by Ashley David
Our new website and blog have been up for a couple months now, and here’s a taste of what folks have been saying: Fiction Writers Review reviewed the new MQR website, and Randall Mann’s “The One Sentence Review” buzzed around Book Forum, The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet: The Blog, and The Rumpus. In addition, posts have been tweeted about on Twitter and posted on Facebook. In short, the conversation is on the move. There’s only one problem…
Continue Reading
by Vicki Lawrence
Jaimy Gordon, who to her surprise just won the National Book Award for her novel Lord of Misrule, called me up the week before the award ceremony, when she was still just a nominee. She’s published a couple pieces in MQR, so I was happy to hear from her—and pleased to discover the reason for her call. It seems that Lord of Misrule began life—like most fiction, I think—as a bunch of characters in her head years before any of it got written down. Her first attempt to get those characters onto paper, and to wrestle with their lives and their relationships and their time and place, formed itself into a short story called “A Night’s Work,” which we published in MQR back in 1994 (and which was selected for Best American Short Stories 1995).
Continue Reading
by Dilruba Ahmed
There’s a song that my husband likes to sing to our son at bedtime. It’s not a traditional bedtime song, by any means, but sung slowly and softly, it’s sweeter than any lullaby I know. And few things are quite as delicious as hearing a two-year old sing lines such as
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where
They all came from
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go
When the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
with both great expression and the lisps and omissions characteristic of toddler speech. I thought of this song when I heard the sad news that poet Steve Orlen had suddenly passed away. During a class in Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, Steve once concluded an insightful discussion of Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill”—a poem that grapples with the mysterious workings of memory—by saying something like, Once in a while, something jumps out from your unconscious mind and scares the s**t out of you.
Continue Reading
by Dilruba Ahmed
I’m a sucker for shiny objects—scarves, bracelets, candy wrappers—and drawn to nearly anything bearing deep, saturated colors. Had I encountered Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry in my local bookstore, I would have been magnetically attracted to the book’s rich magenta cover, which is embellished with a U.S. map suggesting the sheen of an embroidered sari. But even a quick peek into this new collection from the University of Arkansas Press proves that the volume is not just eye candy. With titles such as “September 10, 2001,” “The Mascot of Beavercreek High Breaks Her Silence,” “Urdu Funk: The Gentle Art of Subtitles,” and “Generica/ America,” the collection’s table of contents hints at the diversity of voices and themes among contemporary South Asian American poets.
Continue Reading
by Ashley David
I love being read to. I also love reading aloud. I relish the permutation of reading that is shared. And, in my experience, the opportunity for shared reading tends to crop up in delightful and unexpected ways when I’m on the road. At the tail end of a year and a half spent working and traveling in various parts of the Pacific Rim, for example, I met some SoCal surfers in a hostel in Auckland. New Zealand was their first stop on a surf tour around the world. They were green travelers whereas I was just about ready to go home. I was broke and looking for a job whereas they were flush and looking for a van. We struck a deal. If I found a job first, then off to work I’d go. If they found a van first, then off to the road we’d go. They “won,” which is to say that so did I, and we spent the next three or so weeks chasing waves on the North Island (and hiking and exploring when the surf didn’t cooperate). We also read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions together.
Continue Reading
