An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work
My work is to write this sentence and revise it into that sentence. To take this word and replace it with that word. My work is a novel I wrote from five to seven a.m. for more than two years and that will never be published. My work is to be the person you trust...
When You Meet My Father
Ask him what growing up on the farm in Two Harbors was like. Ask him about what he learned on the farm, where he milked cows before going to school. Ask him about college in Duluth, that one time he stole a beer truck, the married woman who desired an affair. Ask him about those...
Mapping Identity: Borich’s Body Geographic
This interview was prepared by Linda Avery, Polly Moore, Jan Shoemaker, and Aimee Young (current nonfiction students in the Ashland University MFA program, Bonnie J. Rough’s Spring 2013 section) with questions exploring the memoir, Body Geographic. PM: Your voice in this book is so wise, so at peace with all the different parts of you that...
What Can Sonnets Teach Us about Essays? The Benefit of Strict Form
In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver stresses the importance of understanding and practicing metered verse for modern students and writers of poetry. To lack a deep understanding of metrical forms, she says, is “to be without [a] felt sensitivity to a poem as a structure of lines and rhythmic energy and repetitive sound.” How can we...
I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson
I wish I could write like Russell Edson because then I could show my husband standing in the kitchen like a tree that lost its leaves all at once. Or like a rock in the living room that doesn’t notice the lichen. And my daughter would be a bird in the tree, and my son...
Interviewing Emily Dickinson
It’s not that I thought She might really be there, behind the tilting tombstone: Emily Dickinson December 10, 1830 Called Back May 15, 1886, not that I thought touching the stone might make up for something missing in me, some lack I might get back through this pilgrimage—ok, I’m lying—I wanted to touch her, wanted...
On Form and Experimentation in Memoir: Schrand and Wilkins
Drawing on their most recent memoirs, Works Cited and The Mountain and the Fathers, authors Brandon Schrand and Joe Wilkins recently interviewed one another through a series of emails to explore the possibilities and limitations of form and experimentation in memoir. JW: In a sample of his journals published in a recent issue of New Letters, B. H. Fairchild...
The Drowning
In July a boy drowns in the lake. * There is a picture window above our kitchen table and through it a view of the lake. At noon, when we sit to eat sandwiches, the water is glassy and green, fracturing only when unseen fish rise and retreat. The sand on the shore is pale. ...
Tired
I’m tired of the usual—foofy dogs, West End musicals, Edgar Allan Poe. Also leather jackets and the lost middle-aged men who believe that stretching a carcass across their backs brings Hell’s Angels cool. Especially tired of not having one myself. Tired of tragedy ending badly, gullible Hamlet taking the word of a rasping ghost. Tired...
White Guy
I was in Walmart yesterday, swung around the end of one aisle where a five-foot-high cardboard-display edge stuck out about eight inches and, like an old fuck, caught it with my chest. Back up slightly, proceed on toward the Life Savers. Halfway up the aisle (around the Life Savers) this black guy, twenty-five-ish, slightest smile...
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