca Review, Green Mountains Review, and others.

Michael Kimball, Artist's Statement on "The Character of My Father"

          Concerning the inspiration for “The Character of My Father,” Kimball writes that he “tried to write a novel about my father, about the man I imagined my father to be, but I couldn’t do it. So I started writing a memoir about writing a novel about my father—to try to understand my father, my mother and father’s marriage, my failed relationship with my father, and my failed writing about my father. ‘The Character of My Father’ is comprised of the first two chapters of that memoir.”

Biographical Note

          Michael Kimball wrote The Way the Family Got Away, which was published in the United States and in the United Kingdom in 2000. It has been translated into Dutch, Italian, and German, and will be translated into Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew. He is the fiction editor at Taint Magazine (taintmagazine.com).

Interview

John Poch, "Wide Horizons, Clean Air, Hope:  An Interview with Dennis Covington"

Dennis Covington, "Fat Boys: The Prologue to Redneck Riviera" and excerpt from "Palais Royale Riding the Minor"

Biographical Notes

John Poch teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University. He is an editor of 32 Poems Magazine. His book, Poems, is forthcoming from Orchises Press.

Dennis Covington (MFA, Iowa, 1974), Professor of English at Texas Tech University, specializes in fiction and creative nonfiction writing. His book, Salvation on Sand Mountain, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995. His other books include Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage, which was named by Library Journal as a Best Book of 1999. He has also published the award-winning novels Lasso the Moon and Lizard. The latter has been translated into eight languages. He has published stories and essays in many periodicals, including The New York Times, Esquire, Vogue, Redbook, The Oxford American, The Georgia Review, and Chattahoochee Review. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and was founding director of the program in creative writing at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is also completing a work of creative nonfiction, Redneck Riviera, under contract with Perseus Books.

Photography

Gerald Wheeler, "Texas Riders and Their Steeds"

Excerpt:

Biographical Note

Gerald Wheeler lives in Katy, Texas. His photographs, fiction, and poetry have appeared, or are forthcoming, in North American Review, Louisiana Literature, Onthebus, Kaleidoscope, Aethlon, RE:AL, Descant, Rio Grande Review, Sundog, The Louisville Review, Apostrophe, Riverside, Cape Rock, Whole Terrain, Comstock Review, Big Muddy, Connecticut River Review, Peregrine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Tracers (Black Bear Publications). His collection Tracks is forthcoming from Timberline Press. His short story, “The Map Reader,” was nominated by Vincent Brothers Review for the Pushcart Prize.

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