Article

  • Speak, Memory!

    * For once she gets to go with big Cousin Beatie, who is starting her breasts. They’re at Uncle Charlie’s      farm. Grandma says, “Ach, Kind, what will they think of next, enahow, the town school? Hunt the butterflies, yet!” But Beatie says, “It’s an Assignment.” Mother says, “Now go, first.” But she hates the outhouse,…

  • On Anne Stevenson

    Anne Stevenson has been around, quietly, for some time now. Born in England, daughter of the philosopher C. L. Stevenson, she grew up in New Haven and Ann Arbor, married and moved to England almost twenty years ago. She published two books of verse in this country, most importantly Reversals (Wesleyan, 1969). Then Oxford University…

  • The Lost Colony

    The setting out was easy, your hands lifted in air to the relatives turned like trees to the river, the water flocking from the prow. Even when summer came back and doors opened for evening no word came. A search party covered the heavy water, waiting for it to open and hold you before their…

  • The Fiction of Alice Munro

    Along with its counterparts in Europe and the United States, Canadian fiction during the past half century or so has been moving beyond the limits of literal realism, though this departure has not been as radical or as consistent as it has been elsewhere. Many prominent Canadian writers – Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Hood,…

  • Contributors’ Notes

    MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue DeWitt Henry Associate Editors Linda Bamber Lorrie Goldensohn CONTRIBUTORS GAYATRI ACHARYA is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University and is writing a book on autobiography. LINDA BAMBER is Assistant Professor of English at Tufts. She writes book reviews for The Boston Phoenix…

  • Gathering

         for Heather Remember gathering eggs in the morning feeding the shells to the hens at noon? I had forgotten how we gave them back to themselves. The turtle"s nest, how we walked around her ring of stones? The Lincoln Fair? How lost I was when you were, how I looked for you already…

  • Characters

    Flo knew the best way to kill a chicken and it was this. Hang it head downwards, hold on to it, and go in with your knife. Slit the roof of the mouth and the upper part of the beak. Go for the veins that cross each other at the back of the throat. If…

  • Davidson Among the Chosen

    Hannah was her usual reticent self on the subject. "I don't trust them," was all she'd say. Reticent and cryptic. "What the hell you mean you don't trust them?" Brian kept asking her. "Nothing. I just don't trust them. That's all." Brian was trying to find his sneakers. Hannah was no help on that score…