Visiting Artists and Writers
 Susanna Coffey |
 Halsey Rodman |
 Carol Hepper |
 John Lees |
Excerpt from Mitz
by Sigrid Nunez
It was a Thursday in July. That afternoon Leonard and Virginia Woolf drove from London to Cambridge to visit their young friends Barbara and Victor Rothschild. The Rothschilds had been married the December before. They lived in a grand old gray house called Merton Hall. When the Woolfs arrived, they found Barbara waiting outside for them. She sat on a chair on the lawn, a large straw hat shading her pretty face. They had known her since she was a baby. Now here she was expecting a baby herself.
They had tea—just the three of them; Victor was napping. Fresh lemonade—with gin, if they liked—and thin, freshly cut sandwiches. The room was filled with flowers set in large alabaster bowls. A bee had got indoors and kept drifting from bowl to bowl, from red rose to yellow rose, murmuring indecisively. Barbara was indecisive too. What to name the child if a boy? What to name the child if a girl? She and Victor were going abroad soon—where should they stay? Then Victor joined them, ruddy and bright-eyed from his nap and all eager to show them the garden. Virginia, who was very particular about gardens, did not like this one (“stuck like a jam tart . . . a pretentious uncared for garden,” she derided it two days later in her diary).
Excerpt from A Great Piece of Elephant
By Lee Abbott
Even five years after he’ d tried to kill himself on the Bureau of Management bladed road just outside the gates to his brother’s spread the Capitan Mountains almost within a stone’s throw of the birthplace
original Smokey Bear, LT couldn’t figure out why. His life, he’ d thought, been dandy. Well, semi-dandy. Maybe dandy with an asterisk, which infernal punctuation led you to the finest of fine print where you learned about two ex-wives and the ribs he’ d busted doing deep-sea salvage out of Astoria, Oregon, and the four years playing softball for the Navy during Vietnam the bankrupt Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors franchise and the booze—oh, the and oceans and rivers of booze: Oso Negro and vodka and Gordon’s Early Times and Miller and Coors and Robitussin and Listerine and, lordy, grape or grain that might take one vale and turn it into another. But suicide? Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he told the first AA meeting he attended on Buckle Street in east Lubbock, where he now worked building cabinets playing guitar and knocking the golf ball around on occasion while generally trying to keep his head screwed on straight. Sometimes—the blue times, times when the modern world seemed to be missing a handful of its precious parts, the times when he felt each of his fifty-five years falling from him like old skin—he was tempted to quote one long-gone comic crucifixion of Christ: “Just one of the parties that got out of hand.”
July Visiting Artists and Writers:
 Michael Ryan  Emily Cheng  Barbara Gallucci  Robert Henry  Willie Cole  Doreen Gildroy We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.
-Ad Reinhardt
|