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Mary Frisbee’s Black Fin immediately draws us in with a gripping situation and holds our interest throughout. Twenty-seven year old Olive, given a probable medical death sentence, decides to take her own life to spare herself from an agonizing end, but in the very process of trying to kill herself, her plans change abruptly when she takes on...
Reading helps me through my highs and lows. It helps me shape my view of the world, helps me describe the ineffable, helps me make sense of old mysteries while stirring up new ones. I don’t always know the right thing to say to someone, but I usually have a poem or story to share. Some of my favorite books have disappeared into the hands...
Happy Holidays from the North American Review! In December of 1923, the North American Review published Winifred Kirkland's piece, "A Christmas City of the Old South". Winifred Kirkland wrote on a variety of subjects, including; religious pieces, histories on the girlhoods of famous women, and several juvenile books. Today we bring you "A...
I found a deer in the backyard today. It was dead.
I had gone out to mow the back terrace, a section of the yard that slopes down to the next street, and there was this deer there. I don't know if it was male or female, or how old it was.
There were lots of flies around its head, especially around its eyes. I think the flies were...
Last year, on Christmas Day, the poet Dick Allen passed away. The author of nine books of poetry and a former Poet Laureate of Connecticut, Dick was a formidable presence in American literature.
It was fitting that he died on Christmas, a day of birth. He would have appreciated the cyclical implication of that. His last published book was...
It is 2016 in the middle of winter.
However, MoMA is warm.
I am part of Star Black’s “Writing in Response to Art” class which meets on Saturdays. The course involves our ragtag team of writers heading to the museum of the day to write pieces inspired by the works there. Often, we head to the locations with only Professor Black’s prompts...
My primary interest as of recently is the manner in which a “dream narrative” functions. The visions we have in dreams seem to reflect the surrealist nature of our minds, and also seem suited to the writing of the dream as a poem. I have been working on dream narratives for the past few months and plan to compile them as a collection. It...
The line as a not necessarily articulate unit of sensation—a breath, a strain of cerebral activity, the muffled speech of a mother vibrating through the womb to reach a fetus—this is more important to my experience of a poem than anything else. I’d venture to say that, as a poem is a felt thing, these visceral elements are most important...
Reading Ted Kooser's work, I often think of what Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman wrote in his book, Sabbath as Resistance: "Worship that does not lead to neighborly compassion cannot be faithful worship." This same sense of "neighborliness" has been apparent in the poetry of Kooser, who also served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate,...
The North American Review is proud to be published at the University of Northern Iowa, located in Cedar Falls, Iowa. In keeping with our pride in our academic community, the North American Review is sharing interviews conducted for the Final Thursday Reading Series in Cedar Falls. Now in its 19th season, the Final Thursday Reading Series...
When I turned 60, after years of writing poetry and attending poetry workshops, I fell into a funk; I didn’t have a single book to show for all my work. But despair takes you just so far. With the help of a friend who was also a publisher, I put my first book together, found a striking cover, and voila—oh wait—my would-be publisher has gone...
Repost from article "Noir, noir" by Melody Parker printed in The Courier May 23, 2018
Mary Frisbee Johnson is pretty certain about one thing: Her sister-in-law isn’t going to like reading Johnson’s new book, “Black Fin.”
“She loves reading mysteries, and she’s told me she wants to read mine, but ‘Black Fin’ is dark. It’s not a cheerful,...
I was very pleased to find that the short story assigned to me for the Fall 2018 issue of the North American Review was about food. I have a passion for not only cooking food, but also drawing and painting food. I have always found that food and art are very similar in that people eat with their eyes. The texture, shapes, and colors in food...
The act of confession reveals the soft underbelly. But what are acceptable topics? I have heard a certain male writer is famous for saying Sharon Olds would be a great writer if she only got out of bed once in a while. I have been told many times by male teachers and fellow writers that no one wants to read about my experience as a...
The North American Review is proud to be published at the University of Northern Iowa, located in Cedar Falls, Iowa. In keeping with our pride in our academic community, the North American Review is sharing interviews conducted for the Final Thursday Reading Series in Cedar Falls. Now in its 19th season, the Final Thursday Reading Series...
Robley Wilson’s literary accomplishments were unmistakable and impressive. He was the author of six highly regarded collections of short stories, his last being Who Will Hear Your Secrets? published in 2012 by John Hopkins University Press. Boyle describes this book as “stories of power and persuasion by one of the living masters of the...
The poetic line has never seemed enough to me. No matter how expansive, no matter how musically chiming, no matter how taut, how redolent of lacunae and the presence all that emptiness delivers.
I want the song and the swaying backup singers. I want the painting and its artist of flesh and oils. I want the feathers, the nest, the sidewalk’s...
I was listening to a well-respected editor speak on an AWP panel about the type of pieces he’s drawn to and turned off by in his submission pile. He expressed his dislike for work that sounds like it was written in response to a writing prompt. Being the good student that I am, I took notes, not wanting to forget that my own work should never...
My poem “Iconography of a Storm” began in February 2009 at an ekphrastic poetry workshop. The daylong class was held at the San Jose Museum of Art and taught by beloved Bay Area poets/professors, Nils Peterson and Sally Ashton. The main exhibition was “Culture of Spontaneity: San Francisco Abstract Expressionism from the Permanent Collection...
All my life I’ve followed a couple of paths—poetry and poetry in motion. As a dancer-turned-yogi who has always written poems, I used to feel I was doing the splits, straddling two dissimilar and distant worlds—poetry, being arguably the most refined of the verbal arts, and dance, (arguably) the most refined of the physical arts. It felt hard...
Among poems I’ve written, “On Your Way to the Theater” is one of my favorites. This is solely because it expresses something true to my own feelings about aging, and does so in a way that I find pleasurable, that is, I like it’s bemused tone as it laments our universal and inevitable progress toward annihilation. The poem says what it says...
When people ask me what I write about, I sometimes tell them that I am drawn to visionaries with blind spots, especially would-be scientists or artists, or especially figures in history whose ideas were progressive for their time, but are now regarded as absurd, or as pseudoscience. One of my first published stories was about Eliza Farnham,...
In one of my favorite interviews with James Galvin, he talks about writing out of the fear of not knowing verses writing from a sense of knowing. Though none of us can predict our own futures there are distinctive factors, individual and collective, that may forcibly turn our attention toward the uncertain. In these poems from my...
North American Review has kindly invited me to say hello. About me: I’m so happy you’re there. I write because something is fascinating and there is often no one sitting across the room to tell. I also work at a performing arts center, and recently I’ve had the joy of meeting two inspiring people. I hope you don’t mind if I talk to them as...
One of the common themes of my prose poems is isolation/existential angst. I try not to be sappy about it. Instead, I try to make the darker themes somewhat beautiful, whether through imagery or musicality. Being that I’m from Southern California, beach imagery is common in my work. I also mix in urban imagery. I’m interested in the sudden...
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