Excerpts & Contributors: Spring 2004

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary, and biographical notes for our Spring 2004 contributors.  If you wish to read the authors' entire 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

Matthew Cariello, Artist's Statement on "In the Clutch"

          Cariello says, "'In the Clutch' is a collection of stitched-together memories, some of them mine.  Mr. Comet is one girl's father, Tommy is a second-grade buddy, Coach is a college roommate's teacher.  Dad, on the other hand, is wholly invented, although Mom seems familiar.  Joey bears a striking resemblance to another very bad baseball player from my childhood: in my single year of Little League, I hit the ball exactly once, a foul that made the parking lot behind me.  I brought them all together more or less consciously to consider the limits of parenting and mentoring.  Joey's ability to remember accurately and in great detail more than compensates for his reluctance to feel, even years later, his father's unconditional love at his moment of failure.  I tried, in ending there, to let the story's momentum carry through of its own accord.  I tried, in short, just to make contact."

Biographical Note

          Matthew Cariello teaches in the English Department at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he is also the Ombudsman of the Writing Programs.  Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved to the Midwest fifteen years ago.  His fiction has recently appeared in The Long Story and Parting Gifts.

Josie Milliken, Artist's Statement on "Crow"

          About her story "Crow," Milliken writes, "Setting infuses, permeates, and guides the stories I write.  In 1995, two friends and I bought a rickety van and drove away from our homes in Bellingham, Washington, taking with us little more than a propane stove, a set of tools, a lot of tank tops, and three very small bank accounts.  It wasn't until Austin, Texas, that our van broke down and our bank accounts diminished completely.  For the next six months, we stayed in Austin, working and playing and growing up, unhurriedly putting money aside to repair the van.  Eight years after leaving the eclectic landscape of college students, street kids, bats, quirky jobs, and coffee shops--and learning how life can be complicated and messy, silly, painful and sweet, all at the same time--I finally tried to illustrate some of this in some way on paper.  As is my habit, I started with setting, and Crow, Eva, Dirk, Goto-San, and Shadie emerged out of it, eventually populating the world of 'Crow.'"

Biographical Note

          Josie Milliken recently received an MFA in Creative Writing at Arizona State University and is currently at work on a story collection and a novel.  Her fiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Los Angeles Review, and What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.  In the fall, she will begin work on a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Nonfiction

Joey Kennedy, "Father's Day, 1995"

Biographical Note

          Joey Kennedy is a Pulitzer Prize winning editorial writer and columnist for The Birmingham News.  In 2003, Kennedy earned his master's degree in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he also teaches writing and literature.

Poetry

D.C. Berry, Artist's Statement on "Argall, Not Snoop Doggy" and "Nouveau Titanic"

          The poems "Nouveau Titanic" and "Argall, Not Snoop Doggy" come from Hamletta de Pompadour which is a revised look at Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Biographical Note

          D.C. Berry teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.  He has published poems in Connecticut Review, Denver Review, Florida Review (editor's prize), Harvard Review and Tar River.  Eastern Washington University Press published Divorce Boxing in 1998.  Zen Cancer Saloon won the chapbook contest at Black Warrior Review and was published in March of 2004.  Vietnam Ecclesiastes comes out in 2005 from Black Lawrence Press.

Chris Ellery, Artist's Statement on "DART" and "Washing Will"

          Ellery discusses the genesis of his poem "DART" in this way: "When he was eight, my son Ben won a trip to Dallas to see the Mavericks play.  Next morning, after visiting Dealey Plaza and the Sixth Floor Museum, we took a ride on the Red Line DART out to the Dallas Zoo.  It was a beautiful spring day, but the track cut through certain back yards and made me feel voyeuristic, just as I had in the museum while looking at autopsy photos of JFK."

          As for "Washing Will," Ellery states, "Actually his name is Walt, and I cared for him for two days while his elderly wife went to see her granddaughter graduate from high school.  There were DNR orders pinned above his bed, and I had a number to call in case he died.  I must have been teaching Hamlet at the time."

Biographical Note

            Chris Ellery teaches poetry writing, American literature, and film criticism at Angelo State University.  His poems and short stories have appeared in dozens of publications, most recently in Concho River Review, Descant, and Chiron Review.  A former Fulbrighter to Syria, Ellery is co-translator of Whatever Happened to Antara, a collection of short stories by award-winning author Walid Ikhlassi, scheduled for publication this summer by the University of Texas Center for Middle East Studies and University of Texas Press.

Taylor Graham, Artist's Statement on "In Sympathy"

          As for the genesis of her poem "In Sympathy," she writes that "it really did come about when a friend sent out a group email announcing the untimely death of her husband, and some of the recipients hit Reply-All, and a little imagination took it from there."

Biographical Note

            Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects.  Her poems have appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, and elsewhere, including the new anthology, California Poetry: Gold Rush to the Present from Santa Clara Press.

Marilyn Kallet, "Global"

Biographical Note

          Marilyn Kallet is the author of nine books, including How to Get Heat without Fire (poetry) and One for Each Night: Chanukah Tales and Recipes.  Her next book of poems, Lure, is forthcoming from BkMk Press, UMKC, in 2005.  The University of Tennessee Press will publish Don't Dance With Wolves: Lively Reflections on College Teaching in March, 2005.

Rachel Langille, Artist's Statement on "Levitations in Chinese"

          Langille writes of her inspiration for the poem "Levitations in Chinese": "Dumbstruck by unparalleled experience (in this case by love's completely unexpected gifts), we sometimes find ourselves reaching into other vocabularies, other ways of looking at the world, for the means to give such new perceptions shape.  The pleasures that I have found in Chinese poetry and painting over many years--in their quiet delicacy and poise)--provided the medium from which these images conjured themselves, each arising playfully out of the one just before."

Biographical Note

          Rachel Langille lives in Ann Arbor and teaches literature, creative writing, and composition courses at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan.  Her work has appeared in English Journal, Louisiana Literature, The MacGuffin, The Peralta Press, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in the 2002 anthology I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press). She has work forthcoming in The Mochila Review and in a new poetry anthology from Hudson/Headwaters Press.

Donald Levering, Artist's Statement on "Meditation at the Port"

          Levering writes that "Meditation at the Port" came about "after I spent some time in two port towns.  In New Orleans, I observed a blind musician who seemed to have the confidence of a god.  This blind musician brought to mind a previous summer workshop at Port Townsend, Washington, where the blind writer Steven Kuusisto, always with his guide dog, imparted wisdom about writing and life.  These events combined with my reading about the mass extinction of languages in our time, which I felt as a loss of varied ways of seeing the world.  'Muskim' is an extinct language once spoken in Chad; 'Singa' in Uganda; 'Palumata' in Indonesia; 'Seru' in Malaysia.  'Gullah' is an endangered language spoken by descendants of African slaves on islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia; 'Wanyi' is an endangered Queensland aboriginal tongue."

Biographical Note

            Donald Levering has worked as a computer operator, freelance journalist, groundskeeper, and teacher in the Navajo Nation.  In addition to wide appearances in literary journals, his publications include for chapbooks of poetry, The Jack of Spring (Swamp Press), Carpool (Tellus), The Fast of Thoth (Pudding House), and Mister Ubiquity (Pudding House) as well as two full-length poetry volumes, Outcroppings From Navajoland (Navajo Community College Press) and Horsetail (Woodley Memorial Press).  He received his MFA from Bowling Green and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in poetry.  He was also a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize and won first place in the Quest for Peace (rhetoric) Writing Contest.  He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is employed as a Human Services administrator.

Donald Levin, Artist Statement on "Bodies in Motion" and "Unrequited"

          Levin says, "'Bodies in Motion' had its genesis in a conversation I overheard in a bar in Binghamton, New York, in the 1980s.  The subject was the upcoming professional wrestling tour that was soon to swing through town, and the upsurge in business for the local prostitutes the tour always brought.  The conversation didn't find expression as a poem until recently, when, while channel-surfing, I came across an old black-and-white tape of an interview with a locally popular wrestler from the 1960s in Detroit.  I was struck by how polite, almost courtly, he was, and adopted the formality of diction for this mediation on the difficulties of love in a commodified world.

          "The lamp described in 'Unrequited' is an actual lamp.  Like the speaker in the poem, I was fascinated with its frank sensuality in the antique store where it lived for a while.  The challenge of this piece was to create a voice that would be unbalanced enough to develop an obsessive crush on a lighting fixture and then imagine that the feelings actually came from it--but not so unbalanced as to be oblivious to the sadness of his situation at the end."

Biographical Note

          Donald Levin is a Boston-born, Detroit-raised writer, editor, and teacher.  He is the author of a novel, The House of Grins (1992), and his poetry and short fiction have appeared most recently in print and e-journals including Rock Salt Plum Poetry Review, Red Rock Review, Gin Bender Poetry Review, Saucyvox, Literati Review, Lotus Blooms Journal, Delirium, and Stirring.  He is an associate professor of English at Marygrove College in Detroit, where he also edits a literary journal, The Maxis Review.

C.J. Sage, "An Aftermath"

Biographical Note

          C.J. Sage is the editor of The National Poetry Review and the producer of Cupertino Public Radio's weekly poetry magazine.  Her poems have appeared most recently in Verse Daily, The Threepenny Review, Smartish Pace, 32 Poems Magazine, Weber Studies, and Gingko Tree Review, and are forthcoming in Chautauqua Literary Journal, The American Poetry Journal, and Minnesota Review.  She is also the editor of the new poetry anthology And We the Creatures and is an adjunct professor of English at Hartnell College.

Jorge Sanchez, Artist's Statement on "Photo of Us, Sugar Bottom Reservoir: June 2002"

           About "Photo of Us," Sanchez states, "It pictures my soon-to-be wife and I at a beach on a reservoir just outside of Iowa City, Iowa, taken by our friend Megan Levad.  The poem is part of a six-poem sequence called The Iowa City Suite, and comes at the very end of my thesis-cum-manuscript Non-Cartoon World.  I think the poem originates in my tendency to stare at photographs in an attempt to see what's inside of them in the greatest possible detail.  A little weird, I know . . . but when I look at pictures, I'm particularly drawn to blurred areas, and that's what the poem is about.  It comes from a desire to look into something (a photograph, a face, the world, whatever) and find it.  And by it, I mean all of it, to know it inside and out in its totality.  Which, I think, is what literature is all about."

Biographical Note

          Jorge Sanchez is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program in Creative Writing, lives, and teaches in Chicago.

Robert B. Shaw, Artist's Statement on "Tantalus"

           "Tantalus," he writes, is one of a number of poems he has written "on themes from Greek mythology.  Since I am by no means alone in this, I have to conclude that these stories still have immense staying power in the Western psyche.  At the same time, a mere rendition of the oft-repeated tale seems pointless.  My treatments are to a greater or lesser degree subversive; I feel at ease in altering aspects of plot, character, or moral in order to put my own fingerprints on the material.  Such revisionism seems to be what the myths provoke in a modern reader--at any rate, they seem to do this in me.  I hadn't thought of it when I was writing the poem, but there are certain similarities here to Camus's retelling of that other underworld story, the myth of Sisyphus."

Biographical Note

            Robert B. Shaw is a Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.  His latest book of poems, Solving for X (Ohio) was published in 2002 as the winner of the Hollis Summers Prize.

Terri Witek, Artist Statement on "Whole Cloth," "Why Your Parents Move to Florida," and "Circe Before the Reading Lesson"

          Witek talks about her poems, saying, "These poems are undoubtedly a result of recent reading about both color theory and clothing construction.  In a wonderful Dosso Dossi painting, Circe sits astride a green cloth: aside from her reading equipment, this is the only humanly-fashioned item in the landscape.  Florida is a place where you have to know what you know in extreme light.  And at Goodwill, everything you try on wears the strangeness of first having belonged to someone else.  In retrospect, they are all probably about what one encounters when writing: the smallness of what we make, it's weirdness, and at the same time, the almost garish vividness of the truth that requires us to produce these odd little artifacts."

Biographical Note

          Terri Witek has several publications including Fools and Crows (Orchises, 2003), Courting Couples (Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts prize) and Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self (U of Missouri, 1993).  She teaches at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.

Feature Interview

William Wenthe, "Subject Matter: An Interview with Baron Wormser"

Baron Wormser, "Boys," "Two Places," "Study in Two Colors," and "Summer Camp"

Biographical Notes

William Wenthe is the author of two poetry collections: Birds of Hoboken (Orchises Press) and Not Till We Are Lost (Louisiana State University Press).  His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Georgia Review, Southern Review, and Poetry.  He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the Texas Commission on the Arts.  He currently serves as Poetry Editor of Iron Horse Literary Review.

Baron Wormser is the author of six collections of poetry: The White Words (Houghton Mifflin, 1983); Grand Trembling (Houghton Mifflin, 1985); Atoms, Soul Music and Other Poems (Paris Review Editions, 1989); When (Sarabande Books, 1997); Mulroney & Others (Sarabande Books, 2000); and, most recently, Subject Matter (Sarabande Books, 2004).  He is the co-author of two books about teaching poetry: Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000) and A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day (Heinemann, 2004), and he works with students and teachers throughout the United States.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine in 2000.  He teaches at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he co-directs The Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and The Frost Place Seminar, and in the Stonecoast MFA program.  He lives with his wife in Hallowell, Maine.

Discovered Voices Award Winner, Spring 2004

Slias Zobal, Artist's Statement on "Concurrence"

          Zobal writes, "I began 'Concurrence' in December of 2003.  The upstate New York Winter was severe.  I spent most of the season looking from my office window to the icy street.  Despite the weather, people walked by seemingly unconcerned.  I wondered where in the world all those scarved and jacketed people were going.  Maybe I ought to have been out there, braced against the cold, going somewhere, too.  There was a sense of separation, the window dividing me firmly from the outdoors, and of slow accumulation.  I felt the deep chill of winter: the low-slung clouds; the insulation of snow; the window webbed with ice; and the final loneliness of the incommensurable space between each of us, which--in spite of acquaintances, and friendships, and those few unearthly connections that make the heart gasp--I have found scant way to bridge.

Biographical Note

Silas Zobal holds an MFA from the University of Washington and currently pursues a PhD at SUNY, Binghamton.  He serves as co-director of Writing By Degrees, a graduate creative writing conference.  He is fiction co-editor of the journal, Harper Palate.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Orleans Review, Wisconsin Review, Missouri Review, and Glimmer Train.

Photography

Patricia Earl, "Storytelling: Translating Reality into Dream"

Excerpt:

Biographical Note

Patricia Earl is currently the Exhibition Coordinator at the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock, Texas, where she creates and maintains programming for the Fine Art Gallery, the Buddy Holly Museum permanent collection, and the Texas Musicians Hall of Fame.  She has had several exhibitions locally and received her MFA from Texas Tech in 2001.

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

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