We present our Summer/Fall 2019 issue–“Birth, School, Work, Death” … Four phases of life, with the beauty in the details.
If you wish, you can go to the Table of Contents and Contributors’ Notes on Medium here: Contents. All of our features are published there, too.
Here’s what you’ll find in this issue …
All section images by Chad Hunt.
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BIRTH
“Hide & Seek,” a poem by Carol Matos. A child is a galaxy.
“Assisted Hatching,” a memoir by Christine Caulfield. A complicated quest to conceive.
“Animation,” a poem by Kari Wergeland. Time blooms in the garden.
“The First Cry,” a memoir by Marjorie Pryse. Birth, separation, symbiosis.
SCHOOL
“Panthera leo leo; or, a Civics Lesson,” by Alison Powell. On Aristotle’s animals and the predators of junior high.
“The Beauty in Violence,” a poem by Stuart Gunter. A boy and a cartoon.
“Parenting in the Negative,” an essay by Will Stockton. Deficits in the adoption of an older child.
“83rd St. Notebook,” a poem by Ann Quinn. Visit to a childhood interior.
“Midge’s Bite,” a memoir by Donna Lynn Marsh. Childhood fears swell into adult insecurities. A rulebook.
“Don’t Know Much About the French I Took,” a poem by Ron Smith. High school lessons in perspective.
“Film School Follies,” a memoir by Michael Hess. Portrait of the author as a young auteur.
“Passing Through,” an essay by Lise Funderburg. A lesson in identity among thrift-store racks.
“Singing Lauridsen’s ‘Lux Aeterna’ in the First Rehearsal,” a poem by Stuart Gunter. Learning to sing the sublime.
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WORK
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“The Archaeology of Desire,” a portfolio by Gale Rothstein. Narrating a life in assemblage art.
“I Got Grown,” a memoir by Joe Milan, Jr. A young man starts his working life where others’ lives end.
“Work: Savannah Roots,” a poem by Ron Smith. Breaking through the Southern heat.
“I [Hard-Clenched Knuckle-Forward Fist] New York,” an essay by George Choundas. In the mean streets.
“1–800–441–9402,” a poem by Sue Chenette. Working airwaves and phones.
“The Art of Living with the Unacceptable,” an essay with reportage by Miranda Perrone. Activism, a National Monument, and the ballast of civil disobedience.
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DEATH
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“Prologue” and “A Spectacle,” two poems by Heather Tourgee. Is the world ending? You’re not alone.
“Kuan Yin,” a memoir by Judy Anne Wilson. On coming out as a lesbian in the first years of the AIDS crisis.
“Holy Smoke Vanities,” a poem by Gerard Sarnat. Death and the spirit.
“Minor Calamity,” a prose poem by Marya Hornbacher. Childhood fears on a global stage.
“The War Dead in France,” a poem by Julian Green. Grief seeps forward.
“Aunt Milwee’s Balm,” a memoir by Chris Carbaugh. A home remedy unites mourners after its maker’s death.
“Elegy for my Mother,” a poem by Ann Quinn. Life, death, transfiguration.
“Holy Smoke Vanities,” a poem by Gerard Sarnat. Death, Job, and the spirit.
“A Couple In,” a poem by Jenny Gillespie Mason. Love at the end.
“Wordless,” an essay by Susan Moldaw. All we can say at the end.
“Losing Babies,” a poem by Margaret Rogal. Ascending.
“After the Wake, Gramma Ruth Communes with Her Beloved,” a poem by Ellen Kombiyil. Grief on a butterfly’s wings.
“At Death’s Door,” an essay by Margie Patlak. Looking back and clinging to life.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Chris Carbaugh has published work in The Bitter Southerner, Gravel, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature,The South Carolina Review, Kestrel, THEMA, Hippocampus, The New Southerner, and several other journals.
Christine Caulfield is a journalist who frequently covers the law. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Passages North.
Sue Chenette is an editor for the Canadian poetry press Brick Books, and the author of Slender Human Weight (Guernica Editions 2009) and The Bones of His Being (Guernica Editions 2012).
A former FBI agent, George Choundas has been featured in over fifty publications. His story collection, The Making Sense of Things, won the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize from FC2 and was shortlisted for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction from University of North Texas Press, the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose from Pleiades Press, and the St. Lawrence Book Award for Fiction from Black Lawrence Press.
Lise Funderburg is a writer, an editor, and a lecturer in creative writing. Her collection of oral histories, Black, White, Other: Biracial Americans Talk about Race and Identity, has become a core text in the study of American multiracial identity. She is the author of a memoir, Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, and the editor of a forthcoming collection of original essays, Apple, Tree: Writers on Their Parents.
A retired geology professor, Julian Green has published work in Indian River Review.
Gunver Hasselbalch’s drawings and paintings have been exhibited in her native Denmark, where she also works in the theater.
Marya Hornbacher is an essayist, journalist, novelist, poet, and a New York Times bestselling author of five books. Her writing appears regularly in publications such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, Crazyhorse, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Normal School, Fourth Genre, and DIAGRAM. She is the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award for Nonfiction, the Fountain House Humanitarian Award, and a Logan Nonfiction Fellowship.
Chad Hunt contributed a photo essay on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and at home to our first issue, “Dangerous Territory.” His “Images of the Secret Self,” a collection of portraits made of trick-or-treaters, is a popular feature on our website. Chad’s photographs have appeared in Time, Popular Mechanics, and The New York Times. His Afghanistan photographs received a Military Reporters and Editors Award and are in the permanent collection of the George Eastman House Museum.
Jonathan Machen contributed a politically motivated painting, Unite with Love, Resist with Love, to Broad Street in 2017. His work is currently on display in a one-man show at the Boulder History Museum. He also edits Haikutimes.
Jenny Gillespie Mason’s work has been published in Front Porch, Borderlands, The Missouri Review, and Ruminate. She runs a record label, Native Cat Recordings.
Carol Matos’s debut collection of poems, The Hush Before the Animals Attack, was published by Main Street Rag in 2013. Her poetry has appeared in 34th Parallel, Zone 3, The Comstock Review, ROOM, The Prose-Poem Project, Columbia Journal, RHINO, and The Chattahoochee Review.
Work by Joe Milan, Jr., has appeared in publications such as The Rumpus; F(r)iction; Blarb, the blog of The L.A. Review of Books; The Kyoto Journal; and BooksActually’s Gold Standard 2016 anthology.
Susan Moldaw is a chaplain and gerontologist. Her work has appeared in bioStories, Brain, Child Magazine, Lilith, Narrative, Ruminate, and others.
Miranda Perrone is a writer, environmental scientist, and activist whose recent writing can be found in Waxwing, The Rumpus, and Terrain.org, where she also curates audio content.
Marjorie Pryse is the co-author of Writing out of Place, a scholarly book on regionalism in American literature, and the editor of five other books. She has published fiction in Story Quarterly and Mother Jones, and essays in many publications, including Faulkner Journal, American Literature, New England Quarterly, Bennington Review, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Ann Quinn’s poetry collection, Final Deployment, was published in 2018. Her work can be found in Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, and Haibun Today, among others.
Margie Patlak’s science writing has been featured in Discover, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and numerous other publications. Her personal essays have appeared in Proximity, Hippocampus,The Hopper,Cold Mountain Review, and Juxtaprose, where her essay “Rock of Ages” won First Honorable Mention in the 2018 Creative Nonfiction contest. Her nature memoir, More Than Meets the Eye, will be published by Down East Books in 2021.
Margaret Rogal’s poetry has been featured in Plainsongs, Earth’s Daughters, and Zig Zag Lit Mag.
Gale Rothstein is an assemblage and collage artist. She recently had a solo exhibition at the New York City firm FXCollaborative Architects.
Gerard Sarnat’s honors include the Dorfman Prize, a first place in a Poetry in the Arts competition, and nominations for Pushcarts and Best of the Net. His work has appeared in many journals, including Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Poetry Quarterly, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Poets And War, Texas Review, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and Review Berlin. His books are Homeless Chronicles, Disputes, 17s, and Melting the Ice King, all from Pessoa.
A former Poet Laureate of Virginia, Ron Smith is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (University Press of Florida) and three books from LSU Press: Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes. In 2018 he was a Featured Poet at the American Library in Paris. He also contributed to Broad Street’s “Rivals & Players.”
Will Stockton’s latest books include a bilingual edition of Sergio Loo’s Operación al Cuerpo Enfermo / Operation on a Malignant Body (The Operating System, 2019) and, with D. Gilson, Jesus Freak (Bloomsbury, 2018). His work as a translator and a creative writer has appeared in numerous journals, including Asymptote, The Bennington Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.
Previous work by Heather Tourgee has been featured in The Hopper, Split Rock Review, and Yankee Magazine.
Kari Wergeland’s poetry has appeared in many journals, including The Delmarva Review, New Millennium Writings, and Pembroke Magazine. Her chapbook, Breast Cancer: A Poem in Five Acts, was recently named an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist.
Judy Anne Wilson is a member of the Porch Writers’ Collective in Nashville, where she is writing a memoir of the AIDS years in San Francisco.
Cover image: “For What It’s Worth,” by Gale Rothstein.
