Issue 100 | Spring 2019
Issue #100 is our milestone thirtieth-anniversary issue on the theme of friendship, rivalry, and collaboration. Cover art (with 100 gloves) is by Marianne Lettieri. Inside: Shane McCrae on Louise Glück and loneliness; Padraig O Tuama on longing for home; Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison on the poems that grew out of their friendship. We also asked seventeen artists how they changed after turning thirty—including Lia Chavez, Erica Grimm, Bruce Cockburn, Claire Holley, Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, and more. Plus: interview with A.E. Stallings and Adrianne Kalfopoulou on friendship, activism, and poetry; poems on friendship by Luci Shaw, Rodger Kamenetz, and Erika Meitner; fiction by Gina Ochsner; Melissa Range and Christopher Beha on their top ten books of the past thirty years.
Editorial Statement
James K.A. Smith, The Best of Rivals
Fiction
Gina Ochsner, Burn
Patricia Robertson, The Master of Salt
Poetry
Luci Shaw, Take These Words
Rodger Kamenetz, I and We
The House of Reinvention
“I Traveled through a Land of Men…”
Aliki Barnstone, Four Sonnets for Monica Hand
Avraham Chalfi, Anonymous in the Rain
Philip Terman, My Grandfather in Green
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Cutting Hair
Shirley’s Spaniel
Sophia Stid, Inside, she watches the hands of men
C.W. Buckley, To My Future Caregiver
Margaret Gibson, What He Knew
Interview
A.E. Stallings and Adrianne Kalfopoulou, A conversation on poetry, refugees, friendship, and service
On Friendship
Collaboration, rivalry, influence, and the longing for home
Molly McCully Brown and Susannah Nevison, Proof, Matter, Stars
Erika Meitner, Letters to Hillary
Nate Klug, Open, Empty Hands
Shane McCrae, Quick, What’s the German Word for “Friendship-Sickness”?
Bruce Herman, Makoto Fujimura, Malcolm Guite, and J.A.C. Redford, We Lift Each Other into Light: Music, and Poetry in Conversation
Bob Crawford, Kinsman-Redeemers
Pádraig Ó Tuama, Sam’s House
Life After Thirty
Artists and songwriters on what they learned with time
The Path of Vocation: Olga Lah, Catherine Prescott, Melissa Weinman,
Wayne Forte, Marianne Lettieri, Erica Grimm
Collaboration and Community: Theodore Prescott, Leslie Iwai, Letitia Huckaby, Sedrick Huckaby, Claire Holley
Death, Change and Time: Natalie Settles, Mohammed Ali, Steve Prince, Barry Krammes, Lia Chavez, Bruce Cockburn
Thirty Years, Thirty Books
Three writers on their ten favorite books published after 1989
Melissa Range, Poetry: A Word We Have Not Learned
Christopher Beha, Fiction: The Pleasures of Obsolescence
Morgan Meis, Love, Hate, and Digestion: A Miscellany
Contributors
Atar Hadari’s works include Songs from Bialik (Syracuse), Rembrandt’s Bible (Indigo Dreams) and the Pen Translates award-winning Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin (Arc). He translates a monthly verse Bible column for Mosaic.
Bruce Herman’s paintings are exhibited nationally and internationally, and are part of many public and private collections including the Vatican Museums in Rome. He holds the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts at Gordon College. www.bruceherman.com
Claire Holley is a singer-songwriter who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. Her new collection of hymns, Every Hour, is due out this summer.
Letitia Huckaby’s mixed-media work incorporating photography and textiles has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is represented by the Liliana Bloch Gallery and has her MFA from the University of North Texas.
Sedrick Huckaby is a graduate of Boston University and Yale University and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is represented by Valley House Gallery.
Leslie Iwai is an installation artist and sculptor whose studies in mathematics, chemistry, and architecture inform her interactive and material-rich body of work. She lives in Middleton, Wisconsin.
Rodger Kamenetz has recent work in Southern Review and Kenyon Review. His eleven books include The Jew in the Lotus, The History of Last Night’s Dream, and the forthcoming Yonder (Diálogos).
Nate Klug is the author of Anyone (Chicago), a book of poems. He works as Congregationalist minister and lives in the Bay Area of California.
Barry Krammes is an assemblage artist and arts educator who taught at Biola University for thirty-five years. He has also taught assemblage classes at the Glen Workshop. www.barrykrammes.com
Olga Lah’s site-specific installations explore ideas about existence. A second-generation Korean American, she was born and raised in the Los Angeles area and holds degrees in studio art, art history, and theology.
Marianne Lettieri is a visual artist whose mixed-media constructions investigate shifts in cultural values associated with everyday objects. She was named the 2017 Silicon Valley artist laureate.
Morgan Meis writes for many different journals and magazines as a critic and essayist. He has a PhD in philosophy and teaches art, philosophy, and writing at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.
Erika Meitner is the author of five books, including Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in poetry. She currently directs the creative writing programs at Virginia Tech.
Susannah Nevison is the author of two collections of poetry, Lethal Theater (Ohio State) and Teratology (Persea) and co-author with Molly McCully Brown of the collection In the Field Between Us. She teaches at Sweet Briar College.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet, speaker, and theologian whose work centers around themes of language, religion, conflict, and art. His books include Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community, Sorry for Your Troubles (both from Canterbury), and In the Shelter (Hodder & Stoughton).
Gina Ochsner’s books include the story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall (Georgia), selected for the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the novel The Hidden Letters of Velta B (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). www.ginaochsner.com
Catherine Prescott is a portrait painter from Pennsylvania. Recent commissions include the Honorable Reverend Clementa Pinckney, pastor of Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, and the official state portrait of Governor Tom Corbett.
Theodore Prescott is emeritus professor of art at Messiah College. A sculptor and writer, he is married to the painter Catherine Prescott.
Steve Prince is director of engagement and distinguished artist in residence at the Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary. He is represented by Zucot Gallery in Atlanta and Eyekons Gallery in Grand Rapids.
Melissa Range is the author of two collections of poetry, Scriptorium (Beacon) and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech). She teaches at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.
J.A.C. Redford is a composer, arranger, orchestrator, and conductor of concert, chamber, and choral music, film, television, and theater scores, and music for recordings. www.jacredford.com
Ron Reed is founding artistic director of Vancouver’s Pacific Theatre. As a playwright, his most recent works include Tolkien, Refuge of Lies, and The Top Ten Thousand of All Time. He is currently adapting Peter Morgan’s screenplay Longford for the stage.
Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is the author of Hungry Foxes (Aldrich) and the forthcoming Flying Yellow (Paraclete). She has recent poems in Christian Century, Poetry East, and Town Creek Poetry.
Patricia Robertson is the author of the story collections City of Orphans (Porcupine’s Quill), shortlisted for the BC Book Prize, and The Goldfish Dancer (Biblioasis). Her third collection, Hour of the Crab, is forthcoming in 2020. She teaches at the University of Winnipeg.
Natalie Settles’s drawings and large-scale drawing installations are part research, part meditation. Her work intermingles the history and inquiries of art and science.
Luci Shaw has been writer in residence at Regent College since 1988 and is the author of over thirty-five books of poetry and creative nonfiction. Her newest collection is Eye of the Beholder (Paraclete).
Sophia Stid has received fellowships from the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. An MFA student at Vanderbilt, she is the winner of the 2017 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers.
Philip Terman’s most recent book is Our Portion: New and Selected Poems (Autumn House). A selection of his poems, My Dear Friend Kafka, has been translated into Arabic and published by Ninawa Press in Damascus, Syria. He teaches at Clarion University.
Melissa Weinman’s 1999 solo show at Tatistcheff Gallery was reviewed by Eleanor Heartney in Art in America magazine. Her MFA is from the University of Southern California.
Achnowledgements
Luci Shaw’s “Take These Words” appears in Eye of the Beholder (Paraclete, 2018).
A.E. Stallings’s translation of Cavafy’s “The City” © 2006 by A.E. Stallings. From Hapax
(TriQuarterly/Northwestern). All rights reserved.
Adrianne Kalfopoulou’s “This City” appears in A History of Too Much (Red Hen, 2018).