The last nonfiction/memoir course I taught at Florida International University last year included a new student, a young woman named Susan Falco. She was the quietest person in the class, yet spoke with authority (quietly) when she spoke. What she wrote was not only memorable—it burned itself into my memory. Her prose seemed to me…
Translated from the Yiddish by Maia Evrona Like women who are loved to the fullest and are still unsatisfied, and go through life with laughter and with rage in their eyes of fire and agate— so were the years. And they also appeared to be as actors, hesitantly performing Hamlet before the market; as…
Glory to the half rest, to the breath between the third and fourth beats, the dwindling arrow of the decrescendo, to the sunrise over Malibu, and its sleeping starlets, the empty horizon, the city’s great thought…
Lindsay Stuart Hill’s two poems were written after a stay at Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York. Zen texts and the practice of meditation have influenced many of Hill’s recent poems. In a letter to me, she wrote: “As I reread these monastery poems, for me they are centered on the fundamental tension that…
The tribute was held downtown, far away from the theater district. Christine crossed the street gingerly, on four-inch heels thin as pencils—Ivan had always loved women in high heels—and checked the address against the invitation in her purse. The building was new and modern, the front window lettered with Cyrillic characters and a boldface translation:…
They could say what they liked, imitate the way I stuttered the morning Pledge, mashed the alphabet, ask how many chickens 1 plus 3 made, why my brain sat in a corner, in a class of one, refused to read or write, was nailed to my tongue, just as long as they understood that some…
Jynne Dilling Martin completed her MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where I teach, and although she was never my student, except in the occasional workshop, I’ve kept my eye on her. From the start her impressive gifts included a distinct voice— headlong, unprotected, usually jazzed, sometimes manic, often very funny, and always…
1. A finger is cut from a rubber glove And clamped as a tourniquet around my toe. The gouging ingrown nail is to be removed. The shots supposed to have pricked and burned The nerves diabetes has numbed never notice. The toe, as I watch, slowly turns a bluish Gray, the color of flesh on…
As John hurried to the resident locker room after doing his rounds at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, he noticed a sixtyish Korean lady in red sweats cautiously stalking him from about twenty feet away. At first, John thought the wrinkled woman might be a figment of his overworked brain, as he was always tired to the…
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