Volume 48, Issue 2
FRONT COVER: Karen Dolmanisth
LOOM, as instrument and cascade, collaboration with the afternoon sun and Mill 3
Cotton and Linen Thread, Autumn Leaves (Local Locust Trees,
Bright Yellow to Brown), Chemistry, Alchemy and Domestic
Glassware, Factory Window Glass and Dictionary Pages with
Select Words and Definitions, Crochet Lace, Changing Sunlight
and Shadow
80 FT x 60 FT x 60 FT
AS MR‘s BIG BIRTHDAY APPROACHES, we are changing. Becoming more comfortable in the digital universe, we are on the verge of three important technological improvements. One or two of these may be in place by the time this issue reaches you.
We are about to unveil a greatly improved website, including complete tables of contents for every issue from #1 to the present (www.mass review.org), a log for our radio program, information about editors, and many other features. You will also find a link to the second innovation: electronic submission of manuscripts. While we understand the drawbacks involved—for example, we will need to accept traditional paper manuscripts for the better part of a year until the new system is established—it has become evident in the last year or so that there is no turning back this tidal change. This quicker avenue for contributors will be available when our reading period resumes on October 1. Both of these new elements have been designed and executed by our Managing Editor Katie Winger, with the assistance of our intern Aaron Hellem.
Thirdly, we will soon begin podcasting selected programs from the MR2 radio archive. We receive many requests for copies of shows, and fulfilling them through podcast will be relatively effortless, even as it increases our audience. Credit for this initiative belongs to Anjali Khosla, audio editor extraordinaire and MR2 intern.
All these innovations have been made as frugally as possible because of the energy and inspiration of our staff. In the long run, these changes will liberate our interns from the task of managing manuscript traffic, so we can draw on their richer abilities. We would love to add a part-time editorial assistant when we can—producing a magazine of this scope without a single full-time employee is an enormous challenge. Extending your subscription or making a donation now will speed these wonders….
David Lenson
for the editors
Table of Contents
An Introduction, by David Lenson
Out of the Blue, Fiction by Elizabeth Denton
Perpetual Youth Lost by Humankind, Poetry by Daisy Fried
Genesis, Poetry by Michal Lando
Chord Changes, Non-Fiction by Carl Vigeland
My Coeval Archtop, Non-Fiction by Thomas O’Grady
Cahoon Hollow, Wellfleet, Poetry by Robert Dow
The Stars Threw Down Their Spears, Fiction by Aaron Parrett
The Father of the Bride, Fiction by Doris Dörrie, Translated by Gustav A. Richar
Apologue (1); Apologue (2), Poetry by Maggie Smith
This Charming Man, Fiction by Jacob Wegman
On Looking, Non-Fiction by Randon Billings Noble
Apples, Poetry by Jessie Julian
Space for Name: Printing a 1920s Little Magazine, Non-Fiction by Walker Rumble
Flowers for Benny Black, Fiction by Ari Lieberman
Violence, the Word, Poetry by Alessandra Lynch
The Secret Climate the Year I Stopped Writing, Non-Fiction by Phyllis Koestenbaum
The Dead of Winter, Fiction by Elinor Teele
The twin, Poetry by Michael Klein
Levers, Fiction by William Williams
Contributors
Elizabeth Denton is the author of the short story collection, Kneeling on Rice. She teaches fiction at the University of Virginia.
New media sculptor, installation and performance artist Karen Dolmanisth holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts and a BFA from Parsons/Cooper Union. She has exhibited widely, by invitation with Andres Serrano at the Vienna Secession Museum, Austria, and in “Next Age Dada” in the Netherlands. She has been an artist-in-residence at Connecticut College with Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton, and at the Vermont Studio Center. Her grants and awards include the Berkshire Taconic A.R.T. Award, numerous Massachusetts Cultural Council grants, and NEA/NEFA fellowships. She shows frequently at New York City’s Exit Art and Brooklyn’s Smack Mellon, and is represented by the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work was included in the Abrams book New Art, a compendium of important emerging artists from around the world. She lives with her son and partner in Conway, Massachusetts.
Doris Dörrie, a writer and filmmaker, was born in Hanover, Germany, on May 26, 1955. She came to the United States in 1973 to attend the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Ms. Dörrie attended the New School for Social Research in New York. She later returned to Germany and enrolled in the Academy for Film and Television in Munich. Ms. Dörrie has written and directed eight feature films and twenty-five documentaries. Her films have won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. She is a five-time winner of the German National Film Award for Cinematography and in 1991 received the Best Mystery Movie Award. In the U.S. in 1986 she received the Charlie Chaplin Award for best comedy. Ms. Dörrie is also the author of six collections of short stories. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Arkansas Review, Chicago Review, The Literary Review, The Sun, and many more. Ms. Dörrie lives in Munich, Germany.
Robert Dow teaches at Commonwealth College, the University of Massachusetts.
Daisy Fried is the author of two books of poems, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. The recipient of Guggenheim and Hodder Fellowships, she was most recently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Jessie Julian resides in Hopedale, Massachu setts and plans to stay there indefinitely. She is a graduate of Stonehill College and has a BA in English and a BA in Criminal Justice. Jessie works for the Attorney General’s Office in Boston in the Criminal Bureau, photographs in black-and-white, and is happiest with her family, friends, and love.
Michael Klein is the author of Iggo, Track Conditions, and The End of Being Known.
Phyllis Koestenbaum‘s most recent books are Animal Sonnets and Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies, a collection of prose poems. She is a senior scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University.
Michal Lando currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poems have been published in Chelsea.
Ari Lieberman was born in Mexico City and grew up mainly in Israel, in or near Springmound (called the “Tel Aviv” by the natives). He studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia, writing at Cornell University, and is now a doctorate candidate in comparative literature at Princeton University.
Alessandra Lynch is the author of Sails and Wind Left Behind, published by Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She teaches Poetry and Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.
Randon Billings Noble received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and teaches at American University in Washington, DC. She was recently a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and is currently working on a collection of essays called The Summer before Marriage.
Thomas O’Grady lives in Milton, Massachusetts. By day, he teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he is Professor of English, director of Irish Studies and a member of the Creative Writing faculty. By night, he plays guitar in an amateur jazz combo.
Aaron Parrett is a musician and writer born in Butte, Montana. His stories have appeared in Open Spaces, The Wisconsin Review, Pearl, and other places. He lives in a town on the Missouri River called Great Falls, where he teaches music and literature at a Catholic college.
Gustav A. Richar edited three books of historical essays and stories: Parry Sound 1887-1987, Historical Miniatures (Morsel Press, 1986), Parry Sound–Freude grüssen Fruende (Morsel Press, 1998), Parry Sound–Friends greeting Friends (Morsel Press, 1999). His essays have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, South Dakota Review, and others. His stories have appeared in Dandelion, Green Mountains Review, Lynx Eye, Quarry, Windsor Review, Whetstone, Zymergy, and others. Two of his translations have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recently he finished the translation and resetting of Lake Life I, a novel by Werner Koch. He lives with his wife at a remote lake north of Pointe au Baril, Ontario, Canada.
Walker Rumble is the author of The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races (2003) and numerous articles on the history of printing. With Karen Donovan, he operates Oat City Press. The press recently ended a twenty-year run of Paragraph, a magazine of short prose. He holds a Ph.D. in American history and has worked as a compositor and type manager. He lives in Riverside, Rhode Island.
Maggie Smith is the author of Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005) and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). She is currently working on a second full-length collection, poems from which are forthcoming in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Court Green, the tiny, and elsewhere.
Faced with the choice of a steady job and paycheck or the peripatetic and uncertain life of a writer, Elinor Teele chose the sensible latter option. With an arts degree in English from the University of Otago in New Zealand and a doctorate in Old English Literature from the University of Cambridge in England, Ms. Teele has been known to create confused silences at cocktail parties. She is, however, proud of her work in Quality Women’s Fiction, Highlights Magazine, and other publications, and finds redemption in working on a young adult novel set in Massachusetts.
Carl Vigeland has combined lifelong interests in music and sports to create a body of work that explores the phenomenon of performance at its highest level. He is the author of six books: Great Good Fortune, In Concert, Stalking the Shark, Jazz in Bittersweet Blues Life (with Wynton Marsalis), Letters to a Young Golfer (with Bob Duval), and Release (forthcoming). A former newspaper reporter and columnist, Vigeland has written about many different subjects for a wide variety of magazines. A graduate of Harvard, he is a lecturer in journalism at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Jacob Wegman is a short-story writer from the Midwest who earned a master’s degree in English from Iowa State University. This is his first publication.
William Williams lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Lia, and their two children, Isabel and Lee. William holds master’s degrees from Harvard Divinity school and from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His short fiction has been published in Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia.