by Gina Balibrera
James Morrison is a Detroit native, Professor of Literature, Film and Creative Writing at Claremont McKenna College, and an extraordinary writer. He is the author of a memoir, Broken Fever (2001), a novel, The Lost Girl (2007), a collection of short stories, Said and Done (2009) and most recently the novella Everyday Ghosts . Morrison’s work in Everyday Ghosts balances hilarity (the shrieking antics of a hay-feverish monk who has a terrible fear of ants) and the graceful sort of light-touch poignancy inside of an image or line of dialogue, by which his reader is moved, altered, grateful, for having entered such particular narrative richness. James Morrison’s essay “Happiness in a Corner: On Jonathan Strong” appears in MQR’s current print issue, Fall 2011. He agreed to talk with me in October, 2011.
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by Monique Daviau
Last summer, I convinced my friend Chris that he and I should drive from Brooklyn to East Hampton, Long Island, to place a bundle of asparagus on the grave of a poet he had never heard of. I hoped to be very convincing when explaining that Frank O’Hara was my favorite poet, meant the world to me, and that I needed to make the pilgrimage. Fortunately, Chris is always open to using his Zipcar membership to drive down to the tippy-tip of Long Island for a day of cemetery-going, and on the day we’d planned to take the trip, the sun was shining and it was almost as if the city were throwing us out. Go see Frank! As a bonus: perfect beach weather!
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ONE DAY THE DOCTOR TELLS YOU YOU’RE BLIND
to the truth. It’s physical; something about
the retina, rods, and cones. Truth is a wave-
length in the spectrum you’re unable to detect.
All your life you’ve been compensating,
convincing yourself you could see what you
could not. Suddenly you’ve got questions
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by A.L. Major
In November, I watched the National Book Awards ceremony via an online broadcast. A U of Michigan alum of 05′, Jesmyn Ward, was nominated for her novel Salvage The Bones , and if she won, I wanted to witness it. Of course, my impulse to watch the awards was a self-involved, highly illogical one: that if I am a U of Michigan MFA Fiction student and she is an alum of this same program, then I might be able to produce a work of similar notability and talent. When she won, I was surprisingly elated. As if I had won too. I bought her books, the hour after, not yet critical of why it hadn’t occurred to me to buy them before. Later, I realized I’ve become a complacent reader.
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by Marshall Walker Lee
If you believe the Times, and why not believe them, Google is developing everything from robot drones and driverless cars to a space elevator, which, so far as I can deduce, is a kind of hybrid, Wonkafied rocket-cum-slingshot. Great, I say go for it, Google! To tell you the truth, I don’t care about intelligent droids, wireless refrigerators or a dinner plate that loads my bio-feedback straight to Facebook. My interest is in that ‘X’ and it’s whispered hint of secret happenings. The sex of X, the intrigue, that’s what caught my attention, because—here’s my confession— I am obsessed with the letter X
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