Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of six poetry collections (one full-length, four chapbooks, and one forthcoming full-length collection from Ravenna Press); an experimental memoir (An Unsuitable Princess: A True Fantasy/A Fantastical Memoir, Jaded Ibis Press 2014); and a forthcoming novel, The Hawkman: A Fairy Tale of the Great War, from Amberjack Publishing. More information is available at her official website.
In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with LaForge about her upcoming work, her writing process, Greek mythology, teaching, and of course, politics!
– Jane Rosenberg LaForge…
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We hand over our passports as part of the routine. The customs officer reads the country of origin and watches how I’m already taking my glasses off, from years of hearing that being requested. I watch my husband talk to the officer, I can’t seem to make out the words as my ears are still cloudy from the long flight. I rarely feel completely clear until an hour from landing.
“Do you work?” the officer asks me.
“I am not working but rather helping my husband succeed,” I respond. He gives me a blank stare and sure enough, no immediate follow-up.
“Where is your husband’s office located?”
“Los Angeles. Want me to get more specific?”
“Is he looking for a change of career? And yeah, I assumed it’s in LA County if you’re landing here.”…
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Rambling through the brown hills and
rumpled ridges from the observatory
that reminded me every element in
my body (carbon, calcium, nitrogen,
hydrogen, phosphorus, and the like)
came from an ancient star—but
all I can think about are swaths of
star-drenched redwoods, stippled starfish,
all the star-crossed lovers in the world who
shoot past each other, just out of reach.
In these moments after the molten sun
has sunk under the Pacific, a raw wind
whipping through the ribs of the Jeep and
my friend’s bare shoulder leaning into
my own tank-topped chest, I gaze up,
past the slender palms and power lines
to the glimmering specks in the dark
purple ocean of the sky, and consider
how the chemicals were put to better use.
– Ben Groner III…
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Siobhan Vivian is the award-winning author of 2016’s The Last Boy and Girl in the World, 2012’s The List, and the trilogy of novels, Burn for Burn, which she co-wrote with Jenny Han. She graduated from the University of the Arts with a degree in Writing for Film and Television and received her MFA in Creative Writing: Children’s Literature from The New School in NYC. She was an editor at Alloy Entertainment and was a scriptwriter for The Disney Channel. Siobhan currently resides in Pittsburgh, PA, and teaches a Writing Youth Literature course at the University of Pittsburgh.
What was the first story you ever wrote?
It was a piece I had written to get into undergrad. I had done a little creative writing in high school because someone told me the [creative writing] class was easy.…
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Linger awhile . . . so fair thou art.
–Goethe, Faust
the little honorary pallbearers
place their boutonnieres
on the casket before it is lowered,
but for once I am not thinking
about death or about the woman
I knew well long ago, nor—
when people I haven’t seen
for decades hug me as if
just last night we were swapping
stories around someone’s back-
yard fire pit—nor am I, in this
moment, obsessing about
the passage of time, caught
up instead, as it comes over
the slight rise, weaving through
the headstones, silk roses, teddy
bears, tiny American flags,
the guy in a straw hat throwing
wilted flowersinto the back
of a pickup truck, struck
by the sound of someone else’s
bagpipe procession, the wind
taking some notes, softening
the edges of others so that
one could almost believe
in some other land there, foreign
but familiar, just over the hill,
but fornow it’s enough to be here
in this moment, the one in which
my granddaughter kisses my wet
cheek, reminding me of nothing else,
carrying with it no dramatic irony,
no conceit, just a moment
like so many, these days,
I might wish to let linger.…
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On March 7, 2004, the lifeless body of 62-year-old Spalding Gray was pulled from Manhattan’s East River. He had been missing for two months. An actor/storyteller who wrote and performed autobiographical monologues for stage and screen—his most well-known is Swimming to Cambodia—Gray had apparently committed suicide.
Gray became famous by talking about—among other things—his experiences in the warm waters of Southeast Asia while working as an actor in the acclaimed 1984 movie, The Killing Fields. But he ended his life twenty years later in the cold waters off New York City. Was he aware, during the last moments of his life, of that morbid irony? …
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The smell of roasting coffee mixed with the funk of old coffee shop swirled in the air, just underneath the tang of stale cigarette smoke. Classic diner music played overheard as the rubbery seats underneath my ass cried under my shifting, restless weight. With the exception of a few lost souls sitting solo at the bar, coffee cups wrapped intimately around their index fingers and cupped warmly in their palms, we were the only two people in the out of the way truck stop at three in the morning.
I watched her across the laminate tabletop, her eyes fixated on the cup she swirled between her hands. A cigarette rested effortlessly between her cracked lips, it’s pungent plume flowing effortlessly into the depths of her diseased lungs and then back out into the air between us. …
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