29 minute read
Saranac Review No. 12
by Todd Bartel
Advertisement
No. 12
The Saranac Review is published annually by SUNY College at Plattsburgh under the auspices of the Department of English and its Writing Arts Program. We publish both print and digital versions of every issue. To order a current or back copy, please check our website: www.saranacreview.com. © 2016 Saranac Review
Permission to reprint materials from this journal remains the decision of the authors. We request that Saranac Review be credited with initial publication.
The publication of the Saranac Review is made possible with support from the President, the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Canadian Studies of SUNY Plattsburgh, and through the generous support of private donations.
The Saranac Review ONLY accepts online submissions using Submittable.com. Please check our website for submission guideline and to submit. Submissions sent via regular mail will be returned unread.
Any correspondence other than editorial should be conducted through email: saranacreview@plattsburgh.edu.
All submissions must be in English and previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are acceptable, so long as you notify us immediately if the manuscript is accepted for publication elsewhere. Although not necessary, we do appreciate a cover letter. In either case, please be sure to include phone and Email contact information. Please submit only one fiction, drama, or non fiction manuscript at a time and no more than three poems.
Support Saranac Review; become a Friend of Saranac Review. For more information, visit the Saranac Review website: www.saranacreview.com.
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Printed in Canada by Marquis Imprimeur, Inc. Cover art and all interior art by Todd Bartel
ISSN: 1556-1119
The publisher is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses
SARANAC REVIEW
Issue 12 2016–2017
Executive Editor Editors
Art Director Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Associate Poetry Editor Associate Poetry Editor
Nonfiction Editor Associate Fiction Editor & Drama Editor
Administrative Assistant Advisory Board
Editorial Assistants
Art Assistant Business Assistant Business Advisor
J.L. Torres Elizabeth Cohen Kate Moses W. David Powell Aimee Baker Michael Devine Michael Carrino Carol Lipszyc Elaine Ostry Jason Torrance Wendy Truong Bruce Butterfield Thelma Carrino George Davis Brian Giebel Amy Guglielmo Robert Golden Christopher Kirkey Natalie Costa Thill Ana Maria Alcantara Sara Doolen Adam Gordon Tevin Jackson Ryan Kennedy Caitlin Krahn Keith Letky Ashley Levasseur Amanda Mahoney Abisola Mojeed Laura Perras Samantha Torres Chelsey van der Munnik Njeri Wright Michelle Fleury Abraham Makkawi Ed Lusk
The Department of English, SUNY College at Plattsburgh CVH, 101 Broad Street, Plattsburgh, NY 12901
Table Of Contents
EDITORS' NOTES 6
FICTION
Cynthia Hawkins
Treece
10
Kathryn Henion
Frangipani
21
Joseph O'Malley
A Little Give and Take
37
Monique Proulx
Pink and Noir
54
Translated by J.T. Townley Jennifer Steil
Captive
67
Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer
Security
84
ART
Todd Bartel
Promise and Threat—Inquiry in
104
Landscape Vernacular
Todd Bartel
Featured Art
110-129
NONFICTION
Nancy Kline
The Doctor Game
132
Timothy L. Marsh
Play Date
140
Sarah Corbett Morgan
Rain Time in Costa Rica
152
Elizabeth Zaleski
Moving, in Three Parts
155
POETRY
Barbara Adams
Love Token
166
Sweetbitter
168
Howard Altmann
The Visit
170
Lake Effect
171
Mary Marie Dixon
August
172
First Grief
173
Karen Douglass
How I Spent My Nickel
174
Just a Thought
175
Brett Evans
A Final Note
176
Brian Gilmore
kala kala '94 (for Butch Jackson)
177
Leslie Heywood
Clasp
178
Kasey Elizabeth Johnson
Taxonomy
179
Fish Out of Water
180
Gerry LaFemina
The Story of Ash
181
Thaw
184
Carole Glasser Langille
When You Were Angry
186
Winter
187
Michael Lavers
Credo
188
DNA
189
Öland
191
Judith McCombs
Chain Letter to Persons Mostly Unknown
193
Concerning Two Brothers at the Battle of
195
Oriskany. August 6, 1777
Kate O'Shea
Expecting Rain
197
Life, friends, is boring
198
Mary Bass Poulin
On My Youngest Turning Twenty-One
200
A Palimpsest
201
Phoebe Reeves
Leptinotarsa decemlineata
202
J.R. Toriseva
Settle and Submerge
203
Ice Gait: Pond at Rites
205
Edwin Torres
Make Beauty for Me
207
Mitchell Untch
Coventry
208
Before the Wedding
210
Susan C. Waters
Up, Down the Oswegatchie
212
For the Abandoned, the Lost,
213
Who Cast the Longest Shadow No-One Sees Ruins on the Tug Hill Plateau
214
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES 217
Editors' Notes
“While my father was away at war, protecting us from Mussolini, my mother and I spent summers in the cottage on stilts.”
Thus begins Nancy Kline’s fine and subtle literary essay about sexual awakening, The Doctor Game. The piece is exemplary of the high literary stakes of Saranac Review issue number twelve.
An insatiable itch. A child who collects grass. Missing and abducted relatives. The ghosty afterglow of loved ones passed on. When we look over what we have selected in each issue, certain themes sometimes pop into mind, as if we subconsciously culled work that would somehow collaborate and build upon a motif. If such a motif appears in this issue it would have to be that of the mysterious. Each story, essay and poem seems to hold a secret strangeness, a molten center of the peculiar.
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” wrote Albert Einstein, in his seminal work, Living Philosophies, in which he applies his genius to the more poetic side of life. “It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
In this issue we have met the world in the cradle of true art, writers limning the mysteriousness of other lives and of our own, a plane of conscious awareness where the once familiar has become something else, sometimes unrecognizable, or recognized for the first time. We are so proud in this issue to bring you stories, reflections and highly original poetry with subtle and grounded intentionality fused with mystery, in the voices of fiction writers including Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer and Jennifer Steil, nonfiction writers like Kline and Elizabeth Zaleski, and by such poets as Gerry LeFemina, Mitchell Untch, Leslie Heywood, and relative newcomer Kasey Johnson.
Take all these and other writers and wrap them with the nuanced and equally
mysterious collages of visual artist Todd Bartel, digitally mastered by our fine Art Director, David Powell, and we know you will find yourself in a powerfully affecting landscape, lush with imagination and talent.
As always, this issue could not have come together without the acuity and dedication of our entire staff. We’d especially like to thank our tireless Executive Editor and co-founder of SR, J.L. Torres, for his continued guidance, Art Director David Powell for his brilliant eye, Fiction Editor Aimee Baker for her above-andbeyond leadership of our devoted SR Intern team, Poetry Editor Michael Devine for selecting such wonderful pieces from the many excellent ones we received, and our poised and meticulous Administrative Assistant Wendy Truong. A heartfelt thank you to all our Associate Editors for your help and dedication to our literary mission. Thank you, also, to our readers, for your continued and passionate support of the work of the writers and artists we feel privileged to share with you. Let us know what you think – we’d love to hear from you on Facebook, Twitter, or at saranacreview@plattsburgh.edu.
Enter, and enjoy! —Elizabeth Cohen and
Kate Moses
Trilogy of Unknown Martyrs: Paradise, 1989
FICTION
Mythology of Stasis (Salvage Series), 2002
ART
Todd BartelPromise and Threat—Inquiry in Landscape Vernacular
Landscape Vernacular Series The Landscape Vernacular series is an ongoing body of work I began in the spring of 2011 that explores landscape terminology and imagery. Culling from a small collection of dictionaries dating from the early 1800s to the present, these collages juxtapose definitions with period ephemera to explore ideas and attitudes about land and land use, while also addressing the history of landscape painting, American identity, and contemporary ecological issues. The austere look of the series emanates from self-imposed limitations with materials and a process to incorporate them: end pages, book engravings and maps, digital technology and puzzlepiece collage. While I have an extensive library of paper books for making my collages, I also cull online archives for images and texts that can support the needs of any given work. Regarding digital technology, I am strict about not morphing, inventing or embellishing textual or visual information in the Landscape Vernacular collage series, but I sometimes edit and resize my found materials. I print onto period paper to fabricate source materials that are as close to a facsimile as possible. I make technological hybrid collages using 19 th and 20 th century materials re-made in the 21 st century. The Landscape Vernacular series is an offshoot series of another body of work that also uses the blank pages as a conceptual practice.
SARANAC REVIEW 12
Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory) It took me two years to research and collect materials for Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory), a two-sided collage that explores American and American Indian history. The first piece of information I sought was to enquire about the translation of the title of the magazine: Saranac is an Iroquois word that means “cluster of stars.” The definition of the magazine’s namesake spurred research aimed at understanding the differences in attitudes about land use and land ownership between the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy—Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora—and European colonialists and the parallel way they clustered their respective people into democratic societies. I became interested in how the Haudenosaunee Confederation formed out of necessity, banding together to combat advancing Europeans driven by the promise of terra incognita and the new world. According to research by Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields of Toledo University, Ohio, the Haudenosaunee Confederation is “one of the world’s oldest democracies, at least three centuries older than most
104
The Artist and Collage in the Field of Landscape No. 2
SARANAC REVIEW 12
previous estimates, dating to 1142.” 1 In turn, the Haudenosaunee Confederation inspired founding father Ben Franklin to band the colonies together. 2 The magazine’s namesake takes on a heightened meaning when such history is taken into account.
In the early stages of planning the composition for the collage, I used a star motif from an early version of the American flag, but without a thirteenth star in order to parallel a quote by Benjamin Franklin, in which he mentions only twelve colonies—see the collage recto. I made specific use of the magazine’s cover design as a collage element in its own right, knowing that I could communicate something about the interrelated histories noted above. The “cluster of stars” was placed at the exact location in Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory) to conceal half of the star cluster beneath the Saranac Review title once it was loaded into the magazine’s cover template—thus, Saranac Review No. 12 has a collage rebus on its cover, referencing its namesake. I placed the twelve stars strategically behind the title of the magazine, concealing six stars and revealing six others to denote the Haudenosaunee Confederation, of which there are six tribes that form the Confederation. Interestingly, the Confederation had been established for several hundred years with only five tribes—which is why their “constitution,” the Hiawatha Wampum, was designed with only five groups represented—in 1722 the Tuscarora joined the confederation ten years before Georgia became the thirteenth colony. Having not had the benefit of learning Indian American history until doing this research, I found it interesting to consider that the depth of American appropriation not only involved territory; half the United States are named after Indian American words, and both Americans and Indian Americans revere the Bald Eagle as the National Bird respectively.
The greater than ( > ) and less than ( < ) symbols that are embedded in Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory) literally point to the incongruence of respective peoples at odds with their cultural attitudes around land and land use. Iroquois ideas about land conceive of natural resources as gifts that require thanks and stewardship, which abuts European ideas about land as parcels of territory to be purchased and owned by individuals and governments. The intertwined relationship of cultures is punctuated by desperate acts of annihilation on both sides, but it was the genocide of the Huron, the Attiwandaronk, the Erie and other tribes that vaulted the Iroquois to power 3 —which, in turn, prompted the creation of the Haudenosaunee Confederation, and the eventual Declaration of Independence—and, ultimately, centuries later, the creation of the Ganienkeh Manifesto in 1981, when the Mohawk Nation successfully reclaimed tracts of their original territory. Also of interest to my study was the European utopian push for terra nova, examined on the verso of Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory). Whenever I use maps, I select specific longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates that relate to the places involved. In the case of Promise and Threat, the latitudinal parallels correlate to new world voyages emanating from various European locations. I titled the collage after a
106
phrase that appears in a quote by William Sturtevant on the face of the collage. The parenthetical part of the collage’s title has a double meaning due to the play on words that acknowledges the alphabetical happenstance of locating the word “terror” after “territory” in the dictionary.
ART
End Pages, Whiteness, Blank Slates Around 2001, after more than a decade of noticing my thoughts returning, time and time again, to works such as Kazimir Malevich’s White on White, Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and Erased de Kooning Drawing, John Cage’s 4’33,’’ the Beatles’ White Album, and the essay, The Whiteness of the Whale–chapter 42 of Melville’s Moby Dick—I began to collect blank endpapers from 19 th and 20 th century books in an extended effort to work with blankness. I had the idea to make collages of landscapes using nothing but white paper as early as 1999, but it took me until about 2004 before I had collected enough end-pages to begin my first actual constructions. The idea spurred several related works, a series entitled Blank Slates—laser cut collages tracing the related histories of landscape painting and collage—and a number of works that incorporate “blank paper collages.” The work commissioned for the cover of Saranac Review No. 12 is a work that incorporates a blank paper collage—an interpretation of a painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder (American, 1847- 1917), The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), 1895-1910. Ryder’s The Race Track was painted after the death of a close friend of his from New York—who bet on a horse race, lost, and took his own life. The symbolism of the painting and the fact that it was painted about an event that transpired in New York State was of great interest to me regarding this collage project, which was largely made to explore the Iroquois Confederacy, New York State history and the Mohawk people.
Visual Notes on the Works Detail pages for some of the works are provided to allow viewers to inspect and read the definitions and terminology—the small size of the text when reproduced in the publication was rendered illegible. David Powell is a respected collage artist; I admire his design capabilities and his work. I invited David to create a series of digital collages to highlight elements from each collage at a scale that would be easily accessible for viewers to read. David created six beautiful “end note collages” that correspond to all of the collages except the self-portrait and the cover piece. The cover piece is left unadorned like scattered cuttings on a worktable, ready for inclusion and context.
Burnished, Puzzle-piece Collage I use a special method of collage I have evolved over time, similar to how jigsaw puzzles are made in which the pieces are all cut to fit together; the end result is much the same as the technique of inlaid veneer in fine woodworking. Cut pieces are burnished on the front and back of the collage to force the paper fibers to join into a seamless union. It is crucial that I cut the pieces exactly. The process forces that I either separately cut the object and the background where it will fit—most
107
challenging—or stack papers to cut simultaneously both the object and its receiving background. I have to be extremely careful to not let the object move out of place while cutting. When I layer three pieces of paper and cut through all the pages simultaneously, I end up with three separate collages by mixing and matching the parts. Such was the case in the Ryder collage and The Artist and Collage in the Field of Landscape No. 2. For those projects, I ended up with three works each, where the shapes of the collages are identical, but the paper color shifts from one work to the next because of the exchanging and sharing of the pieces between each respective collage. The paper I use is not able to withstand tape being pulling off the surface without resulting in severe tearing due to its age. Thus, all the pieces that are being cut in a given moment are held in place by hand for the entire process of cutting. Burnished, puzzle-piece collages are obviously challenging and very time consuming to make, but the metaphor provided by the method is conceptually complimentary for this particular body of work: all cut elements play a vital role in the exploration of the subject for each individual collage, which incorporates many wide and disparate but literally connected materials. A subject’s interconnectivity of ideas, events, portraits and symbols drives the selection of imagery, and the puzzle-piece collage process echoes the delicate interdependence between elements.
—Todd Bartel, Watertown, MA, April 17, 2016
1
Bruce E. Johansen, Dating the Iroquois Confederacy, reproduced in Akwesasne Notes New Series, Fall—October/November/December, 1995, Volume 1 #3 & 4, pp. 62-63. Note: “Using a combination of documentary sources, solar eclipse data, and Iroquois oral history, Mann and Fields assert that the Iroquois Confederacy’s body of law was adopted by the Senecas (the last of the five nations to ratify it) August 31, 1142. The ratification council convened at a site that is now a football field in Victor, New York. The site is called Gonandaga by the Seneca.”
2
William C. Sturtevant, Woodsmen and Villagers of the East, in The World of the American Indian, Melville Bell Grosvenor, Editor-in-Chief, National Geographic Society, Washington D.C. 1974, p. 133-134. 3 Sturtevant, p. 130. —Todd Bartel.
SARANAC REVIEW 12
The Artist and Collage in the Field of Landscape No. 2, 2014 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage, antique papers, Xerographic prints on 20th & 19th century end papers, pencil, document repair tape 10 x 8 inches A Journey (After A.D.), 2011 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage using only 19th century papers, end pages, dictionary definitions, Xerographic transfers, yes glue, pencil, archival document repair tape, and Alfred DeCredico’s collage remnants 10.5 x 11inches
108
Sublime Climate, 2011 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage using only 19th century papers, end pages, book engravings, dictionary definitions, Xerographic transfers, yes glue, pencil, archival document repair tape, and Alfred DeCredico’s collage remnants 13.25 x 12.5 inches
Animas Hominis, 2011 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage using only 19th century papers, end pages, Xerographic transfer, Yes Glue, pencil, archival document repair tape, and Alfred DeCredico’s collage remnants 13.75 x 14.5 inches
ART
Set Apart or Belonging To An Individual or A People, 2011 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage using only 19th century papers, end pages, Xerographic transfer, yes glue, gouache, pencil, archival document repair tape, book engravings and dictionary definitions 23.5 x 11.25 inches
All That Part of a Picture Which is Not of the Body or Argument, 2011 burnished puzzle-piece fit collage using only 19th century papers, end pages, Xerograpic transfer, Memeograph, improperly exposed/fixed photo remnants, Italian letter remnant (c. 1880), yes glue, pencil, antique cellophane tape, archival document repair tape and dictionary definitions 16.25 x 13.5 inches
Dog Star Rising, 2011 & 2014 burnished, puzzle-piece fit collage, 19th century papers, end pages, marbled paper, rain washed and weather beaten bulletin board paper, found ink-imbued card, photo-transfers on end pages, weather beaten wall paper remnant, atlas chart, map graticules, dictionary letter tab, yes glue, pencil, antique cellophane tape, archival document repair tape and dictionary definitions 18.3125 x 18.375 inches
Proportions and Table Manners, 2014 burnished, puzzle-piece fit collage, 19th century papers, end pages, marbled papers, Xerographic prints on antique end pages, toner transfers on rain eroded bulletin board papers, cancelled stamp and envelope remnant, pencil, antique cellophane tape, archival document repair tape, yes glue and dictionary definitions, in artist-made frame 24.5 x 19.125 inches
Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory), 2016 burnished puzzle-piece collage, 19th century book end pages, book engraving (View in the Valley of the Mohawk, James Duthie, c. 1870), 20th century map graticules, gummed star labels (recto), stamps (verso), Xerographic transfers, watercolor, graphite, document repair tape, Yes glue 14.5 x 25.125 inches
All photos: Todd Bartel
109
A Journey (After A. D.)
Sublime Climate
Animus Hominis
Set Apart or Belonging to an Individual, or a People
All That Part of a Picture That is Not of the Body or Argument
Dog Star Rising
Proportions and Table Manners
Proportions and Table Manners, (verso)
Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory)
Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory), (verso)
Notes from: Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory)
Notes from: Promise and Threat (Terror Comes After Territory)
Notes from: Sublime Climate
Notes from: Animus Hominis
Notes from: Set Apart or Belonging to an Individual, or a People
Notes from: All That Part of a Picture That is Not of the Body or Argument
Notes from: Dog Star Rising
Notes from: Proportions and Table Manners
Trilogy of Unknown Martyrs: Oxygen, 1989
NONFICTION
Trilogy of Unknown Martyrs: Autonomy, 1989
POETRY
Contributors' Notes
Barbara Adams has published three books of poetry, a study of Laura Riding’s poetry, and a memoir. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Confrontation, Dalhousie Review, Slant, etc. She has won the Robert Frost Foundation Award for Poetry, and the Negative Capability Prize for Fiction. She is Professor Emerita, Pace University.
Howard Altmann is the author of two poetry collections, Who Collects the Days and In This House. A Montreal native, he lives in New York City.
Todd Bartel is a collage artist, curator and educator who lives in Watertown, Massachusetts. His work examines the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture. He holds a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University.
Mary Marie Dixon is a visual artist and poet with publications in periodicals and a collection of poetry, Eucharist, Enter the Sacred Way (Franciscan UP, 2008.) Her focus on women’s spirituality and the mystics combined with the Great Plains and the spiritual power of nature appears in visual and poetic form.
Karen Douglass has published short fiction, a novel titled Accidental Child, and five books of poetry. She is a co-host for Cannon Mine Poetry in Lafayette CO, a member of Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop, Colorado Independent Publishers Association (board member), and Boulder Writers’ Workshop. Her publication list is available at www.KVDbooks.com.
Brett Evans lives, writes, listens to jazz and drinks in his native north Wales. He is co-editor of the poetry and prose journal Prole. His debut chapbook, The Devil’s Tattoo, was published by Indigo Dreams (UK) in April 2015. Dog walks are preferable to telephone talks.
Brian Gilmore, a Washington, D.C. poet, is the author of three collections of poetry, including his latest, We Didn’t Know Any Gangsters (Cherry Castle, 2014), a 2015 Hurston-Wright Award nominee. A Cave Canem Fellow 1997, and a Kimbilio Fellow 2014, 2015, he teaches public interest law at Michigan State University.
Cynthia Hawkins, a pushcart nominee and recent finalist for the Sundance Episodic Narrative Lab, has had work published in Passages North, the Emerson Review, ESPN the Magazine, Parent:Wise, and the anthology The Way We Sleep. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas San Antonio.
Kathryn Henion’s fiction has appeared in Natural Bridge, Green Mountains Review, The Briar Cliff Review, and Confrontation, among others. She earned a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University, where she also served as editor of Harpur Palate. She reads fiction for Drunken Boat and lives and works in Ithaca, NY.
Leslie Heywood is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University. She is the author of four books of poems, most recently Abnormal Repetitive Behaviors (Red Hen Press, 2016). She is also the author of the sports memoir Pretty Good For a Girl.
Kasey Elizabeth Johnson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Corium Magazine, decomP, The Knicknackery, Prick of the Spindle, and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, among others. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
SARANAC REVIEW 12
Nancy Kline’s memoirs, essays, and short stories have appeared widely. She has published nine books, including a novel, a study of René Char’s poetry, a biography of Elizabeth Blackwell, and a number of book-length translations of modern French writers. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
Gerry LaFemina is the author of numerous books including, most recently Little Heretic (poems) and Palpable Magic: Essays on Poets and Prosody, both from Stephen F. Austin UP. He directs the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University,
where he is Associate Professor of English, and serves as a poetry mentor in the MFA program at Carlow University.
Carole Glasser Langille is the author of four books of poems and two collections of stories. Her most recent collection is I Am What I Am Because You Are What You Are, a book of linked stories published in October 2015. She teaches Creative Writing at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia.
Michael Lavers’ poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Arts & Letters, West Branch, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.
Timothy L. Marsh earned his doctorate in Creative Writing from The University of Wales Aberystwyth. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Barrelhouse, Fourth River, The New Welsh Review, The Los Angeles Review and The MacGuffin. He has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Graduate Exchange Scholar at Auburn University. In 2015 he served as the Hub City Press Writer-in- Residence.
Judith McCombs’ work has appeared in Nimrod (Neruda Award), Poetry, Prairie Schooner. She is the author of five collections including the most recent Habit of Fire: Poems Selected and New. Winner of the Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen prize, she has held NEH and Canadian Senior Fellowships, and won Maryland State Arts Council’s highest 2009 Individual Artist Award for Poetry.
Sarah Corbett Morgan’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, Bluestem Magazine, Blue Lyra Review, and Notre Dame Magazine among others. She grew up in Oregon, but now lives with her husband in the jungles of Costa Rica. Nature is her church. Visit her website: www.scmorgan.com
Joseph O’Malley’s story, “A Little Give and Take,” is one of a series of connected stories about the Fallon family that takes place in Detroit in 1980-81. The stories of the other family members have appeared in Beloit Fiction Review, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, and A Public Space.
Kate O’Shea lives in Dublin. Her chapbook Crackpoet is available on Amazon. New work in Orbis, Cyphers, PoetHead and Prole, and an anthology of work inspired by Alan Sillitoe. Her haiku will be in an anthology of new haiku writing from Ireland, and work will appear in the upcoming, Don’t be Afraid: An Anthology to Seamus Heaney.
Mary Bass Poulin’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Review, Eclipse, Pearl, Spillway, Stolen Island Review, Front Range Review, Progenitor, and elsewhere. Poulin teaches at Thomas College and has an MFA from Vermont College. She lives in the western mountains of Maine with her family.
Monique Proulx has written five novels, two collections of short fiction, and several screenplays. She has won numerous awards, including the Prix littéraire Adrienne- Choquette for Sans coeur et sans reproche and the Prix Québec-Paris for Homme invisible à la fenêtre. Her most recent novel is Ce qu’il reste de moi.
Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati’s Clermont College. Her chapbook The Lobes and Petals of the Inanimate was published by Pecan Grove Press (2009). Her poems have recently appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Drunken Boat.
Jennifer Steil is an award-winning American writer and journalist living in La Paz, Bolivia. Her debut novel, The Ambassador’s Wife, was published by Doubleday in July 2015 to critical acclaim. Her first book, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Broadway Books 2010), chronicles her adventures as editor of the Yemen Observer newspaper.
J.R. Toriseva is the recipient of the Mary Merritt Henry Prize in Poetry and currently is an Asst. Professor and Director of the Division of English & Communication Arts at SUNY-Genesee CC. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Prism International, Nimrod, Soundings East, among others.
Edwin Torres’ poetry collections include, Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), Yes Thing No Thing (Roof Books), and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books). Recent anthologies include: In/Filtration: A Hudson Valley Salt Line (Station Hill Press) and Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing (Counterpath).
J. T. Townley has published in Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and an MPhil in English from Oxford University, and he teaches at the University of Virginia. To learn more, visit jttownley.com.
Mitchell Untch has been a finalist in several poetry contests, including the C.P. Cavafy International Poetry Prize and the Janet McCabe Poetry Prize. Work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Nimrod Intl., The Beloit Poetry Journal, Confrontation, Georgetown Review, Poet Lore, and North American Review.
Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer’s short stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, and have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, The Summerset Review, Quiddity, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Bluestem, Epiphany, and other venues. She teaches at New York University. Her website is: www.ruvaneevilhauer.com
Susan C. Waters has an advanced degree from the writing program at George Mason University. Currently, she is Professor of English at New Mexico Junior College. Ms. Waters started out as a journalist covering hard news in upstate New York.
Elizabeth Zaleski earned her MFA in nonfiction from The Ohio State University, and her work has also appeared in Harpur Palate. She has moved three times since Moving was completed, and in part four, her parents remarry one another and inform her via email a week later.
