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 WRITI NG AMERICA 
 
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 NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS 
 
A MILLENNIUM ARTS PROJECT 
 
 WRITINGAME RICA 
 
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 NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS 
 
Contents 
 
 Chairman's Message 3 
 
 Editor's Note 5 
 
 The Writer's Place by E.L. Doctorow 7 
 
 State and Writer 8 
 
 Afterword by Gigi Bradford 1 08 
 
CHAIRMAN'S MESSAGE 
 
 VV 1x1 N Vj J\ 1VI Hj Ja 1 V_j J\ celebrates the achievements of National Endowment for the 
 
 Arts Literature Fellowship recipients, a program that has existed nearly as long as 
 the agency itself. We asked 50 writers — one representing each state — to contribute 
 a piece for this anthology, which seeks to evoke a sense of place, a portrait in 
 miniature of American life as we approach the beginning of the new millennium. 
 We take as our motto Whitman's lines: "I hear America singing, the varied carols 
 I hear." These writers are part of that American song, that American story. 
 
 The writers — and the 2,200 other recipients of Creative Writing Fellowships — 
 have made their mark on American letters and our culture this latter half of 
 the 20th century. We are grateful for their contributions and are proud to have 
 supported so many who tell the story — in poetry and prose — of the people 
 and places of our Nation. They belong to us all, for we all participate in writing 
 America through the stories of our lives. 
 
 WRITING AMERICA is an official part of the National Endowment for 
 the Arts' celebration of the Millennium through the arts. 
 
 - Jane Alexander 
 
State and Writer 
 
 Alabama 
 
 Dennis Covington 
 
 8 
 
 Montana 
 
 William Kittredge 
 
 58 
 
 Alaska 
 
 John Haines 
 
 10 
 
 Nebraska 
 
 Ron Hansen 
 
 60 
 
 Arizona 
 
 Alberto Rios 
 
 12 
 
 Nevada 
 
 Teresa Jordan 
 
 62 
 
 Arkansas 
 
 CD. Wright 
 
 14 
 
 New Hampshire 
 
 Maxine Kumin 
 
 64 
 
 California 
 
 Maxine Hong Kingston 
 
 16 
 
 New Jersey 
 
 Robert Pinsky 
 
 66 
 
 Colorado 
 
 Linda Hogan 
 
 18 
 
 New Mexico 
 
 Joy Harjo 
 
 68 
 
 Connecticut 
 
 J.D. McClatchy 
 
 20 
 
 New York 
 
 Paul Auster 
 
 70 
 
 Delaware 
 
 W.D. Snodgrass 
 
 22 
 
 North Carolina 
 
 Kaye Gibbons 
 
 72 
 
 Florida 
 
 Joy Williams 
 
 24 
 
 North Dakota 
 
 Larry Watson 
 
 74 
 
 Georgia 
 
 Alice Walker 
 
 26 
 
 Ohio 
 
 Rita Dove 
 
 76 
 
 Hawaii 
 
 Cathy Song 
 
 28 
 
 Oklahoma 
 
 Diane Glancy 
 
 78 
 
 Idaho • 
 
 Robert Wrigley 
 
 30 
 
 Oregon 
 
 Kim Stafford 
 
 80 
 
 Illinois 
 
 Li-Young Lee 
 
 32 
 
 Pennsylvania 
 
 Annie Dillard 
 
 82 
 
 Indiana 
 
 Scott Russell Sanders 
 
 34 
 
 Rhode Island 
 
 Michael S. Harper 
 
 84 
 
 Iowa 
 
 Jane Smiley 
 
 36 
 
 South Carolina 
 
 Susan Ludvigson 
 
 86 
 
 Kansas 
 
 Albert Goldbarth 
 
 38 
 
 South Dakota 
 
 Dan O'Brien 
 
 88 
 
 Kentucky 
 
 Bobbie Ann Mason 
 
 40 
 
 Tennessee 
 
 Charles Wright , 
 
 90 
 
 Louisiana 
 
 Ernest Gaines 
 
 42 
 
 Texas 
 
 Sandra Cisneros 
 
 92 
 
 Maine 
 
 Ira Sadoff 
 
 44 
 
 Utah 
 
 Mark Strand 
 
 94 
 
 Maryland 
 
 Linda Pas tan 
 
 46 
 
 Vermont 
 
 Louise Gliick 
 
 96 
 
 Massachusetts 
 
 Linda Gregg 
 
 48 
 
 Virginia 
 
 Richard Bausch 
 
 98 
 
 Michigan 
 
 Philip Levine 
 
 50 
 
 Washington 
 
 Colleen McElroy 
 
 100 
 
 Minnesota 
 
 David Mura 
 
 52 
 
 West Virginia 
 
 Denise Giardina 
 
 102 
 
 Mississippi 
 
 Richard Ford 
 
 54 
 
 Wisconsin 
 
 Jane Hamilton 
 
 104 
 
 Missouri 
 
 Mona Van Duyn 
 
 56 
 
 Wyoming 
 
 Gretel Ehrlich 
 
 106 
 
EDITOR'S NOTE 
 
 Some of the writers in this anthology are peripatetic souls, moving from place to 
 place in order to make a living or out of sheer wanderlust. Others have sprung up 
 from the soil and have been rooted all their lives in their own hometowns. All of 
 the writers, whether native sons or daughters or merely passing through, manage to 
 evoke a sense of place through their words. This anthology is designed to showcase 
 how their strong, clear voices describe American places. It is not a study in literary 
 regionalism, but a montage of vignettes from each of the 50 states. 
 
 In putting together this book, our task was fairly simple: find a writer and a work 
 or excerpt which manage to evoke each state. The difficulty arose from a surplus of 
 good writers, and many of the outstanding voices the Arts Endowment has assisted 
 over the course of a generation could not be included due to lack of space. From 
 the wealth of voices, we selected these 50, aiming in general for a mix of poetry and 
 prose, guided only by our gut feelings: does this say Pennsylvania? Does this evoke 
 a sense of Wyoming? We chose one voice for each state, one of many possibilities. 
 
 We thank all 50 writers who contributed to WRITI NG AMERICA as well as 
 E.L. Doctorow who provided the Foreword. We are grateful to their publishers, 
 not only for granting us re-print permission, but more importantly, for their ongoing 
 support of serious literary work. Gigi Bradford and Cliff Becker, who are responsible 
 for Literature grants, were instrumental in all aspects of making this anthology. 
 
 WRITING AMERICA also serves, we hope, as inspiration to emerging writers. 
 We hope this book provides a glimpse of the tremendous vitality, diversity, and energy 
 of contemporary American literature and that the works themselves will arrest your 
 attention and send you rushing off to the bookstore or library for more good words. 
 
 - Keith Donohue 
 Publications Director 
 
OUR WRITERS AND POETS FIND 
 
 THE MEANING, OR HIDDEN LIFE, 
 IN THE OBSERVABLE LIFE, THEY 
 
 ELICIT FROM THE VISIBLE WHAT 
 
 IS INVISIBLE - WHO WE ARE AND 
 
 WHERE WE ARE GOING AND TO 
 
 WHAT MORAL CONSEQUENCE. 
 
THE WRITER'S PLACE 
 
 A 
 
 poem, or a novel, is thought to be an expression of overriding individuality. In 
 fact there is a ground song from which every writer takes voice, and our recognition 
 of the genius of a writer -Mark Twain for instance - cannot exclude the people and 
 the territory he comes from. 
 
 It is the wise society that provides what discreet encouragement it can for these 
 singers who rise unbidden from the land. Inevitably, as Thoreau did with Walden, 
 writers and poets endow places with meaning, locate them in the moral universe, 
 give them a charged name. 
 
 This is essential business because uncharged with invisible meaning, the visible is 
 nothing, mere clay. 
 
 Our writers and poets find the meaning, or hidden life, in the observable life, they 
 elicit from the visible what is invisible - who we are and where we are going and to 
 what moral consequence. 
 
 Nobody else can do this for us, not our movie stars, not our workaday politicians, 
 nor our corporate CEOs nor media pundits. It is by nature a labor that must be 
 independent of our material interests. It yields the dimensional reality that can only 
 come of a multiplicity of witnesses. You will note that the TV commentator, with 
 his vast audience, will allow himself only the narrowest range of thought, the most 
 neutral diction. The writer with his small audience puts no limit on his thought and 
 glories in his diction. The dared truth inseparable from its own precise articulation 
 is what the writer and the poet will give you. It is a natural resource no less than our 
 forests, rivers, farmlands and fisheries. 
 
 - E.L. Doctorow 
 
Dennis Covington 
 
 Dennis Covington is the author 
 of Salvation on Sand Mountain, 
 which was a finalist for the 
 1995 National Book Award in 
 Nonfiction. He is also the author 
 of two novels, Lasso the Moon 
 and Lizard, which won the 
 Delacorte Press Prize for 
 a First Young Adult Novel. 
 Covington's articles and short 
 stories have appeared in The 
 New York Times, Los Angeles Times 
 Magazine, The Georgia Review, 
 Vogue, Redbook, Southern Exposure 
 and other periodicals. His play 
 adaptation of Lizard premiered at 
 the Alabama Shakespeare Festival 
 Theatre and was staged in Atlanta 
 as part of the 1 996 Olympic Arts 
 Festival. He has received the 
 Rea Non-Fiction Prize from the 
 Boston Book Review and the 
 Barrie Stavis Playwright Award 
 from the National Theatre 
 Conference. A native of 
 Birmingham, Alabama, Covington 
 directs the creative writing 
 program at the University of 
 Alabama at Birmingham, where 
 he lives with his wife, novelist 
 Vicki Covington, and their two 
 daughters. 
 
 The NEA fellowship I 
 received last year was clearly 
 a blessing. It allowed me six 
 months of concentrated 
 writing time, a paradise of 
 work. The circumstances, too, , 
 seemed significant. The award 
 came at the very moment 
 when I felt I had tapped into 
 the voice of my people, the 
 nearly forgotten culture of 
 poor Southern whites. So 
 I am grateful not only as 
 an individual writer, but as 
 a member of a generation 
 cut off from its roots. 
 
 The award came at the very moment when I felt 
 I had tapped into the voice of my people, the nearly 
 forgotten culture of poor Southern whites. 
 
ALABAMA 
 
 from 
 
 Salvation on Sand Mountain 
 
 . . .Listen up. The peculiarity of Southern experience 
 didn't end when the boll weevil ate up the cotton 
 crop. We didn't cease to be a separate country when 
 Burger King came to Meridian. We're as peculiar 
 a people now as we ever were, and the fact that our 
 culture is under assault has forced us to become 
 even more peculiar than we were before. Snake 
 handling, for instance, didn't originate back in the 
 hills somewhere. It started when people came down 
 from the hills to discover they were surrounded by 
 a hostile and spiritually dead culture. All along 
 their border with the modern world - in places like 
 Newport, Tennessee, and Sand Mountain, Alabama 
 - they recoiled. They threw up defenses. When 
 their own resources failed, they called down the 
 Holy Ghost. They put their hands through fire. 
 They drank poison. They took up serpents. 
 
 They still do. The South hasn't disappeared. 
 If anything, it's become more Southern in a last-ditch 
 effort to save itself. And the South that survives will 
 last longer than the one that preceded it. It'll be 
 harder and more durable than what came before. 
 Why? It's been through the fire. And I'm not just 
 talking about the civil rights movement, although 
 certainly that's a place we could start. I'm talking 
 about the long, slow-burning fire, the original civil 
 war and the industrialization that it spawned. I'm 
 talking about the migration to the cities, the cholera 
 epidemics, the floods. I'm talking about the wars 
 that Southerners fought disproportionately in this 
 century, the poverty they endured. I'm talking about 
 our fall from Grace. I'm talking about the scorn and 
 ridicule the nation has heaped on poor Southern 
 whites, the only ethnic group in America not 
 permitted to have a history. I'm talking about the 
 City. I don't mean Atlanta. I mean Birmingham. 
 
 In the country, they put their evil spirits in 
 colored glass bottles hung on trees. But let me tell 
 you what we do with evil spirits in the City. We start 
 with coal that a bunch of our male ancestors died 
 getting out of the ground. We heat it in ovens till it 
 gives offpoisonous gases and turns into coke, 
 something harder and blacker than it was to begin 
 with. Then we set that coke on fire. We use it to fuel 
 our furnaces. These furnaces are immense things, 
 bulb shaped and covered with rust. You wouldn't 
 want one in your neighborhood. We fill the furnace 
 with limestone and iron ore and any evil spirits we 
 find lying around. The iron ore melts in the coke- 
 driven fire. Impurities attach to the limestone and 
 float to the top. What settles to the bottom is pure 
 and incredibly hot. At a precise moment, we open 
 a hole in the bottom of the furnace, and molten iron 
 cascades out, a ribbon of red so bright you can 
 hardly look at it. When I was a kid you could stand 
 on the viaduct above the Sloss furnaces in down- 
 town Birmingham and watch the river of molten iron 
 racing along the ground, incandescent, inexorable, 
 and so unpredictable that a spark from it flew up 
 one night while my father's friend, Ross Keener, 
 was leaning over the rail of the viaduct, flew up and 
 put out his eye. 
 
 That's the kind of South I'm talking about. 
 
 - Dennis Covington 
 
John Haines 
 
 John Haines has lived and worked 
 in the Alaska wilderness much of 
 his life. His many volumes of 
 poetry include News from the 
 Glacier: Selected Poems 1 960- 1 980, 
 and his many prose works include 
 the memoir The Stars, the Snow, 
 the Fire published by Graywolf 
 Press. Mr. Haines's honors include 
 an award from the Governor of 
 Alaska for lifetime contribution 
 to the arts, a Western States Arts 
 Federation Lifetime Achievement 
 Award, and a Lenore Marshall/The 
 Nation poetry prize. He received 
 a Literature Fellowship in 1968. 
 
 It has been many years 
 since that fellowship. I was 
 then still far in the sticks of 
 Alaska, many miles from a 
 city, and with no phone of my 
 own, the nearest being some 
 miles away. 
 
 This grant came close on 
 the heels of a Guggenheim. 
 The two grants, following 
 closely on each other, gave 
 me the first real money I had 
 seen in many years, and made 
 life a good deal easier in the 
 circumstances I was then 
 living in. Certainly it can be 
 said that the funding from my 
 fellowship allowed me to buy 
 new books, and to have some 
 needed leisure in which to 
 read those books and work 
 at whatever I had on hand at 
 the time. I can say also that 
 having been given a fellowship 
 at the time generated a 
 
 certain interest elsewhere 
 and eventually sent me out 
 on my first reading tour 
 through the lower 48. 
 
 In other words, the two 
 fellowships coming close 
 together as they did, changed 
 my life. I doubt that many 
 people have had their lives 
 changed as drastically as mine 
 was at the time, but I don't 
 doubt that many others have 
 had some related experience 
 and a period free from 
 immediate money concerns. 
 
 [The fellowship]. . . generated a certain interest elsewhere 
 and eventually sent me out on my first reading tour through 
 the lower 48. 
 
 10 
 
ALASKA 
 
 from 
 
 The Stars, The Snow, The Fire 
 
 There are shadows over the land. They come out of the 
 ground, from the dust and the tumbled bones of the earth. 
 Tree shadows that haunt the woodlands of childhood, holding 
 fear in their branches. Stone shadows on the desert, cloud 
 shadows on the sea and over the summer hills, bringing water. 
 Shapes of shadows in pools and wells, vague forms in the 
 sandlight. 
 
 Out of the past come these wind-figures, the flapping 
 sails of primitive birds with terrible beaks and claws. Shadows 
 of things that walked once and went away. Lickers of blood 
 that fasten by night to the veins of standing cattle, to the foot 
 of a sleeping man. In the Far North, the heavy, stalled bodies 
 of mastodons chilled in a black ooze, and their fur-clad bones 
 still come out of the ground. Triceratops was feeding in the 
 marshlands by the verge of the coal-making forest. 
 
 Shadows in doorways, and under the eaves of ancient 
 buildings, where the fallen creatures of stone grimace in sleep. 
 Domestic, wind-tugged shadows cast by icy branches upon 
 a bedroom window: they tap on the glass and wake us. They 
 speak to the shadows within us, old ghosts that will not die. 
 Like trapped, primordial birds, they break from an ice pool 
 in the heart's well and fly into walls built long ago. 
 
 Stand still where you are - at the end of pavement, in 
 a sunbreak of the forest, on the open, cloud-peopled terrace 
 of the plains. Look deeply into the wind-furrows of the grass, 
 into the leaf-stilled water of pools. Think back through the 
 silence, of the life that was and is not here now, of the strong 
 pastness of things - shadows of the end and the beginning. 
 
 It is autumn. Leaves are flying, a storm of them over the 
 land. They are brown and yellow, parched and pale - Shelly' s 
 "pestilence-stricken multitudes." Out of an evening darkness 
 they fly in our faces and scare us; like resigned spirits they 
 whirl away and spill into hollows, to lie still, one on the other, 
 waiting for snow. 
 
 -John Haines 
 
 ^ 
 
 11 
 
Alberto Ribs 
 
 Alberto Rios is the author of 
 seven books and chapbooks of 
 poetry, including Teodoro Luna's 
 Two Kisses, and two collections of 
 short stories, including Pig Cookies. 
 He is the recipient of the Arizona 
 Governor's Arts Award, the Walt 
 Whitman Award, the Western 
 States Book Award for Fiction, 
 five Pushcart Prizes in both poetry 
 and fiction, and a Guggenheim 
 Fellowship. His work is included 
 in The Norton Anthology of Modern 
 Poetry, as well as in over 100 
 national and international literary 
 anthologies. His writing is 
 regularly taught and translated, 
 and has been adapted to both 
 classical and modern music. Rios 
 is presently Regents Professor of 
 English at Arizona State University. 
 
 The NEA helped make me, 
 to loosely quote Neruda, 
 a writer of public purpose. 
 When I received my fellowship 
 in 1 979, I had just graduated 
 from the University of Arizona 
 with an MFA, and had no 
 particular plan other than to 
 write. If jobs are scarce now, 
 they were even scarcer then. 
 I had just married, and true to 
 my childhood, moved from 
 Tucson back to rural Arizona, 
 seven miles south of Florence 
 in an area known as Cactus 
 Forest. There I was. 
 
 My NEA grant was for $ 1 0,000, 
 and I bought a car.The car 
 helped make me a writer and a 
 teacher; it let me make my job 
 be anywhere and everywhere. 
 I found the classroom to be 
 many places.The car was red, 
 to be wild - I think to show 
 what I felt in my heart about 
 the whole circumstance - but 
 it was a station wagon, too, 
 which spoke to the work I 
 knew it would mean. I was 
 never sorry. 
 
 This working everywhere, 
 with anyone: this has stayed 
 with me. If the teaching was 
 a scramble of a livelihood 
 in those days, Poets-in-the- 
 Schools, community forums, 
 library talks, I nevertheless 
 remember it only as a joy, and 
 the foundation of what would 
 soon become my university 
 teaching. Writing mattered, 
 and was a passion, even if in 
 the fields of Eloy, or in the 
 shadows of the Superstitions 
 in Apache Junction, they had 
 never spoken this secret 
 aloud. The NEA helped me 
 to find this out - about them 
 and about myself. 
 
 The NEA helped make me, to loosely 
 quote Neruda, a writer of public purpose. 
 
 12 
 
ARIZONA 
 
 True Story of the Pins 
 
 Pins are always plentiful 
 
 but one day they were not 
 
 and your Uncle Humberto 
 
 who collected all the butterflies 
 
 you see here on the walls, 
 
 was crazy looking for some 
 
 and he went to your cousin 
 
 Graciela the hard seamstress 
 
 who has pins it is rumored 
 
 even in hard times 
 
 but when she found out 
 
 why he wanted them 
 
 because the wind from the south 
 
 who was her friend 
 
 since the earliest days of her 
 
 childhood on the sea 
 
 told her, she firmly refused 
 
 your poor Uncle Humberto 
 
 whose picture is here 
 
 on the wall behind you, 
 
 did you feel his eyes, 
 
 and he went into the most terrible 
 
 of rages, too terrible 
 
 for a butterfly collector 
 
 we all said afterward 
 
 and he burst a vein 
 
 that grew like a great snake 
 
 on his small forehead 
 
 and he died on the dirt 
 
 floor of Graciela's house 
 
 who of course felt sick 
 
 and immediately went 
 
 and put pins, this is what has 
 
 made her hard, through 
 
 the bright wings of the butterflies 
 
 Humberto had prepared 
 
 since he was after all 
 
 her father and she 
 
 could afford no better 
 
 light of perpetuity. 
 
 ■Alberto Rios 
 
 13 
 
CD. Wright 
 
 C.D.Wright was born and 
 raised in the Ozark Mountains 
 of Arkansas. She has published 
 eight collections of poetry, most 
 recently Tremble and JustWhistle, 
 a booklength poem. String Light 
 won the 1 992 Poetry Center Book 
 Award given by San Francisco 
 State University. She was awarded 
 the Wittner Bynner Prize for 
 Poetry from the American 
 Academy and Institute for Arts 
 and Letters in 1986, and in 1987, 
 Fellowships from the Guggenheim 
 Foundation and the Bunting 
 Institute. She was a 1989 recipient 
 of the Whiting Writers' Award 
 and a 1990 recipient of the 
 Rhode Island Governor's Award 
 for the Arts. In 1 994, she was 
 named State Poet of Rhode Island, 
 a five-year post. With poet 
 Forrest Gander, she edits Lost 
 Roads Publishers. Wright teaches 
 at Brown University in Providence, 
 Rhode Island. 
 
 Along with hundreds of other 
 writers, and artists in all 
 media, a fellowship from the 
 National Endowment for the 
 Arts was the single most 
 important award of my 
 creative life. While I have 
 been the fortunate recipient 
 of other awards, some with 
 substantially larger monetary 
 attachments, none other 
 were as critical to me as the 
 NEA's in securing an 
 opportunity to establish 
 myself as an American artist. 
 It specifically granted me 
 time to finish my first 
 booklength collection of 
 poems, Translations of the 
 Gospel Back Into Tongues t 
 a book which has been 
 
 reprinted many times in the 
 1 5 years since its first release, 
 and time and encouragement 
 to write the next book. Some 
 of the presses with which 
 I have been affiliated would 
 not have been able to publish 
 my books or anyone else's 
 without assistance from the 
 NEA. In fact the life of my 
 genre is constantly threatened 
 in a time and a place in which 
 there is such a proliferation 
 of competing claims on one's 
 attention. I am not even sure 
 there would be a recognizable 
 American poetry if the 
 National Endowment for the 
 Arts had not asserted the 
 value of having a vital culture. 
 
 I am not even sure there would be a recognizable 
 American poetry if the National Endowment for the 
 Arts had not asserted the value of having a vital culture. 
 
 14 
 
ARKANSAS 
 
 Kings' Daughters, 
 
 Home for Unwed Mothers, 1948 
 
 Somewhere there figures a man. In uniform. He's not white. He 
 
 could be AWOL. Sitting on a mattress riddled with cigarette burns. 
 
 Night of a big game in the capitol. Big snow. 
 
 Beyond Pearl river past Petal and Leaf River and Macedonia; 
 
 it is a three-storied house. The only hill around. White. 
 
 The house and hill are white. Lighted upstairs, down. 
 
 She is up on her elbows, bangs wet and in her eyes. The head 
 
 of the unborn is visible at the opening. The head 
 
 crowns. Many helping hands are on her. She is told not to push. 
 
 But breathe. A firm voice. 
 
 With helping hands. They open the howl of her love. Out of her issues: 
 
 volumes of letters, morning glories on a string trellis, the job 
 
 at the Maybelline Factory, the job at the weapons plant, the hummingbird 
 
 hive, her hollyhocks, her grandmother's rigid back next to her 
 
 grandfather's bow, the briefest reflection of her mother's braid 
 
 falling below her wing blades, her atomizers and silverbacked 
 
 brush and comb, the steel balls under her father's knuckles, the 
 
 moon's punched-out face, his two-dollar neckties, the peacock 
 
 coming down the drive; there was the boy shuffling her way with 
 
 the melon on his shoulder, car dust all over his light clothes, the 
 
 Black Cat fireworks sign on the barn, her father's death from 
 
 moving the barn by himself, the family sitting in the darkened 
 
 room drinking ice tea after the funeral, tires blown out on the 
 
 macadam, the women beaten like eggs, the store with foundation 
 
 garments, and boys pelting the girls with peony buds, the meatgrinder 
 
 cringing in the corner of the store, the old icebox she couldn't 
 
 fix and couldn't sell so buried to keep out the kids, her grandmother's 
 
 pride, the prettiest lavalier, the pole houses; there was the boy 
 
 with the melon shifted to the other shoulder, coming her way, 
 
 grown taller and darker, wiping his sweat with his hand, his beautiful 
 Nubian head, older and set upon by the longingly necked girls 
 from the bottoms, his fishing hole, learning the questions of equality: 
 six for the white man and none for the rest; the sloping shadows 
 and blue hollows behind his shack, what the sunflowers saw, the 
 wide skirts she wore, the lizards they caught, the eagerness with 
 which they went through each other's folds of hair and skin, the 
 boy's outnumbered pride. 
 
 This couldn't go on, the difficulty of concealment, putting make-up 
 over a passion mark. 1947, summer of whiskey and victory and 
 fear. It was long, then over. The letters burned. She heaves. Bleeds. 
 In the words of the grandmother: Do not eat oranges under the moon, 
 eat fruit that is green and cold. What was meant by that, really. 
 The infant's head is huge. She tears. He's white. He'll make it 
 just fine. The firm voice. The hands that helped. 
 What would become of this boychild. The uniformed man and she 
 will never know. That they will outlive him. They will never know. 
 That he will do things they never dreamed. 
 
 - CD. Wright 
 
 15 
 
Maxine Hong 
 Kingston 
 
 Maxine Hong Kingston is the 
 author of The Woman Warrior - 
 Memoirs of a Girlhood Among 
 Ghosts, China Men, Tripmaster 
 Monkey - His Fake Book, 
 and Hawai'i One Summer. 
 She lives in California. 
 
 Given an NEA grant, I feel 
 thanked by my country. 
 In a more perfect world, I 
 would have received it when 
 I needed it. I wish there were 
 a way for the unknown writer 
 to get a boost. To me, the 
 NEA grant is reward for 
 having already arrived at 
 one's goal. For that, in turn, 
 I thank you. 
 
 Given an NEA grant, I feel thanked 
 by my country. 
 
 16 
 
WR 
 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 from 
 
 Tripmaster Monkey 
 
 "Let's walk," he said, stubbing out his cigarette. 
 "Let's amble the blue North Beach streets as the 
 evening sun goes down into the far grey water." 
 
 Though they walked through the land of the 
 wasted, no Make sights popped out to hurt him, she 
 dispelling them. By day, the neon was not coursing 
 through its glass veins. The dancing girl in spangles 
 and feathers had flown out of her cage, which hung 
 empty over the street. Nobody barked and hustled 
 at the doorways to acts and shows. The day-folks, 
 wheeling babies, wheeling grandpa, holding 
 children by the hand, were shopping for dinner at 
 the grocery stores and the bakery, dropping by the 
 shoe repair. Oh, the smell of the focaccia oven — O 
 Home. A florist with white moustachios jaywalked 
 through traffic with armsful of leonine football 
 chrysanthemums. Behind glass, at the all-day-all- 
 night place on the pie-wedge corner, poets, one to a 
 table, were eating breakfast. The Co-Existence Bagel 
 Shop was gone. The old guys, Seventh Seal knights, 
 had played chess with Death and lost. The Bagel 
 Shop, Miss Smith's Tea Room, Blabbermouth Night 
 at The Place — all of a gone time. Out from the open 
 door of La Bodega, a folksy guitar sweetened the air. 
 The guitar was being passed around, and each 
 played the tune he knew. You should have been there 
 the night Segovia dropped by and played flamenco. 
 Wittman musefully sang as if to himself a Mose 
 Allison riff. 
 
 A young ma-a-an 
 
 ain't nothin'in this world today. 
 
 Because the ol' men's 
 
 got all the money. 
 
 The air of the City is so filled with poems, you have 
 to fight becoming imbued with the general romanza. 
 Nanci's long black hair and long black skirt skirled 
 with the afternoon breezes. The leather of her 
 shoulder bag strapped a breast. Her arms and 
 outstretched legs were also long and black; she wore 
 a leotard and tights like an old-fashioned Beat chick 
 
 but, honestly, a dancer, dance togs for a good reason. 
 Here he was: Wittman Ah Sing profiling down the 
 street with a beautiful almost-girlfriend, clipping 
 along, alongside, keeping up with him, the two of 
 them making the scene on the Beach, like cruising 
 in the gone Kerouac time of yore. 
 
 He ducked into the bookstore. She followed 
 right on in. She stood beside him, browsing the rack 
 of quarterlies, quite a few brave Volume 1 Number 
 Ones. There were homemade books too, mimeo 
 jobs, stencils, and small-press poetry that fit neat in 
 the hand. On the top rack — right inside the door at 
 eye level for all to see coming in or going out — was: 
 an artistic avant-garde far-out new magazine that 
 had published — in print — a scene from his play- 
 in-progress — the lead-piece — with his byline — 
 right inside the front cover. He could reach over 
 and hand it to her, but it would be more perfect if 
 she happened to pick it out herself, come upon his 
 premiere on her own, and be impressed. (F. Scott 
 Fitzgerald, trying to impress Sheila Graham, had 
 driven to every bookstore in L.A., but could not find 
 a copy of any of his books.) 
 
 Wittman went downstairs to the cool basement, 
 where among the bookshelves were chairs and tables 
 with ashtrays. He had first come to this place when 
 he was a high-school kid on one of his escapes from 
 Sacramento, Second City to Big City. No No Free 
 Reading sign. No No Smoking. You didn't have to 
 buy a book; you could read for nothing. You had a 
 hangout where you didn't have to spend money. 
 Quiet. All the radios in Chinatown blaring out the 
 ball game, but here, we don't care about the World 
 Series. He hadn't known the City Lights Pocket 
 Book Shop was famous until the Howl trial, which 
 he had cut school to attend. "Shig" Shigeyoshi 
 Murao was the one charged with selling an obscene 
 book. The muster of famous poets had blown 
 Wittman away — everybody friends with everybody 
 else, a gang of poets. He, poor monkey, was yet 
 looking for others of his kind. 
 
 - Maxine Hong Kingston 
 
 17 
 
Linda Hogan 
 
 Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw poet, 
 novelist, and essayist. Her most 
 recent books are Dwellings:A 
 Spiritual History of the Natural World 
 and a novel, Solar Storms, which 
 received the Colorado Book 
 Award. Hogan's earlier novel, 
 Mean Spirit, was one of three 
 finalists for the Pulitzer Prize 
 in 1 99 1 . Seeing Through the Sun, 
 received an American Book Award 
 from the Before Columbus 
 Foundation, and The Book of 
 Medicines received the Colorado 
 Book Award and was a finalist 
 for the National Book Critics 
 Circle Award. She is the recipient 
 of a Guggenheim fellowship, 
 a Minnesota Arts Board Grant, 
 a Colorado Writers Fellowship, 
 a Lannan Fellowship, and The 
 Five Civilized Tribes Museum 
 Playwriting Award. She is 
 co-editor of Intimate Nature: 
 The Bond Between Women and 
 Animals and "Everything Has a 
 Spirit," a documentary film on 
 PBS. Her novel Power will be 
 published by Norton in 1998. 
 
 The year I received an NEA 
 fellowship was just before the 
 literature of Native American 
 writers was surfacing and 
 becoming visible to American 
 publishing.The conscience 
 of this country was not yet 
 examined. For the most part, 
 we Indian people were 
 portrayed as part of the 
 American narrative in words 
 not our own, in stories told 
 about us but not by us. 
 
 The year I received a 
 fellowship I was able to 
 have the time and silence 
 to write, to add a voice to 
 the story of our land, an 
 indigenous voice grown from, 
 shaped by, this land. It allowed 
 for the expression of love 
 and relationship that rose 
 from within this beautiful 
 landscape and the people 
 it has sustained, the people 
 who have sustained it. 
 
 Among researchers who 
 study whale language, 
 it is known that the songs 
 of whales are constantly 
 changing. Some parts of the 
 song drop away while new 
 songs appear. Like whales, 
 our stories, too, are 
 constantly growing and 
 evolving. Through writing, 
 through time, our world is 
 made larger, reenvisioned 
 with sharper, more clear 
 eyes. The stories I have been 
 allowed to participate in, 
 through the gift of this time 
 of support, have allowed for 
 another view of history and 
 the American story, a view 
 still growing. 
 
 The stories I have been allowed to participate in, - 
 through the gift of this time of support, have allowed 
 for another view of history and the American story. . 
 
 18 
 
COLORADO 
 
 Drum 
 
 Inside the dark human waters 
 
 of our mothers, 
 
 inside the blue drum of skin 
 
 that beat the slow song of our tribes 
 
 we knew the drifts of continents 
 
 and moving tides. 
 
 We are the people who left water 
 
 to enter a dry world. 
 
 We have survived soldiers and drought, 
 
 survived hunger 
 
 and living 
 
 inside the unmapped terrain 
 
 of loneliness. 
 
 That is why we have thirst. 
 
 It is why 
 
 when we love 
 
 we remember our lives in water, 
 
 that other lives fall through us 
 
 like fish swimming in an endless sea, 
 
 that we are walking another way 
 
 than time, 
 
 to new life, backward 
 
 to deliver ourselves to rain and river, 
 
 this water 
 
 that will become other water 
 
 this blood that will become other blood 
 
 and is the oldest place 
 
 the deepest world 
 
 the skin of water 
 
 that knows the drum before the hand meets it. 
 
 - Linda Hogan 
 
 19 
 
J. D. McClatchy 
 
 J.D. McClatchy is the author 
 of four collections of poems: 
 Scenes From Another Life, Stars 
 Principal, The Rest of the Way, and 
 Ten Commandments. His literary 
 essays are collected in White Paper, 
 which was given the Melville Cane 
 Award by the Poetry Society of 
 America, and in Twenty Questions. 
 He has also edited TheVintage Rook 
 of Contemporary World Poetry, 
 The Vintage Book of Contemporary 
 American Poetry, Poets on Painters, 
 Recitative: Prose by James Merrill, 
 and Anne Sexton:The Poet and Her 
 Critics. His new translation of 
 Horace's The Art of Poetry will be 
 published later this year by Sea 
 Cliff Press. McClatchy has taught 
 at Princeton, Yale, Columbia, 
 UCLA, Rutgers, and other 
 universities, and since 1991, 
 
 he has served as editor of 
 The Yale Review. He has written 
 four libretti, most recently 
 for Tobias Picker's Emmeline, 
 commissioned by the Santa Fe 
 Opera in 1 996 and broadcast 
 nationally on PBS. In 1996, he 
 was named a Chancellor of the 
 Academy of American Poets. 
 In 1 99 1 , he was given an Award 
 in Literature by the American 
 Academy and Institute of Arts 
 & Letters, and the citation read: 
 "It may be that no more eloquent 
 poet will emerge in his American 
 generation." 
 
 "Bees" is a fable about 
 two aspects of the creative 
 imagination: its syrups and 
 its stitching, its restlessness 
 and its concentration. Both 
 are necessary to make - or 
 rather, do the work of art. 
 Through its fellowship 
 program, the National 
 Endowment for the Arts 
 has given literary artists 
 the time to think and the 
 encouragement to write. 
 I know because a while ago, 
 when I needed one, I had the 
 good fortune to receive one 
 of these fellowships, and it 
 made a crucial difference. 
 Every poem takes a lifetime 
 to write. Over the years, the 
 NEA's enlightened initiatives 
 have themselves given life 
 to the nation's imagination. 
 If the spirit of this country 
 is not its foremost national 
 interest, what is? And when 
 government abdicates its 
 responsibility to nourish that 
 spirit, who is being served? 
 
 Over the years, the NEA's enlightened initiatives have 
 themselves given life to the nation's imagination. 
 
 20 
 
CONNECTICUT 
 
 Bees 
 
 First to bloom at last 
 
 this late spring 
 the crabapple's a wain 
 
 of white the ox 
 sun is hauling homeward. 
 
 Humble brawl on top 
 goaded by syrups, 
 
 the rut of work so far 
 from the wing-lit 
 
 hive of their making. 
 
 A bent toward folly argues 
 
 for intelligence. 
 They'll break with the past 
 
 as with an enemy. 
 The flowers cry to them. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Left behind, in clover's 
 
 common sense, 
 a solitary honeybee 
 
 plies her trade. 
 Circumspect, all twelve 
 
 thousand eyes are trained 
 on her needlework: 
 
 genetic cross-stitch 
 and pollen purl. 
 
 Her pattern is the field's. 
 
 - J.D. McClatchy 
 
 21 
 
W. D. Snodgrass 
 
 W.D. Snodgrass is a poet, 
 translator and literary critic 
 who has published over a dozen 
 books, including After Experience: 
 Poems and Translations, The Fuhrer 
 &unker,To Shape a Song,The Death 
 of Cock Robin, Autumn Variations, 
 and Each in His Season. He taught 
 for many years at the University 
 of Delaware and received the 
 Pulitzer Prize for Heart's Needle. 
 
 The grant I received from 
 the NEA in 1966 permitted 
 me to take a Sabbatical Leave 
 from my teaching post at 
 Wayne State University. 
 
 Of the three books I worked 
 on, the most crucial for 
 me was a collection of new 
 poems, After Experience. 
 I had been warned by older 
 poets that because of the 
 good reception my first book 
 had met, I should expect many 
 bad reviews for this book. 
 So it was very important for 
 me that, if the book were 
 attacked, that would not 
 shake my confidence that 
 I had done the best I could. 
 
 I also did a great deal of work 
 on translating the poems of 
 the great German comic poet, 
 Christian Morgenstern. Lore 
 Segal and I translated roughly 
 1 50 of his poems and then 
 chose 1 24 for our volume, 
 Gallows Songs, which used 
 
 engravings by Paul Klee. I 
 once overheard Randall Jarrell 
 remark that it was the best 
 book of poetry translations 
 he'd ever read. To call that 
 encouraging would be a vast 
 understatement. 
 
 Finally, I was able to do much 
 of the work on a cycle of poems 
 about the death of my sister. 
 These poems appeared in 
 1970 from the Perishable Press 
 in a pseudonymous volume, 
 Remains, by S.S. Gardons. 
 After the death of my parents, 
 this book was republished 
 (with some revisions) by 
 BOA Editions in 1985. 
 
 At that critical juncture - the 
 period after a successful first 
 book and a time of great 
 turmoil in my personal affairs 
 - such support was of greatest 
 value in assuring me that my 
 work was recognized and held 
 in high regard. 
 
 At that critical juncture. . . such support was 
 of greatest value. 
 
 22 
 
DELAWARE 
 
 A Seashell 
 
 Say that inside this shell, some live 
 
 Thing hungered, trembled to survive, 
 
 Mated, died. Lift this to your ear 
 
 The way the young, on tape decks, hear 
 
 What to become, or on the phone, 
 
 The old evoke a dial tone 
 
 To what they had. Your blood will pound 
 
 Down those bare chambers, then resound 
 
 Your own ear's caverns as a ground 
 
 Bass swells, the depths of some salt tide 
 Still tuned to our salt blood. Outside, 
 The woods, nights, still ring back each word. 
 Our young owl, though, that always heard 
 My hoot, then veered down through the dark, 
 Our fox that barked back when we'd bark, 
 Won't answer, though. Small loss, now, when 
 Friends ask that I not call again. 
 Our pulse homed in on each other's, then. 
 
 Last night, I heard your voice — caught on 
 Streets we once taped in Isfahan; 
 Then, in a mosque near Joppa, blent 
 With hushed devotions and lament. 
 Now, put the shell back down, at rest 
 Near this brain coral, this wren's nest, 
 These photographs that will stand here 
 On their shelf in the silent, dear, 
 Locked, empty house another year. 
 
 - W.D. Snodgrass 
 
 23 
 
Joy Williams 
 
 Joy Williams is perhaps best 
 known for her gemlike short 
 stories, particularly the collection 
 Taking Care. She is the author 
 of State of Grace, The Changling, 
 Breaking and Entering, and Escapes, 
 and a history and guide called 
 The Florida Keyes. She has taught 
 around the country at several 
 universities, and in 1974, she 
 received a Guggenheim fellowship. 
 She lives in the Florida Keys. 
 
 It's a remarkable thing to 
 be rewarded by one's own 
 government for being an 
 artist, for pursuing a unique 
 vision. The recognition and 
 money was enormously 
 helpful to me at the time, 
 and since then I've been a 
 judge for the NEA and know 
 that the criteria is excellence, 
 always only excellence and 
 promise. It's a great fellowship 
 to receive, a sustaining and 
 emboldening award. 
 
 It's a remarkable thing to be rewarded by 
 one's own government for being an artist, 
 for pursuing a unique vision. 
 
 24 
 
FLORIDA 
 
 from 
 
 The Yard Boy 
 
 The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived 
 in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. 
 Being enlightened wasn't easy. It was very hard 
 work. It was manual labor actually. 
 
 The enlightened being is free. He feels the 
 sorrows and sadness of those around him but does 
 not necessarily feel his own. The yard boy felt that 
 he had been enlightened for about two months, at 
 the most. 
 
 The yard boy had two possessions. One was a 
 pickup truck. The other was a plover he had stuffed 
 and mounted when he thought he wanted to be an 
 ornithologist, in the days before he had become a 
 spiritual materialist. The bird was in the room he 
 rented. The only other thing in the room was a bed. 
 The landlady provided sheets and towels. Some- 
 times when he came back from work hot and sweaty 
 with little bits of leaves and stuff caught in his hair, 
 the landlady would give him a piece of key lime pie 
 on a blue plate. 
 
 The yard boy was content. He had hard 
 muscular arms and a tanned back. He had compas- 
 sion. He had a girl friend. When he thought about 
 it, he supposed that having a girl friend was a cop- 
 out to the security which he had eschewed. This 
 was a preconception however and a preconception 
 was the worst form of all the forms of security. The 
 yard boy believed he was in balance on this point. 
 He tried to see things the way they were from the 
 midst of nowhere, and he felt he had worked out 
 this difficulty about the girl friend satisfactorily. 
 The important thing was to be able to see through 
 the veils of preconception. 
 
 The yard boy was a handsome fellow. He 
 seldom spoke. He was appealing. Once he had 
 run over an old lady and had broken her leg, but 
 no one had gotten mad at him about it. Now that 
 he was a yard boy his hands smelled of 6-6-6. 
 His jeans smelled of tangelos. He was honest and 
 truthful, a straightforward person who did not 
 distinguish between this and that. For the girl friend 
 he always had a terrific silky business which was 
 always at the ready. 
 
 The yard boy worked for several very wealthy 
 people. In the morning of every day he got into his 
 pickup and drove over the causeways to the Keys 
 where he mowed and clipped and cut and hauled. 
 He talked to the plants. He always told them what he 
 was going to do before he did it so that they would 
 have a chance to prepare themselves. Plants have 
 lived in the Now for a long time but they still have 
 to have some things explained to them. 
 
 At the Wilsons' house the yard boy clips a 
 sucker from an orange tree. It is May. Even so, the 
 orange tree doesn't like it much. Mrs. Wilson comes 
 out and watches the yard boy while he works. She 
 has her son with her. He is about three. He doesn't 
 talk yet. His name is Tao. Mrs. Wilson is wealthy 
 and can afford to be wacky. What was she supposed 
 to do after all, she asked the yard boy once, call her 
 kid George? Fred? For Godssakes. 
 
 Her obstetrician had told her at the time that 
 he had never seen a more perfectly shaped head. 
 
 The Wilsons' surroundings are splendid. 
 Mrs. Wilson has splendid clothes, a splendid figure. 
 She has a wonderful Cuban cook. The house is 
 worth three quarters of a million dollars. The 
 plantings are worth a hundred thousand dollars. 
 Everything has a price. It is fantastic. A precise 
 worth has been ascribed to everything. Every worm 
 and aphid can be counted upon. It costs a certain 
 amount of money to eradicate them. The sod is laid 
 down fresh every year. For weeks after the lawn is 
 installed, the seams are visible and then the squares 
 of grass gather together and it becomes, everywhere, 
 in sun or shade, a smooth, witty and improbable 
 green like the color of a parrot. 
 
 Mrs. Wilson follows the yard boy around 
 as he tends to the hibiscus, the bougainvillea, 
 the poinciana, the Cuban Royal, the natal plum. 
 They stand beneath the mango, looking up. 
 
 "Isn't it pagan," Mrs. Wilson says. 
 
 -Joy Williams 
 
 25 
 
Alice Walker 
 
 Alice Walker was born in Georgia 
 and has worked all over the 
 country as a social worker and 
 teacher. She has written novels, 
 children's fiction, poetry, essays, 
 novellas and short stories and 
 earned numerous awards and 
 fellowships for her work. Her 
 short story collections include 
 In Love andTrouble and Ybu Can't 
 Keep A Good Woman Down, and 
 among her poetry titles are 
 Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll See Ybu 
 in the Morning and Horses Make 
 a Landscape Beautiful. Her novels 
 include the Pulitzer Prize-winning 
 The Color Purple. Her most recent 
 book is Anything We Love Can Be 
 Saved: A Writer's Activism. 
 
 The small NEA grant 
 encouraged me to believe 
 someone other than myself 
 valued what I was doing. This 
 was large. 
 
 The small NEA grant encouraged me to believe 
 someone other than myself valued what I was doing. 
 
 26 
 
WRITING 
 
 GEORGIA 
 
 The Flowers 
 
 It seemed to Myop as she skipped lightly from hen 
 house to pigpen to smokehouse that the days had 
 never been as beautiful as these. The air held a 
 keenness that made her nose twitch. The harvesting 
 of the corn and cotton, peanuts and squash, made 
 each day a golden suqarise that caused excited little 
 tremors to run up her jaws. 
 
 Myop carried a short, knobby stick. She struck 
 out at random at chickens she liked, and worked out 
 the beat of a song on the fence around the pigpen. 
 She felt light and good in the warm sun. She was 
 ten, and nothing existed for her but her song, the 
 stick clutched in her dark brown hand, and the tat- 
 de-ta-ta-ta of accompaniment. 
 
 Turning her back on the rusty boards of her 
 family's sharecropper cabin, Myop walked along the 
 fence till it ran into the stream made by the spring. 
 Around the spring, where the family got drinking 
 water, silver ferns and wildflowers grew. Along the 
 shallow banks pigs rooted. Myop watched the tiny 
 white bubbles disrupt the thin black scale of soil and 
 the water that silently rose and slid away down the 
 stream. 
 
 She had explored the woods behind the house 
 many times. Often, in late autumn, her mother took 
 her to gather nuts among the fallen leaves. Today 
 she made her own path, bouncing this way and that 
 way, vaguely keeping an eye out for snakes. She 
 found, in addition to various common but pretty 
 ferns and leaves, an armful of strange blue flowers 
 with velvety ridges and a sweetsuds bush full of the 
 brown, fragrant buds. 
 
 By twelve o'clock, her arms laden with sprigs 
 of her findings, she was a mile or more from home. 
 She had often been as far before, but the strangeness 
 of the land made it not as pleasant as her usual 
 
 haunts. It seemed gloomy in the little cove in which 
 she found herself. The air was damp, the silence 
 close and deep. 
 
 Myop began to circle back to the house, back 
 to the peacefulness of the morning. It was then she 
 stepped smack into his eyes. Her heel became 
 lodged in the broken ridge between brow and nose, 
 and she reached down quickly, unafraid, to free 
 herself. It was only when she saw his naked grin that 
 she gave a little yelp of surprise. 
 
 He had been a tall man. From feet to neck 
 covered a long space. His head lay beside him. 
 When she pushed back the leaves and layers of earth 
 and debris, Myop saw that he'd had large white 
 teeth, all of them cracked or broken, long fingers, 
 and very big bones. All his clothes had rotted away 
 except some threads of blue denim from his overalls. 
 The buckles of the overalls had turned green. 
 
 Myop gazed around the spot with interest. 
 Very near where she'd stepped into the head was a 
 wild pink rose. As she picked it to add to her bundle 
 she noticed a raised mound, a ring, around the 
 rose's root. It was the notted remains of a noose, a 
 bit of shredding plowline, now blending benignly 
 into the soil. Around an overhanging limb of a great 
 spreading oak clung another piece. Frayed, rotted, 
 bleached, and frazzled — barely there — but 
 spinning relendessly in the breeze. Myop laid down 
 her flowers. 
 
 And the summer was over. 
 
 - Alice Walker 
 
 27 
 
Cathy Son| 
 
 Cathy Song was born in Honolulu, 
 Hawai'i. Her first book of poems, 
 Picture Bride, was selected by 
 Richard Hugo as winner of the 
 1 982 Yale Series of Younger Poets 
 Award and was also nominated 
 for the National Book Critics 
 Circle Award. Her second book, 
 Frameless Windows, Squares of Light, 
 was published in 1988 by WW. 
 Norton. In 1994, the University 
 of Pittsburgh Press brought out 
 School Figures in the Pitt Poetry 
 Series. She has received a number 
 of awards including the Shelley 
 Memorial Award from the Poetry 
 Society of America and the Hawai'i 
 Award for Literature. Her poetry 
 has been widely published in such 
 anthologies as The Norton Anthology 
 of Modern Poetry and The Norton 
 Anthology of American Literature. 
 
 A Literature fellowship from 
 the National Endowment for 
 the Arts means a great deal 
 to me. It means I live in a 
 country that refuses to be 
 shut down, numbed, silenced 
 and partylined by the ranting 
 and raving of the truly timid - 
 those who in their fear of life 
 and living seek to make it 
 their mission to obstruct the 
 voices of its artists. It means I 
 live in a country that chooses 
 to hear the vital singing - the 
 pulsations, the life blood, the 
 pathways that connect us 
 profoundly to each other, 
 profoundly to the intelligent 
 compassionate cosmos. 
 
 [This fellowship] means a great deal to me. 
 It means I live in a country that refuses to be 
 shut down, numbed, silenced... 
 
 28 
 
HAWAII 
 
 Picture Bride 
 
 She was a year younger 
 
 than I, 
 
 twenty-three when she left Korea. 
 
 Did she simply close 
 
 the door of her father's house 
 
 and walk away. And 
 
 was it a long way 
 
 through the tailor shops of Pusan 
 
 to the wharf where the boat 
 
 waited to take her to an island 
 
 whose name she had 
 
 only recently learned, 
 
 on whose shore 
 
 a man waited, 
 
 turning her photograph 
 
 to the light where lanterns 
 
 in the camp outside 
 
 Waialua Sugar Mill were lit 
 
 and the inside of his room 
 
 grew luminous 
 
 from the wings of moths 
 
 migrating out of the cane stalks? 
 
 What things did my grandmother 
 
 take with her? And when 
 
 she arrived to look 
 
 into the face of the stranger 
 
 who was her husband, 
 
 thirteen years older than she, 
 
 did she politely untie 
 
 the silk bow of her jacket, 
 
 her tent-shaped dress 
 
 filling with the dry wind 
 
 that blew from the surrounding fields 
 
 where the men were burning the cane? 
 
 - Cathy Song 
 
 29 
 
Robert Wrigley 
 
 Robert Wrigley was born in East 
 St. Louis, Illinois, but has lived the 
 last 20 years and more in Idaho, 
 where he has come to a deep 
 and abiding love of the Western 
 wilderness. He has published four 
 books of poetry, the most recent 
 being In The Bank Of Beautiful Sins, 
 which won the 1997 San Francisco 
 Poetry Center Book Award. 
 In addition to his two NEA 
 Fellowships, he has received 
 fellowships from the Guggenheim 
 Foundation and the Idaho 
 Commission on the Arts. For 
 two years in the mid-eighties, 
 he served as Idaho's state 
 writer-in-residence. He lives 
 with his family at Lenore, in the 
 canyon of the Clearwater River. 
 
 As I look down the list 
 of contributors to this 
 anthology, I am both humbled 
 and honored. It's a little like 
 a literary who's who, except 
 that many of the folks here 
 were not who they are now, 
 back when they received their 
 NEA Fellowships. And that's 
 the point. NEA Literature 
 Fellowships have always been 
 an investment in literary 
 potential, in the kind of 
 writers who will probably 
 never make the bestseller list, 
 but who will in the long run 
 shape the literary history of 
 the nation. Even with my NEA 
 Fellowship, I couldn't afford 
 to quit my job and write full- 
 time, but it allowed me to 
 
 teach half-time and to devote 
 just enough of myself to my 
 art to take the necessary 
 stride to another level, and 
 maybe that stride is why I am 
 lucky enough to find myself in 
 this extraordinary company 
 today. And as the primary 
 definition of "fellowship" 
 indicates, it is foremost a 
 feeling of community that 
 comes with such an award. 
 Not merely a community 
 of writers either, but a 
 community of Americans, 
 who have helped us to get 
 the work down on paper, and 
 to whom we mean to give 
 back the best we can do. 
 
 NEA Literature Fellowships have always been an 
 investment in literary potential, in the kind of writers who 
 will probably never make the bestseller list, but who will 
 in the long run shape the literary history of the nation. 
 
 30 
 
IDAHO 
 
 Field Burning: A Full Moon 
 
 Cold air comes down like a dome 
 
 above the burning fields. 
 
 For days the rabbits and mice have fled, 
 
 the sky all smoke and rapturous wings. 
 
 It is something to see, all right, 
 
 cars from town parked along the barrows, 
 
 bird-watchers clutching binoculars, 
 
 and parents on their knees 
 
 tracing an eagle's plummet toward a vole. 
 
 Now the moon, a salmon medallion, 
 
 some red-faced farm boy leering past a banjo. 
 
 Who doesn't love the black birds 
 
 coming priestly through the just-cooled ash 
 
 and euthanized stubble? They will eat 
 
 even cooked meat, they will primp 
 
 and call, little tramps of darkness 
 
 keeping funereal hours, cassocked wings 
 
 behind their backs, furrow to furrow, collecting souls. 
 
 - Robert Wrigley 
 
 31 
 
Li-Young Lee 
 
 Li-Young Lee was born in 1 957 
 in Jakarta, Indonesia of Chinese 
 parents. In 1959 after spending a 
 year as a political prisoner, Lee's 
 father fled the country with his 
 family, and settled in America in 
 1 964. Lee is the author of two 
 volumes of poetry: The City in 
 Which I Love You, the 1 990 Lamont 
 Poetry Selection of the Academy 
 of American Poets, and Rose. Mr. 
 Lee is the recipient of grants from 
 the Guggenheim Foundation and 
 the Illinois Council on the Arts. 
 
 I can't imagine my life without 
 the grants. They allowed me 
 the kind of uninterrupted time 
 to follow every instinct and 
 intuition to their inevitable 
 conclusions. The fellowships 
 allowed me to practice a kind 
 of consistency and constancy 
 in regards to my art. 
 
 The fellowships allowed me to practice 
 a kind of consistency and constancy in 
 regards to my art. 
 
 32 
 
ILLINOIS 
 
 This Hour and What Is Dead 
 
 Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking 
 
 through bare rooms over my head, 
 
 opening and closing doors. 
 
 What could he be looking for in an empty house? 
 
 What could he possibly need there in heaven? 
 
 Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? 
 
 His love for me feels like spilled water 
 
 running back to its vessel. 
 
 At this hour, what is dead is restless 
 and what is living is burning. 
 
 Someone tell him he should sleep now. 
 
 My father keeps a light on by our bed 
 
 and readies for our journey. 
 
 He mends ten holes at the knees 
 
 of five pairs of boys' pants. 
 
 His love for me is like his sewing: 
 
 too much thread and various colors, 
 
 the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces 
 
 clean through with each stroke of his hand. 
 
 At this hour, what is dead is worried 
 and what is living is fugitive. 
 
 Someone tell him he should sleep now. 
 
 God, that old furnace, keeps talking 
 
 with his mouth of teeth, 
 
 a beard stained at feasts, and his breath 
 
 of gasoline, airplane, human ash. 
 
 His love for me feels like fire, 
 
 feels like doves, feels like river water. 
 
 At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind 
 and helpless. While the Lord lives. 
 
 Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone. 
 
 I've had enough of his love 
 
 that feels like burning and flight and running away. 
 
 - Li-Young Lee 
 
 33 
 
Scott Russell Sanders 
 
 Scott Russell Sanders is the author 
 of 15 books, including novels, 
 collections of stories and essays, 
 and personal narratives. His work 
 has been supported by fellowships 
 from the Indiana Arts Commission, 
 the Lilly Endowment, and the 
 Danforth and Guggenheim 
 Foundations. Among his honors 
 are the Associated Writing 
 Programs Award in Creative 
 Nonfiction for The Paradise of 
 Bombs, the Ohioana Book Award 
 for Staying Put, and the Great 
 Lakes Book Award for Writing 
 From The Center. In 1 995 he 
 received the Lannan Literary 
 Award for his collected work 
 in nonfiction. Sanders has also 
 won the highest teaching award 
 at Indiana University, where he is 
 Distinguished Professor of English. 
 
 When I received the 
 fellowship, I had published 
 only a single book, after ten 
 years of hard work, and I 
 was beginning to wonder 
 if my stubborn commitment 
 to writing was foolhardy. 
 The letter from NEA not 
 only assured me of a year's 
 freedom to concentrate 
 on my art, it reassured me 
 that I wasn't a fool for loving 
 language or for imagining that 
 I might learn to use it well. 
 While my fellow writers, 
 acting as judges, picked my 
 manuscript out of the pile, 
 my fellow citizens gave me 
 the money through their 
 taxes, and this gift has 
 deepened my desire to 
 make books that are useful 
 to my community, as well 
 as beautiful. 
 
 . . .this gift has deepened my desire to make books that 
 are useful to mv conmimiitv. as well as beautiful. 
 
 34 
 
INDIANA 
 
 from 
 
 Landscape and Imagination 
 
 To be intimate with a landscape is to know its moods 
 and contours as you would know a lover's. The shape 
 of breasts and hills, the sound of a laugh or the song 
 of bullfrogs, the smell of hair and honeysuckle — 
 such knowledge becomes part of who you are. As in 
 marriage, however, what is utterly familiar may lose 
 its charm, may in fact become invisible, until you are 
 deprived of it. Absent yourself a while from lover or 
 landscape, and upon returning you will recognize 
 with fresh acuity what you had known but forgotten. 
 
 I experienced such a freshening of awareness 
 not long ago, when I returned with my family to 
 Indiana after a year's sojourn in Boston. We drove 
 into the state one afternoon toward the end of July, 
 the air rushing in our car windows like the breath 
 from a furnace, a haze of muggy heat blurring the 
 flat horizon. Thunderheads were massing in the 
 west, grave clouds that cast their dark temper onto 
 the whole countryside. A rising wind made silver 
 maples show the pale undersides of their leaves and 
 set cattails stirring in stock ponds and bent the 
 trajectories of birds. After a year in the bunched-up 
 terrain of New England, I was amazed by the extent 
 of sky, the openness of the land, the vigor of the 
 head-high corn, the loneliness of the farmsteads, 
 the authority of those clouds. 
 
 We pulled over and shut off the engine for a 
 change of drivers. I could smell hot tar bubbling in 
 the joints of the road, creosote in telephone poles, 
 windblown dust from cultivated fields, the mustiness 
 of new-mown hay, the green pungency of Queen 
 Anne's lace and chicory and black-eyed Susans. 
 In the stillness I could hear the distant grumble of 
 thunder like a clearing of throats, and the nearby 
 ratcheting of crickets and cicadas. Only when 
 I caught those smells, heard those sounds, did I 
 realize how much I had missed them in the East, 
 just as I had missed the sight of a level horizon 
 broken by power lines, grain elevators, water towers, 
 
 silos, and the shade trees around farmhouses. 
 During our absence, the Midwest had suffered 
 through a plague of cicadas. When we had called 
 Indiana from Boston, the ruckus of insects over the 
 telephone had all but drowned out the voices of our 
 friends. Now, as I walked around to the passenger 
 side of the car, cast-off cicada shells crunched under 
 my feet. That sensation also was a re-discover)'. 
 We angled south from Indianapolis toward 
 home in Bloomington, coasting from the glacial 
 plain into wooded hills, a landscape not so markedly 
 different from that of New England. And yet even 
 here my heightened senses picked up a flurry of 
 details that characterize this place: limestone 
 roadcuts, the white blaze of sycamores in creekbeds, 
 pastures growing up in cedar and sumac, bottom- 
 lands planted in soybeans, sway-backed barns 
 tatooed with ads for chewing tobacco, sinuous 
 gravel driveways leading to basketball hoops, 
 trailers and shacks interspersed with tidy ranch 
 houses, the occasional white clapboard mansion 
 encrusted with fretwork, the blither of billboards 
 (outlawed in most of New England), the low-slung 
 evangelical churches, and over it all that sovereign 
 sky. The light was the silken yellow peculiar to a 
 region of tornadoes. The fields recendy harrowed 
 were the color of buckskin. Unchecked by ocean or 
 mountains, the storm that came roaring through the 
 hills was another local species, its thunder jolting us 
 inside the car with sudden changes in air pressure. 
 In the twilight before the deluge, fireflies along the 
 roadside blinked their semaphore of desire. Even in 
 the dark that overtook us before we reached our 
 front door, there was an unmistakable familiarity in 
 the roasted-earth smell of rain and in the leap of 
 lightning, which lit up the swirling treetops and 
 shaggy hills. 
 
 - Scott Russell Sanders 
 
 35 
 
Jane Smiley 
 
 Jane Smiley is the author 
 of At Paradise Gate, Duplicate Keys, 
 The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, 
 Ordinary Love and Good Will, and 
 Moo. Her novel, A Thousand Acres, 
 received the Pulitzer Prize. She 
 teaches in the Department of 
 English at Iowa State University. 
 
 I received my first NEA 
 fellowship in 1977. 1 got 
 $7500, which was a 
 tremendous amount at the 
 time, and enabled me to 
 write my first novel, Barn 
 Blind. The pat on the back 
 was worth as much as the 
 money. For the first time, I 
 felt rewarded rather than just 
 allowed to proceed. I received 
 my second fellowship in 1987, 
 after I had established myself 
 as a promising young writer, 
 but while I was still casting 
 about for the real subjects of 
 my mature work.The money 
 enabled me to write fiction 
 
 rather than look for 
 journalism or nonfiction 
 topics that might be quick to 
 sell. In both instances, money 
 from the NEA smoothed my 
 passage through difficult 
 transitional moments in my 
 career, and helped me move 
 forward. All in all, I received 
 $27,500. Once my career was 
 established, the federal taxes 
 and social security taxes I paid 
 on my writing repaid by many 
 times what I received. All 
 federal programs should have 
 such a rate of return! 
 
 The money enabled me to write fiction rather than 
 look for journalism or nonfiction topics that might be 
 quick to sell. 
 
 36 
 
WR 
 
 NG 
 
 IOWA 
 
 from 
 
 A Thousand Acres 
 
 There was no way to tell by looking that the land 
 beneath my childish feet wasn't the primeval mold 
 I read about at school, but it was new, created by 
 magic lines of tile my father would talk about with 
 pleasure and reverence. Tile "drew" the water, 
 warmed the soil, and made it easy to work, enabled 
 him to get into the fields with his machinery a mere 
 twenty-four hours after the heaviest storm. Most 
 magically, die produced prosperity — more bushels 
 per acre of a better crop, year after year, wet or dry. 
 I knew what the tile looked like (when I was very 
 young, five- or twelve-inch cylinders of real tile 
 always lay here and there around the farm, for repairs 
 or extensions of rile lines; as I got older, "tile" 
 became long snakes of plastic tubing), but for years, 
 I imagined a floor beneath the topsoil, checkered 
 aqua and yellow like the floor in the girls' bathroom 
 in the elementary school, a hard shiny floor you 
 could not sink beneath, better than a trust fund, 
 more reliable than crop insurance, a farmer's best 
 patrimony. It took John and Sam and, at the end, 
 my father, a generation, twenty-five years, to lay the 
 tile lines and dig the drainage wells and cisterns. 
 I in my Sunday dress and hat, driving in the Buick 
 to church, was the beneficiary of this grand effort, 
 someone who would always have a floor to walk on. 
 However much these acres looked like a gift from 
 nature, or of God, they were not. We went to church 
 to pay our respects, not to give thanks. 
 
 It was pretty clear that John Cook had gained, 
 through dint of sweat equity, a share in the Davis 
 farm, and when Edith turned sixteen, John, thirty- 
 three by then, married her. They continued to live in 
 the bungalow, and Sam and Arabella ordered a house 
 from Sears, this one larger and more ostentatious 
 
 than the bungalow, "The Chelsea." They took 
 delivery on the Chelsea (four bedrooms, living room, 
 dining room, and reception hall, with indoor 
 bathroom, and sliding doors between the living 
 room and dining room, $1 129) at the freight delivery 
 point in Cabot. The kit included every board, joist, 
 nail, window frame, and door that they would need, 
 as well as seventy-six pages of instructions. That was 
 the house that we grew up in and that my father lived 
 in. The bungalow was torn down in the thirties and 
 the lumber was used for a chicken house. 
 
 I was always aware, I think, of the water in the 
 soil, the way it travels from particle to particle, 
 molecules adhering, clustering, evaporating, hearing, 
 cooling, freezing, rising upward to the surface and 
 fogging the cool air or sinking downward, dissolving 
 this nutrient and that, quick in everything it does, 
 endlessly working and flowing, a river sometimes, 
 a lake sometimes. When I was very young, I imagined 
 it ready at any time to rise and cover the earth again, 
 except for the rile lines. Prairie settlers always saw 
 a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any 
 other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen 
 the Atlantic. The Davises did find a shimmering 
 sheet punctuated by cattails and sweet flag. The 
 grass is gone, now, and the marshes, "the big wet 
 prairie," but the sea is still beneath our feet, and 
 we walk on it. 
 
 - Jane Smiley 
 
 37 
 
Albert Goldbarth 
 
 Albert Goldbarth lives in Wichita, 
 Kansas. He has been publishing 
 notable books of poetry for over 
 two decades, a number of which 
 gratefully acknowledge fellowship 
 assistance from the NEA. His 
 collections include Heaven and 
 Earth, which received the National 
 Book Critics Circle Award, and 
 his most recent volume, Adventures 
 in Ancient Egypt. He is also the 
 author of two books of creative 
 nonfiction.A Sympathy of Souls 
 and Great Topics oftheWorld. 
 
 It's tempting to praise the 
 Creative Writing Fellowship 
 program of the National 
 Endowment for the Arts 
 by repeating the wisdom 
 common among my artist 
 friends: that a culture is 
 judged in future generations 
 most honorably when it is 
 judged by its artistic legacy. 
 This is true, but for me, today, 
 it's a little too lofty. My own 
 fellowships from the NEA 
 have meant, much more 
 
 simply and immediately, 
 a kind of hands-on 
 encouragement (emotional 
 as well as fiscal) when it 
 was most needed; and an 
 immediate implication that 
 artistic production is, as much 
 as the keeping of accounts 
 books or the piling up of 
 weapons, seen as a viable 
 contribution to the ongoing 
 life of one's country. For that, 
 let me yelp a few hurrahs. 
 
 . . .a culture is judged in future generations 
 most honorably when it is judged by its 
 artistic legacy. 
 
 38 
 
KANSAS 
 
 Futures 
 
 The sky is nearly plaided with the speedy traffic 
 
 of boomerang-shape, one-family (or sportier) airmobiles 
 
 on the cover of the sci-fi book he's reading, he being 
 
 fourteen. He can't abide the present moment, it's so 
 
 . . .crummy, really crummy. He can't start 
 
 to see his own next twenty years, whatever 
 
 compromise and common, almost begrudgingly kept, fidelities 
 
 it's sure to hold. And so he's all of a thousand years 
 
 ahead of the rest of his sleeping household, 
 
 dreamily leaping over the pinnacled surface of other planets 
 
 in silvery gravi-boots: a woman to rescue, 
 
 a Star Alliance robo-ship to save. A thousand years 
 
 ago, (AD 922) the envoy Ibn Fallan witnessed 
 
 "the girl who devoted herself to death" be 
 
 stabbed, and then pyred alongside a Viking chief 
 
 while, otherwheres, one Luitprand of Cremona (AD 950 or so) 
 
 was delivered "on the shoulders of two eunuchs" 
 
 into the presence of the Emperor of Constantinople, whose throne, 
 
 "anon, did float in the air above me." Wonders. Atrocities 
 
 and wonders. And though they couldn't foretell the simple 
 
 rrrip of a velcro strip, or the tick of an engine cooling down 
 
 like the pawl on a slowing carnival wheel, still 
 
 these ancient chroniclers would recognize our own 
 
 ongoing fears, small courage, and sleeplessness. Speaking 
 
 of which: while I've been diverting us, someone's awakened. 
 
 His mother. She rarely sleeps for more than an hour 
 
 now, from the lump's extending its spidery legs. 
 
 The doctor says: six months. And so at night she carefully 
 
 plans the listed details of her own funeral. The music, 
 
 the floral decor (by individual blossom), the opening poem. 
 
 Her own sure, heart-of-hearts choice for the latter is 
 
 Dylan Thomas's "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" 
 
 — such a painful, lavish, spilled-out bag of language! — but 
 
 her Women's Support Group thinks a "woman poet" more 
 
 appropriate, and wields subtle pressures men 
 
 would never be allowed. After all, the battle is never over; 
 
 there's so much left to be done. 
 
 Albert Goldbarth 
 
 39 
 
Bobbie Ann Mason 
 
 Bobbie Ann Mason is from 
 Kentucky. She has published two 
 collections of stories and three 
 novels: Liia + Spence, In Country, 
 and Feather Crowns. She has 
 received a Guggenheim 
 Fellowship, a grant from the 
 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, 
 and the American Academy and 
 Institute for Arts & Letters Award. 
 
 I used my NEA fellowship to 
 write my novel, In Country, 
 which was published by 
 Harper & Row in 1 985. 
 When I began writing my 
 novel, I found my energy was 
 not focused on the work at 
 hand because of the disparate 
 nature and erratic scheduling 
 of the activities required 
 to earn a living.Therefore, 
 the NEA grant came at an 
 opportune time to let me pull 
 back and turn my attention 
 entirely to the novel. 
 
 I wanted to do something 
 that would be rich and lasting, 
 but I never expected it to 
 have such popular appeal and 
 tangible social effect. Yet this 
 novel was a surprising 
 commercial success, and it 
 has affected the lives of many 
 people. In Country is about a 
 high school girl's quest for 
 knowledge about her father, 
 who died in Vietnam just 
 before she was born. Because 
 
 of the moment in our history, 
 the subject struck a cord in 
 many readers - especially high 
 school and college students, 
 and Vietnam veterans and 
 their families. In Country 
 was also made into a film, 
 which opened the story up 
 to a broader audience. 
 
 The NEA grant helped me 
 write the novel, which I did 
 for my own artistic reasons. 
 I report these unexpected 
 benefits that In Country 
 brought to the community - 
 from the classroom to the 
 veterans' group to the 
 economy and morale of my 
 own hometown - because I 
 think they are significant in 
 reminding people that what 
 may look like self-indulgence 
 in its beginnings can turn out 
 to have long-reaching, positive 
 effects on the culture. 
 
 I wanted to do something that would be rich and .lasting, 
 but I never expected it to have such popular appeal and 
 tangible social effect. 
 
 40 
 
KENTUCKY 
 
 from 
 
 In Country 
 
 Sam walked down a dusty lane with her grandfather. She was seeing 
 the place her dad knew. She was seeing where her mother lived once 
 for a few weeks, where Sam started growing in her belly. Her roots 
 were here, and she had been here often enough for the place to be 
 familiar, but not enough to really know it. She felt she was seeing it 
 for the first time. 
 
 "I remember when Dwayne first brought Irene out here," 
 Pap said. "She was just a skinny little squirt like you. Nothing 
 embarrassed her. She went around asking me the name of everything. 
 She got a kick out of Emma's hen-and-chickens cactuses, said they 
 was like pincushions. Imagine that. She picked the biggest bunch of 
 flowers. She went back in the fields along the fence rows and picked 
 daisies and Queen Anne's lace and black-eyed Susans and I don't 
 know what-all. I never would have thought of picking weeds like that. 
 She was raised on a farm, so I was surprised she'd thought of picking 
 them." 
 
 "She always liked flowers," Sam said. They were talking about 
 Irene as though she were the one who had died, and when they 
 talked about Dwayne they weren't specific. You should always be 
 specific, Sam thought. 
 
 "Country kids are just like the city kids now," Pap said. 
 "They've got more. And they have cars, so they can go running 
 around. Used to, Saturday was when you went to town, but now they 
 take off and go any day of the week." 
 
 They talked about Sam's new car for a while, and then Pap 
 said, "Everybody always thought it was something that Dwayne 
 left us such a gift. When you were born, I remember how proud 
 everybody was." He hammered a nail into a fence post. "Everybody 
 expected a boy, of course, but we loved you just the same." 
 
 "Everybody wished I was a boy," Sam said, crushing a clover 
 head in her hand. "Did you know my daddy picked the name?" 
 she asked. "He thought it was in the Bible." 
 
 "No. I didn't know that. Why, you learn something new every 
 day. Well, I'll say!" he stroked his chin thoughtfully. 
 
 While her grandfather worked on the fence, Sam walked down 
 by the creek. She had remembered some wild goose-plum trees in the 
 creek. She found them, but she didn't see any fruit. The trees had 
 honeysuckle vines on them. On a vine she saw a large green stinkbug 
 with an orange spot and a figure eight on its back. Water striders 
 pranced on the shallow pools of clear water in the creek bed. She 
 used to call them Jesus bugs because of the way they walked on water. 
 
 She looked around the farm, trying to see it in a new way, trying 
 to see what her father had known, the world he knew before he went 
 to Vietnam. These were his memories, what he took with him over 
 there. She thought she could comprehend it. Everything he knew 
 was small and predictable: Jesus bugs, blue mold, hound dogs, fence 
 posts. He didn't know about the new consolidated county high 
 school, rock video, M*A*S*H. He didn't know her. 
 
 At the house, the dog, outside his pen now, bowed lazily, 
 then lay down in a patch of dirt he had dug in the shade near the 
 flowerbed. His back was covered with scabs. Sam recognized many 
 of the flowers — tall blue stalks, pink droopy flowers, big round 
 yellow faces — but she had no names for them. The rosebushes were 
 insect-eaten. The lilies had dried up. The August sun was beating 
 down. Sam recognized a plant with seed pods forming from some 
 of the flowers. She remembered that when they turned brown those 
 seed pods would explode, scattering their seeds. She remembered 
 the plant's name — touch-me-not. 
 
 "I found that diary," Mamaw called to Sam from the porch. 
 "You can have it, but I don't reckon it'll tell you anything. He just 
 set down troop movements and weapons and things like that. It's not 
 loving, like the letters he wrote back. Those was personal. Irene 
 didn't even want this little book, but you can have it if you want it." 
 
 Sam reached for the brown spiral notebook. Mamaw was 
 standing on the porch, and Sam was below her on the steps. Sam 
 remembered reaching just this way at graduation when the principal 
 handed her the rolled diploma. But inside the ribbon was a blank 
 piece of paper. The real diplomas were mailed later, because they had 
 come too late from the printer. 
 
 Mamaw said, "I remembered that I couldn't even read all of 
 it because I couldn't figure out his handwriting, so I don't expect 
 it'll tell you anything, but at least you'll have something of his." 
 She shooed a cat out the door. "Do you want us to take you out to 
 the graveyard later?" Mamaw said. 
 
 "No, not today," Sam said, her eyes on the cat. "I've got to go 
 somewhere." 
 
 "Whereabouts?" 
 
 "Paducah. I've got to go to Paducah." 
 
 - Bobbie Ann Mason 
 
 41 
 
Ernest Gaines 
 
 Ernest Gaines was born and 
 raised in Louisiana. He is the 
 author of many acclaimed novels, 
 including: Of Love and Dust, 
 The Autobiography of Miss Jane 
 Pittman,A Gathering of Old Men, 
 and A Lesson Before Dying which 
 received the National Book 
 Award. Mr. Gaines has taught 
 at workshops around the world. 
 
 When I graduated from San 
 Francisco State College in 
 1 957, 1 gave myself ten years 
 to see if I could make a living 
 at writing. During that time 
 I wrote five to six hours a day, 
 five days a week. I got part- 
 time jobs to support myself. 
 I worked as a printer's helper 
 a few years, then as a postal 
 worker. I made just enough 
 money to pay the rent for 
 a one-room apartment and 
 to pay for my meals. During 
 those years I received some 
 local recognition: a fellowship 
 to attend Stanford University 
 for a year and the Joseph 
 Henry Jackson Award. 
 In 1967, my second novel, 
 Of Love and Dust, was noticed 
 by the national press, and that 
 same year I received a grant 
 from the NEA. It couldn't 
 have happened at a better 
 time, because I was beginning 
 to have doubts about the 
 
 possibility of becoming a 
 writer. Writing was all I 
 wanted to do, but I had to 
 support myself as well, and 
 I was not doing a very good 
 job at it. The NEA grant - a 
 thousand dollars at that time 
 - encouraged me to keep 
 writing. I was finally being 
 recognized by critics and my 
 colleagues. The young writer 
 needs that. He needs the 
 money, yes - but he also needs 
 a little recognition now and 
 then to keep pushing himself. 
 I know many young very 
 talented people who gave up 
 out of despair. I feel that 
 I was lucky. The recognition 
 by the NEA gave me enough 
 push to start my next novel, 
 The Autobiography of Miss Jane 
 Pittman. I have not looked 
 back since. 
 
 The recognition by the NEA gave me enough push 
 to start my next novel. . . I have not looked back since. 
 
 42 
 
WRITING 
 
 LOUISIANA 
 
 from 
 
 A Lesson Before Dying 
 
 I took them back down the quarter. When I stopped 
 in front of Miss Emma's house, my aunt got out of 
 the car with her. 
 
 "I'm going to Bayonne," I told my aunt. 
 
 She had not shut the door yet. 
 
 "I'll be home to cook in a little while," she said. 
 
 "I'll eat in town," I told her. 
 
 Tante Lou held the door while she stood there 
 looking at me. Nothing could have hurt her more 
 when I said I was not going to eat her food. I was 
 supposed to eat soon after she had cooked, and if 
 I was not at home I was supposed to eat as soon as 
 I came in. She looked at me without saying anything 
 else, then she closed the door quietly and followed 
 Miss Emma into the yard. 
 
 I turned the car around and started up the 
 quarter again. There was not a single telephone in 
 the quarter, not a public telephone anywhere that 
 I could use before reaching Bayonne, and Bayonne 
 was thirteen miles away. 
 
 After leaving the quarter, I drove down a 
 graveled road for about two miles, then along a 
 paved road beside the St. Charles River for another 
 ten miles. There were houses and big live oak and 
 pecan trees on either side of the road, but not as 
 many on the riverbank side. There, instead of 
 houses and trees, there were fishing wharves, boat 
 docks, nightclubs, and restaurants for whites. There 
 were one or two nightclubs for colored, but they 
 were not very good. 
 
 As I drove along the river, I thought about all 
 the schoolwork that I should have been doing at 
 home. But I knew that after being around Miss 
 Emma and Henri Pichot the past hour, I would not 
 have been able to concentrate on my work. I needed 
 to be with someone. I needed to be with Vivian. 
 
 Bayonne was a small town of about six 
 thousand. Approximately three thousand five 
 hundred whites; approximately two thousand five 
 hundred colored. It was the parish seat for St. 
 Raphael. The courthouse was there; so was the jail. 
 
 There was a Catholic church uptown for whites; 
 a Catholic church back of town for colored. There 
 was a white movie theater uptown; a colored movie 
 theater back of town. There were two elementary 
 schools uptown, one Catholic, one public, for 
 whites; and the same back of town for colored. 
 Bayonne's major industries were a cement plant, 
 a sawmill, and a slaughterhouse, mosdy for hogs. 
 There was only one main street in Bayonne, and 
 it ran along the St. Charles River. The department 
 stores, the bank, the two or three dentists' and 
 doctors' and attorneys' offices, were mostly on this 
 street, which made up less than half a dozen blocks. 
 
 After entering the town, which was marked by 
 the movie theater for whites on the riverbank side of 
 the road, I had to drive another two or three blocks 
 before turning down an unlit road, which led back 
 of town to the colored section. Once I crossed the 
 railroad tracks, I could see the Rainbow Club, with 
 its green, yellow, and red arched neon lights. Several 
 cars were parked before the door; one of them, a big 
 white new '48 Cadillac, belonged to Joe Claiborne, 
 who owned the place. A man and a woman came 
 through the door as I got out of my car to go inside. 
 There were probably a dozen people in the place, 
 half of them at the bar, the rest of them sitting at 
 tables with white tablecloths. I spoke to Joe 
 Claiborne and went through a side door into the cafe 
 to use the telephone. The tables in the cafe had 
 checkered red and white tablecloths. Thelma ran the 
 cafe, and her husband, Joe, ran the bar. I asked her 
 what she had for supper. 
 
 "Smothered chicken, smothered beefsteaks, 
 shrimp stew," she said. 
 
 There was only one other person in the cafe, 
 and he sat at the counter eating the stewed shrimps. 
 
 "Shrimps any good?" I asked Thelma. 
 
 "All my food's good," she said. 
 
 "Shrimps," I told her. 
 
 - Ernest Gaines 
 
 43 
 
Ira Sad off 
 
 Ira Sadoff is the author of four 
 collections of poetry, most 
 recently Emotional Traffic, An Ira 
 Sadoff Reader, a novel, Uncoupling, 
 as well as stories and essays in 
 various literary magazines. He 
 co-founded the literary magazine 
 Seneca Review and served as 
 poetry editor of Antioch ReWew. 
 Mr. Sadoff teaches at Colby 
 College and the MFA program at 
 Warren Wilson College. He lives 
 in Hallowell, Maine with his wife 
 Linda and Casey and Julie. 
 
 The Fellowship gave me the 
 time and opportunity to write 
 and chronicle my relationship 
 to my neighbors and the 
 Maine landscape, to give voice 
 to other people who lived in 
 my community who neither 
 had the leisure nor training 
 to express in concentrated 
 language their plights or fates. 
 
 Additionally, the grant 
 authorized me as a poet 
 in America and the world: 
 poetry does not survive in a 
 market economy, especially 
 an economy driven by 
 international conglomerates 
 (virtually all our major 
 publishers and bookstores 
 are owned by such 
 conglomerates). Poetry 
 does not respond to the profit 
 motive. What it does respond 
 
 to is a world of feeling, some 
 recognition that we belong 
 to a human community with 
 shared experiences. For a 
 government to support and 
 affirm the art of poetry 
 affirms that we care about 
 our spiritual welfare as well 
 as simply defending ourselves 
 against enemies, real or 
 imagined. A nation without 
 poetry is a nation without 
 a soul. 
 
 For a government to support and affirm the art of 
 poetry affirms that we care about our spiritual welfare. 
 A nation without poetry is a nation without a soul. 
 
 44 
 
MAINE 
 
 Pemaquid Point 
 
 The lighthouse as an image 
 of loneliness has its limits. 
 
 For as we stand on the shore 
 of this ocean, the crusted snow 
 
 on the granite hills and grass 
 disguised beneath it, that tower 
 
 seems a place where people gather 
 some vision of themselves: the marriage 
 
 of rock to water, of wave to snail 
 washed up on shore. We're small, 
 
 and waving to the lobster boat — 
 which could be miles away or close 
 
 enough to raise our voices to — makes 
 us wish our journeys took us further, 
 
 past witness, to a scene where 
 we belonged. A man in blue 
 
 pulls up his net: tiny fish 
 swim free of it. And the man 
 
 pulling anchor, whose strength 
 tugs him farther from the shore, 
 
 pays tribute to our rootlessness. 
 As he shouts to start the engine up, 
 
 to take his course, he leaves us 
 in the distance, the repeated ritual 
 
 of his wake. And like the water 
 stirred against the lighthouse wall, 
 
 breaking up, wave after wave, we 
 forget ourselves. Learn our place. 
 
 - Ira S a doff 
 
 45 
 
Linda Pastan 
 
 Linda Pastan has published nine 
 volumes of poetry, most recently 
 Heroes In Disguise and An Early 
 Afterlife. She has been a finalist for 
 the National Book Award and for 
 the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. 
 From 1 99 1 -95, she was Poet 
 Laureate of Maryland and was 
 on the staff of the Bread Loaf 
 Writers' Conference for 20 years. 
 Carnival Evening: New and Selected 
 Poems, 1968-1998 is due from 
 Norton in the Spring of 1998. 
 
 I received my grant in the 
 1 970s, when the NEA and I 
 were both relatively young. 
 It wasn't for a lot of money 
 then, though the dollar did go 
 farther than it does today - 
 but not that far. It did, 
 however, pay for enough child 
 care to get me through a lot 
 of drafts of a lot of poems. 
 More important, at a time 
 when my writing life seemed 
 almost subversive, it lent 
 credibility to my claim that 
 I was a writer, not just to 
 doubting friends and family 
 but more crucially to myself. 
 The mere fact of having been 
 chosen helped give me the 
 courage to continue with my 
 work at times of grave self 
 doubt. In fact it still does. 
 
 . . .having been chosen [for a grant] helped 
 give me the courage to continue with my work 
 at times of grave self doubt. 
 
 46 
 
MARYLAND 
 
 To a Daughter Leaving Home 
 
 When I taught you 
 
 at eight to ride 
 
 a bicycle, loping along 
 
 beside you 
 
 as you wobbled away 
 
 on two round wheels, 
 
 my own mouth rounding 
 
 in surprise when you pulled 
 
 ahead down the curved 
 
 path of the park, 
 
 I kept waiting 
 
 for the thud 
 
 of your crash as I 
 
 sprinted to catch up, 
 
 while you grew 
 
 smaller, more breakable 
 
 with distance, 
 
 pumping, pumping 
 
 for your life, screaming 
 
 with laughter, 
 
 the hair flapping 
 
 behind you like a 
 
 handkerchief waving 
 
 goodbye. 
 
 - Linda Pastan 
 
 47 
 
Linda Gregg 
 
 Linda Gregg was born in 
 Suffern, New York. She grew 
 up in northern California - 
 in the country. Her books of 
 poetry include Too Bright to See, 
 Alma, The Sacraments of Desire, 
 and Chosen by the Lion. She 
 has received a Guggenheim 
 Fellowship, a Whiting Writer's 
 Award, and five Pushcart Prizes. 
 Ms. Gregg has taught at the 
 University of Iowa, the University 
 of Houston and others. She is 
 in the woods of Massachusetts 
 trying to finish her new book in 
 time to teach at the University of 
 California, Berkeley in the fall. 
 
 The NEA did many things 
 for me as I'm sure it has for 
 other artists. Simply being 
 acknowledged as a serious 
 writer by the government of 
 our country is a wonderful 
 thing to do for anyone in the 
 creative arts. Of course, one 
 of the best things that the 
 NEA grants have done is to 
 allow the time to produce 
 the work. In my case it was 
 especially important because 
 it enabled me to write 
 Chosen by the Lion, which is 
 the best book I've ever done. 
 
 Simply being acknowledged as a serious writer by the 
 government of our country is a wonderful thing. . . 
 
 48 
 
MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 To Be Here 
 
 The February road to the river is mud 
 and dirty snow, tire tracks and corncobs 
 uncovered by the mildness. I think I am 
 living alone and that I am not afraid. 
 Love is those birds working hard at flying 
 over the mountain going somewhere else. 
 Fidelity is always about what we have 
 already lived. I am happy, kicking snow. 
 The trees are the ones to honor. The trees 
 and the broken corn. And the clear sky 
 that looks like rain is falling through it. 
 Not a pretty spring, but the real thing. 
 The old weeds and the old vegetables. 
 Winter's graceful severity melting away. 
 I don't think the dead will speak. 
 I think they are happy just to be here. 
 If they did, I imagine them saying 
 birds flying, twigs, water reflecting. 
 There is only this. Dead weeds waiting 
 uncovered to the quiet soft day. 
 
 - Linda Gregg 
 
 49 
 
Philip Levine 
 
 Philip Levine is a poet of many 
 honors. His volume The Simple 
 Truth won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. 
 Among his many titles are 
 They Feed They Lion, the award- 
 winning Ashes and SevenYears 
 From Somewhere. He also has 
 written The Bread ofTime: 
 Toward an Autobiography. 
 
 For many years, he taught writing 
 and English at several universities. 
 He is one of three poets featured 
 on the Internet Poetry Archive 
 (http://www.sunsite.unc.edu/ipa/ 
 index.html) where you can hear 
 him read some of his work. 
 
 Over the years I've received 
 three grants from the NEA. 
 The first one in 1976, meant 
 the most to me. I had been 
 teaching a very heavy load 
 at California State University 
 at Fresno, and found it 
 increasingly difficult both 
 to teach properly and get 
 my writing done. I had just 
 published my seventh book 
 of poems, The Names of the 
 Lost, which was nominated 
 for the National Book Critics 
 Circle Award and won the 
 Lenore Marshall Award. 
 
 I took an entire year off 
 teaching and travelled to 
 Spain in order to revive my 
 sense of the landscape and 
 the spiritual, cultural, and 
 political history. Inspired, I 
 returned to Fresno and wrote 
 most of the poems that made 
 up the two books published 
 in '79: Ashes and Seven Years 
 from Somewhere. These books 
 brought me the National 
 Book Critics Circle Award and 
 the National Book Award. 
 
 The grant in '81 allowed me 
 to move to New York City 
 where I was able to focus on 
 a poem involving my early 
 years both in that city and 
 the city of my birth, Detroit. 
 In a rented loft on the lower 
 West Side, I was able to bring 
 all that material together in 
 my poem, "Poem With No 
 Ending," the centerpiece of 
 my book Sweet Will. The '87 
 grant gave me the resources 
 to return to Detroit in order 
 to research the poem, 
 "A Walk with Tom Jefferson," 
 the longest and best poem 
 I've ever written. 
 
 Had such grants existed 
 when I was in my 30s and 
 early 40s and teaching too 
 much and writing too little, 
 there's no knowing how much 
 more I might have written, 
 but I thank my good fortune 
 that they arrived in time to 
 help me become, for better 
 or worse, the poet I have 
 become. 
 
 The '87 grant gave me the resources to return to Detroit in 
 order to research the. . . longest and best poem I've ever written. 
 
 50 
 
MICHIGAN 
 
 You Can Have It 
 
 My brother comes home from work 
 and climbs the stairs to our room. 
 I can hear the bed groan and his shoes drop 
 one by one. You can have it, he says. 
 
 The moonlight streams in the window 
 and his unshaven face is whitened 
 like the face of the moon. He will sleep 
 long after noon and waken to find me gone. 
 
 Thirty years will pass before I remember 
 that moment when suddenly I knew each man 
 has one brother who dies when he sleeps 
 and sleeps when he rises to face this life, 
 
 and that together they are only one man 
 sharing a heart that always labors, hands 
 yellowed and cracked, a mouth that gasps 
 for breath and asks, Am I gonna make it? 
 
 All night at the ice plant he had fed 
 the chute its silvery blocks, and then I 
 stacked cases of orange soda for the children 
 of Kentucky, one gray boxcar at a time 
 
 «* 
 
 with always two more waiting. We were twenty 
 
 for such a short time and always in 
 
 the wrong clothes, crusted with dirt 
 
 and sweat. I think now we were never twenty. 
 
 In 1948 in the city of Detroit, founded 
 
 by de la Mothe Cadillac for the distant purposes 
 
 of Henry Ford, no one wakened or died, 
 
 no one walked the streets or stoked a furnace, 
 
 for there was no such year, and now 
 that year has fallen off all the old newspapers, 
 calendars, doctors' appointments, bonds, 
 wedding certificates, drivers licenses. 
 
 The city slept. The snow turned to ice. 
 The ice to standing pools or rivers 
 racing in the gutters. Then bright grass rose 
 between the thousands of cracked squares, 
 
 and that grass died. I give you back 1948. 
 I give you all the years from then 
 to the coming one. Give me back the moon 
 with its frail light falling across a face. 
 
 Give me back my young brother, hard 
 and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse 
 for God and burning eyes that look upon 
 all creation and say, You can have it. 
 
 Philip Levine 
 
 51 
 
David Mura 
 
 David Mura is a poet, creative 
 nonfiction writer, critic, playwright 
 and performance artist. A Sansei 
 or third generation Japanese 
 American, Mura is the author of 
 Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a 
 Sansei, listed in the New York Times 
 1 99 1 Notable Books of Year. 
 Mura's new memoir, Where the 
 Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey 
 of Race, Sexuality and Identity, was 
 published in May 1996. His most 
 recent book of poetry is The Colors 
 of Desire, which won the Carl 
 Sandburg Literary Award. His 
 first book of poetry, After We Lost 
 Our Way, won the 1989 National 
 Poetry Series Contest. Mura is 
 the Artistic Director of the Asian 
 American Renaissance, an Asian 
 American arts organization in 
 Minnesota. He lives in Minneapolis 
 with his wife, Susan Spencer, 
 a pediatric oncologist, and his 
 three children Samantha, Nikko 
 andTomo. 
 
 "I can't go on. I'll go on." 
 So says one of the characters 
 in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. 
 This seems to me both a 
 statement about life in 
 general and about writing 
 in particular. 
 
 In the beginning, when a 
 writer has few credentials, he 
 or she hears loudly the stern 
 warning, "It is impossible" or 
 "You can't go on." My NEA 
 Fellowship came at a crucial 
 time in my career, when I was 
 in the process of becoming 
 a memoir writer as well as 
 a poet, when I was making 
 a leap from a familiar to an 
 unfamiliar genre. It brought 
 me crucial time to work both 
 on my poetry and on the 
 beginnings of Turning Japanese, 
 a book about my year-long 
 stay in Japan and my new 
 understanding and acceptance 
 of my identity and heritage 
 as a Japanese American. 
 
 But more than time to write, 
 the fellowship offered me 
 encouragement, a recognition 
 that I was not deluding myself 
 with my pursuit of writing. 
 I feel I've been able to add 
 to the literature of America 
 a new body of work that 
 reflects the stories and 
 concerns of my community 
 and family, material that 
 was not part of my education 
 and which is still neglected 
 in the mass media with its 
 homogenized portraits of who 
 we are. The NEA fellowship 
 was not only for myself but 
 for my community of 
 Japanese Americans and 
 Asian Americans, for the 
 stories within us that still 
 need to be told. 
 
 The NEA fellowship was not only for myself but for my 
 community of Japanese Americans and Asian Americans, 
 for the stories within us that still need to be told. 
 
 52 
 
MINNESOTA 
 
 from 
 
 Turning Japanese 
 
 I am a Sansei, a third-generation Japanese-American. 
 In 1984, through luck and through some skills as a 
 poet, I traveled to Japan. My reasons for going were 
 not very clear. 
 
 At the time, I'd been working as an arts 
 administrator in the Writers-in-the-Schools program, 
 sending other writers to grade schools and high 
 schools throughout Minnesota. It wasn't taxing, but 
 it didn't provide the long stretches needed to plunge 
 into my own work. I had applied for a U.S. /Japan 
 Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship mainly because 
 I wanted time to write. 
 
 Japan? That was where my grandparents came 
 from, it didn't have much to do with my present life. 
 
 But then Japan had never seemed important to 
 me, even in childhood. On holidays when we would 
 get together with relatives, I didn't notice that the 
 faces around me looked different from most of the 
 faces at school. I didn't notice that my grandfathers 
 were in Japan, my grandmothers dead. No one spoke 
 about them, just as no one spoke about Japan. We 
 were American. It was the Fourth of July, Labor Day, 
 Christmas. All I noticed was that the food we ate — 
 futomaki, mazegohan, teriyaki, kamaboko — was 
 different from what I liked best — McDonald's, 
 pizza, hot dogs, tuna-fish salad. 
 
 For me Japan was cheap baseballs, Godzilla, 
 weird sci-fi movies like Star Man, where you could 
 see the strings that pulled him above his enemies, 
 flying in front of a backdrop so poorly made even I, 
 at eight, was conscious of the fakery. Then there were 
 the endless hordes storming G.I.'s in war movies. 
 
 Sometimes the Japanese hordes got mixed up in my 
 mind with the Koreans, tiny Asians with squinty 
 eyes mowed down in row after row by the steady 
 shots of John Wayne or Richard Widmark. Before 
 the television set, wearing my ever-present Cubs 
 cap, I crouched near the sofa, saw the enemy 
 surrounding me. I shouted to my men, hurled a 
 grenade. I fired my gun. And the Japanese soldiers 
 fell before me, one by one. 
 
 Of course, by the eighties, I was aware, as 
 everyone else was, of Japan's burgeoning power, 
 its changing image — Toyota, Nissan, Sony, 
 Toshiba, the economic, electronic, automotive 
 miracle. Rather than savage barbarism the Japanese 
 were now characterized by a frightening efficiency 
 and a tireless energy. Japan was a monster of 
 industrialization, of huge, world-hungry corpora- 
 tions. Unfair trade practices, the trade imbalance. 
 Robot people. 
 
 But none of this had much to do with me. 
 After all, I was a poet. 
 
 - David Mura 
 
 53 
 
Richard Ford 
 
 Richard Ford was born in Jackson, 
 Mississippi in 1944 and attended 
 public school there until he 
 entered college in Michigan in 
 1962. His first novel, A Piece of 
 My Heart, was published in 1976. 
 Since then he has published six 
 books of fiction, including novels 
 and stories, as well as many 
 essays. His novel Independence Day 
 won both the 1996 Pulitzer Prize 
 for Fiction and the PEN Faulkner 
 Award. His most recent book of 
 stories, Women With Men, was 
 published in 1997. He is married 
 to Kristina Ford and lives both 
 in New Orleans and in Chinook, 
 Montana. 
 
 I've been lucky enough to get 
 two NEA Fellowships, one in 
 the seventies and one in the 
 eighties, and I'm sure my 
 quota is up. But the first was 
 the most, I'm supposed to say, 
 profound. I'd been ducking 
 regular employment, trying 
 to keep my writing on track, 
 and basically being funded by 
 my wife. The fellowship kept 
 me free from what is 
 misinterpreted to be "honest 
 work" - work for somebody 
 else. I wrote a novel during 
 the year of the Fellowship, 
 and the money helped my 
 wife quit her job and begin 
 thinking of something better 
 to do. What the Fellowship 
 "meant," or at least seemed 
 to mean, apart from these 
 quite practical concerns, was 
 that the great numbers game 
 which young writers often 
 obsess over (I actually didn't, 
 though I was aware of it) was 
 
 not always destined to play 
 out against me. It meant the 
 world outside my room (I was 
 living in New Jersey at the 
 time) wasn't indifferent to 
 what I was writing; that I 
 had a chance, and wasn't 
 necessarily wasting my time. 
 I've always thought that 
 writing success is measured 
 by readers, and so here were 
 some readers who thought 
 I was okay. Beyond that, 
 being quirkily patriotic, I also 
 thought it was neat that "the 
 government" deemed my 
 work worthwhile. I must have, 
 in fact, French blood in me 
 because I did and still do think 
 that the collective body of a 
 country's artistic. efforts (even 
 novelists' efforts) comprises 
 a worthwhile contribution to 
 the nation's well-being. 
 
 It meant the world outside my room wasn't indifferent 
 to what I was writing. . . 
 
 54 
 
MISSISSIPPI 
 
 • ~## 
 
 
 
 from 
 
 My Mother, In Memory 
 
 After that the life that would take us to the end began. 
 A fragmented, truncated life of visits long and short. 
 Letters. Phone calls. Telegrams. Meetings in cities 
 away from home. Conversations in cars, in airports, 
 train stations. Efforts to see each other. Leaving 
 dominated eveiything — my growing older, and hers, 
 observed from varying distances. 
 
 She held out alone in Mississippi for a year, 
 moved back into the house on Congress Street. She 
 rented out the other side, worked at the hospital, 
 where for a time, I think, the whole new life she'd 
 been handed worked out, came together. I am 
 speculating, as you can believe, because I was gone. 
 But at least she said she liked her job, liked the young 
 interns at the hospital, liked the drama of the ER, 
 liked working even. It may have started to seem 
 satisfactory enough that I was away. It may have 
 seemed to her that there was a life to lead. That under 
 the circumstances she had done reasonably well with 
 things; could ease up, let events happen without 
 fearing the worst. One bad thing did finally turn into 
 something less bad. 
 
 This, at least, is what I wanted to think. How 
 a son feels about his widowed mother when he is far 
 away becomes an involved business. But it is not 
 oversimplifying to say that he wants good to come to 
 her. In all these years, the years of fragmented life 
 with my mother, I was aware that things would never 
 be completely right with her again. Partly it was a 
 matter of her choosing; partly it was a matter of her 
 own character — of just how she could see her life 
 
 without my father, with him gone and so much life 
 left to be lived in an unideal way. Always she was 
 resigned somewhere down deep. I could never 
 plumb her without coming to stop point — a point 
 where expectation simply ceased. This is not to say 
 she was unhappy after enough time had passed. Or 
 that she never laughed. Or that she didn't see life as 
 life, didn't regain and enjoy herself. All those she 
 did. Only, not utterly, not in a way a mother, any 
 mother, could disguise to her only son who loved 
 her. I always saw that. Always felt it. Always felt her 
 
 — what? — discomfort at life? Her resisting it? 
 Always wished she could relent more than she 
 apparently could; since in most ways my own life 
 seemed to spirit ahead, and I did not like it that hers 
 didn't. From almost the first I felt that my father's 
 death surrendered to me at least as much as it took 
 away. It gave me my life to live by my own designs, 
 gave me my own decisions. A boy could do worse 
 than to lose his father — a good father, at that — just 
 when the world begins to display itself all around 
 him. 
 
 - Richard Ford 
 
 55 
 
MonaVan Duyn 
 
 MonaVan Duyn, the author of 
 nine books of poetry, has won 
 the National Book Award, the 
 Bollingen Prize and the Pulitzer 
 Prize. She is a member of the 
 Academy of Arts and Letters, 
 the Academy of Arts and Sciences, 
 and is a Chancellor of the Academy 
 of American Poets. In 1992-93, 
 she was Poet Laureate of the 
 United States. She lives in St. Louis. 
 
 The NEA grant made 
 it possible for me to 
 concentrate imaginative 
 energy on writing without 
 teaching for a time. It was 
 also, importantly, a sign of 
 respect for my work among 
 the poetry readers and 
 writers of my country. 
 
 The NEA grant made it possible for me to 
 concentrate imaginative energy on writing. 
 
 56 
 
MISSOURI 
 
 Notes from a Suburban Heart 
 
 Freud says that ideas are libidinal cathexes, 
 that is to say, acts of love. 
 
 - Norman 0. Brown 
 
 It's time to put fertilizer on the grass again. 
 
 The last time I bought it, the stuff was smelly and black, 
 
 and said "made from Philadelphia sewage" on the sack. 
 
 It's true that the grass shot up in a violent green, 
 
 but my grass-roots patriotism tells me to stick 
 
 to St. Louis sewage, and if the Mississippi isn't thick 
 
 enough to put in a bag and spread on a lawn, 
 
 I'll sprinkle 5-10-5 from nobody's home, 
 
 that is to say... 
 
 it's been a long winter. The new feeder scared off the birds 
 
 for the first month it was up. Those stupid starvelings, 
 
 puffed up like popcorn against the cold, thought the thing 
 
 was a death-trap. The seeds and suet on its boards 
 
 go down their gullets now, and come out song, 
 
 but scot-free bugs slit up the garden. It is spring. 
 
 I've "made bums out of the birdies," in my next-door neighbor's 
 
 words, 
 
 that is to say... 
 
 your life is as much a mystery to me as ever. 
 
 The dog pretends to bite fleas out of sheer boredom, 
 
 and not even the daffodils know if it's safe to come 
 
 up for air in this crazy, hot-and-cold weather. 
 
 Recognitions are shy, the faintest tint of skin 
 
 that says we are opening up, is it the same 
 
 as it was last year? Who can remember that either? 
 
 That is to say, 
 
 I love you, in my dim-witted way. 
 
 - Mona Van Duyn 
 
 % 
 
 57 
 
William Kittredge 
 
 William Kittredge grew up on 
 the MC Ranch in southeastern 
 Oregon, farmed until he was 35, 
 studied at the Writer's Workshop 
 at the University of Iowa, and has 
 just retired as Professor of English 
 and Creative Writing at the 
 University of Montana. Kittredge 
 has held a Stegner Fellowship at 
 Stanford ( 1 973-74) and received 
 two Pacific Northwest Bookseller's 
 Awards for Excellence (1984,1987), 
 the Montana Governor's Award 
 for the Arts in 1 986, and the PEN 
 West Award for nonfictional book 
 of the year in 1 992. In October, 
 1 994, Kittredge was presented 
 with the National Endowment for 
 the Humanities' Charles Frankel 
 Prize for service to the humanities. 
 Published widely in national 
 magazines, Kittredge co-authored 
 
 the nine novels in the Cord series 
 of Westerns, published two 
 collections of short stories, The 
 Van Gogh Field and Other Stories 
 and We Are Not InThisTogether, 
 as well as a collection of essays, 
 Owning It All. He was co-editor 
 of The Last Best Place.A Montana 
 Anthology and co-producer of 
 the film A River Runs Through It. 
 His memoir, Hole in the Sky, was 
 published in 1992 by Knopf. 
 A book of essays, Who Owns the 
 West, was published by Mercury 
 House in 1996, and The Portable 
 Western Reader will be published 
 by Viking/Penguin in the summer 
 of 1997. 
 
 In my early 30s, during the 
 mid- 1 960s, working as a ranch 
 foreman in the Great Basin 
 desert country of southeastern 
 Oregon, I began trying to 
 write. I wanted to write 
 because I saw that as a way 
 to have a significant life, by 
 which I mean make my work 
 into a gift, just as books I 
 revered had been gifts to me, 
 helping me define myself and 
 my values. 
 
 But a decade later, I was still 
 enormously unsure of myself, 
 floundering and thinking about 
 giving it up, when I got a grant 
 from the National Endowment 
 for the Arts, a gift of time 
 to work. The grant, as I 
 understood it, was a vote of 
 confidence, given me freely 
 by other writers. As a direct 
 result, I've kept working and 
 continue to work, almost 
 every day. Whatever I've 
 accomplished proceeds in 
 a quite clear line from that 
 first grant. It was, for me, for 
 these reasons, invaluable. 
 
 Whatever I've accomplished proceeds in 
 a quite clear line from that first grant. 
 
 58 
 
MONTANA 
 
 from 
 
 The Politics of Storytelling 
 
 The poet C.K. Williams came to Missoula some 
 years ago and spoke of "narrative dysfunction" as a 
 prime part of mental illness in our time. Many of us, 
 he said, lose track of the story of ourselves, the story 
 which tells us who we are supposed to be and how 
 we are supposed to act. 
 
 It isn't any fun, and doesn't just happen to 
 people, it happens to entire societies. Stories are 
 places to live, inside the imagination. We know a lot 
 of them, and we're in trouble when we don't know 
 which one is ours. Or when the one we inhabit 
 doesn't work anymore, and we stick with it anyway. 
 
 We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do 
 things because of what is called character, and our 
 character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. 
 Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in 
 the dark, and rework our stories. We do it again the 
 next morning, and all day long, before the looking 
 glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. 
 Other than such storytelling there is no reason to 
 things. 
 
 Aristotle talks of "recognitions," which can 
 be thought of as moments of insight or flashes 
 of understanding in which we see through to 
 coherencies in the world. We are all continually 
 seeking after such experiences. It's the most com- 
 monplace thing human beings do after breathing. We 
 are like detectives, each of us trying to make sense 
 and define what we take to be the right life. It is the 
 primary, most incessant business of our lives. 
 
 We figure and find stories, which can be 
 thought of as maps or paradigms in which we see our 
 purposes defined; then the world drifts and our 
 maps don't work anymore, our paradigms and 
 stories fail, and we have to reinvent our understand- 
 ings, and our reasons for doing things. Useful 
 stories, I think, are radical in that they help us see 
 freshly. They are like mirrors, in which we see 
 ourselves reflected. That's what stories are for, to 
 help us see for ourselves as we go about the continual 
 business of reimagining ourselves. 
 
 If we ignore the changing world, and stick to 
 some story too long, we are likely to find ourselves in 
 a great wreck. It's happening all over the West, right 
 now, as so many of our neighbors attempt to live out 
 rules derived from old models of society which 
 simply reconfirm their prejudices. 
 
 They see what they want to see. Which is some 
 consolation. But it is not consolation we need. We 
 need direction. 
 
 The interior West is no longer a faraway land. 
 Our great emptiness is filling with people, and we 
 are experiencing a time of profound transition, 
 which can be thought of as the second colonization. 
 Many are being reduced to the tourist business, in 
 which locals feature as servants, hunting guides, and 
 motel maids, or local color. People want to enclose 
 our lives in theirs, as decor. 
 
 The Native American people were living 
 coherent lives, at one with their circumstances, 
 when our people displaced them, leaving them 
 mostly disenfranchised and cut off from the 
 possibility in our society, their reservations like 
 little beleaguered nations battling to survive in our 
 larger one as we condnue wrecking the traditional 
 resources of their cultures. The result, for them, 
 is anomie, nothing to hang on to, powerlessness. 
 We are shamed and look away, and do little to help. 
 
 So it is deeply ironic that the Native Americans 
 are being joined in their disenfranchisement by 
 loggers and miners and ranchers, and the towns 
 which depend on them. Our ancestors came to the 
 West and made homes for themselves, where they 
 could live independent lives. Because of their 
 sacrifices, we in the dominant society think we own 
 the West, we think they earned it for us. But, as we 
 know, nobody owns anything absolutely, except their 
 sense of who they are. 
 
 - William Kittredge 
 
 59 
 
Ron Hansen 
 
 Ron Hansen grew up in Omaha. 
 Nebraska and was educated 
 at Creighton University, the 
 University of Iowa's Writers 
 Workshop, and Stanford 
 University, where he held a 
 Wallace Stegner Creative Writing 
 Fellowship. In addition to his short 
 story collection, Nebraska, he has 
 written the novels Desperadoes, 
 The Assassination of Jesse James by 
 the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette 
 in Ecstasy, and most recently, 
 Atticus. which was a finalist for 
 the National Book Award and the 
 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. 
 He is presently the Gerard Manley 
 Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts 
 and Humanities at Santa Clara 
 University. 
 
 I have been awarded two 
 National Endowment for the 
 Arts Literature Fellowships. 
 The honor was good for my 
 spirits, but more importantly, 
 the funds really made a 
 difference, for though my 
 fiction writing was earning 
 praise, I was still quite poor, 
 and the hard and continuing 
 effort to make ends meet 
 was interfering with my 
 production. With the help of 
 those two fellowships, I was 
 able to complete two books, 
 The Assassination of Jesse James 
 by the Coward Robert Ford, 
 which was nominated for 
 the PEN/Faulkner Award 
 in Fiction, and a book of 
 stories called Nebraska, 
 for which I won an award 
 in literature from the 
 American Academy and 
 Institute of Arts and Letters. 
 
 The honor was good for my spirits, but more importantly, 
 the funds really made a difference, . . 
 
 60 
 
WRITING 
 
 NEBRASKA 
 
 " : 
 
 Nebraska 
 
 Everyone is famous in this town. And everyc 
 necessary. Townspeople go to the Vaughn Grocery 
 Store for the daily news, and to the Home Restau- 
 rant for history class, especially an evensong when 
 the old people eat graveled pot roast and lemon 
 meringue pie and calmly sip coffee from cups ti 
 dp to their mouths with both hands. The Kiwanis 
 Club meets here on Tuesday nights, and hopes are 
 made public, petty sins are ridily dispatched, and 
 the proceeds from the gumball machine are tallied 
 up and poured into the upkeep of a playground. 
 Yutesler's Hardware has picnic items and kitchen 
 appliances in its one window, in the manner of those 
 prosperous men who would prefer to be known 
 for their hobbies. And there is one crisp, w; 
 Protestant church with a steeple, of the sort pictured 
 on calendars: and the Immaculate Conception 
 Catholic Church, gravlv holding the town at bav 
 
 _ 
 
 like a Gothic wolfhound. And there is an insurance 
 agency, a county coroner and justice of the peace, a 
 secondhand shop, a handsome chiropractor named 
 Koch who coaches the Pony League baseball team. 
 a post office approached on unpainted wood steps 
 
 :de of a cheap mobile home, the Nighthawk 
 tavern where there's Falstaff up beer, a green pool 
 table, a poster recording the Comhuskers score • 
 crazy man patiently tolerated, a gray-haired woman 
 with an unmoored eye. a boy in spectacles thick as 
 paperweights, a carpenter missing one index finger, 
 a plump waitress whose day job is in a basement 
 beautv shop, an old woman who creeps up to the 
 side door at eight in order to purchase one shot glass 
 ofwhiskr 
 
 .And yet passing by. and paying attention, an 
 outsider is onh" aware of what isn't, that there's no 
 bookshop, no picture show, no pharmacy or dry- 
 cleaners, no cocktail parties, extreme opinions, 
 jewelry or piano stores, motels, hotels, hospital, 
 political headquarters, philosophical theories about 
 Being and the soul. 
 
 High importance is only attached to 
 practicalities, and so there is the Batchelor Funeral 
 Home, where a proud old gendeman is on display- 
 in a dark brown suit, his yellow fingernails finally 
 clean. his smeared evt » his coat pocket, 
 
 a grandchild on tiptoes by the casket, peering at the 
 lips that will not move, the spar: I that will 
 
 not rise. .And there's Tommy Seymour's for Sinclair 
 gasoline and mechanical repair? . balloon 
 dinosaur bobbing from a string over the cash 
 
 _ :er. old tires piled beneath the cottonw ood. 
 For Sale in the sideyard a Case tractor, a John D; 
 reaper, a hay mower, a red manure spreader, and a 
 rusty grain conve oming them, 
 
 standing up inside them, trying slyly and lirde by 
 litde to inherit machinery for the earth. 
 
 And beyond that are woods, a slope of pasture, 
 rnprv catde pens, a driveway made of limestone 
 pebbles, and the house where Alic ; 
 through a child's World Book Encyclopedia, 
 stopping at the descriptions of California. Capet 
 Ceylon. Colorado. Copenhagen. Corpus Christi. 
 ta Rica. Cyprus. 
 
 ^Idow Dworak had been watering the lawn 
 in an open raincoat and apron, but at nine she walks 
 the green hose around to the spigot anc 
 down the nozzle so that the spray is a n - ;al 
 
 bowl softiy baptizing the ivy. She says. "How about 
 some camomile tea? - And she savs. "Yum. Oh. boy. 
 That hits the spot." .And bends to shut the water off. 
 
 The Union Pacific night train rolls through 
 town just after ten o'clock when a sixty-vear-old man 
 named Adolf Schooley is a boy again in bed. and 
 when the huge weight of forty or fifty- cars josdes his 
 upstairs room like a motor he'd put a quarter in. 
 .And over the sighing industry of the train, he can 
 hear the train saying Xebrask-a. .\<braska. \(braska. 
 .And he cannot sleep. 
 
 - Ron Hansen 
 
 61 
 
Teresa Jordan 
 
 the memoir. Riding the White Horse 
 -:~r i- 1 Zz'-z'i •••:— e* :':e 
 -•":• ::- I'.en r: s-e "u e:':e: 
 :•■■ : i--.- : :z =: :-' .'.es:e~ 
 women's writing. She lives on a 
 small ranch in northern Nevada 
 with her husband. foNdorist 
 Hall Cannon, and is currently 
 at work on a novel. Steeping with 
 ft -.- - : : 
 
 My NEA Literature fellowship 
 gave me breathing space, a 
 chance to step back from the 
 day-to-day necessity of earning 
 a living and experiment. Up 
 to that point, I had written 
 primarily nonaction. During 
 my NEA year, I wrote fiction. 
 By the end of it, a cast of 
 characters had walked into my 
 life and peopled an imaginary 
 place. My first novel. Sleeping 
 with the Animals, was well on 
 its way. 
 
 My NEA Literature fellowship gave me breathing space, 
 a chance to step back from the day-to-day necessity of 
 earning a living and experiment 
 
 . 
 
WRITING 
 
 NEVADA 
 
 Old Anne 
 
 the arm that hadrTt healed right would not bend 
 
 to hold a hairbrush. "Hack it off!" 
 
 Old Anne said of her braid, that braid like blood 
 
 flung from the heart, so long a part of her, 
 
 that thick grey snake slung heavy down her back. 
 
 Young Charlotte, wide-eyed Charlotte, stroked the shears, 
 
 reached out her hand to touch the braid, drew back — 
 
 "Please, child," Anne said, "don't be afraid to help me." 
 
 So Charlotte cut, and Old Anne closed her grey 
 
 sun-tired eyes. The hacking made her think 
 
 of falling, the colt falling, rain-soaked limestone soil 
 
 slick as oil — slicker — and a boulder held 
 
 cut jagged at the bottom of the hill. 
 
 The heavy braid hung loosely now by just a few thin strands: 
 
 The scissors sawed one last time through, it fell. 
 
 The soft thud she remembered just before 
 
 she woke, before the pain set in: the young horse, 
 
 stunned on top of her, had just begun to twitch. 
 
 - Teresa Jordan 
 
 63 
 
Maxine Kumin 
 
 Maxine Kumin has published 
 I I books of poems, four novels, 
 a collection of short stories, and 
 three collections of essays. She 
 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 
 for her fourth book, Up Country. 
 Looking for Luck won the Poets' 
 Prize in 1994 and was a finalist 
 for the National Book Critics 
 Circle Award that year. Now a 
 Chancellor of the Academy of 
 American Poets, Kumin was a 
 Consultant in Poetry to the 
 Library of Congress in 1 980-8 1 . 
 She has taught at a number of 
 universities, including Princeton, 
 Columbia and MIT and is the 
 McGee Professor of Writing at 
 Davidson College in the Spring of 
 1997. Kumin lives on a farm in 
 New Hampshire where she and 
 her husband raise horses and 
 vegetables. 
 
 Winning a National Council 
 on the Arts Fellowship in 1967 
 was a rich affirming moment 
 in my life. It said that I was 
 indeed a writer, not merely 
 a self-proclaimed one, and 
 it gave me the courage to 
 persist as a poet in a climate 
 that was not hugely 
 welcoming to women poets. 
 
 [The fellowship] gave me the courage to 
 persist as a poet in a climate that was not 
 hugely welcoming to women poets. 
 
 64 
 
NEW HAMPSHIRE 
 
 Appetite 
 
 I eat these 
 
 wild red raspberries 
 
 still warm from the sun 
 
 and smelling faintly of jewelweed 
 
 in memory of my father 
 
 tucking the napkin 
 under his chin and bending 
 over an ironstone bowl 
 of the bright drupelets 
 awash in cream 
 
 my father 
 
 with the sigh of a man 
 
 who has seen all and been redeemed 
 
 said time after time 
 
 as he lifted his spoon 
 
 men kill for this. 
 - Maxine Kumin 
 
 65 
 
Robert Pinsky 
 
 Robert Pinsky grew up in the 
 New Jersey coastal town of Long 
 Branch. His books include The 
 Want Bone, History of My Heart 
 (awarded the William Carlos 
 Williams Prize of the Poetry 
 Society of America), and An 
 Explanation of America. He teaches 
 in Boston University's graduate 
 writing program. His translation of 
 The Inferno of Dante was awarded 
 the Landon Translation Prize and 
 The Los Angeles Times Book Award 
 in poetry for 1995. His The Figured 
 Wheel: New and Collected Poems 
 was published by Farrar, Straus 
 & Giroux in Spring, 1996. His - 
 collection of essays, Poetry and 
 the World, was nominated for 
 the National Book Critics Circle 
 Award in criticism. In the fall of 
 1997, he will begin his term as 
 the U.S. Poet Laureate. 
 
 My NEA grant gave me 
 practical help and 
 encouragement at a time 
 when I needed it, with 
 small children, teaching 
 responsibilities, and the 
 struggle to write. A perhaps 
 neglected virtue of these 
 grants is the encouragement 
 they give many of us in our 
 humanistic work aside from 
 writing; I think I was made a 
 better teacher and a more 
 devoted teacher of students 
 who were or became 
 teachers, because I was 
 confirmed by the NEA grant 
 in my devotion to the project 
 of art. However good our 
 writing is or is not, we labor 
 to keep a certain light alive. 
 
 I think I was made a better teacher. . . 
 because I was confirmed by the NEA grant 
 in my devotion to the project of art. 
 
 66 
 
WRITING 
 
 NEW JERSEY 
 
 The Street Of Furthest Memory 
 
 The street flails 
 
 old substances, a chaff 
 
 of felt, beaver-board 
 
 slate shingles, tarpaper — plain 
 or made to resemble masonry 
 and brick — , oilcloth, sharkskin. 
 
 In a film of rain, the street 
 shines. Luncheonette, 
 lot, shoemaker, 
 
 They get clearer 
 
 in the rain, a spring rain 
 
 patched with sun, 
 
 the bright drops on glass, 
 on awnings of canvas, on cars 
 moving down the street 
 
 as the awnings flap, 
 flickering like a torn 
 film, coupe and sedan passing 
 
 to beyond your earliest 
 memory, on the street 
 out of memory, the sweet 
 
 street flailing its 
 
 lost substances, tangling 
 
 off as though thrown 
 
 from the spinning black 
 reel, unthreading rapidly, like 
 panic flailing the street. 
 
 - Robert Pinsky 
 
 67 
 
Joy Harjo 
 
 Joy Harjo is a poet, writer, 
 essayist, teacher, and saxophonist 
 with the jazz band Poetic Justice 
 which has just issued a new CD, 
 "Letter from the End of the 
 21st Century." Her most recent 
 collection is TheWomenWho 
 Fell From the Sky. She is also the 
 author of The Spiral of Memory: 
 Interviews, and has a forthcoming 
 anthology of Native women's 
 writing of North America to be 
 published by Norton next Spring. 
 She has won the Academy of 
 American Poets Award, the 
 Josephine Miles Award for Poetry, 
 and the William Carlos Williams 
 Award from the Poetry Society 
 of America. Joy Harjo lives in 
 New Mexico. 
 
 When ] received my first 
 NEA fellowship for poetry, 
 I was a single parent with two 
 children who were four and 
 nine years old, and I had just 
 graduated from the Iowa 
 Writers' Workshop. I had 
 published a chapbook as 
 an undergraduate at the 
 University of New Mexico 
 and while a graduate student 
 had completed a manuscript 
 that would soon by published 
 by I. Reed Books. I did not 
 have a job waiting me upon 
 graduation, and as far as I 
 knew, I would have to resort 
 to waitressing or working in 
 a hospital when I returned to 
 New Mexico. 
 
 Though I was fueled on pure 
 faith and bravado, I wasn't 
 sure how I'd pull it off this 
 time. Maybe I had just made 
 up a life that included a reach 
 toward something no one in 
 my immediate family either 
 understood or recognized. 
 My mother was a cook, my 
 father worked as a sheet- 
 metal worker. 
 
 The awarding of the NEA 
 grant came at this crucial 
 time. It gave me faith to 
 continue, as well as a 
 paycheck of sorts to write 
 until I secured a job (which I 
 did, teaching creative writing 
 at the Institute of American 
 Indian Arts). With the time 
 the grant bought, I was able 
 to buy childcare, pay rent and 
 utilities, and my car payments 
 while I wrote what would 
 be most of my second book 
 of poetry, She Had Some 
 Horses, the collection that 
 actually started my career. 
 The grant began the 
 momentum that has carried 
 me through these years. 
 I can now call myself a poet. 
 
 My mother is still waiting 
 for me to write a "real" book. 
 My father has since died, but 
 his family now thinks poetry 
 makes all the sense in the 
 world. 
 
 The grant began the momentum that has carried me 
 through these years. I can now call myself a poet. 
 
 68 
 
Bra 
 
 NEW MEXICO 
 
 Perhaps The World Ends Here 
 
 The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat 
 to live. 
 
 The gifts of the earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it 
 has been since creation, and it will go on. 
 
 We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the cor- 
 ners. They scrape their knees under it. 
 
 It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be 
 human. We make men at it, we make women. 
 
 At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. 
 
 Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our 
 children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as 
 we put ourselves back together once again at the table. 
 
 This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun. 
 
 Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the 
 shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory. 
 
 We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for 
 burial here. 
 
 At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering 
 and remorse. We give thanks. 
 
 Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing 
 and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. 
 
 - Joy Harjo 
 
 69 
 
Paul Auster 
 
 Paul Auster is a novelist, essayist, 
 poet, and translator. His novels 
 include The Music of Chance, 
 which was nominated for the 
 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award, Moon 
 Palace, In the Country of Last Things, 
 Mr.Vertigo, and the three novels 
 known as The NewYorkTrilogy. 
 He has also written a memoir, 
 The Invention of Solitude; a 
 collection of essays, The Art of 
 Hunger, and a volume of poems, 
 Disappearances. Mr. Auster also 
 wrote the screenplay for the 
 movie Smoke. He has a new book 
 coming out in the fall of 1997. 
 
 Both grants made an enormous 
 difference, relieving me of 
 intense financial pressures and 
 giving me time to do the work 
 I had in me to do.The money 
 took care of my most basic 
 needs (food, rent), and 
 suddenly, for the first time in 
 my life, I had some breathing 
 room, a chance to hunker down 
 and write without worrying 
 how I was going to pay that 
 month's bills. The second grant 
 allowed me to finish City of 
 Glass (the first volume of my 
 NewYorkTrilogy), and I mark 
 that year as a turning point in 
 my progress as a writer. The 
 Endowment's help was crucial - 
 a rope thrown to a drowning 
 man - and I am forever 
 thankful to the good people 
 who rescued me. 
 
 '"\ . .the years have taught me this: if there's a 
 pencil in your pocket, there's a good chance that 
 one day you'll feel tempted to start using it." 
 
 70 
 
NEW YORK 
 
 from 
 
 Why Write? 
 
 I was eight years old. At that moment in my life, 
 nothing was more important to me than baseball. 
 My team was the New York Giants, and I followed 
 the doings of those men in the black-and-orange caps 
 with all the devotion of a true believer. Even now, 
 remembering that team — which no longer exists, 
 which played in a ballpark that no longer exists — I 
 can reel off the names of nearly every player on the 
 roster. Alvin Dark, Whitey Lockman, Don Mueller, 
 Johnny Antonelli, Monte Irvin, Hoyt Wilhelm. 
 But none was greater, none more perfect nor more 
 deserving of worship than Willie Mays, the incandes- 
 cent Say Hey kid. 
 
 That spring, I was taken to my first big-league 
 game. Friends of my parents had box seats at the Polo 
 Grounds, and one April night a group of us went to 
 watch the Giants play the Milwaukee Braves. I don't 
 know who won, I can't recall a single detail of the 
 game, but I do remember that after the game was over 
 my parents and their friends sat talking in their seats 
 until all the other spectators had left. It got so late 
 that we had to walk across the diamond and leave by 
 the center-field exit, which was the only one still 
 open. As it happened, that exit was right below the 
 players' locker rooms. 
 
 Just as we approached the wall, I caught sight 
 of Willie Mays. There was no question about who it 
 was. It was Willie Mays, already out of uniform and 
 standing there in his street clothes not ten feet away 
 from me. I managed to keep my legs moving in his 
 direction and then, mustering every ounce of my 
 courage, I forced some words out of my mouth. "Mr. 
 Mays," I said, "could I please have your autograph?" 
 
 He had to have been all of twenty-four years old, 
 but I couldn't bring myself to pronounce his first 
 name. 
 
 His response to my question was brusque 
 but amiable. "Sure, kid, sure," he said. "You got a 
 
 pencil?" He was so full of life, I remember, so full 
 of youthful energy, that he kept bouncing up and 
 down as he spoke. 
 
 I didn't have a pencil, so I asked my father if 
 I could borrow his. He didn't have one, either. Nor 
 did my mother. Nor, as it turned out, did any of the 
 other grownups. 
 
 The great Willie Mays stood there watching 
 in silence. When it became clear that no one in the 
 group had anything to write with, he turned to me 
 and shrugged. "Sorry, kid," he said. "Ain't got no 
 pencil, can't give no autograph." And then he 
 walked out of the ballpark into the night. 
 
 I didn't want to cry, but tears started falling 
 down my cheeks, and there was nothing I could do 
 to stop them. Even worse, I cried all the way home 
 in the car. Yes, I was crushed with disappointment, 
 but I was also revolted at myself for not being able 
 to control those tears. I wasn't a baby. I was eight 
 years old, and big kids weren't supposed to cry over 
 things like that. Not only did I not have Willie 
 Mays' autograph, but I didn't have anything else, 
 either. Life had put me to the test, and in all 
 respects I had found myself wanting. 
 
 After that night, I started carrying a pencil 
 with me wherever I went. It became a habit of mine 
 never to leave the house without making sure I had 
 a pencil in my pocket. It's not that I had any 
 particular plans for that pencil, but I didn't want to 
 be unprepared. I had been caught empty-handed 
 once, and I wasn't about to let it happen again. 
 
 If nothing else, the years have taught me this: 
 if there's a pencil in your pocket, there's a good 
 chance that one day you'll feel tempted to start 
 using it. As I like to tell my children, that's how 
 I became a writer. 
 
 - Paul Auster 
 
 71 
 
Kaye Gibbons 
 
 Kaye Gibbons was born in Nash 
 County, North Carolina, in I960. 
 Her first novel, Ellen Foster was 
 published while she was a student 
 at the University of North 
 Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 
 then, she has written four novels: 
 A Virtuous Woman, A Cure For 
 Dreams, Charms for the Easy life, 
 and Sights Unseen. She has 
 received awards from the 
 American Academy of Arts 
 and Letters, the Chicago Tribune, 
 and PEN American Center. 
 
 Before I received an NEA 
 Literature Fellowship in 1 989, 
 I did not have the money for 
 the February rent. But that 
 grant enabled me to pay the 
 rent, feed the children, and 
 work in peace. However, 
 I never saw the grant as 
 something to which I was 
 entitled. I felt that I could 
 contribute something of value 
 to the body of American 
 letters and therefore to my 
 country. Because of the book 
 I wrote with the grant and 
 because of subsequent books, 
 I have since paid over 
 $750,000 in Federal income 
 tax.The government has 
 been more than repaid for its 
 investment in my work, and 
 for that, we should both be 
 grateful. 
 
 I never saw the grant as something to which 
 
 I was entitled. I felt that I could contribute something 
 
 of value to the bodv of American letters and therefore 
 
 to mv country. 
 
 72 
 
NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 from 
 
 Ellen Foster 
 
 When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would 
 figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it 
 got easy. 
 
 The way I liked best was letting go a poisonous spider in his bed. 
 It would bite him and he'd be dead and swollen up and I would 
 shudder to find him so. Of course I would call the rescue squad and 
 tell them to come quick something's the matter with my daddy. When 
 they come in the house Fm all in a state of shock and just don't know 
 how to act what with two colored boys heaving my dead daddy onto 
 a roller cot. I just stand in the door and look like I'm shaking all over. 
 
 But I did not kill my daddy. He drank his own self to death the 
 year after the Count)" moved me out. I heard how they found him shut 
 up in the house dead and everything. Next thing I know he's in the 
 ground and the house is rented out to a family of four. 
 
 All I did was wish him dead real hard every now and then. And 
 I can say for a fact that I am better off now than when he was alive. 
 
 I live in a clean brick house and mosdy I am left to myself. When 
 I start to cany an odor I take a bath and folks tell me how sweet I look. 
 
 There is plenty to eat here and if we run out of something we 
 just go to the store and get some more. I had me an egg sandwich for 
 breakfast, mayonnaise on both sides. And I may fix me another one 
 for lunch. 
 
 Two years ago I did not have much of anything. Not that I live in 
 the lap of luxury now but I am proud for the schoolbus to pick me up 
 here even- morning. My stylish well-groomed self standing in the front 
 yard with the grass green and the hedge bushes square. 
 
 I figure I made out pretty good considering the rest of my family 
 is either dead or crazy. 
 
 Every Tuesday a man comes and gets me out of social studies and 
 we go to a room and talk about it all. 
 
 Last week he spread out pictures of flat bats for me to comment 
 on. I mosdv saw flat bats. Then I saw big holes a bodv could fall right 
 
 t © * © 
 
 into. Big black deep holes through the table and the floor. And then he 
 took off his glasses and screwed his face up to mine and tells me I'm 
 scared. 
 
 I used to be but I am not now is what I told him. I might get a 
 litde nen-ous but I am never scared. 
 
 - Ka\f Gibbons 
 
 73 
 
Larry Watson 
 
 Larry Watson was born in Rugby, 
 North Dakota and raised in 
 Bismarck. He is the author of the 
 novel In a Dark Time, a book of 
 poetry, Leaving Dakota, and the 
 novels Justice, Montana 1 948, 
 and White Crosses. In 1993, 
 Montana 1 948 received the 
 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, 
 the Mountain & Plains Bookseller 
 Association Regional Book Award, 
 and was named one of the Best 
 Books of the Year by both Library 
 Journal and Booklist. He teaches 
 English at the University of 
 Wisconsin at Stevens Point. 
 
 On that January day, my 
 writing career felt like the 
 weather forecast - cold and 
 getting colder. Since my first 
 novel had been published 
 seven years earlier, I had been 
 struggling. I'd managed to 
 publish a few poems and short 
 stories and an occasional 
 book review, but these 
 rewards were so scattered 
 that I began to doubt whether 
 the time I spent writing was 
 justifiable, especially since any 
 hour I spent at the typewriter 
 meant an hour that I wouldn't 
 spend with my family or on 
 my teaching. 
 
 Then I opened the envelope 
 and learned that I had won 
 a creative writing fellowship 
 from the National 
 Endowment for the Arts. 
 My wife remembers that I 
 pumped my fist in the air as 
 though I had just made the 
 winning basket, but to tell 
 the truth, it wasn't the elation 
 of victory that I was feeling. 
 It was relief. I was relieved to 
 
 learn that someone - in 
 this case, an agency of the 
 government - not only 
 believed my efforts were 
 justified but wanted to 
 encourage me to continue. 
 What's more, the NEA 
 believed this on the basis 
 of my work alone, without 
 regard for my reputation 
 (or lack of one), my personal 
 history, or my financial status. 
 
 Oh, the money was nice. 
 I had a heavy teaching load 
 at the time, and the 
 endowment allowed me to 
 teach less and write more 
 for a few semesters. But the 
 greatest gift the NEA gave me 
 was its vote of confidence - 
 and my subsequent sense of 
 validation as a writer. 
 
 As I recall, the rest of that 
 winter was remarkably mild. 
 
 . . .the NEA believed [my efforts were justified], on 
 the basis of my work alone, without regard for my 
 reputation (or lack of one), my personal history, or 
 my financial status. 
 
 74 
 
NORTH DAKOTA 
 
 from 
 
 Justice 
 
 The wind rattled the window in its frame, and Gail 
 reacted instinctively, huddling deeper under the 
 blankets. When she was a child, that north wind 
 meant the long walk to school would be even colder. 
 She tried to think — when David started school, 
 which route would he walk? Which street would 
 offer him the most protection from the winter wind? 
 Gail realized that she was moving in her mind 
 through the streets of Bentrock, Montana. Of course, 
 that was her son's home, his birthplace, where his 
 father and paternal grandparents lived. 
 
 Now that she thought of it, Wesley's father 
 was the only man who had held David. When they 
 brought the baby home from the hospital, Wesley's 
 parents were waiting for them. They had brought 
 gifts — baby cloths and a blanket and a rattle shaped 
 like a dumbbell, and a new rocking chair with a can 
 seat ("for Gail when she has to get up from those 
 2:00 A.M. feedings"). 
 
 Enid Hayden carefully folded the blanket away 
 from David, exposing his red, wrinkled face. Julian 
 Hayden practically grabbed David from Gail's arms. 
 He lifted the baby high above his head. Gail was sure 
 she saw David's eyes widen in alarm, and she thought 
 she heard Wesley gasp. But neither of them said a 
 word while Julian continued to hold their son aloft. 
 "How does it feel to be home, boy?" Julian asked his 
 grandson. "How does it feel to breathe this air?" 
 
 Gail had been in North Dakota for almost three 
 days, and her own father had not yet held David. 
 What was the matter with these men — did they 
 think a baby was so fragile that it could be crushed 
 or broken in their arms? Did they think their hands 
 were unsuited for holding a child? That their hands 
 
 were soiled with dirt and misdeeds and therefore 
 unfit to touch the clean, the innocent? My God, 
 what did they think human hands were for? 
 
 The wind gusted even harder, and Gail heard 
 another familiar sound, like handfuls of sand being 
 thrown against the glass. She knew what that meant: 
 the wind had brought snow, fine-grained and icy, 
 down from the north. This time Gail did not 
 burrow deeper under the quilt. She threw the 
 blankets off and went to the bassinet to make certain 
 David hadn't wriggled loose from his blankets. 
 
 To her astonishment, the baby was already 
 awake. He was struggling to lift his head as if he was 
 desperate to see above and beyond the white wicker 
 walls of his bassinet. His fingers clenched and 
 unclenched, and his legs kicked determinedly as if 
 they could find purchase in the thin cold morning 
 air. 
 
 His mouth worked and contorted with the 
 effort to suckle or cry or both, but for the moment 
 Gail just watched him. As soon as he made a sound, 
 as soon as he found a voice, she would pick him up. 
 But not before. 
 
 - Larry Watson 
 
 75 
 
Rita Dove 
 
 Rita Dove was born in Akron, 
 Ohio in 1952 and educated 
 at Miami University of Ohio, 
 Universitat Tubingen in Germany, 
 and the University of Iowa. 
 She has published the poetry 
 collections TheYellow House on 
 the Corner, Museum, Thomas and 
 Beulah, Grace Notes, Selected 
 Poems, and Mother Love, a book 
 of short stories Fifth Sunday, the 
 novel Through the Ivory Gate, essays 
 under the title The Poet'sWorld, 
 and the play The Darker Face of 
 the Earth (first production 1996, 
 Oregon Shakespeare Festival). 
 She has received numerous 
 literary and academic honors, 
 among them the 1987 Pulitzer 
 Prize in Poetry, the 1996 Heinz 
 Award in the Arts and Humanities, 
 and the 1996 Charles Frankel 
 Prize; from 1993 to 1995, she 
 served as Poet Laureate of the 
 United States and Consultant in 
 Poetry to the Library of Congress. 
 Rita Dove is Commonwealth 
 Professor of English at the 
 University of Virginia in 
 Charlottesville, where she lives 
 with her husband and daughter. 
 
 In 1978, 1 was a young poet, 
 fresh out of graduate school, 
 who had not yet published her 
 first volume of poetry.The 
 fellowship not only gave me 
 a boost in confidence, but it 
 also allowed me to dedicate 
 concentrated periods of time 
 to the development of my art. 
 I was able to regard the 
 fellowship as a "nest egg," 
 so that I was not forced to 
 accept the first teaching job 
 offered me (which would have 
 surely delayed the publication 
 of my first poetry book by 
 several years); instead, I could 
 live frugally and write full 
 time for a year. 
 
 Of course, it is impossible 
 for me to say what I would 
 have done had I not receiyed 
 a fellowship; I can only say 
 that I believe the course of 
 my literary career would 
 have been markedly different. 
 Because of my gratitude, 
 I have served on several panels 
 for the Endowment - my 
 way of repaying, in part, the 
 support and encouragement 
 provided me at a young and 
 tentative age. 
 
 I was able to regard the fellowship as 
 
 a "nest egg," so that. . . I could live frugally 
 
 and write full time for a year. 
 
 76 
 
OHIO 
 
 Small Town 
 
 Someone is sitting in the red house. 
 
 There is no way of telling who it is, although 
 
 the woman, indistinct, in the doorway must know; 
 
 and the man in the chestnut tree 
 
 who wields the binoculars 
 
 does not wish to be seen from the window. 
 
 The paint was put there by a previous owner. 
 
 The dog in the flower bed 
 
 is bound by indiscriminate love, 
 
 which is why he does not bark 
 
 and why in one of the darkened rooms 
 
 someone sits, a crackling vacuum. 
 
 The woman wears a pale blue nightgown 
 
 and stares vaguely upward. The man, 
 
 whose form appears clearly among the leaves, 
 
 is not looking at her 
 
 so much as she at him, 
 
 while away behind the town a farmer 
 
 weeps, plowing his fields by night 
 
 to avoid being laughed at during the day. 
 
 - Rita Dove 
 
 77 
 
Diane Glancy 
 
 Diane Glancy is from Oklahoma 
 and now is associate professor 
 at Macalester College in St. Paul, 
 Minnesota. Her novel, Pushing the 
 Bear, about the l838Trail of Tears 
 was published by Harcourt Brace 
 in 1996. A second novel, The Only 
 Piece of Furniture in the House, was 
 published by Moyer Bell, also in 
 1 996. A collection of nine plays, 
 War Cries, and a new collection 
 of essays, The West Pole, were 
 published in 1997. 
 
 My NEA grant came in 1 990 
 which was a pivotal year for 
 me. I had finished a MFA 
 program and began teaching 
 at a small college. It gave me 
 money to take summers and 
 intercessions off to write. A 
 poetry collection, Lone Dog's 
 Winter Count, and a short 
 story collection, Firesticks, 
 came from it. Also time to 
 work on my novel, Pushing 
 the Bear, about the 1 938 
 Trail of Tears. It was the 
 substantiation as well as the 
 money which gave me hope 
 and confidence that there 
 was a way for me to do 
 what I had set out to do. 
 I am very grateful. 
 
 It was the substantiation as well as the money 
 which gave me hope and confidence that there 
 was a way for me to do what I had set out to do. 
 
 78 
 
OKLAHOMA 
 
 from 
 
 Lead Horse 
 
 n 
 
 Rain blew through the screen. Nattie stood in the 
 open door. Feeling the spray on her face. 
 
 A tree in the backyard slammed its door. Or maybe it 
 was the room upstairs. The windows were still open. 
 
 Her backyard bushes beat the ground. Back and 
 forth their fists pounded the grass. 
 
 Let the curtains stand straight out. Let the storm 
 stomp-dance through her house. Ratde her plastic 
 dress-bags hanging on the door. Her shawl-fringe 
 and feathers. 
 
 She watched the lid to the trash can fly across the 
 yard like a war shield. She watched the leaves buck. 
 
 What's the battle out there, Nattie? Joes said. He 
 scratched his ear when Nattie looked at him. 
 
 The wind wheezed through the weatherstripping on 
 the door. The whole yard shook. And it was the day 
 of a family birthday. A relative Nattie only wanted to 
 send a card to, usually, but now she was on her way, 
 and the cousins were going to show up and Nattie 
 had a sink full of dishes and a war in the yard and 
 Joes at the table. And he was starting to hum like 
 electricity on the backyard wire. 
 
 It's a lot for one old woman, she thought. 
 
 It'll be over soon, Joes comforted. 
 
 The relatives or the storm? 
 
 The trees raised and bowed their arms in exagger- 
 ated motions as if the cousins already pulled in the 
 drive. But the relatives were out there under an 
 underpass in their car. The old green Plymouth 
 tossing a litde in the gusts of wind. Chewing them 
 but not yet swallowing. Jerking all the while with 
 pleasure Nattie could only imagine. 
 
 She was making her corn chowder and cornbread 
 and corn pudding. She should have said she'd meet 
 them at Benny Bill's Ranchero. They could have a 
 steak and dance. But the cousins didn't like that. She 
 
 could outdude them any time. In fact, they couldn't 
 dude at all. Yes. What a storm-sash she was. 
 
 But Joes could still make her blush. And the cousins 
 were coming and she was supposed to cowtow and 
 lick their fritters. The trees swept their arms. The 
 storm shuttered over the house. Horse hooves 
 running. 
 
 Still the rain torpedoed the house. Just like Crouper 
 and Boaz, the cousins, when they were boys, 
 roughhousing upstairs and you wanted to yell at 
 them to stop. 
 
 You going to close that door, Nat? 
 
 When I'm ready. 
 
 She'd seen the highway once from a place. The one 
 time she flew. She'd felt the invisible cord that jerks 
 a plane into the sky. A pull-toy right up to the clouds 
 where the highway and its cloverleaf looked like 
 cucumber pickles in ajar, the tight highway loops 
 like curls of onion. 
 
 Maybe a spirit fell to the yard, flailing, by the looks 
 of it. The arms and legs struggling to get up and 
 disappear before someone could look from her 
 house and say, hey, there's a spirit out there. The 
 splot between the elm and the oak, and the bushes 
 beating it away. No, the wisteria didn't want any 
 fallen spirit in their yard. Something was being swept 
 out of the Hunting Grounds. The Great Spirit had 
 his war stick out. The old hammock wind-danced. 
 
 Then Joes was at the door with her. Kissing her jaw. 
 Rubbing his fingers across her back. Sometimes his 
 hand went just under the fatty part of her hip. 
 
 Keep your hands on your own self, she said. 
 
 Lightning cracked so loud Nattie closed the door. 
 
 - Diane Glancy 
 
 79 
 
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OREGON 
 
 from 
 
 Having Eveiything Right 
 
 You have to listen real hard to hear anything at all: 
 a little snow ticking down through the juniper trees: 
 the click of the chain around a family plot flexing in 
 the cold. Wind. You hear it quite a while before it 
 arrives. Then the eastern half of your face might just 
 as well be stone. 
 
 Ten years ago I was here to do a formal study 
 of the cemetery layout. As part of my folkloristic 
 fieldwork. I made a systematic ramble of thirteen 
 central Oregon cemeteries, stepping respectfully in 
 the August dust of memorial plots at Grizzly. 
 Antelope. Ashwood, Grandview. Madras. Hay 
 Creek, Bakeoven. Warm Springs. Simnashio. Camp 
 Polk, and three without names. I wanted to know 
 how the adjacent communities of the living marked, 
 surveyed, and maintained these trim little cities of 
 stone and sage. I wanted to know how many 
 gravemarkers listed family relations, military rank, 
 professions, hobbies, wise proverbs, and the verse of 
 grief or hope. I wanted to know how these stretches 
 of sacred ground were isolated from the catde range 
 surrounding them: wood fence, iron gate, barbed 
 wire, poplar square. On the main street of how many 
 towns would there be a sign for the "Cemetery: 2 
 miles"? How many plots would be local secrets 
 tucked away up a side canyon? 
 
 I wanted to seek and listen, to map and ponder 
 the visible artifacts of religious belief my people 
 hold. I did all that. The study is in the archive. The 
 memory works on me. 
 
 But now it's dusk at Camp Polk, and I'm 
 visiting old friends. Here's Ray, by the champion 
 juniper gnarl he loved to paint. His name in my 
 mouth brings up a riff of banjo jangle I heard him 
 play. There's a snow-swir-1 dancer over his place now. 
 
 I remember my discovery ten years ago. that 
 graves even-where planted heads to the west. This 
 marks the Christian readiness to rise up facing Christ 
 as He will bloom from the east on Judgment Day. 
 And I remember how many of the thirteen cemeteries 
 marked the end of a dead-end road: the Ashwood 
 plot up a dirt track with no sign. The Grizzly 
 cemetery at the ripe heart of a wheatfield with no 
 road at all, forgotten like the town of Grizzly itself. 
 
 which some prosperous corporation bought. I drove 
 around and around that field, knowing I was close, 
 my map fluttering from my hand in the heat, until 
 finally I squinted my eyes past the shimmering wheat 
 and saw the cemetery fence out there in the middle of 
 eveiything. 
 
 Somewhere near the cemetery here at Camp 
 Polk, a hundred odd years ago, the U.S. Army buried 
 a cannon before fleeing from the Indians. Treasure 
 hunters have sought it. as if it were a memory they 
 owned by rights, as if that brass body might be raised 
 up and carried away. You have to brave a series of 
 "No Trespassing'" signs to get to Camp Polk. Ten 
 years ago there was a sign to invite visitors on toward 
 the cemetery on its little hill beyond the most 
 handsome of falling barns. This evening, there is no 
 sign. You have to know. 
 
 Driving into Shaniko, on my cemetery route in 
 1975, 1 remember slowing the car to ask directions of 
 an old-timer crumpled easily beside a shed, whitding 
 steadily at a stub of wood. I didn't realize until too 
 late the impertinence of my opening question: 
 "Excuse me, sir. could you direct me to the cem- 
 etery?" 
 
 There was a tremendous pause, as he turned 
 slowly up from his work to unroll a vacant smile. No 
 answer was on the way. I thanked him. and drove on 
 to the Eat Cafe. This time, I tried to be a bit more 
 discreet, making my request in hushed tones to the 
 waitress as she came rollicking across the room with 
 half a dozen steaming plates along her arms. 
 
 "Excuse me. I'm trying to find the cemetery — 
 for research.'" 
 
 She lurched experdy to a stop without josding 
 a plate, and shouted to the long table of white-haired 
 ladies at the far end of the room. "Hev girls, we got a 
 cemetery?" They vaguely shook their heads. 
 
 "Mister," she said, "we ain't got one. Try 
 Antelope." I explained that I had already been there, 
 and learned what I could. 
 
 "Well." she said, "then I don't think we can help 
 you. We don't figure to do much dying in this towTi." 
 
 - Kim Stafford 
 
 81 
 
Annie Dill ard 
 
 Annie Dillard has published 
 poetry, short stories, criticism, 
 memoirs, essays and a novel. 
 Her books include Tickets for a 
 Prayer Wheel, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 
 -which won the 1975 Pulitzer 
 Prize, An American Childhood, 
 The Writing Life, and the novel 
 The Living. She has taught at 
 several universities and lived in 
 Virginia, the Pacific Northwest, 
 Connecticut and Florida. 
 An American Childhood is her story 
 of growing up in the '50s in 
 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 
 
 The grant freed me from 
 teaching and enabled me to 
 write two books: a book of 
 thoughts about contemporary 
 fiction, Living by Fiction, and 
 a book of essays, Teaching 
 a Stone to Talk. The Boston 
 Globe generously called the 
 latter one of the ten best 
 books of the 1 980s; oddly 
 enough, Outside magazine 
 listed it as one of the ten best 
 books of the past 25 years. 
 Anthologists often use 
 selections from both the 
 
 - 
 
 books. 
 
 I try to describe what it 
 feels like to be alive in the 
 United States. My books 
 are about rural Virginia, 
 about Pittsburgh, about the 
 Pacific Northwest Coast.... 
 Literature has all my heart 
 and mind. That the NEA 
 supports literature in the 
 United States enhances and 
 confirms our cultural status. 
 All civilized nations support 
 artists; we know nations 
 by their works of art. 
 
 All civilized nations support artists; we know nations 
 by their works of art. 
 
 82 
 
PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 from 
 
 An American Childhood 
 
 When everything else has gone from my brain — 
 the President's name, the state capitals, the 
 neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own 
 name and what it was on earth I sought, and then 
 at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces 
 of my family — when all this has dissolved, what will 
 be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory 
 of land as it lay this way and that. 
 
 I will see the city poured rolling down the 
 mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights 
 sprinkled and curved around the hills' curves, rows 
 of bonfires winding. At sunset a red light like 
 housefires shines from the narrow hillside windows; 
 the houses' bricks burn like glowing coals. 
 
 The three wide rivers divide and cool the 
 mountains. Calm old bridges span the banks and 
 link the hills. The Allegheny River flows in brawling 
 from the north, from near the shore of Lake Erie, and 
 from Lake Chautauqua in New York and eastward. 
 The Monongahela River flows in shallow and slow 
 from the south, from West Virginia. The Allegheny 
 and Monongahela meet and form the westward- 
 wending Ohio. 
 
 Where the two rivers join lies an acute point of 
 flat land from which rises the city. The tall buildings 
 rise lighted to their tips. Their lights illumine other 
 buildings' clean sides, and illumine the narrow city 
 canyons below, where people move, and shine 
 reflected red and white at night from the black 
 waters. 
 
 When the shining city, too, fades, I will see only 
 those forested mountains and hills, and the way the 
 rivers lie flat and moving among them, and the way 
 the low land lies wooded among them, and the blunt 
 mountains rise in darkness from the rivers' banks, 
 steep from the rugged south and rolling from the 
 north, and from farther, from the inclined eastward 
 
 plateau where the high ridges begin to run so long 
 north and south unbroken that to get around them 
 you practically have to navigate Cape Horn. 
 
 In those first days, people said, a squirrel 
 could run the long length of Pennsylvania without 
 ever touching the ground. In those first days, the 
 woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, 
 sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white 
 pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the 
 mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin 
 was thinnest. 
 
 The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. 
 Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove 
 in Philadelphia by 1735, and Thomas Jefferson was 
 a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been 
 living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. 
 But west of the Alleghenies, not even a cabin. No 
 Indians lived there, or even near there. 
 
 Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut 
 out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. 
 Bright Carolina parakeets — red, green, and yellow 
 — nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, 
 too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, 
 ruffled grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, 
 and every long once in a while a nervous gang of 
 empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking 
 through the leaves — but no one heard any of this, 
 no one at all. 
 
 -Annie Dillard 
 
 83 
 
Michael S. Harper 
 
 Michael S. Harper is University 
 Professor and Professor of English 
 at Brown University, where he has 
 taught since 1970. He is the first 
 Poet Laureate of the State of 
 Rhode Island, a term he held from 
 1988-93. He has published ten 
 books of poetry, two of which 
 were nominated for the National 
 Book Award: Dear John, Dear 
 Coltrane arid Images of Kin, New 
 and Selected Poems, the latter won 
 the Melville-Cane Award from the 
 Poetry Society of America. His 
 book History Is Your Own Heartbeat 
 won the Black Academy of Arts & 
 Letters Award for poetry in 1 97 1 . 
 In 1990, he received the Robert 
 Hayden Poetry Award from the 
 United Negro College Fund. 
 He is coeditor of Every Shut Eye 
 Ain't Asleep, an anthology of 
 poetry by African Americans 
 from 1 945 to the present, and 
 in 1997, he received the first 
 annual Claiborne Pell Award for 
 excellence in the arts. 
 
 "Artists are here to disturb 
 
 the peace." -James Baldwin 
 
 » 
 
 I combined my NEA Award 
 with a Guggenheim grant so 
 I could take the whole year 
 off from Brown University, 
 where I have taught since 
 1970; administering a 
 program has taken its toll, 
 but 1977 was pivotal; I had 
 just returned from an eight- 
 country trip in Africa to my 
 brother's demise. 
 
 The African countries have 
 remained in my memory: 
 Senegal, where I was granted 
 an audience with Senghor; 
 Gambia, where I traveled to 
 Juffure, the famous Mandinka 
 town of Alex Haley's Roots; 
 Ghana, where I visited 
 Emmanuel Boye and Kofi 
 Awoonor, who'd survived 
 imprisonment in Cape Coast; 
 Nigeria, where I could not 
 locate ChinuaAchebe, 
 the novelist; Zaire, where 
 
 I had an audience with 
 Nadine Gordimer, and where 
 I read at the U.S. Information 
 Agency and heard her story 
 about the sacrifice of a chief 
 in the border area; Botswana, 
 where I sawWole Serote; 
 Zambia, where I met 
 Frank Chipasula, the poet; 
 Kenya, where I saw Karen 
 Blixen's vision juxtaposed 
 to James Ngugi. 
 
 Literature, for me, has always 
 been a study of comparative 
 humanity, the formal and the 
 vernacular at work in the 
 parlance of speech and song. 
 My service to NEA panels 
 over the years has been in 
 recognition of our regional 
 integrity, our scope as a 
 nation, its complex configu- 
 rations of culture, and a 
 waning literacy. Artists are 
 here to disturb the peace. 
 
 Literature, for me, has always been a study of - 
 comparative humanity, the formal and the vernacular 
 at work in the parlance of speech and song. 
 
 84 
 
RHODE ISLAND 
 
 We Assume: 
 
 On the Death of Our Son, 
 
 Reuben Masai Harper 
 
 We assume 
 
 that in 28 hours, 
 
 lived in a collapsible isolette, 
 
 you learned to accept pure oxygen 
 
 as the natural sky; 
 
 the scant shallow breaths 
 
 that filled those hours 
 
 cannot, did not make you fly — 
 
 but dreams were there 
 
 like crooked palmprints on 
 
 the twin-thick windows of the nursery — 
 
 in the glands of your mother. 
 
 We assume 
 
 that sterile hands 
 
 drank chemicals in and out 
 
 from lungs opaque with mucus, 
 
 pumped your stomach, 
 
 eeked the bicarbonate in 
 
 crooked, green-winged veins, 
 
 out in a plastic mask; 
 
 A woman who'd lost her first son 
 
 consoled us with an angel gone ahead 
 
 to pray for our family — 
 
 gone into that sky 
 
 seeking oxygen, 
 
 gone into autopsy, 
 
 a fine brown powdered sugar, 
 
 a disposable cremation: 
 
 We assume 
 
 you did not know we loved you. 
 
 - Michael S. Harper 
 
 85 
 
Susan Ludvigson 
 
 Susan Ludvigson's most recent 
 books of poems are Trinity and 
 Helle's Story; she has published 
 five other collections with LSU 
 Press, and two other chapbooks. 
 Her New and Selected Poems is 
 scheduled for publication by 
 LSU Press in 1999. Ludvigson 
 frequently represents the U.S. at 
 international writing congresses, 
 which have included the first 
 meeting of French, Soviet, and 
 American women writers in Paris, 
 as well as poetry festivals in 
 Canada, Belgium, and the former 
 Yugoslavia. Among her fellowships 
 are a Guggenheim and a Fulbright. 
 She is Poet-in-Residence and 
 Professor of English atWinthrop 
 University in Rock Hill, South 
 Carolina. 
 
 It seems to me an almost 
 religious act of faith for 
 legislators to affirm the 
 importance of works of the 
 imagination, of the spirit, 
 by giving modest support 
 to artists. It is not an 
 exaggeration to say that 
 such support changed my 
 life, my view of history, my 
 relationship to the world. 
 My poems are more mature 
 by far, their richest materials 
 often coming directly from 
 experiences that grants made 
 possible. This fellowship 
 bought me time - the one 
 resource artists rarely have 
 in abundance, and our 
 greatest need. 
 
 My poems are more mature by fan their richest 
 materials often coming directly from experiences 
 that grants made possible. 
 
 86 
 
SOUTH CAROLINA 
 
 Grace 
 
 Walking behind two men, I watch 
 
 the long tail of a pheasant drift 
 
 and rise, hanging half out 
 
 of a pocket made for it, feathers 
 
 caught in the small breeze 
 
 parting, coming together 
 
 like living things. They're September 
 
 colors, could make the quills 
 
 our neighbor says he'd write with 
 
 if he wrote. 
 
 The one with the bird has his shotgun 
 broken, its V slung over his shoulder 
 an echo of geese. The other 
 carries his gun in his arms, is calling 
 the spaniel, who chases a moth 
 into a ditch. 
 
 Dawn again. Sun's a pink slit 
 between mountains. I wait 
 for the crack of a shot to slice 
 the lightening sky. But all the birds 
 have disappeared — even the swallows 
 whose spiral above the balcony 
 at this hour is a mournful concert, 
 a skittery dance. 
 
 Pines in the distance begin to brighten, 
 deep blue to something like green. 
 
 Everything winged must be dreaming. 
 - Susan Ludvigson 
 
 87 
 
Dan O'Brien 
 
 Dan O'Brien lives and works 
 on a ranch in South Dakota. 
 An avid naturalist, he has written 
 two classics on falconry: The Rites 
 of Autumn: A Falconer's Journey 
 Across the American West and 
 Equinox: Life, Love, and Birds of 
 Prey. His collection of short 
 stories, Eminent Domain, received 
 the Iowa Award for Short Fiction, 
 and he has written the novels 
 Spirit of the Hills, In the Center of 
 the Nation, and Brendan Prairie. 
 
 I was working as a part-time 
 biologist and taking care of 
 cows when the NEA came 
 through. It was the first time 
 anyone had told me that my 
 writing might be of some 
 value. I still do a little biology 
 and take care of a few cows, 
 but my tax return says 
 "writer." If it weren't for 
 the NEA grant that would 
 not be the case. 
 
 I still do a little biology and take care of a few cows, 
 but my tax return says "writer" 
 
 88 
 
SOUTH DAKOTA 
 
 from 
 
 In the Center of the Nation 
 
 Coming from either direction the land changes before you have a chance to 
 get ready for it. Traveling eastward, you see the grasslands for the first time 
 from several thousand feet up in the Rocky Mountains. You come around 
 a turn intent on the ruggedness of the mountains, and suddenly the pine 
 trees, rocks, and fast-running water are gone. Below you, though still fifty 
 miles off, is the flattest, smoothest, most treeless stretch of land imagin- 
 able. And if you're traveling west, you've just gotten used to the fertile, 
 black soils of Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, just come to expect the neatly 
 planted, prosperous farm buildings surrounded by cultivated groves of 
 trees, when you come to the Missouri River, and it all goes to hell. 
 Suddenly the order is gone, the prosperity scattered. When you get the 
 feeling that the whole world can see you but no one is watching, you have 
 come to the grasslands of North America. 
 
 They roll up out of the Missouri River breaks and flatten, with few 
 deviations, for six hundred miles. Since the beginning the grasslands have 
 reminded Europeans of an ocean, an ocean of grass. But, of course, they 
 were as far from the big water as they would get. Maybe knowing that, 
 but still having the feeling that they're floating, unable to reach anything 
 familiar and solid, tends to drive people crazy. And maybe it's that 
 craziness that makes some people move the way they do when they come 
 to the grasslands: from one river drainage to the next, from town to town, 
 right through the grasslands. Get away, fast. 
 
 Things have always moved out here, but usually in a circle. Like the 
 geese, the ducks, the Indians, the buffalo. My God, the buffalo! Millions, 
 weighing a ton apiece, turning grass into meat and moving on. Not moving 
 through like the ocean people, but moving in huge, annual circles and 
 coming back to the place where they have always been. Moving along the 
 Missouri when they felt like it, turning to the west and grazing along the 
 Cheyenne River, staying on the benches to the south, eating the wheat- 
 grass, the bluestem, the switchgrass, and fescue. 
 
 For ten million years they moved like that, until Europeans came 
 and said that all of it had to belong to someone. The buffalo were killed. 
 For trespassing? Who knows? Only the birds, those that survive, still 
 move in grand swirling migrations that take them thousands of miles 
 south in winter and thousands of miles north in summer. They move 
 back and forth with the seasons, perpendicular to the path of the people 
 on the interstate highway. 
 
 H 
 
 Dan O'Brien 
 
 89 
 
Charles Wright 
 
 Charles Wright was born in 
 Hardin County, Tennessee and 
 grew up there and in North 
 Carolina. He is a poet of 
 extraordinary range and 
 productivity, publishing collections 
 of his work since 1963. He is the 
 author of The Voyage, The Dream 
 Animal, Backwater, Dead Color, 
 The Southern Cross, Zone Journals 
 and TheWorld ofTenThousand 
 Things. Born in Tennessee, he has 
 taught at a number of American 
 universities; for the past 14 years, 
 he has been Professor of English 
 at the University of Virginia. 
 He has received a Guggenheim 
 Fellowship, the PEN Translation 
 Prize for his work on Italian poet 
 Eugenio Montale, the National 
 Book Award, and the Lenore 
 Marshall Poetry Prize. 
 
 The NEA grant was of 
 enormous help to me. It 
 enabled me to spend time 
 in two places, Montana and 
 California, which played a 
 large part in a long poem I 
 was undertaking and which 
 went on into November of 
 1 984. The poem, "A Journal 
 of True Confessions," I I pages 
 long, took me almost five 
 months to complete. It was 
 published in The Paris Review. 
 I was also able to produce 
 two shorter pieces, "March 
 Journal" and "Night Journal," 
 both of which appeared in 
 Field magazine, and "Yard 
 Journal" which appeared in 
 The NewYorker. 
 
 Still, the primary importance 
 of the grant to me, and the 
 primary result of the grant 
 in writing terms, is the long, 
 five-month piece I mentioned. 
 Without the grant, I would 
 have been unable to go to the 
 two locations and spend time 
 there that resulted in such, 
 I like to think, good results. 
 The poem is the centerpiece 
 of the first part of the book, 
 a group of 'verse journals.' 
 I am greatly indebted to the 
 Literature Program and the 
 National Endowment for the 
 Arts for the freed time and 
 resources it gave me to get 
 this particular work done. 
 
 [The grant] enabled me to spend time in two places, 
 Montana and California, which played a large part in a 
 long poem I was undertaking... 
 
 90 
 
TENNESSEE 
 
 Driving Through Tennessee 
 
 It's strange what the past brings back. 
 
 Our parents, for instance, how ardently they still loom 
 
 In the brief and flushed 
 
 Fleshtones of memory, one foot in front of the next 
 
 Even in retrospect, and so unimpeachable. 
 
 And towns that we lived in once, 
 
 And who we were then, the roads we went back and forth on 
 
 Returning ahead of us like rime 
 
 In the moonlight's fall, and Jesus returning, and Stephen Martyr 
 
 And St. Paul of the Sword . . 
 
 — I am their music, 
 
 Mothers and fathers and places we hurried through in the night: 
 I put my mouth to the dust and sing their song. 
 Remember us, Galeoto, and whistle our tune, when the time comes, 
 For charity's sake. 
 
 - Charles Wright 
 
 91 
 
Sandra Cisneros 
 
 Sandra Cisneros was born in 
 Chicago and now lives and writes 
 in San Antonio, Texas. She has 
 worked as a teacher to high 
 school dropouts, a poet-in-the- 
 schools, a college recruiter, an 
 arts administrator, and as a visiting 
 writer at a number of universities. 
 She received a fellowship from 
 the Lannan Foundation in 1991. 
 Among her books are a collection 
 of poetry entitled My Wicked 
 Wicked Ways, the novel The House 
 on Mango Street, and a collection 
 of short stories Woman Hollering 
 Creek. 
 
 To call yourself a writer takes 
 a great deal of audacity when 
 you don't earn your living 
 writing, when you don't have 
 a trust fund, health insurance, 
 a car, a house, a book, and are 
 overcome with despair with 
 your wretched life, still 
 sleeping on the floor, books 
 stored in milk crates, and 
 your employment record is 
 wobbly because you keep 
 quitting jobs when they don't 
 leave you time to write. 
 
 The NEA Fellowship I 
 received for poetry in 1 982 
 arrived when I was feeling 
 most vulnerable, most close 
 to giving up. 
 
 I quit my job, paid off my 
 student loans, wrapped up 
 my community volunteer 
 work, and wrote full-time for 
 a year and a half. During this 
 period I finished my novel, 
 The House on Mango Street, 
 and most of my next book 
 of poetry, if the NEA had 
 not arrived, I would still be 
 writing Mango Street. 
 
 Another NEA in 1987, this 
 time for fiction, arrived as if 
 Divine Providence knew I was 
 dangling from a thread. A 
 severe depression in my 32nd 
 year almost did me in. The 
 fellowship saved my life - 
 saved me from myself, from 
 the self-destruction of despair 
 and verified I was indeed 
 valuable, what I did mattered, 
 not just to myself and to a few 
 friends, but to strangers who 
 had judged my work extraordi- 
 nary and, therefore, deemed 
 my life important.That year, 
 that validation meant more to 
 me than the money. 
 
 As a small press writer, 
 as a woman and a woman 
 of Mexican descent, my 
 fellowships helped to serve 
 as validation that I was in fact 
 a genuine writer, not some 
 dilettante pretending to be. 
 I could not call myself writer 
 now if it weren't for the timely 
 assistance of the National 
 Endowment for the Arts. 
 
 As a small press writer as a woman and a woman 
 of Mexican descent, my fellowships helped to serve as 
 validation that I was in fact a genuine writer. . . 
 
 92 
 
TEXAS 
 
 My Lucy Friend 
 Who Smells Like Corn 
 
 Lucy Anguiano, Texas girl who smells like corn, like 
 Frito Bandito chips, like tortillas, something like that 
 warm smell oinixtamal or bread the way her head 
 smells when she's leaning close to you over a paper 
 cutout doll or on the porch when we are squatting 
 over marbles trading this pretty crystal that leaves a 
 blue star on your hand for that giant cat-eye with a 
 grasshopper green spiral in the center like the juice of 
 bugs on the windshield when you drive to the border, 
 like the yellow blood of butterflies. 
 
 Have you ever eated dog food? I have. After 
 crunching like ice, she opens her big mouth to prove 
 it, only a pink tongue rolling around in there like a 
 blind worm, and Janey looking in because she said, 
 Show me. But me, I like that Lucy, corn-smell hair 
 and aqua flip-flops just like mine that we bought at 
 the K-Mart for only seventy-nine cents same time. 
 
 I'm going to sit in the sun, don't care if it's a 
 million trillion degrees outside, so my skin can get so 
 dark it's blue where it bends like Lucy's. Her whole 
 family like that. Eyes like knife slits. Lucy and her 
 sisters. Norma, Margarita, Ofelia, Herminia, Nancy, 
 Olivia, Cheli, y la Amber Sue. 
 
 Screen door with no screen. BANG! Litde black 
 dog biting his fur. Fat couch on the porch. Some of 
 the windows painted blue, some pink because her 
 daddy got tired that day or forgot. Mama in the 
 kitchen feeding clothes into the wringer washer and 
 clothes rolling out all stiff and twisted and flat like 
 paper. Lucy got her arm stuck once and had to yell, 
 Maaa! and her mama had to put the machine in 
 reverse and then her hand rolled back, the finger 
 black and later, her nail fell off. But did you arm get 
 flat like the clothes? What happened to your arm? Did 
 they have to pump it with air? No, only the finger, 
 and she didn't cry neither. 
 
 Lean across the porch rail and pin the pink sock 
 of the baby Amber Sue on top of Cheli's flowered 
 T-shirt, and the blue jeans of la Ofelia over the inside 
 seam of Olivia's blouse, over the flannel nightgown of 
 Margarita so it don't stretch out, and then you take 
 the work shirts of their daddy and hang them upside 
 down like this, and this way all the clothes don't get 
 
 so wrinkled and take up less space and you don't 
 waste pins. The girls all wear each other's clothes, 
 except Olivia who is stingy, because there ain't no 
 boys here. Only girls and one father who is never 
 home hardly and one mother who says, Ay! I'm real 
 tired, and so many sisters there's no time to count 
 them. 
 
 I'm sitting in the sun even though it's the hottest 
 part of the day, the part that makes the streets dizzy, 
 when the heat makes a little hat on the top of your 
 head and bakes the dust and weed grass and sweat up 
 so good, all steamy and smelling like sweet corn. 
 
 I want to rub heads and sleep in a bed with little 
 sisters, some at the top and some at the feets. I think 
 it would be fun to sleep with sisters you could yell at 
 one at a time or all together, instead of all alone on the 
 fold-out chair in the living room. 
 
 When I get home Abuelita will say, Didn 't I tell 
 you? and I'll get it because I was supposed to wear 
 this dress again tomorrow. But first I'm going to jump 
 off an old pissy mattress in the Anguiano yard. I'm 
 going to scratch your mosquito bites, Lucy, so they'll 
 itch you, then put Mercurochrome smiley faces on 
 them. We're going to trade shoes and wear them on 
 our hands. We're going to walk over to Janey Ortiz's 
 house and say, We're never going to he your friend 
 again forever! We're going to run home backwards 
 and we're going to run home frontwards, look twice 
 under the house where the rats hide and I'll stick one 
 foot in there because you dared me, sky so blue and 
 heaven inside those white clouds. I'm going to peel a 
 scab from my knee and eat it, sneeze on the cat, give 
 you three M&M's I've been saving for you since 
 yesterday, comb your hair with my fingers and braid 
 it into teeny-tiny braids real pretty. We're going to 
 wave to a lady we don't know on the bus. Hello! I'm 
 going to somersault on the rail of the front porch even 
 though my chones show. And cut paper dolls we draw 
 ourselves, and color in their clothes with crayons, my 
 arm around your neck. 
 
 And when we look at each other, our arms 
 gummy from an orange Popsicle we split, we could 
 be sisters, right? We could be, you and me waiting for 
 our teeths to fall and money. You laughing something 
 into my ear that tickles, and me going, Ha Ha Ha Ha. 
 Her and me, my Lucy friend who smells like corn. 
 
 - Sandra Cisneros 
 
 93 
 
Mark Strand 
 
 Mark Strand was born in 
 Summerside, Prince Edward 
 Island, Canada. His collections 
 of poems include: Dark Harbor, 
 The Continuous Life, Selected Poems, 
 The Late Hour.The Story of our 
 Lives, Reasons For Moving, and 
 SleepingWith One Eye Open. 
 He has also published a book 
 of prose, entitled The Monument 
 and has written books on artists 
 William Bailey and Hopper. His 
 translations include two volumes 
 of the poems of Carlos Drummond 
 de Andrade. He has also published 
 three books for children. 
 
 Strand has been the recipient 
 of Fellowships from the 
 Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, 
 and Guggenheim Foundations. 
 He has been awarded the 
 Fellowship of the Academy of 
 American Poets, a John D. 
 And Catherine T. MacArthur 
 Foundation Award, the Bollingen 
 Prize, and has served as Poet 
 Laureate of the United States. 
 He is currently the Elliott Coleman 
 Professor of Poetry in the Writing 
 Seminars at the Johns Hopkins 
 University. For many years, he 
 wrote and taught at the University 
 of Utah in Salt Lake City. 
 
 The NEA was valuable in 
 relieving me of tedious and 
 time-consuming obligations 
 of journalism. I was able to 
 concentrate my literary 
 efforts to what I was best at - 
 namely, poetry. I shall always 
 be grateful to the National 
 Endowment for the Arts for 
 the generosity in giving me 
 the grant. 
 
 The NEA [grant allowed me to] to concentrate my literary 
 efforts to what I was best at - namely, poetry. 
 
 94 
 
WR 
 
 NG 
 
 UTAH 
 
 Life in the Valley 
 
 Like many brilliant notions — easy to understand 
 But hard to believe — the one about our hating it here 
 Was put aside and then forgot. Those freakish winds 
 Over the flaming lake, bearing down, bringing a bright 
 Electrical dust, an ashen air crowded with leaves — 
 Fallen, ghostly — shading the valley, filling it with 
 A rushing sound, were not enough to drive us out. 
 Nor were those times the faded winter sun 
 Lowered a frozen half-light over the canyons 
 And silent storms buried the high resorts 
 With heavy snows. We simply stayed indoors. 
 Our friends would say the views — starlight over 
 The clustered domes and towers, the frigid moon 
 In the water's glass — were great. And we agreed, 
 And got to like the sight of iron horses rusting 
 In the fields, and birds with wings outspread, 
 Their silver bones glowing at the water's edge, 
 And far away, huge banks of clouds motionless as lead. 
 
 - Mark Strand 
 
 95 
 
Louise Gluck 
 
 Louise Gliick is an award-winning 
 poet. In 1985, she received the 
 National Book Critics Circle 
 Award for TheTriumph of Achilles, 
 and in 1 993, she received the 
 Pulitzer Prize for TheWild Iris. 
 Among her other titles are 
 Firstborn, Descending Figure, and 
 Proofs and Theories. She is the 
 recipient of a Rockefeller grant 
 and two Guggenheim fellowships, 
 and currently teaches at Williams 
 College and lives in Vermont. 
 
 Like most writers, I do other 
 work. During the period of 
 my most recent fellowship, 
 I was teaching at Williams 
 College. In many ways, I love 
 that work: I cannot always be 
 certain when my own writing 
 will be going well and, since 
 I live in a rural area, have 
 found it helpful - often - to 
 be in greater proximity to 
 human sound, to have 
 objective tasks. But Williams 
 is far from northern Vermont: 
 six hours by Vermont Transit. 
 Increasingly, the rhythm 
 of my teaching life (which 
 divides the week - three 
 nights away, four at home) 
 has been a strain. By the time 
 of my last fellowship, it had 
 become quite a desperate 
 strain; because I do not teach 
 full time, I was not eligible 
 for sabbaticals. 
 
 The great gift of that 
 fellowship was the relief of 
 pressure; that the year itself 
 was not one of my most 
 productive seems hardly 
 an issue. I finished a book 
 (Ararat). But I am convinced 
 that subsequent work owes 
 much to that time, to the 
 sense of possible liberation, 
 or, at least, respite from an 
 exhausting regimen. 
 
 I am convinced that subsequent work owes 
 much to that time, to the. . . respite from an 
 exhausting regimen. 
 
 96 
 
WRITING 
 
 VERMONT 
 
 Vespers 
 
 Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree 
 Here, in Vermont, country 
 of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived 
 it would mean you existed. 
 
 By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist 
 
 exclusively in warmer climates, 
 
 in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California, 
 
 where are grown the unimaginable 
 
 apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps 
 
 they see your face in Sicily; here, we barely see 
 
 the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself 
 
 to share with John and Noah the tomato crop. 
 
 If there is justice in some other world, those 
 like myself, whom nature forces 
 into lives of abstinence, should get 
 the lion's share of all things, all 
 objects of hunger, greed being 
 praise of you. And no one praises 
 more intensely than I, with more 
 painfully checked desire, or more deserves 
 to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking 
 of the perishable, the immortal fig, 
 which does not travel. - 
 
 - Louise Gliick 
 
 97 
 
Richard Bausch 
 
 Richard Bausch is a novelist and 
 short story writer, who teaches 
 at George Mason University in 
 Virginia. Recipient of a Guggenheim 
 fellowship, he has written the 
 novels Real Presence, The Last Good 
 Time, Mr. Field's Daughter, Violence 
 and Rebel Powers. His short stories 
 are collected under the titles 
 Spirits, and Other Stories, The 
 Fireman's Wife and Other Stories, - 
 and Rare and Endangered Species. 
 His most recent book is Good 
 Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, 
 and All the Ships At Sea, a novel. 
 
 I had the whole morning to 
 myself, and I was supposed to 
 spend it writing. Instead I lay 
 on the couch and listened to 
 Sibelius's 5th Symphony. It 
 was fall, and there was a big 
 picture window in the living 
 room of the house we lived in 
 then. This window looked out 
 on woods, all those fall colors, 
 and the leaves were dropping, 
 as if with the cadences of the 
 music of that symphony's 
 opening movement. I watched 
 the performance a while, then 
 got up and went out of the 
 house, to an amusement/ 
 game store and spent about 
 six dollars playing Pac Man, 
 feeling sick at heart, the way 
 avoidance of work always 
 makes me feel. I drove home 
 with the sense of having 
 wasted the morning, and in 
 the mail was this large white 
 envelope, telling me the good 
 news. It was like a prod from 
 on high, like notice from the 
 universe that I was expected 
 to get back to work. I wrote 
 most of The Last Good Time 
 and several of the stories 
 of Spirits, And Other Stories 
 under its auspices. 
 
 When I realized what it was, 
 I drove over to the university 
 and walked up to my wife 
 Karen's office, and handed the 
 letter to her. This was going 
 to make it possible for one or 
 both of us to be home with 
 the children; it was going to 
 mean time for me to work. 
 Karen stared at the letter, 
 and smiled, and kept staring. 
 One of my students, a friend, 
 the late Dan Rudy, saw me 
 crossing the campus on the 
 way to her office. He told me 
 later that he knew from the 
 way I looked that something 
 wonderful had happened. 
 
 I've since been given a 
 Guggenheim Fellowship; 
 The Lila Wallace Reader's 
 Digest Writer's Award; and 
 the Award of the Academy 
 of Arts and Letters. Nothing 
 ever quite matched the 
 excitement, happiness and 
 encouragement I felt, that 
 sunny fall day in 1 982, when 
 I learned that I'd got the 
 NEA Fellowship. 
 
 It was like a prod from on high, like notice from the 
 universe that I was expected to get back to work. 
 
 98 
 
VIRGINIA 
 
 from 
 
 High-Heeled Shoe 
 
 Dornberg, out for a walk in the fields behind his 
 house one morning, found a black high-heeled shoe 
 near the path leading down to the neighboring 
 pond. The shoe had scuffed places on its shiny 
 surface and caked mud adhering to it, but he could 
 tell from the feel of the soft leather that it was well 
 made, the kind a woman who has money might 
 wear. He held it in his hand and observed that his 
 sense of equilibrium shifted; he caught himself 
 thinking of misfortune, failure, scandal. 
 
 The field around him was peaceful, rife with 
 fragrances of spring. The morning sun was warm, 
 the air dry, the sky blue. Intermittently, drowsily, 
 the cawing of crows sounded somewhere in the 
 distance, above the languid murmur of little breezes 
 in the trees bordering on the far side of the pond. 
 A beautiful, innocent morning, and here he stood, 
 holding the shoe close to his chest in the defensive, 
 wary posture of the guilty — the attitude of someone 
 caught with the goods — nervously scraping the 
 dried mud from the shoe's scalloped sides. 
 
 The mud turned to dust and made a small red 
 cloud about his head, and when the wind blew, the 
 glitter of dust swept over him. He used his shirttail 
 to wipe his face, then walked a few paces, automati- 
 cally looking for the shoe's mate. He thought he saw 
 something in the tall grass at the edge of the pond, 
 but when he got to it, stepping in the mud and 
 catching himself on thorns to make his way, he found 
 the dark, broken curve of a beer bottle. The owner 
 of the pond had moved last fall to Alaska, and there 
 were signs posted all over about the penalties for 
 trespassing, but no one paid any attention to them. 
 Casual littering went on. It was distressing. 
 Dornberg bent down and picked up the shard of 
 glass. Then he put his hand inside the shoe and 
 stretched the leather, holding it up in the brightness. 
 
 He felt weirdly dislodged from himself. 
 
 Beyond the pond and its row of trees, four 
 new houses were being built. Often the construction 
 crews, made up mostly of young men, came to the 
 pond to eat their box lunches and, sometimes, to 
 fish. On several occasions they remained at the site 
 long after the sun went down; the lights in the most 
 nearly finished house burned; other cars pulled in, 
 little rumbling sports cars and shiny sedans, 
 motorcycles, even a taxi now and again. There were 
 parties that went on into the early morning hours. 
 Dornberg had heard music, voices, the laughter of 
 women, all of which depressed him, as though this 
 jazzy, uncomplicated gaiety — the kind that had no 
 cost and generated no guilt — had chosen these 
 others over him. The first time he heard it, he was 
 standing at the side of his house, near midnight, 
 having decided to haul the day's garbage out before 
 going to bed (how his life had lately turned upon 
 fugitive urges to cleanse and purge and make order!). 
 The music stopped him in the middle of his vaguely 
 palliative task, and he listened, wondering, thinking 
 his senses were deceiving him: a party out in the 
 dark, as if the sound of it were drifting down out of 
 the stars. 
 
 Some nights when sleep wouldn't come, he 
 had stared out his window at the faint shadows of 
 the unfinished houses and, finding the one house 
 with all its windows lighted, had quietly made his 
 way downstairs to the back door and stood in the 
 chilly open frame, listening for the music, those 
 pretty female voices — the tumult of the reckless, 
 happy young. 
 
 - Richard Bausch 
 
 99 
 
Colleen McElroy 
 
 Colleen j. McElroy lives in Seattle, 
 where she is on the faculty of the 
 Department of English at the 
 University of Washington. She has 
 published a number of collections 
 of poetry and short stories, and 
 writes for stage and television. 
 Her most recent publications are 
 A Long Way from St. Louis, Driving 
 Under the Cardboard Pines (fiction), 
 and What Madness Brought Me 
 Here: New and Selected Poems, 
 1 968-88. A new collection of 
 poems, Travelling Music, is forth- 
 coming in 1 998. Winner of the 
 Before Columbus American Book 
 Award, she also has received 
 two Fulbright Fellowships, 
 a DuPont Fellowship, and a 
 Rockefeller Fellowship. Her 
 work has been translated into 
 Russian, Italian, German, Malay, 
 and Serbo-Croatian. 
 
 While Goethe whispered, 
 "Light, more light!" as his last 
 words, most writers despair 
 from wanting: Time, more 
 time! We borrow it from our 
 families, from ourselves (at 
 the expense of our health), 
 from jobs that provide us with 
 meager amounts of time. 
 We long for that reprieve that 
 will allow us days of time to 
 write, to create, to devote 
 ourselves to the artistic 
 imagination. As a writer, the 
 NEA Fellowship allowed me 
 those blessed hours, time 
 
 to explore the realms of the 
 imagination, to allow writing 
 to be that healthy job that I 
 need to sustain myself as an 
 artist. It was that rare period 
 of time when I could let 
 writing and literature 
 consume entire days, and I 
 think, grow in my craft in 
 ways that I cannot when my 
 time is divided. It gave me 
 the luxury of being a full-time 
 writer, and of finishing books 
 that time, that elusive 
 element, kept at arm's length. 
 
 As a writer; the NEA Fellowship allowed me those blessed hours, 
 time to explore the realms of the imagination, to allow writing to 
 be that healthy job that I need to sustain myself as an artist. 
 
 100 
 
WASHINGTON 
 
 The Lover Romanced by Rain 
 
 . . . oh, the bread of colleens butters the rain 
 
 — D. Boucicault, "The Brides of Garryowen' 
 
 you and me 
 
 and a warm rain falling 
 
 Seattle rain 
 
 and my hair wrapped 
 
 in a tight scarf 
 
 the light falling 
 
 like polka dots 
 
 of green shadows 
 
 the pale scents of summer 
 
 dancing in a backdrop of trees 
 
 while each moment falls 
 
 into patterns of yesterdays 
 
 windowpanes of rain 
 
 and you covering the landscape 
 
 from here to the peninsula 
 
 today I am home alone 
 
 the rain has turned hard 
 
 and cruel as your laughter 
 
 the house is soaked and steamy 
 
 it smells dank and moldy 
 
 mud worries the doorway 
 
 milk turns sour with mildew 
 
 I found a moss-covered picture of you 
 
 curled like a dead spider 
 
 in the corner on a dark shelf 
 
 and the rain 
 
 singing like a sleeping pill 
 
 at night the rain is lonely 
 
 and calls me friend 
 
 I cannot remember what you called me 
 
 it has been raining for three months 
 rain falling without clouds 
 covering Elliott Bay in pale silver light 
 falling through a sudden haze of sun 
 and I hear the devil's wife 
 her moans synchronized to the beat 
 while blood showers of red rain 
 wash away footprints of dead souls 
 and cloak the night with singing stones 
 
 I no longer try to remember your eyes 
 I keep my room in the rainfall 
 of morning and open my arms 
 to the pulse of water 
 let tiny trickles wriggle like wet 
 fingers past my black belly and down 
 into the shallow cup of thighs 
 where I drown singing 
 
 it is always raining somewhere 
 whenever I dream of you 
 your face dissolves in rain 
 
 Colleen McElroy 
 
 101 
 
Denise Giardina 
 
 Denise Giardina grew up in a 
 coal camp in McDowell County, 
 West Virginia. She received a 
 B.A. in history from West Virginia 
 Wesleyan College and an M.Div. 
 from Virginia Theological Seminary 
 (Episcopal) in Alexandria, Virginia. 
 Giardina has published three 
 novels, Good King Harry, Storming 
 Heaven, and Unquiet Earth. Her 
 fourth novel, Saints and Villains, 
 is scheduled for publication in 
 early 1 998. Storming Heaven was 
 a Discovery selection of the Book- 
 of-the-Month Club, a New Voices 
 selection of the Quality Paperback 
 Award for new writers, and 
 received the 1 987 W. D. 
 Weatherford Award for the 
 
 best published work about the 
 Appalachian South. The Unquiet 
 Earth received an American Book 
 Award from the Before Columbus 
 Foundation, and the Lillian Smith 
 Award for fiction. Ms. Giardina 
 has written op-ed pieces for the 
 NewYorkTimes and the Washington 
 Post, and wrote about her 
 experiences in the Pittston coal 
 strike of 1 989-90 for The Nation, 
 Southern Exposure and the Village 
 Voice. She was the writer-in- 
 residence at Hollins College in 
 1991, and at various times, she 
 has been a teacher, community 
 organizer, activist, hospital clerk, 
 and is a former Episcopal deacon. 
 She now lives in Charleston and 
 teaches at West Virginia State 
 College. 
 
 I have been pleased to be a 
 recipient of an NEA fellowship 
 for creative writing on two 
 separate occasions. Both 
 fellowships came at fortuitous 
 times and allowed me to 
 take time off from other 
 employment to finish my 
 third and fourth novels. I have 
 been especially grateful for 
 my most recent fellowship. 
 I have recently completed 
 a novel, Saints and Villains, to 
 be published by W.W. Norton 
 in 1 998. For four years I 
 struggled to research and 
 write this novel about 
 German theologian Dietrich 
 Bonhoeffer and to teach at 
 my local college at the same 
 time. Any novelist will tell you 
 that without sustained and 
 uninterrupted time to think 
 and write, the task of finishing 
 a book is much more difficult. 
 Thanks to the NEA, I was able 
 to take half a year off without 
 pay. Added to my usual 
 summer break, I was able to 
 finish half of my manuscript 
 in nine months. There is no 
 question that without the 
 NEA's help, my novel would 
 still be far from completion. 
 
 Thanks to the NEA, I was able to. . . finish half of 
 my manuscript in nine months. 
 
 102 
 
WEST VIRGINIA 
 
 from 
 
 Storming Heaven 
 
 Earliest thing I recall from when I was a boy is Daddy coming in 
 from the mines and taking his bath. It always scared me when he 
 came in. It would be way after dark, and I'd be asleep with Talcott 
 and Kerwin in the bed in the front room. Most nights he'd come in 
 quiet, just lay himself down, coal dust and all, on a mat behind the 
 cookstove in the kitchen, so as not to track dirt into the rest of the 
 house. He would be back out before dawn anyway, so there was no 
 need to bathe. But on Saturday, Mommy boiled water, rattled coal 
 in the buckets to throw on the fire, pulled out the Number Three 
 wash tub. I could never sleep through the noise. I always lay on the 
 side of the bed next to the door, so I could hang my head over the 
 edge and watch her. Daddy would stomp onto the back porch, peel 
 off his boots, and bang them against the steps to knock off the crusts 
 of mud and coal dust. He stripped off his clothes and left them in a 
 heap for Mommy to wash the next day. She never washed his mine 
 clothes with the rest of our things. Then Daddy came inside. His 
 face and hands were black and shiny; the rest of him was pale and 
 waxy like lard. The whites of his eyes were vivid. He tossed his pay 
 envelope on the kitchen table. 
 
 "Snake again," was all he would say, meaning he hadn't been 
 able to mine enough coal to pay off the bills at the company store, 
 that he still owed for food and doctoring and his work tools and 
 blasting powder, that his paycheck had a single wavy line where the 
 money figures should have been. But I learned about those things 
 later. At that age, I thought he meant he had seen a copperhead, and 
 that was why his eyes looked so wild and frightful. I lived in terror 
 of snakes. 
 
 Daddy sank slowly into the round tub of hot water, moaning as 
 he went down. The tub was just large enough for him to sit in if he 
 drew up his knees under his chin. The edge of the tub scraped his 
 backbone just above his fleshless buttocks. Mommy stood over him 
 pouring water from her pots and kettles. She scrubbed his face like 
 he was one of us babies but never got all the coal dust off. His face 
 was gray on Sundays like a newspaper photograph. 
 
 Denise Giardina 
 
 103 
 
Jane Hamilton 
 
 Jane Hamilton lives, works, and 
 writes in an orchard farmhouse 
 in Wisconsin. Her short stories 
 have appeared in Harper's 
 magazine, and her first book, 
 The Book of Ruth, was awarded the 
 1989 PEN/Hemingway Foundation 
 Award for best first novel. The 
 Book of Ruth was chosen for the 
 Oprah Winfrey book club in 1996. 
 Her second novel, A Map of the 
 World, was a best seller. 
 
 The NEA fellowship came at 
 a point when I desperately 
 needed space and quiet and 
 time. The fellowship made 
 the writer's life possible and 
 so saved my life. This sounds 
 dramatic, I suppose, but in 
 truth the fellowship gave me 
 nothing less than possibility 
 and hope. With the funds, I 
 bought space and quiet and 
 time, essential as air for a 
 writer and so difficult to come 
 by in the work-a-day world. 
 
 With the funds, I bought space and quiet and 
 time, essential as air for a writer and so difficult 
 to come by in the work-a-day world. 
 
 104 
 
WISCONSIN 
 
 
 
 from 
 
 A Map of the World 
 
 I have thought a fair amount about our farm, about our house that 
 was built in 1852. It was still a good house, even though it didn't 
 look like much. There are thousands of those houses across the 
 Midwest. White clapboard houses with old windmills in their yards, 
 many of them standing empty now on the prairies of Kansas and 
 Nebraska. They are a series of squares, built according to need. Ours 
 are deceptively strong houses, stronger than the winds of a twister, 
 determined against insects and drought and long winters, deter- 
 mined against time, against all of the generations that have passed 
 through them. I have tried to imagine the men and women who have 
 broken their bread in our kitchen, and tilled the soil and fallen asleep 
 at night, too tired to take their boots off, as I sometimes was. The 
 farmer who built our house, Thomas Clausen, kissed his wife good- 
 bye and walked off to fight in the Civil War. An old guy down at DePs 
 told me about him. When Clausen came back from the war he turned 
 the other way and went to California to pan for gold. I don't know if 
 his wife and children begrudged him his absences. 
 
 Alice once told me that pioneer women suffered from anorexia, 
 that there was evidence that proved it was so. I couldn't imagine 
 Thomas Clausen walking up the lane from California only to find his 
 wife skin and bones. I was used to thinking of that first family as 
 long-suffering but philosophical, wise and robust. I found a picture 
 up in the attic of a later family, standing out in front of the house, all 
 of them, even the baby, looking grim as hell. I actually don't have too 
 much rapture about time past, although Alice has accused me of 
 being hopelessly sentimental. There has never been a time of simple 
 light. Still, I try to imagine the land for the taking, and what it must 
 have meant to have space for as far as the eye can see. The Wisconsin 
 Indians in 10,000 B.C., perhaps sleeping right where our yard was, 
 hunted mastodon. Mastodon. They ate bison, giant beavers, caribou, 
 and elk. It is unthinkable now that anyone could ever have drunk out 
 of our rivers and lakes. I don't have the power to imagine what it 
 must have been like. I can't even visualize the endless prairie, the vast 
 tracks of woodland. I can't hold in my mind long enough to know 
 absolutely what we've lost. And so the loss is magnified, knowing, as 
 I do, that my powers are poor, and that our world has become 
 diminished beyond all measure. 
 
 I have thought about the boy who lived on our farm, Gurdon 
 Huck, who in 1908 fell off a hay wagon and broke his neck. I found 
 his father's log of weather and planting and harvesting, on the floor 
 of our closet. It was under a hatbox like a piece of trash. His last entry 
 says, "June 9, 1908. Yesterday our boy fell off the wagon. Broke his 
 neck. Dead." I showed the notebook to Dan, but I wasn't willing to 
 give it up to the Dairy Shrine. It belongs to the house. In the attic, 
 in an old trunk, we found books on agriculture and etiquette and 
 religion, a fountain pen, a bag of lace, a cracked platter, a pie tin filled 
 with black-and-gray stones. We had no idea who gathered the stones 
 or where. We brought them downstairs and set them in the middle of 
 our kitchen table. They were smooth as could be. As the weeks went 
 on they gathered dust and crumbs and jelly spots. They came to look 
 less and less like relics from the ages and more and more like us. 
 I cleaned them up and put them back in the attic. 
 
 The people who lived in our house probably considered, as 
 most of us do, that our moment is what is real. It wasn't too long after 
 we moved to the farm that for me time began to run together. That 
 way of seeing probably comes with age. The past seemed to flow into 
 the present, in some instances taking over the here and now. It was all 
 the traces that made me feel the quickness of passing time, of passing 
 generations. Alice wondered what we should do with the old things, 
 the laces, the stones, the pens, the books. For her it was a matter of 
 deciding between Goodwill and the monthly trash pickup. "They'll 
 stay in the attic," I said. I tried to tell her that that pile of stuff served 
 as a reminder that we are passersby, nothing more. Yet I also believed 
 that those few things in the chest, all of the associations long ago, 
 the layers of wallpaper in our bedroom, the journal in the closet — 
 all of that experience matters. Alice reiterated that I was an incurable 
 romantic. I could only say again that the past, the details of the past, 
 in some terrible and impossible ways, matters. I say impossible 
 because what seems important today is probably not tomorrow, and 
 in any case most everything is lost and forgotten, or else destroyed. 
 I stubbornly believed, in the six years we lived on the farm, that the 
 people before us in our house left their history to us, knowing that 
 we would safeguard it. 
 
 -Jane Hamilton 
 
 105 
 
Gretel Ehrlich 
 
 Gretel Ehrlich was born in Santa 
 Barbara, California and educated 
 at Bennington College and 
 UCLA Film School. She moved 
 to Wyoming in 1 976 where she 
 lived and worked on sheep and 
 cattle ranches for 17 years. Her 
 books include Geode, Rock Body, 
 poems, To Touch the Water, poems, 
 The Solace of Open Spaces, essays, 
 Drinking Dry Clouds, short stories, 
 Heart Mountain, novel, Islands, 
 The Universe, Home, essays, Arctic 
 Heart, poems, A Match to the 
 Heart, memoir, Yellowstone, Land 
 of Fire and Ice, Questions of Heaven, 
 travel memoir. She is at work on 
 a book of nonfiction and a volume 
 of stories, both for Pantheon. 
 In 1987, she was the recipient of 
 a Whiting Foundation Award and 
 a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. 
 The American Academy of Arts 
 and Letters honored her with 
 the Harold B.Vurcell Award for 
 distinguished prose in 1986. 
 She now divides her time between 
 the central coast of California 
 and Wyoming. 
 
 I applied for an NEA fellowship 
 in 1979 or maybe it was 1980, 
 after having gone through the 
 third worst winter in the 
 history ofWyoming alone, 
 in a one-room log cabin, with 
 very little firewood, no down 
 parka, and not much to eat. 
 My husband-to-be had died of 
 cancer, I'd put in four months 
 at a Buddhist monastery, 
 returned to Wyoming, and 
 took up cowboying to pay 
 for rent. Everything has, 
 contained within it, the seeds 
 of a teaching situation: having 
 lost everything, I felt there 
 was nothing more to lose. 
 What better time to see if 
 I had what it took to be a 
 writer. 
 
 The NEA fellowship gave 
 me that delicious jumpstart. 
 Between cowboying duties, I 
 had time to reread the entire 
 canon of Asian and western 
 literature, Wyoming history, 
 
 and current thinking in 
 physics, botany, and ecology. 
 Mornings, I read Wallace 
 Stevens, Virgil's "Eclogues," 
 Robert Lowell, Octavio Paz, 
 John Berryman, Li Po, Basho, 
 Dogen, and Ikkyu; afternoons, 
 I reread Absalom, Absalom!, 
 Portrait of a Lady, Winesburg, 
 Ohio, The Grapes of Wrath, 
 A Hundred Years of Solitude, 
 Anna Karenin, Kafka's Parables, 
 The Plague, A Farewell to Arms, 
 etc., and in the evenings I 
 read The History ofWyoming 
 by Larson, Emerson, Thoreau, 
 Edward Hoagland, Annie 
 Dillard, Lewis and Clark, 
 and all the wonderful western 
 diaries and expedition notes 
 from the University of 
 Nebraska Press. Finally, I 
 began writing. The resulting 
 book was The Solace of Open 
 Spaces, published by Viking 
 Penguin in 1984. 
 
 Between cowboying duties, I had time to reread the. entire 
 canon of Asian and western literature, Wyoming history, 
 and current thinking in physics, botany, and ecology. 
 
 106 
 
WYOMING 
 
 "UK 
 
 from 
 
 Looking for a Lost Dog 
 
 I walk and walk. Past the falls, through a pass, 
 toward a larger, rowdier creek. The sky goes black. 
 In the distance snow on the Owl Creek Mountains 
 glares. A blue ocean seems to stretch between, and 
 the black sky hangs over like a frown. A string of 
 cottonwoods whose new, tender leaves are the color 
 of limes pulls me downstream. I come into the 
 meadow with the abandoned apple orchard. 
 The trees have leaves but have lost most of their 
 blossoms. I feel as if I had caught strangers 
 undressed. 
 
 The sun comes back, and the wind. It brings 
 no dog, but ducks slide overhead. An Eskimo from 
 Barrow, Alaska, told me the reason spring has such 
 fierce winds is so birds coming north will have 
 something to fly on. 
 
 To find what's lost; to lose what's found. 
 Several times I've thought I might be "losing my 
 mind." Of course, minds aren't literally misplaced — 
 on the contrary, we live too much under them. As 
 with viewing the falls, we can lose sight of what is too 
 close. It is between the distant and close-up views 
 that the struggle between impulse and reason, logic 
 and passion takes place. 
 
 The feet move; the mind wanders. In his 
 journals Thoreau wrote: "The saunterer, in the good 
 sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, 
 which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest 
 course to the sea." 
 
 Today I'm filled with longing — for what I'm 
 not, for what is impossible, for people I love who 
 can't be in my life. Passions of all sorts struggle 
 soundlessly, or else, like the falls, they are all noise 
 but can't be seen. My hybrid anguish spends itself 
 as recklessly and purposefully as water. 
 
 Now I'm following a game trail up a sidehill. 
 It's a mosaic of tracks — elk, bear, rabbit, and bird. 
 If city dwellers could leave imprints in the cement, 
 it would look this way: tracks would overlap, go 
 backward and forward like the peregrine 
 saunterings of the mind. 
 
 I see a dog's track, or is it a coyote's? I get 
 down on my hands and knees to sniff out a scent. 
 What am I doing? I entertain expectations of myself 
 as preposterous as when I landed in Tokyo — I felt 
 so at home there that I thought I would break into 
 fluent Japanese. Now I sniff the ground and smell 
 only dirt. If I spent ten years sniffing, would I learn 
 scents? 
 
 The tracks veer off the trail and disappear. 
 Descending into a dry wash whose elegant, tortured 
 junipers and tumbled boulders resemble a Japanese 
 garden, I trip on a sagebrush root. I look. Deep in 
 the center of the plant is a bird's nest, but instead 
 of eggs, a locust stares up at me. 
 
 Some days I think this one place isn't enough. 
 That's when nothing is enough, when I want to live 
 multiple lives and be allowed to love without limits. 
 Those days, like today, I walk with a purpose but no 
 destinations. Only then do I see, at least momen- 
 tarily, that everything is here. To my left a towering 
 Cottonwood is lunatic with birdsong. Under it I'm 
 a listening post while its great gray trunk — like a 
 baton or the source of something — heaves its green 
 symphony into the air. 
 
 I walk and walk: from the falls, over Grouse 
 Hill, to the dry wash. Today it is enough to make 
 a shadow. 
 
 - Gretel Ehrlich 
 
 107 
 
AFTERWORD 
 
 W K I I N Cj A 1V1 ill IX 1 Vj A demonstrates the vitality of the American story. 
 
 Literature is a national art. Work written in Ohio is published in Oregon 
 and read throughout the country and around the world. Books tell the stories 
 of our lives and help us to understand each other. Through them we can 
 appreciate our differences and celebrate our commonalities. At the end of 
 the century and at the beginning of the millennium, American books record 
 and reflect what it means to be an American alive today. 
 
 After thirty years, the record of the Creative Writing Fellowships shows 
 unparalleled support for writers at critical, early stages of their careers. Since 
 1967, the American people have invested $33.7 million on American writers. 
 The dividends are the thousands of novels, short story collections, essays and 
 poems that give voice to the American experience and deepen our culture, 
 adding a note of grace in our lives. 
 
 Many of the most acclaimed books of contemporary American literature 
 have been written on Endowment fellowships, as this volume demonstrates. 
 Since 1990, 27 of the 33 recipients of poetry and fiction awards through the 
 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle 
 Award have been previous Arts Endowment fellowship winners. 
 
 This record becomes even more astounding when one realizes that since 1984 
 fellowships have been awarded on the basis of anonymous manuscript review; 
 panelists do not know the identity of the writers, their publishing histories, 
 
 108 
 
academic achievements or previous awards. Grants are made on the basis of 
 artistic excellence alone. The process of manuscript review lasts seven months, 
 undertaken by an annually changing panel of distinguished writers, editors, 
 and readers. Each year between two and five percent of eligible applicants 
 receive grants. 
 
 From the beginning, literary fellowships were designed to differ from other 
 national awards by encouraging new work and allowing emerging writers time 
 to write. When they receive the award, most grantees are virtually unknown. 
 Only a handful of Americans can make a living from writing; most writers 
 hold full-time jobs, and write when they can. Arts Endowment fellowships 
 bring national recognition from a writer's peers and afford grantees the 
 chance for a short time away from their daily jobs to concentrate on their art. 
 WRITINGAMERICA, with a single contribution from each of the United 
 States, exemplifies the many chapters of the American story at this time, and 
 in this place. I hope you have found, as I did, that you too are in this book. 
 
 - Gigi Bradford 
 Literature Director 
 1991-1997 
 
 To find out more about Creative 
 Writing Fellowships, visit our web site 
 at http://arts.endow.gov or contact 
 our Office of Public Information for 
 the latest application guidelines. 
 
 109 
 
PERMISSIONS 
 
 The excerpts of essays, fiction, and 
 poetry collected in Writing America 
 have appeared previously in publica- 
 tions as noted below. We gratefully 
 acknowledge the cooperation of 
 editors, agents, and the authors for 
 their permission to reprint these 
 works. 
 
 Paul Auster's excerpt is from "Why 
 Write?" which originally appeared in 
 The New Yorker. Copyright © 1995 
 by Paul Auster. 
 
 Richard Bausch's excerpt is from 
 the story "High-Heeled Shoe" in 
 the collection Rare & Endangered 
 Species. Published by Vintage Books. 
 Copyright © 1995 by Richard 
 Bausch. 
 
 Sandra Cisneros's "My Lucy 
 Friend Who Smell Like Corn" 
 is from Woman Hollering Creek 
 Copyright © 1991 by Sandra 
 Cisneros. Published by Vintage 
 Books, a division of Random House, 
 Inc. and originally in hardcover 
 by Random House, Inc. Reprinted 
 by permission of Susan Bergholz 
 Literary Services, New York. 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Dennis Covington's excerpt is 
 from Salvation on Sand Mountain. 
 Published by Addison- Wesley 
 Publishing Company. Copyright 
 © 1995 Dennis Covington. 
 
 Annie Dillard's excerpt is from 
 An American Childhood. Published 
 by Harper 8c Row, Publishers, Inc. 
 Copyright © 1987 by Annie Dillard. 
 
 Rita Dove's poem "Small Town" is 
 from The Yelloiu House on the Corner. 
 Published by Carnegie Mellon 
 University Press. Copyright © 1993 
 by Rita Dove. 
 
 Gretel Ehrlich's excerpt from 
 "Looking for a Lost Dog" was 
 published in The Gray wolf Annual 
 Three: Essays, Memoirs, and 
 Reflections. Published by Graywolf 
 Press, first appeared in New Age 
 Journal. Copyright © 1986 by 
 Gretel Ehrlich. 
 
 Richard Ford's excerpt is from the 
 essay "My Mother, In Memory" 
 which appeared in a different form 
 in Harper's magazine. Copyright 
 © 1997 by Richard Ford. 
 
 Ernest Gaines's excerpt is from 
 his novel A Lesson Before Dying. 
 Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 
 Copyright © 1993 by Ernest Gaines. 
 
 Denise Giardina's excerpt is from 
 the novel Storming Heaven. 
 Published by WW Norton 8c Co. 
 Copyright©1987 by Denise Giardina. 
 
 Kaye Gibbons's excerpt is from her 
 novel Ellen Foster. Published by 
 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 
 Copyright © 1987 by Kaye Gibbons. 
 
 Diane Glancy's excerpt is from the 
 story "Lead Horse" which appeared 
 in Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short 
 Stories of the Contemporary Native 
 American Experience. Published 
 by Doubleday. Copyright © 1992 
 hy Diane Glancy. 
 
 Louise Gliick's poem is one of several 
 interwoven works entitled "Vespers" 
 in The Wild Iris. Published by 
 The Ecco Press. Copyright © 1992 
 by Louise Gliick. 
 
 Albert Goldbarth's poem "Futures" 
 first appeared in Gettysburg Review. 
 Copyright © 1996 by Albert 
 Goldbarth. 
 
 Linda Gregg's poem "To Be Here" 
 is from The Sacraments of Desire. 
 Published by Graywolf Press. 
 Copyright © 1991 by Linda Gregg. 
 
 John Haines's excerpt is from 
 The Stars, The Snow, The Fire. 
 Published by Graywolf Press. 
 Copyright © 1989 by John Haines 
 
 Jane Hamilton's excerpt is from her 
 novel A Map of the World. Published 
 by Doubleday. Copyright © 1994 
 by Jane Hamilton. 
 
 Ron Hansen's excerpt is from 
 "Nebraska" in the collection also 
 entitled Nebraska. Published by 
 Atlantic Monthly Press. Copyright 
 © 1989 by Ron Hansen. 
 
 Joy Harjo's poem "Perhaps the 
 World Ends Here" is from The 
 Women Who Fell From the Sky. 
 Published by WW. Norton & Co. 
 Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. 
 
 Michael S. Harper's poem "We 
 Assume: On the Death of Our Son, 
 Reuben Masai Harper" appears in 
 Images of Kin: New iff Selected Poems. 
 Published by the University of 
 Illinois Press. Copyright © by 
 Michael S. Harper. 
 
 Linda Hogan's poem "Drum" 
 is from The Book of Medicines. 
 Published by Coffee House Press. 
 Copyright © 1993 by Linda Hogan. 
 
 Teresa Jordan's poem "Old Anne" 
 is featured in Buckaroo: Visions 
 and Voices of the American Cowboy. 
 Published by the Western Folklife 
 Center. Copyright © 1997 by Teresa 
 Jordan. 
 
 Maxine Hong Kingston's excerpt is 
 from her novel Tripmaster Monkey — 
 His Fake Book. Published by Alfred 
 A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1989 
 by Maxine Hong Kingston. 
 
 William Kittredge's excerpt is from 
 "The Politics of Storytelling" which 
 appeared in the anthology Northern 
 Lights. Published by Vintage Books. 
 Copyright © 1994 by William 
 Kittredge. 
 
 110 
 
Maxine Kumin's poem "Appetite" is 
 from The Long Approach. Published 
 by Viking. Copyright © 1985 by 
 Maxine Kumin. 
 
 Li-Young Lee's poem "This Hour 
 and What is Dead" is from The City 
 in Which I Love You. Published by 
 BOA Editions, Ltd. Copyright 
 © 1990 by Li-Young Lee. 
 
 Philip Levine's poem "You Can Have 
 It" is from Seven Years from Some- 
 where. Published by Atheneum. 
 Copyright © 1993 by Philip Levine. 
 
 Susan Ludvigson's poem "Grace" 
 is from Everything Winged Must Be 
 Dreaming. Published by LSU Press. 
 Copyright © 1993 by Susan 
 Ludvigson. 
 
 Bobbie Ann Mason's excerpt is 
 from her novel In Country. Published 
 by Harper 8c Row, Inc. Copyright 
 © 1985 by Bobbie Ann Mason. 
 
 J.D. McClatchy's poem "Bees" is 
 from Stars Principal. Published by 
 Macmillan Publishing Company. 
 Copyright © 1986 by J.D. McClatchy. 
 
 Colleen McElroy's poem "The 
 Lover Romanced by Rain" appears 
 in What Madness Brought Me Here: 
 New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988. 
 Published by Wesleyan University 
 Press. Copyright © 1990 by Colleen 
 McElroy. 
 
 David Mura's excerpt is from 
 Turning Japanese: Memoirs of 
 a Sansei. Published by Anchor 
 Doubleday. Copyright © 199 1 
 by David Mura. 
 
 Dan O'Brien's excerpt is from the 
 novel In the Center of the Nation. 
 Published by Atlantic Monthly Press. 
 Copyright © by Dan O'Brien. 
 
 Linda Pastan's poem "To a 
 Daughter Leaving Home" is 
 from The Imperfect Paradise. 
 Published by W. W. Norton 8c Co., 
 Copyright © 1988 by Linda Pastan. 
 
 Robert Pinsky's poem "The Street 
 of Furthest Memory" is from 
 Sadness and Happiness. Published 
 by Princeton University Press. 
 Copyright © 1975 by Robert Pinsky. 
 
 Alberto Puos's poem "True Story of 
 the Pins" is from Whispering to Fool 
 the Wind. Published by The Sheep 
 Meadow Press. Copyright © 1987 
 by Alberto Rios. 
 
 Ira Sadoff's poem "Pemaquid Point" 
 is from Emotional Traffic. Published 
 by David Godine Books. Copyright 
 © 1989 by Ira Sadoff. 
 
 Scott Russell Sanders's excerpt from 
 the essay "Landscape and Imagina- 
 tion" was published in Secrets of the 
 Universe. Published by Beacon Press, 
 Boston. Copyright © 1991 by Scott 
 Russell Sanders. 
 
 Jane Smiley's excerpt is from her 
 novel A Thousand Acres. Published 
 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 
 ©1991 Jane Smiley. 
 
 W.D. Snodgrass's poem "A Seashell" 
 appeared in Selected Poems 1957- 
 1987. Published by SOHO Press. 
 Copyright © 1987 by W.D. 
 Snodgrass. 
 
 Cathy Song's poem "Picture Bride" 
 is from Picture Bride. Published by 
 Yale University Press. Copyright 
 © 1983 by Cathy Song. 
 
 Kim Stafford's excerpt is from the 
 essay "December Meditation at 
 Camp Polk Cemetery" in Having 
 Everything Right: Essays of Place. 
 Published by Penguin USA. 
 Copyright © 1987 by Kim Stafford. 
 
 Mark Strand's poem "Life in the 
 Valley" is from The Continuous Life. 
 Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 
 Copyright © 1990 by Mark Strand. 
 
 Mona Van Duyn's poem "Notes 
 from a Suburban Heart" appeared 
 in If It Be Not I: Collected Poems, 
 1959-1982. Published by Alfred 
 A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 
 by Mona Van Duyn. 
 
 Alice Walker's story "The Flower" 
 is part of the collection In Love and 
 Trouble. Published by Harcourt 
 Brace. Copyright © 1973 by 
 Alice Walker. 
 
 Larry Watson's excerpt is from his 
 novel Justice. Published by Milkweed 
 Editions. Copyright © 1995 by 
 Larry Watson 
 
 Joy Williams's excerpt is from 
 her story "The Yard Boy" which is 
 part of the collection Taking Care. 
 Published by Vintage Books, 
 originally in hardcover by Random 
 House, Inc. Copyright © 1985 by 
 Joy Williams. 
 
 CD. Wright's poem "King's 
 Daughters, Home for Unwed 
 Mothers, 1948" is from String Light. 
 Published by The University of 
 Georgia Press. Copyright © 1991 
 by CD. Wright. 
 
 Charles Wright's poem "Driving 
 Through Tennessee" is from 
 The Southern Cross. Published 
 by Random House, Inc. Copyright 
 © 1981 by Charles Wright. 
 
 Robert Wrigley's poem "Field 
 Burning: A Full Moon," is from 
 In The Bank of Beautiful Sins. 
 Published by Penguin, USA. 
 Copyright © 1995 by Robert Wrigley. 
 
 Ill 
 
CREDITS 
 
 Published by 
 
 Office of Communications 
 
 Cherie Simon, Director 
 
 Designed by 
 
 Cox & Associates, Inc. 
 
 Silver Spring, MD 
 
 Edited by 
 Keith Donohue 
 Publications Director 
 
 With special thanks to 
 
 Gigi Bradford and Cliff Becker 
 
 This book was printed using 
 private donated funds. 
 
 w 
 
 National Endowment for the Arts 
 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW 
 Washington, DC 20506-0001 
 202/682-5400 
 http://arts.endow.gov 
 
 112 
 

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