Excerpts & Contributors: Spring 2005

 On this page we provide excerpts, commentary, and biographical notes for our Spring 2005 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

Roy Kesey, Artist's Statement on "Gorget"

          On the genesis of "Gorget," Kesey writes, "I lived in Peru for eight years and often got way more cat-calls than I deserved in the meat-markets there--and, of course, here I speak of actual meat-type markets, the places you go to buy, you know, meat.  An I suppose in those moments when I was pretending to be picky about the thickness of the alpaca filets, I was, in fact, just enjoying the attention, kind of waiting around in my head for a voice they could properly be talked about in.

          "'Gorget' was originally a lot shorter and dumber.  There was a wife who existed for no other reason than to cause the reader to exclaim, 'This guy is married?  What the hell?'  There was no discussion whatsoever of ornithology or the Capac Nan.  And the narrator sounded, even more than he currently does, as if (in the words of friend and fellow writer Stephan Clark) he 'grew up in an Eastern European circus.' So I went back and stripped out the dumb bits, researched hummingbirds for a couple of months, and ended up with what you see here."

Biographical Note

          Roy Kesey was born in California and currently lives in Beijing.  His short stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, McSweeney's, Other Voices, The Iowa Review, and Quarterly West, among other magazines.  His dispatches from China appear regularly on McSweeney's website, and his "Little-known Corners" meta-column appears monthly in That's Beijing.

Jeff Vande Zande, Artist's Statement on "Following a Stupid Man"

          Jeff Vande Zande's story, "Following a Stupid Man," had an interesting beginning, as he explains: "I can put my finger on the catalyst for nearly every one of my stories--except 'Following a Stupid Man.'  It came to me more like a vision.  I know I was driving and listening to NPR--a news piece about the influences of America in some small country.  I remember thinking about what was lost as countries became more like us.  I remember, too, thinking something about an old spoon."

Biographical Note

          Jeff Vande Zande teaches writing at Delta college.  His stories have appeared in Our Working Lives: Short Stories of People and Work, The MacGuffin, Midnight Mind, Parting Gifts, Controlled Burn, Passages North, and Crab Creek Review.  He has three poetry chapbooks: Transient (March Street Press); Last Name First, First Name Last (Partisan Press); and Tornado Warning (March Street Press).  In 2004, Bottom Dog Press released his full-length collection, Emergency Stopping and Other Stories.

Lowell Mick White, Artist's Statement on "The Speed of Sound"

          About "The Speed of Sound," he writes: "This is a story that began as a memory but which quickly stumbled off on its own into an unmapped territory. The memory is this: when I was four years old or so, I heard a sonic boom and asked what it was.  My mother, who was a mathematician, used the airplane-through-the-wall-image to explain what had happened--an image that certainly shocked its way into my mind.  I haven't the faintest idea where the rest of the story came from--it just sort of materialized itself."

Biographical Note

          Lowell Mick White's poetry and fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including Antietam Review, 2River View, and Gray's Sporting Journal.  He is a past recipient of the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the Texas Institute of Letters and the University of Texas, and is currently a graduate student at Texas A&M University, where he is Co-Editor of the online journal Big Tex(t) and the Production Editor of the print journal Callaloo.

Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva, Artist's Statement on "Cross-Cultural Studies"

          Regarding the genesis of "Cross-Cultural Studies," she writes, "As a freshman in college, my daughter coordinated a weekly campus event called 'The International Conversation and Coffee Hour.' Her stories about the people she met--both the foreign students and the few brave local students who came to greet them--seemed to grow in my imagination, getting tangled with memories from my own college days of a group of Indian students who befriended me, taught me a few things about Indian music and culture, and generally broadened my outlook on human experience.  The story began to take shape around the time of the 9/11 attack, when I felt very acutely the undercurrents of racism and xenophobia that fueled much of national conversation.  My hope for the story was that Tracie's voice might capture the ambivalence that a bright, connected 18-year-old, growing up in these complicated times, might experience in a first romance and a first contact with a different culture."

Biographical Note

          Rosemary Zurlo-Cuva lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she works as a freelance journalist and teaches creative writing to middle schoolers.  Her stories have appeared in Wisconsin Academy Review, River Oak Review, and Compass Rose.  She is at work on a novel.

Nonfiction

Jennifer Brice, Artist's Statement on "On Keeping House"

          Brice writes that "On Keeping House" is part of "a work in progress, a collection of essays on material culture.  The collection's working title is A Commonplace Soul, taken from Montaigne's essay 'Of Solitude': 'Wiser men, having a strong and vigorous soul, can make for themselves a wholly spiritual repose.  But I, who have a commonplace soul, must help support myself by bodily comforts.'"

Biographical Note

          Jennifer Brice is the author of The Last Settlers, a work of creative nonfiction about homesteaders in the Alaska wilderness.  Her essays have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, River Teeth, The Blue Mesa Review, The Sonora Review, American Nature Writing, and The Dolphin Reader, among others.  She teaches at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

Poetry

David W. Allen, Artist's Statement on "The Historical Markers"

          Allen's poem, "The Historical Markers," is a split between a trip Allen's family took to Yellowstone and a trip he took while in college with a friend to Tombstone: Allen writes, "During the Yellowstone trip, I was a high school senior no longer seeing other people objectively, notably other families.  Those first two stanzas are exactly how I saw things at the time--the other family was much happier, of course, and we were the family with the leaking tent.  The last two stanzas represent the wilderness of adulthood, imagined in Tombstone, with a last nod to my father who loved to stop at every darn plaque on the side of the road that said something about history."

Biographical Note

            David W. Allen completed his M.F.A. in poetry from Arizona State University in 1999.  He lives in the country next to a field of raspberries with his wife, who is expecting their first child.

Nin Andrews, Artist's Statement on "Discipline"

          Andrews writes about "Discipline": "[It's] a poem about my daughter's and my own experience in ballet class.  As a girl, I was benched in ballet.  My daughter, who begged me to take dance lessons, was also humiliated in ballet class.  I remember watching her instructor shout at her.  He didn't know I was on the other side of a one-way mirror.  My daughter, a tiny five-year-old, could not follow his directions.  All around her, other little girls leaped and twirled. . . . I think of the poem as a kind of metaphor for my own experience as a girl and a woman."

Biographical Note

          Nin Andrews is the author of several books, including The Book of Orgasms and Why They Grow Wings.  Her books, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane (Web Del Sol) and Sleeping with Houdini (Tupelo) are forthcoming in 2005 and 2006.

Jerry Bradley, Artist's Statement on "I Never Think of My Father" and "Cat as in Catastrophe"

          About "I Never Think of My Father," Bradley writes, "As a boy, I remember everyone telling me how much I looked like my father.  When my father died in 1972, I, a neophyte poet, dutifully wrote him a poem.  More than three decades later, I realized I hadn't written a second.  This resulting poem was prompted by a visit to the two Bradley cousins we stayed with in Kentucky two weeks each summer when I was a boy.  The one I hadn't seen in twenty years remarked that my father was the meanest man he ever knew.  He may have been right, although I thought of my father more as stern and emotionally distant than mean--and this is the judgment of the person who was probably closest to him.  Now when I think of my father, I think of how hard his life must have been and how hard he needed to be to endure a poor childhood, the early death of his mother, twenty-eight years in the military (largely as a military policeman) with service in World War II and the post-War occupation of Germany, and then ulcers and cancer.  That same hardness sometimes made it impossible for him to be a caring husband and loving father."

          About "Cat as in Catastrophe," Bradley writes, "I lived in New Mexico for seventeen years, and several times a year, I drove the 565-mile route to my childhood home in Texas.  Those two residences where I lived longest represent the poles of my psychic consciousness--the mind-numbing conformity of urban Dallas and the startling aloneness of life in the New Mexican desert (it's possible, like an old rail car, to end up anywhere).  Each embodies its own potential annihilation.  In between are the flat cotton fields of West Texas, as cheerless a landscape as I know.  The poem is intended as a primer and takes its title from an old joke.  It is part of a trilogy.  The second is called 'Dog as in Dogmatic.' If you know the old joke, you can rightly guess the title of the third poem."

Biographical Note

            Jerry Bradley is Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Vice President for Research at Lamar University.  He is the author of four books, including The Movement: British Poets of the 1950s (Twayne) and a collection of poetry entitled Simple Versions of Disaster (U of North Texas P), which was commended by the Dictionary of Literary Biography.  His poetry has appeared in many literary magazines, including New England Review, American Literary Review, Modern Poetry Studies, Poetry Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review.  He is also Poetry Editor of Concho River Review and is Past-President of the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers and of the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association.

Nancy Naomi Carlson, Artist's Statement on "What Adam Knows"

          Of her poem "What Adam Knows," she says, "it comes from a much longer sequence of Eve poems in which I explore the naming of 'things.' In addition, I've played with the things Eve might have named--things which, in a sense, 'belong' to her--as opposed to what Adam might have named. . . . Hence, nightfall belongs 'to her--ceding light, an evening.'"

Biographical Note

            Nancy Naomi Carlson has published poems in such journals as Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Chautauqua Literary Journal, The South Carolina Review, Cimarron Review, Chelsea, River Styx, The Literary Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Greensboro Review.  Her collection of poetry, Kings Highway, won the 1997 Washington Writers' Publishing House competition, and Complications of the Heart won the 2002 Texas Review Press' Robert Phillip Poetry Chapbook Prize.  Imperfect Seal of Lips was the winner of the 2005 Tennessee Chapbook Prize.  Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2003, 2004, and 2005, she is currently the associate editor or Tupelo Press and an instructor at the Bethesda Writing Center.

Karla Clark, Artist's Statement on "Portrait of Mother and Child"

          On the genesis of "Portrait of Mother and Child," Clark writes, "The poem grew out of an image that I held in my memory for decades.  At the time I began 'Portrait,' I was caring for my mother during her final, very difficult years, and our relationship was very much on my mind.  She died in 2001--the same year that my husband had triple-bypass surgery and 9/11 changed the world.  After that, the poem's images remained constant, but its meaning changed.  What began as a personal meditation on my relationship with my mother eventually took its place as part of a book of poems about what I believe to be a prominent aspect of contemporary life: that is, the way in which the individual is both an essentially helpless witness to and an actor in the same painful events."

Biographical Note

          Karla Clark won the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize in 1998 in the category of "Emerging Poet."  Her poem, "Stoppered Heart Blessing #9," which appeared in Runes in 2003, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2004.  Her poetry has also recently appeared in The Mississippi Review, PMS, The Marin Poetry Anthology, and the Phi Kappa Phi Forum.  She has poems forthcoming in The South Carolina Review and Arts and Letters.  She is author of a chapbook, What Made the Moon, and a recently completed manuscript, Calendar Art.

Richard Foerster, Artist's Statement on "A Pot of Crocuses," "Loretta's Peacocks," and "Chapelle du Rosaire, Venice"

          Richard writes about the genesis of his poems: "I wrote these three poems during a seven-week residency at Chateau de La Napoule in France.  My sister's neighborhood in California is indeed overrun with feral peacocks--a delight to behold, but no friends to gardeners or light sleepers.  I wasn't actually present for the euthanizing of those eggs, but when I was told of the incident, I got to thinking not so much about the morality of the act as about the 'non-natives' that take up residence in a new land.  As a first-generation American, I've always been troubled that my small family is now 'generation-less.' Those five eggs symbolize the end of the line for our clan.

          "'A Pot of Crocuses' started with a line that came to me in a dream: 'you want to enter the piked earth again / invincible with flowers.' In the morning, I wrote in my notebook that any poem that might emerge would likely be about 'one of those vernal boys of resurrection,' and I recalled that in ancient Athens the women celebrated the death and resurrection of Adonis during a springtime festival which included setting out on their rooftops small pots of forced flowers.  The poem began to fall into place when I made the connection with the skateboarder in my neighborhood.

          "While in France, I visited Matisse's chapel, where he had designed every detail, down to the vestements.  The interplay of the colored light with the stark black-and-white religious iconography on the opposing wall both complemented and challenged my understanding of the ritual significance of the Mass.  Standing in that space, was I a congregant or a museum-goer?  When that blinding shaft of light painfully caused my eyes to tear, I thought of Saul struck down on the road to Damascus.  But what struck me more, and sparked the poem into being, was when I sat down the next day to translate the reading from Malachi that have been part of the Sunday service: roughly, 'his radiance will bring about the healing.'"

Biographical Note

          Richard Foerster lives in New York Beach, Maine, where he edits Chautauqua Literary Journal.  His latest collection is Double Going (BOA Editions, 2002).  The poems in this issue will appear in his new book, The Burning of Troy, which BOA will publish next year.

Jason Huff, Artist's Statement on "Crystal's Triolet"

          As an addict, Jason explains that he is "very familiar with the effects of drugs and what they do to you.  I've written several poems trying to work out my addiction in the only way I know how, with words.  R.S. Gwynn introduced me to the triolet, and I found that the triolet and other similar poems, like the villanelle, work very well in writing about addiction.  The repetitive lines are a great form to deal with the obsessiveness of it.  'Crystal's Triolet' was the first triolet I wrote.  In it, I tried to convey the obsessive behavior and anxiety that comes with drug addiction (and anyone familiar with methamphetamine abuse will be very familiar with the behavior in the poem), but I did try to keep the tone somewhat light, though not too light.  Let the reader be the judge of how successful I was."

Biographical Note

            Jason Huff is originally from the Chicago area, but has lived in southeast Texas for many years now.  He has published poetry in The Texas Review and descant, where he won the Baskerville Publishers Award for 2003.

Laura McCullough, Artist's Statement on "In the Zeus Gun Shop"

          About "In the Zeus Gun Shop" she says, "the occasion for any poem, the seed of it, is never quite as exciting to me, or at least has become less exciting to me the longer I write, as the surprise I arrive at during the revision process when whatever the poem is really about begins to surface.  This poem began in a gun shop of the poem's name--Zeus--in a town called Pleasantville.  As I began to consciously work the mythological elements and to explore some issues of the hyper-masculine world, it became clear that the real poem was about mothers and sons and the tensions that exist (regardless of gender) between parents and children as the young near the time of emancipation. The last lines of the poem were my uncomfortable surprise."

Biographical Note

          Laura McCullough holds an M.F.A. from Goddard College and teaches at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such places as Nightsun, Boulevard, Gulf Coast, Hotel Amerika, Whiskey Island, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry East, and others.

Melissa Morphew, Artist's Statement on "Drones Seek the Bee Orchids" and "The Barker's Song"

          About "drones Seek the Bee Orchids," she writes: "[T]his poem is one in a long sequence, a sixty-four-page verse novella of sorts, called Weeding Borges' Garden, a treatise on grief, love, and the nature of time.  The sequence was inspired by Borges' story, 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' and in it, a young woman falls in love with a gardener who deserts her after she becomes pregnant.  The sequence begins with the young woman weeding, thinking about her daughter who has recently drowned.  This poem, 'The Drones Seek the Bee Orchids,' deals with the young woman and her relationship with the gardener."

          Regarding the origin of her poem, "The Barker's Song," she writes, "Lately I have been concentrating on bringing elements of magical realism to my poetry.  I think that impulse is blatant in 'The Barker's Song,' whose speaker I see as a Gabriel Garcia Marquez-like snake oil salesman, one whose wares are esoteric and intriguing enough to draw in the most wary buyer.  I meant the poem as a critique of the rampant consumerism in our country that lulls us into capitalist complacence by promising us power/happiness through purchase.  But of course it is a false power, a false happiness, a scam."

Biographical Note

          Melissa Morphew is an associate professor of creative writing at Sam Houston State University.  Over the years, her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner.  The recent recipient of a W.B. Yeats Society Award for Poetry, she has a new collection, Fathom, forthcoming in the spring of 2006 from Turning Point Press.

Michael Salcman, Artist's Statement on "This Is the Hand"

           About "This Is the Hand," Salcman says: "This poem is part of a significant series devoted to the history of my family and especially to the life of my father.  My parents survived the Holocaust by refusing to join their relatives who went meekly to the transports. My mother took out false papers as a Christian maid and worked in the home of her oppressors; my father, an officer in the Czech army before the war, spent his time fighting in the resistance.  I was born just after the war in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and the three of us immigrated to the United States in 1948.  My father is 93, and his handwriting is still beautiful.  He is still the finest human being I have ever met.  The poem began as an attempt to describe the qualities of his 'hand,' a script that would fit naturally into our own Declaration of Independence, one that he often employed in his work as a mechanical engineer and in every letter I have ever received from him.  The poem then generalized itself into a discussion of all the things his real hand has been through--his career, his experiences during the war, his prayerfulness in synagogue--and what it meant to have this genteel hand so close to me all my life. Virtually every poem I have ever written about my father eventually has found a good home."

Biographical Note

          Michael Salcman was Chairman of Neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and serves as President of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.  His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Raritan, Poetry East, Nimrod, Atlanta Review, and New York Quarterly.  His third chapbook, A Season Like This, (Finishing Line Press) has just been published.

Adam Shobert, "Sheathing"

Biographical Note

            Adam Shobert lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his cat and his iPod.  He is the poetry editor of convincingjohn.com.  His first book, Love in the Time of Caller ID, is currently looking for a publisher.

Ira Sukrungruang, Artist's Statement on "Languages"

           About "Languages," he writes: "This poem came about from a discussion in my creative nonfiction class about the use of dialogue in essays.  My students asked me how writers have the ability to 'make stuff sound wicked real.'  During the lesson, I asked who spoke different languages, and a few people raised their hands.  I asked them which ones, and they said French or Spanish or Latin or Japanese.  And I told them about the languages I had in me, which was around ten.  Listen, I told them, we pull out the language we need in a given situation.  The way I was talking to them wasn't the language I spoke to the chair of my English department, or the one I used with my childhood friends on the southside of Chicago.  We all navigate this vast landscape of language."

Biographical Note

          Ira Sukrungruang is a first-generation Thai-American, born and raised in Chicago.  His work has appeared in Witness, North American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous other literary journals.  He is co-editor of What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology (Harcourt) and Scoot Over, Skinny: the Fat Nonfiction Anthology (Harcourt).  He teaches creative writing at State University of New York, Oswego.

Feature Interview

J. Marcus Weekley, "Observing the Hours: An Interview with Ilya Kaminsky"

Biographical Notes

J. Marcus Weekley is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University.  He is also a photographer, and he has exhibited work locally and nationally.  His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Iowa Review, Modern Haiku, 3 a.m., and Quick Fiction, among other places.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, of the former Soviet Union. His family received asylum from the American government and came to the United States in 1993. From 1999-2000, he served as a George Bennett Fellow Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy.  In addition, he has won the National Russian Essay Contest and the Ruth Lily Fellowship from Poetry magazine.  His first full-length collection, Dancing in Odessa (2004), winner of Tupelo Press' 2002 Dorset Prize, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Yale Younger Poets Series, and the Walt Whitman Award.  He is also the author of Musica Humana, a chapbook published by Chapiteau Press (2002). His poems have appeared in New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, and numerous other places.  In the late 1990s, he co-founded Poets for Peace, an organization that sponsors hundreds of poetry readings across the United States and abroad with the sole goal of supporting organizations such as Doctors without Borders and Survivors International.  Against Certainty, an anthology of Poets for Peace readings in the San Francisco Bay Area, was published with his foreword in 2003.  Kaminsky currently resides in San Francisco, where he works as a law clerk for the National Immigration Law Center and as a Bay Area legal aide, assisting immigrants, the impoverished, and the homeless in solving their legal difficulties.

Discovered Voices Award Winner, Spring 2005

Salita S. Bryant, Artist's Statement on "Aviary," "Prayer, at nine and a half," and "The Monogamy Box"

          On the genesis of her poems, Bryan writes: "If there is anything to say about inspiration, it is that, for me, it manifests itself most fully when I am able to be fully present in today--not yesterday, not tomorrow, even if I am writing about yesterday or tomorrow.  The three poems included here were written in February of this year, during the long months of frigid, snowy, northern weather when I was startled to discover, in the midst of all that snow, that the south I had left a few months earlier had never been more firmly with me, or that I had never had such clarity about the past.  A big part of that clarity is making sure I am paying attention and not assuming.  On my first day in New York City, I saw what I thought was the investigation of a murder scene, complete with bloody body.  Tuned out to be a Law and Order shoot, but it reminded me of the necessity of not taking anything for granted, including what I think I understand and what I always carry with me regardless of where I am--particularly during those delightful times when I am brave enough to jump off the high dive, to scare myself, to do what a fully lived, fully present life calls for, and not what I feel like I ought to or should do."

Biographical Note

Salita S. Bryant holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Mississippi and currently lives in Manhattan.  She is pursuing an M.F.A. in poetry at New York University where she also teaches in the Expository Writing Program.  Salita has published numerous essay and is Associate Editor o an anthology, Liberties Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic (forthcoming, U of Georgia P).  She has won numerous poetry awards and has recently placed in both the Greater Augusta Arts Council's Porter Fleming Writing Competition and the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Prize.  She has most recently published poetry in the North American Review, Wind, Snake Nation Review, and Dogwood, and she is completing a collection of poems, A Vast and Fortunate Room.

Photography

Gerald R. Wheeler, "Year of the Foal"

Excerpt:

Biographical Note

Gerald R. Wheeler's photography, fiction, and poetry have appeared in North American Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Louisiana Literature, Owen Wister Review, Slant, International Poetry Review, Penn English, Peregrine, Cape Rock, Aethlon, Kaleidoscope, Rio Grande Review, Riversedge, War, Literature and the Arts, and elsewhere.  He has recently won photography awards from Listening Eye and Antietam Review.

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