Posts Tagged: Essay

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“A Bridge to Some Other Possibility”: Interview with Bryan Borland & Seth Pennington

 

Indiana Review is accepting submissions to the 1/2 K Prize until August 15, 2018. Final judges Bryan Borland and Seth Pennington will select a winner to receive $1000 and publication. Essence London, who shares Arkansas with them as home, asks them to talk a bit about writers they love and collaboration and refreshing images. Though they are in conversation here primarily as editors, know too that they are writers and that you can find their latest work on their respective websites: bryanborland.com and sethpennington.com.

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40.1 SNEAK PEEK: excerpt of WE ARE NOT SAINTS by BRENNA WOMER

SP_Womer_We Are Not Saints

 

Brenna Womer is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University where she teaches composition and literature and serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, DIAGRAM, The Pinch, Hippocampus, Booth, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance is forthcoming on C&R Press.

 

Blue Room: “Cunt” by Siân Griffiths

Siân Griffiths reads from “Cunt,” and we interview Creative Nonfiction Editor, Anna Cabe, on why she voted for the piece. Listen here for an glimpse of our latest issue and insight into our selection process.

“Cunt” was originally published in Indiana Review 39.2, Fall 2017.

Thanks to Youtube Audio Library and John Deley for letting us use “Beer Belly Blues.”

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39.2 SNEAK PEEK: CUNT by SIÂN GRIFFITHS

Griffiths_Cunt excerpt

 

Siân Griffiths lives in Ogden, Utah, where she directs the Creative Writing Program at Weber State University. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, Ninth Letter, Redivider, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Quarterly West, and The Rumpus, among other publications. Her short fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once by Versal and once by The Georgia Review, and her debut novel, Borrowed Horses (New Rivers Press), was a semi-finalist for the 2014 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Currently, she reads fiction as part of the editorial team at Barrelhouse. For more information, please visit sbgriffiths.com

 

 

Online Feature: “Hip Joints” by Joy Castro

In the late afternoon of the twentieth century, after Vietnam and before Anita Hill, in the Appalachian highlands of rural West Virginia, it was senior year, and Madonna and the Police filled the airwaves: “Like a Virgin,” “King of Pain.”

Every noon, I drove the six miles from East Fairmont High School to the little machine shop tucked on a winding back road. I’d park in the gravel lot and let the car battery run the radio while I ate my brown-bagged tuna sandwich and stared out the windshield.  My classmates at East Fairmont were dissecting little dead animals and solving for y.

I was done with all that; I was impatient; I had all the credits I needed to graduate. I took morning classes so the state wouldn’t charge me with truancy, and then I left for work.

“I machine artificial hip joints for 3M,” I would say when people asked.

It was tedious, it was eight hours every weekday, it was just the whir of machines for company, the other workers attending silently to their own stations.  But at least it wasn’t McDonald’s or Dairy Queen; I didn’t have to wait on people from high school.  And it beat minimum wage by a couple of dollars an hour.  Sixteen years old, forty hours a week:  I felt lucky.

The titanium hip joints were pocked with small regular holes; they looked like halves of silver Wiffle balls.  Titanium:  strong and light, sleek and durable, a perfect metal for aerospace engineering or replacing the worn interiors of human bodies.  I’d imagine the gloved hands of surgeons inserting the shining silver balls into the dark slick privacies of the pelvis.

In the shop, the machines were huge teal cubes, large and clean, twice as tall as I was, with hot moving steel parts at their hearts where I put my hands to lock down and then remove the half-balls. The machines all had red warning labels that showed how you could die or lose a limb.

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