CREATIVE WRITING SERIES 2008
presents: Emerging Figures in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry

Click to download poster pdf.

Monday, February 25 @ 7:30 pm Parks Exhibition Center
Reception and book signing to follow

Jeffrey Harrison, Poet
Author of five books of poems, including Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006) and The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems (Waywiser Press, 2006)

Friday, February 29 @ 7:30 pm Parks Exhibition Center
Reception and book signing to follow

Jennifer Chang, Poet
Author of The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2007)
and

Cecily Parks, Poet
Author of Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia Press, 2007)

Friday, March 7 @ 7:30 pm Nelson Hall, Fireside Room

Timothy Solon Woodward, Novelist
Author of Cadillac Orpheus (Free Press, 2007)
and

Beena Kamlani, Fiction Writer and Essayist
Author of short stories in Ploughshares and Virginia Quarterly Review
and essays in Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin, 1999)

Friday, April 11 @ 7:30 pm Parks Exhibition Center

G.C. Waldrep, Poet
Author of Disclamor (BOA Editions, 2007) and Goldbeater’s Skin (Center for Literacy Publishing, 2003)

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From the longer sequence "Arcade Language"

by Trevor Boley, class of 2008

FOUR SQUARED
We sat atop a mountaintop with a telescope,
stargazing at the constellational snow
fall
which descended
like handsome Styrofoam.
We saw the wild create some kind of under water
pattern in the way the tree branches formed,
as if the horizon’s rays melted into
horizontal ice sickles.
We looked to the way she formed our skin’s conjuror
the three letter trinity of life, that contains
replication that only the divine organs
of some greater psychology could
produce.
Then we started to enjoy these non-artificial flavorings,
and used the pentagrams of snowflakes,
simulate the way bracelets are woven,
to the symmetry of a sword, to the grasp of a plump
warm
pie.
We have watched the little children,

at recess playing four square.

Through the dual loop lenses of a old man’s winking ice roses,
He looks at things through a layer of translucent children,
always playing merrily in front of his vision.
We have taken blinds from mountain top telescopes.
So what wooden block fortress did the wild steal from, from what pool
of legos
did the outskirts of Eden
borrow from.
If There is hydrogen bonding, is my molecular
configuration joined to some alternate essence?
If I was a man built of Velcro would I stick to
Shakespeare’s “Wheel of Fortune.”
or would the wheel of fortune roll through a snow storm like
a broken down Ford,
and stick to me
like thumb tack.
However like everything that has a being on this earth there is a shadow,
and the pregnancy of conversation, of Apollo and Socrates,
has no shadow, but
if it did you would hear a laugh so loud that your hair
would run away from your scalp.
This value’s alter ego is a frightening Wizard of Oz lit on fire,
it contains no author.

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Desert Duende

by Claire Simons, class of 2008

Tonight I unite and coalesce
with the moon. I drive through
periwinkle desert thinking of
Pablo Neruda, trying to link love poetry
to the black-and-white photograph
I saw, of the sagging, dying man.

Visions: moss encroaches upon moss.
Leaf envelops leaf.
I capture images and suck on them like
jawbreakers, chocolate, petals.
Something to be savored:
the scent of rosebud oil, cinnamon bark,
sweet basil. I take white paper and
vibrant crayons and reveal the messages
embossed in cardboard book covers. I mine for
lost gems in the quarries of my memory,
longing to curl up inside a dew-soaked morning,
to feel the unity that stems from fingers.

Tonight I steam
like broccoli––sauna-bred.
My navel pines for nourishment––
hand, thumb, finger-pad.
The Joshua trees shed their fur,
shaggy necklaces ease down their spines
and I smell my rose and
chamomile hair and relish slide guitar,
pour hand out the window, the dusk-enchanted
desert consuming me and my thoughts so I can
steal away to a feeling I once had––
pressure soothing fauna to sleep.

Tonight I live infinite lives: drink all night
in bowling alleys, wear turquoise amulets and snakeskin.
Drive past haloed cacti, the ivory of their spiny bristles
glowing, and hum into the wind.

 

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Apology for the Death of Your Father

by Amrita Khalid, Creative Writing Major, class of 2005

3rd prize in the 2005 Kenyon Review poetry Prize for Young Writers

You were the kind of
Girl that detached herself
Early. You were born unlinked,
Free, nature-tossed. He named
You in Sanskrit, named you after
Flowers.

They told me your father died
On a soft, blue Tuesday
Morning. The night was warm
Before, they said he died in his
Sleep, passing slowly, exhaling.

  II
On coming to see you, I
Felt as if I could never
Really see you. On parting,
I felt like I could never part
Sooner.

If I could tell you how
Sorry I was, I would, if I knew
It would help, I would.

  III
The mourning in my voice
Lilts, it forms like a
Wine-glass, transparent
And hollow.

You look up, your
Eyes, hot, blue, and mellow.
With your eyes, you break it.

  IV
The sick politeness of death,
You’re not the one for it.

I remember when we were too
Young to know any better,
Our families went swimming
At the lake, and we went so far
We got lost in depths of the water,
Everything was razor-wet and blue,
And you got lost so hard all you
Could do was drink it.

I held onto a rock and watched them
Save you, your body slick and robotic,
Your chest still. I thought you were killed.
Face cut from the rocks,
Lightly bleeding that ugly, alien liquid.
Ask me to recall, and
I’ll tell you, how sick that was, how
Polite that was.

  V
I unearth you. Your arms
Are starved like tree branches.

You’re too limp to move, so I
Look at you, pull you apart, quietly,
Carefully. How cold you are, how
Exhausted and tiny and cold.

I look at you.
Look at
What a mess
Life has made of you.

Days will pass, years, even,
When you’re walking over stones
To avoid him, or to confront him.
People will hush out his name, you’ll
Ache to forget him, you’ll cross him
Out savagely, and then reach out,
Arms flailing, screaming out in
Agony, the instinctual bond
Between daughter and father,
Long buried, and you, the half-
Orphan, the incomplete growing
Animal, your father’s face blurring.

You’ll fall asleep.

One day, you’ll wake and you’ll
Realize that you’re without him,
You’ll know that you’ll be fine.

Because that’s all we can ask, in the end.

To be fine.

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Water Line

by Laura Ruffino, class of 2008
also winner of the Poetry Society of America Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award

Laura Ruffino ’08 (from Chalmette, Louisiana)
Winner of the Poetry Society of America Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award

There are always blankets in the closet; always
packed and folded: pots, the operation,
the souvenir of our grandfather’s starched bed sheets
and the ability to make sound with our fingers.
*
When the floor returns I’ll burrow,
between flaps of skin—
sweat pockets kept secret;
I’ll lay in your shirts
until home’s heat floods
seeds below our blue window:
the garden resurrects itself
in a new bed each August.
*
When she taught us
that our bodies could float—
fingers under cages, through skin
looking for the thing
—that thing—the float,
the air: I saw my uncle, his quarter
of a tongue in the water
of his daughter’s nailed attic.
She taught me to float
and I found him tied to a bridge, pegged
onto roofing nails: bent into a triangle,
teaching his grandson the meaning of shape.
*
Neighbor, in hopes that you would grow
with a close heartbeat, I cut off your ears
and sewed the openings closed. I poured
a sting ray’s tail-blood between your hands
so that when we parted the ocean would carry
our story of hieroglyphs in your legs.
*
To be acquainted
with the sponged cousin
that grows in my bedroom:
the lead grandmothers
who formed circles under
wilted fans—crusades.
*
I was beside the bed watching her body:
scared of the time I’d taken
to notice its weakness. I wanted that body
in fragments snagging my shoelaces;
I wanted to guess the shadows
between her breasts like stepping
through the night forest and trying to know
if grey spots are moon light or stones.
*
My cousins turned their hair into wind chimes
when they were pregnant. They wanted to keep the children
full of music. To soothe the infants
created on the backs of eyes: the mother’s
soft teeth broke colic, rebuilt a family.
*
It was easy to forget the dead boy
as snow washed his name
off my hands with temperature.
It was easy to forget the dead boy
as snow washed his hands
off my name with temperature.
*
There are thousands of hurricane kids
in your neck—I could hear them
when I pressed my mouth there
to show you the sounds
of an R—I know you’ve felt them,
while shaving the fine hairs of your chin;
and at the time that you slid
the razor’s plastic lip beside the curve
of your ear I know you heard them—
because I asked how long you’d been shaving:
since before you were born,
you smiled.
*
Carnival came and you
did not have a grave
to set the cake baby beside—
to eat sugar with.
—Splayed like urchin,
loud to hold; how boots sucked your legs
underwater—how I dream
about you naked in the hallway
asking for your baby—dig me under, baby,
child, I don’t want to be remembered
by anyone but you. The egrets breathing
behind your accent.
*
By the time I’d returned the screws had unwound
themselves from our walls; In a wine box in weeds
below the trailer: papers, cans, roaches, widows, a hole
to the left of my father’s third belt loop. I want to ask him
“is the store open?” —have you been touching things for me?
*
In my parish, all teenagers are slow
to English—we are faceless dogs
tethered to a Cyclops summer.
When questioned we answer
the bayou is not and we are not
and the dumpster doesn’t want us,
the school does not want us,
no one opens their door.
*
My sister’s daydream: mute,
on our smoking table
holding a cement mallet
meant for sheetrock—
The workers punched in
her paper walls, layers of white
tissue pulped onto carpet,
the men’s tools covered
in mites, silverfish.
*
I keep an old woman under my arm,
white with tied hair and glasses—
she’s been there for years;
since my father took me
to the wire-lined bridge
and pinched his thumbs to crab fins.
Now, driving home I pretend
she was never a part of me,
that I never shifted through bodies
on the dinner table.
*
Skin raised with sheet music
where the boy put his fat lips
to my body—like rows of dumpsters
set down to guard my mother:
where I’d feel it most,
labor that he placed in me sipped
rope from the folding bed with crowbars
and sweat: for eight months I kept him
posed on rafters where only mice listen.

 

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Reasons for My Presence at the Idyllwild Arts Academy

by Geoff Gossett, Creative Writing Major, class of 2004

and the Outstanding Creative Writing student of the class of 2004

 

Right now I am sitting in front of the TV for the 3 rd night in a row as I have done since I have had free time from school. To tell you the truth it's kind of depressing because this gets old fast.   The only reason I'm not completely passed out right now is because I have this article due in a week.   I also must drive back to school Sunday afternoon where workloads and a warm dorm room await my presence.   That makes me happy. Not the fact that I paid, but the notion in the back of my head that I have a lot of stuff to do when I get back.

 

I never did homework at my other high school in Palm Desert.   I actually dropped out because it seemed that I wasn't going anywhere.   That's what happens to a person when they don't do anything meaningful for two or more years. It was kind of nice though. Sometimes when I have to have a 25-page story ready for a reading with the other essays, thought papers, and nightly assigned reading joining it on my nightly agenda, I think to myself how nice it was that there was a time where I could sleep 16 hours a day. Then I could walk into the kitchen and have a full dinner prepared because I lived with my parents. That's pure security.   It's also a track that leads nowhere for a long period of time.

 

It turns out that I like working. I never realized it till my first year as a junior here at Idyllwild. Even when I skim on homework and procrastinate it ends up being two full hours of compressed, fast work dispersed throughout the day. That workload, to me, has become a sort of job security to someone that has no time for a job.   “School is your job, Geoff.”   That's what my dad said when I wanted to get to work at KFC my sophomore year.   It's true. I can't deny it.   When I write a paper it's actually an evolution of the work that I hope to publish when I'm born free in the world again. It used to be that every paper I did was just a set of points that would get me into a college where I would actually write papers, read, and listen in class because I was actually going to learn something.   I used to think that high school was to college what middle school was to high school; it's repetitious, seemingly pointless, and was only used as a stepping-stone to make the next step.

 

That isn't that case anymore.   The whole point of this Academy is so that wouldn't be the case anymore. I got a first-rate education from vastly over-qualified teachers for two years in a variety of fields (specifically in writing since that is my major).   I've gotten more information and experience in the last year and a half than in the rest of my life combined. I need time to process all of that so that when I do know what it is that I'm going to contribute to this world, I'll be intelligent and mature enough to effectively do that instead of some guy with a minimum wage job with a picket sign, screaming anti-governmental mantras.

 

That's actually how I used to be.   The only difference was that I didn't have a job, I was sixteen, and my parents still paid for everything. There's another thing that I will take from here and hold onto as tightly as an asthmatic holds onto their inhaler: I'm not a generic angsty teenager anymore.   I still am mad at the world for various reasons but the strange thing is that my teachers and advisors are more angry at things than I am. I like that because before I was just among my friends ranting about how the government was screwing me in these various ways that I read bout in a Chomsky book. Now I still sometimes say such things but instead I have this 45-year-old next to me in class or in the dorms (some of the teachers live with us) saying, “Actually, Geoff, you're wrong. I was there when that happened and this is how it was.”   These people who teach me everything I know today have the education and the life experience to be able to have distaste for political or social scenarios only they have a focused reason. They know exactly what it is that they're talking about and they're completely willing and eager to talk to me about that. I normally would have to search up and down for that sort of grounding opinion and aged, wise insight. Now I'm swimming in it and can't get away from it.

 

Last year when the war in Iraq broke out, a discussion broke out on campus that went on for months that I actually tried to avoid. I'm relatively apathetic towards political happenings and so I normally avoid the ethical and philosophical discussions that seem to accompany the talks that go on. Walking around campus and going to class was like watching the BBC all day only I was involved in the talks intimately. My U.S. History teacher stopped class one day every other week to answer questions and explain the US-Iraq relations and how the war was going to affect that and why all of this was even happening. He's a PhD and so he knows exactly what it was what he was saying in almost every conceivable way, and if he didn't he know how to help us find a way to get what we wanted to know. There was even a meeting in the library one night where several teachers volunteered to answer questions and concerns about the war and how to handle our feelings of confusion and discontent. Frankly political discussion makes me roll my eyes in disgust but I much preferred this way of going about these things. It's much better than the unfocused paranoia that accompanies the news these days.

 

That's why I'm here on the couch right now in front of the TV. I need the break. I don't feel like doing anything important because I've done a lot since I came back to school in September and I know I will have more when I get back. I've already had a reading, a 5-minute stand-up comedy routine, a ten-minute screenplay of a comedy skit, and several advanced grammar tests done and turned-in before I was allotted this week to go home to bask in the nothingness of unassigned work and vacation time. My only problem is I can only watch TV for so long now. I used to be able to do it for hours and days on end. I still can but now I have this empty feeling after doing it. I can't enjoy the shows and movies that I used to because I start thinking about the plot structure and characterization of each scene. It's actually ruined the majority of my movie viewings but makes the masterpieces even more brilliant.

 

So that explains why it's now, four days later at one fifty in the morning I sit on my couch, back in the dorms now that break is over, putting the final edits on this article that I started writing in front of the TV back home. I really don't want to have that idle time anymore. Sleep is nice but a purpose and a positive outlook on my future helps me wake up on those dreadful mornings before class.