Crab Creek Review: Notes on Contributors: Spring/Summer 2004

MARY ALEXANDRA AGNER, Somerville, Massachusetts, has poetry forthcoming in North American Review, Salt, and Passages North, among others. She has spent most of her life observing the universe and writing about it. "Telesilla of Argos is remembered more for the events embellished in this poem than the surviving scraps of her poetry, but I believe the two could be related and was inspired to show how."

BRUCE BARCKLOW, Seattle, Washington, lives with his wife and son; two grown daughters are social activists in Mexico City and Denver. Originally from New Jersey, he graduated from NYU and the University of Washington, where he obtained an MSW. He supervises social workers for severely disturbed children. This is his first publication. "What's missing? Observation, knowledge and peace, of course. I try to invoke the spirit of William Stafford whenever I write."

LAURA BERNSTEIN, Detroit, Michigan, has appeared in The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, and Southern Poetry Review. She has work forthcoming in Rattle and Controlled Burn. "This poem is one of an ongoing series that deals with all sorts of natural disasters. Overall, I am less concerned with the events themselves than the anxiety that precedes them, or their aftereffects, how in the end, somehow, balance is always restored."

ELIZABETH BIGELOW, Westfield, Massachusetts, is a speech pathologist. Formally, she was a profession ballet dancer and it was during her dancing career that she began to write poetry. She has taken poetry classes at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "This poem is a paradelle. I like to look for new forms of poetry and especially like forms that shift language and meaning. Paradelles are very time consuming and structurally interesting. This poem took three long days to write and has seen many many revisions."

ACE BOGGESS, Huntington, West Virginia, is the author of The Beautiful Girl Whose Wish Was Not Fulfilled, a book of poems. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, Florida Review, and Atlanta Review. "This piece is part of an ongoing series of poems answering questions from books, friends, websites, etc. It makes for very personal writing, and I have read predominantly from this unpublished questions manuscript on tour."

ANDRE BRESEE, Pleasant Hill, California, works at a credit union. There is a stalled novel on his computer, along with lyrics to a musical that will never see the stage. No children, but there are a girlfriend, nieces, a nephew, and cats. "The idea of the piano repairing itself came only on about the third draft; after that, everything was a little easier."

DEAN BRINK, Tacoma, Washington, teaches Japanese Studies at Saint Martin's College in Lacey, Washington, and organizes "poets for peace and social justice" readings at the Antique Sandwich Company. He is working on a chapbook, Quantum Wishes, and research on intertextuality in various forms of Japanese verse as they change during modernization in the late nineteenth century. "It can be amusing when people become so confident in their manipulation of appearances that they have no idea what they are doing or what others piece together. Hasn't everybody read Crime and Punishment? It's enough to drive one to nature poetry."

SUSAN CASEY, Seattle, Washington, has written poems across the country and stretched her pen as far as Slovakia and Japan. She has sung "Ô Champs-Élysées" with coworkers at Disneyland Paris. She has published writing in Bayou, Many Mountains Moving, and Asahi Weekly, as well as on Seattle's buses. "Where is the line between the dead and the living? At some moments, that border seems to blur."

MICHAEL DIEBERT, Decatur, Georgia, has had poetry in the Southern Indiana Review and JAMA.

JOE MAX EMMINGER, Seattle, Washington, graciously offered us artwork for a second cover. He first appeared on the Autumn/Winter 2001issue. His artwork can be seen at Grover/Thurston Gallery in Seattle and at yarddog.com. "I am a self-taught painter—every day I paint. Painting is the center of my life but it was a crooked line to get here. My paintings are about what I see and what's in my head. When I go to the studio I find out what that is. I start a painting by putting marks on the paper—then I see what it's about. The paintings evolve as I paint them—in a way I try to stay out of the way and let them happen. I try to leave room for them to breathe and live in the world."

JOAN FISET, Seattle, Washington, has a book of memoir prose poems, Now the Day is Over, Blue Begonia 1997, that won the King County Arts Commission's Publication Prize. Her poems have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Bitter Oleander, Primavara and others. She is a psychotherapist in private practice, and as a PTSD contractor with the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs, works with Vietnam veterans and their families. "As a child growing up in Massachusetts I watched the night sky for the first snowfall of winter through the window in our living room. This poem is informed by the reverie I remember experiencing between myself and what I sensed was the life of the snow and what its still silent presence made possible."

MARK FITZGERALD, Falls Church, Virginia, teaches literature and writing at Strayer University and is currently completing a book of poems. "This one sprang from the core of a meditation I wrote about arriving."

MATTHEW FLUHARTY, Jamaica, Massachusetts, has appeared in Open City, The Notre Dame Review, and The Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Lancaster Unversity, UK and is currently studying Irish poetry at Boston College. He is the editor of Way American magazine. "This was written after I was quarantined in the Beloit Public Library during an anthrax hoax in October 2001. I took a long drive along the northern Illinois border after the bio-teams discovered the baby powder in a videocassette of E.T., laughing a little but also shaken. I got lost in the back roads between the corn silos and old dairy barns, singing along to the Carter Family."

GEORGE FORTIER, St. Louis, Missouri, is cofounder, with poet Kirk Sweasinger, of a writers' collective known as The Project. He works for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and lives with his wife and two daughters. "I like the way that a harsh climate or a breaking down often allows for utter clarity—brought on here by wanting more (more love) from less." ANNE CARROLL FOWLER was born and grew up in Maine, where a number of her poems are set, and where she returns frequently to visit her family and friends. Her poems have been published in many journals. She is an ordained Episcopal priest and serves as rector of St. John's Church in Jamaica Plain, where she lives with her husband Sam Allen. "I had never heard this pronouncement—lucky in love or parking—until my theatre-going friend told me, and I was struck by how these utterances of our mothers' resonate (detonate?) throughout our lives."

CAMERON K. GEAREN New Haven, Connecticut, has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day and selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She currently teaches poetry writing at a public high school devoted to the arts. "I lived in mainland China from 1998 to 1999, and then spent 6 weeks in Hong Kong in 2001. These poems use those two settings to explore my outsider status there and feelings of disequilibrium that arise for me when I'm living inside a culture that is not native to me."

SANDRA GRAFF, Wallkill, New York, lives with her husband and children. She teaches English at SUNY Orange. Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Girl in Garden, in 2002. Her work has appeared in Lynx and Poetry Depth Quarterly, and is forthcoming in Poetry Motel, Blueline, and Cider Press Review. "Underneath my cat Tillie's voice was another voice speaking to me. I had to listen!"

JOSEPH GREEN, Longview, Washington, teaches at Lower Columbia College. A chapbook of his poems, The End of Forgiveness, is available from Floating Bridge Press. "My son recently inherited the chair in 'Recliner,' a green velour La-Z-Boy with no beer stains —yet."

BRUCE HOLBERT, Spokane, Washington, teaches at an inner-city high school. He is currently at work on a novel, Whiskey, of which "Blind Nigger" is an excerpt. Other chapters have appeared in the Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Other Voices, and The Inlander. "I first heard the term 'blind nigger' in reference to a particularly difficult pool shot. Something about such an offensive term being used in a context completely unhinged from race struck me as both ridiculous and heartbreaking. When the main character in this story began to flounder when he encountered happiness for the first time, I felt the same combination of emotions."

THOMAS JUVIK, Port Orchard, Washington, teaches high school. His mentor for the past 33 years has been the late Jack Cady. Recent stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Tampa Review, and Briar Cliff. He is presently seeking a publisher for his Vietnam era novel Everybody Knows This is Nowhere. Of "The Way Home" he writes, "The main character is based on a friend who re-upped for Vietnam after walking in on a bad scene. I always wished it would have turned out better for him, and it does, in this story."

JEAN KANE, Poughkeepsie, New York, teaches literature at Vassar College where she writes poetry and ficition. She has published in both genres, in periodicals such as DoubleTake, the Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Cimarron Review. She recently completed a manuscript of poetry, The History of Water on Mars. "I remember seeing ads with this title in comic books. The illustration would feature a woman's leg with little lightining bolts surrounding it. I didn't understand anything about this ad—perhaps one of the reasons that I remembered it. I recalled this ad several decedes later when I acquired a hair on my chin. It sprouted mortality and knowledge."

MERCEDES LAWRY, Seattle, Washington, has appeared in Poetry, Rhino, Fine Madness, and Nimrod. She has received honors from the Seattle Arts Commission and Artist Trust. She has also published fiction for children. "I'm reading about Van Gogh. I was haunted by the phrase that serves as the title and the question of how we look when feeling deep sorrow."

GASTÓN MADRIGAL wrote "Dogs 'Til We Die" for his AP English class while a high school student in San Antonio, Texas. His teacher found it inappropriate.

MARJORIE L. MANWARING , Seattle, Washington, is a freelance writer and editor. She teaches poetry in the schools and coedits the online poetry journal Switched-on Gutenberg. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Seattle Review, 5AM, DMQ Review, Pontoon, and on the Metro buses. "The inspiration for the poem "Kiss" was finding an old bottle of McKesson's Mercurochrome (price tag: 16 cents) in my grandfather's medicine cabinet."

STEPHEN MCDONALD, Murrieta, California, is a Professor of English at Palomar College in San Marcos. He is the author of four college composition texts and a recently completed chapbook entitled Where There Was No Pattern. His poetry has appeared in The California Quarterly and is forthcoming in RATTLE. "'Sowbug' is a meditation on the presence of Spirit in the most insignificant of creatures. 'Sparrow' describes a personal transformation I experienced one winter afternoon, when I was feeling very much like 'thirty stories of steel girders.'"

ZACH SAVICH, Seattle, Washington, is a graduate of the University of Washington, and currently studies at the University of Iowa. "After writing in Rome for five weeks, I left with only this poem. It is dedicated to Richard Kenney, who advocated napping, and to Jay Thompson, who slept near me."

JONATHAN SHAPIRO, Seattle, Washington, has had poetry recently published in the Seattle Review and Sow's Ear. "This poem's 'spark' came from watching a wood-stove fire burn while in residency at Caldena, a lovely artist colony in the Cascades."

BRANDON SHIMODA, Asheville, North Carolina, has spent the last seven years in towns up and down the Hudson River, interleaved with extended stays in Oregon, Belize, and southern Mexico. His work has appeared in New Orleans Review, Snow Monkey, and Small Spiral Notebook, among others. "Voles exemplify the significance of the overlooked; their sermons are delivered in feces—carriers of seeds and spores invaluable to the life of forests. As for the 'orchardist,' I mourn his losses, but not those derived from fallen and bruised apples. After all, that which is delicious, is delicious."

BILL TEITELBAUM, Chicago, Illinois, has appeared in The First Line and Red Wheelbarrow. "Sea Change" is part of a collection in progress with the working title, God's Orphans. "Many of my stories concern the pursuit of order, that need we express for realities that make sense. The protagonist's loony affliction has to mean something. Why, he asks. Why him? Why this? Stuff happens, that he knows—but not for no reason."

MARK VANNIER, Chicago, Illinois, recently earned an MFA in fiction from Southern Illinois University where he worked as an assistant editor for Crab Orchard Review. "'Animal Planet' was inspired by a friend's pet rabbit and, to a lesser degree, his love of Willie Nelson."

EMILY S. WARREN, Shelton, Connecticut, is a writer, a graduate student, a nurse, and a compulsive traveler. She spends her days holding hands, reading cardiac monitors, and looking for poetry everywhere: airport lounges, hospital corridors, taxis, even kitchens. "This poem is what happens when you put down your book on Venetian Art to finally do the dinner dishes; wondering when and how that THING we all wait for—not so patiently—might appear to us."

BILL YAKE, Olympia, Washington, has recently recorded eight species of butterflies previously unreported in Grays Harbor County. His first full collection of poetry, This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain, is just out from Radiolarian Press. "The first draft was written shortly after a Tim McNulty workshop while I poured over local maps in a cabin not far from Winthrop, WA. The moon, dim light, and place names are strictly factual."