It’s not often that a writer is equally adept at poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism, yet Lee Upton has been an exception to the rule for over a decade. Unsurprisingly, her latest novel—Wrongful—only cements that fact, as it’s a thoroughly stirring and imaginative but realistic mystery/character study (in the self-aware vein of Agatha Christie) that exemplifies her many talents.
Per the official synopsis:
When the famous novelist Mira Wallacz goes missing at the festival devoted to celebrating her work, the attendees assume the worst—and some hope for the worst. Ten years after the festival, Geneva Finch, an ideal reader, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to Mira Wallacz. A twisty literary mystery dealing with duplicity, envy, betrayal, and love between an entertainment agent and a self-deprecating former priest, Wrongful explores the many ways we can get everything wrong, time and again, even after we’re certain we discovered the truth.
Peter E. Murphy is the author of a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry and prose including the forthcoming A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption about growing up in Wales and New York City. The founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University based in Atlantic City, he leads writing workshops around the US an in Europe.
I met Peter Murphy at the Murphy Writing Winter Getaway in January 2024. I was lucky enough to be one of thirty-two scholarship recipients for the Getaway’s 30th anniversary and was able to speak with Peter during the photo taken of Peter with the awardees. Fortunately, Mr. Murphy is easygoing and lighthearted and he did not look down his nose when I used the fact that we share the name “Peter” as an introduction.…
Untitled, from the series “How to Make the Coffin Dance”, Myriam Dalal, 2016
D Day
On the day of my brother’s funeral, I heard that my father danced in front of his coffin. I tried to imagine it: the steps, the location of the coffin in the parking lot of the building, the mourners watching my father, the face of my brother, that of my father, what each of them was wearing that day and whether my father’s clothes would have been undone, his shirt coming partly unbuttoned during the performance. I wasn’t allowed to come down to the building’s entrance to see my brother in the coffin. I was told it was better if I stayed there, sitting on the sofa in the foyer of our home, while the rest of the family went down to see him lying down with his eyes closed one last time.…
Prize-winning poet Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment, and her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks, and she maintains a long-running blog. In this interview (conducted by writer Ian Haight), Michael discusses her experiences as an American undergraduate educator, as well as the impacts of technology and her recent residency at Joya, Spain, on her writing.
You’ve recently retired from a career in academia, and you worked primarily with undergraduates—especially those new to a higher education environment. How do these students tend to value literature and creative writing, and how has this valuation changed over time?
My university job mainly took place in the context of academic support for students deemed “at risk” of not persisting to a degree.…
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton & Company)
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures the allure of gardens for those with equivocal feelings about fellow humans, writing that Sally Seton “often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” Gardens offer us a glimpse into prelapsarian natural beauty and slow living, but as Olivia Laing demonstrates in The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, not everyone gets to relish the peace of these Edens. They are inherently politicized and deeply emotional spaces.
Laing’s celebrated works of creative nonfiction include To the River and The Lonely City, both of which prove she is unrivaled in her ability to interweave memoir with accounts of English landscapes and other artistic touchstones.…
Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions by Marina Rubin (Crowsnest Books)
Knockout Beauty and Other Afflictions by Marina Rubin is a recent collection of seventeen short stories about various female characters such as Daisy in “Jaula” about whom Rubin writes, “In writing circles, she was known more for her beauty than her talent.” It’s a trick for the reader. After she has an alleged romantic encounter with a famous male writer, the critics change their tune about Daisy: “Turns out the girl could write.” The trick could become a feminist critique, the “jaula” of the title a cage into which women characters and often women writers find themselves trapped.
The trick, a sort of epiphany, might even begin with the title, even with the cover of the book itself, showing an attractive blonde gazing out over a vague flame behind the capitalized letters KNOCKOUT BEAUTY.…
To talk about this book, we must start with the mountain. Close your eyes.
You are a thousand feet tall and thousands of miles wide. Many things crack and spurt and shoot across your back, all monster magic words: bloodroot, spotted skunk cabbage, blackberry cane, poison ivy. You feel the hushed step of deer, the turkeys raking through the mud. You see the man, moving through the brush like a “diseased fox,” stalk and kill two women in the woods. You are the only witness to their deaths, and the violence of this act sinks into you like a splinter. Things split and break loose. Things that live deep within you slip out. This is where the book begins: a murder, a trembling, a magic shaking out of the mountain and upending the lives of our main characters, sisters Sheila and Angie. …
