The Sewanee Review

Fiction

Cass and Charlene

Ann Beattie

We (Cass’s former students, friends, past and present neighbors, and respected adversaries) had been invited to gather in Connecticut for the seventy-seventh birthday of Casswell Duncan Damaris by his wife, Charlene Andresson. (It’s important that a woman retain her maiden name, even if the concept of “the maiden” has been tainted by simple-minded people who’ve invented nonsense about the symbolism of unicorns and the plights of dashing knights).

Nonfiction Online Feature

Close to the Bone: Mary Robison Reconsidered

Justin Taylor

Here’s what I think it comes down to: the minimalists met with the most success, individually and in aggregate, as story writers. They came to prominence through magazine publications. Some (Carver, Hempel) never wrote novels, and even those who did have tended to fare better in the short form (Hannah, Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason). Because Robison’s style is elliptical, and because her novels are short and appear so rarely (every ten years or so), it has been too easy for too long to consider Robison a member of this second category.

Fiction

No Such War

John Wray

For two days they followed the river, fording and refording it times without number, picking their way across it daintily where stones broke the surface, stumbling like mules through the current where circumstance left them no choice. The gorge grew wider and greener as the river descended and she passed the hours looking for songbirds along its banks, stopping and peering into the rushes whenever any movement caught her eye.

Poetry

To Our Miscarried One, Age Fifty Now

Sharon Olds

Every twenty years, I turn / and address you, not knowing who you were / or what you were. You had been three months / in utero, when our friend came to visit / with her virus which I caught and you died—or it may be / your inviableness had been conceived with you— / you might have been, all along, going to / last fourteen weeks, though I had felt, as we lay on the living-room floor, the couch / pushed in front of the door at the pure gold / hour at the core of your big sister’s / nap, that you had taken deep.

Craft Lecture

The Determination of Incident or What is Character?

Michael Cunningham

I teach writing. One of the great things about teaching writing is that, in the process of figuring out how to teach your students, you find you teach yourself. I’m still surprised at how much I gain by taking what I feel I simply know about writing and breaking it down into its elements in an attempt to render it cogent and comprehensible to others. As it turns out, there’s nothing like being compelled to explain what you do to help clarify your own thinking about what you do.

Nonfiction

This Is the Beginning of Writing

Lauren Elkin

I often come across writers I love talking about the beginnings of what they do. Why and where it starts, what gets in its way. It’s a preoccupation of the essay, you might say. A trope. I suppose I’m only now noticing it because I’m at the beginning of a few projects, trying to decide which to devote myself to first. Each has its own hold on me; each requires the exclusion of the others.

Nonfiction

As It Was Give(n) to Me

Stacy Kranitz

Representing place is a complicated negotiation. How can a photographer demystify stereotypes, represent culture, sum up experience, and interpret memory and history? The following images attempt to answer that question using images of exploration and extraction in Appalachia today.

Poetry

Telogen Effluvium

William Brewer

Something happened— / said the derm after I explained how, / for weeks, my hair kept falling. / He said to think back a few months. / I said that my grandmother died in August / and he said that’s not traumatic enough, / I said that my father had surgery in April / and he said that’s too long ago, / but that regardless of what happened, / the shedding had stopped—

Fiction

Ms. Battles

Sidik Fofana

The first day of school they assigned me and Cassius with the new seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Broderick, for fifth period, and all I had to do was look him up and down once to tell he was gonna be a mess. White boy with no hair on his chin, smilin at his books.

Poetry

Instructions

Austen Leah Rosenfeld

Start with description. / Talk about the dark of the desert, the way the stars are grooves cut by ice skates. / Pretend it was November. / Decide that the wind came from a storm in the sea. / Imagine your mother was asleep, dreaming about foxes. / Tell us that a slot machine is just a night-blooming flower.

Fiction

Inheritance

Megan Mayhew Bergman

The taxi took the curves of the unmarked army road over the mountain, muffler rattling. Hayes rolled down her window. The air was heavy with fragrance, something like wild dill, yellow and blooming by the road, bright against the scrub and dry brush. She looked down at an expanse of clouds that she knew was hiding a deep blue stretch of ocean.

The Conglomerate

The Migrations of Love: Reconsidering Andre Dubus

Walt Evans

Dubus’s fiction is populated by people who’ve made big mistakes, the kind that come to define a life: murderers, rapists, absentee parents, lapsed Catholics, and whiskey priests. But the most self-lacerating introspection occurs among the most common of sinners—adulterers.

Archival Content Poetry

The Loon’s Cry

Howard Nemerov

On a cold evening, summer almost gone, / I walked alone down where the railroad bridge / Divides the river from the estuary. / There was a silence over both the waters, / The river’s concentrated reach, the wide / Diffusion of the delta, marsh and sea, / Which in the distance misted out of sight.

Fiction Online Feature

Beautiful People

Lisa Taddeo

There are wolves and there are foxes and there are ptarmigans and there are agents and there are women you can pay to kick you in the balls with the sharp patent toe of a shoe you bought them for that express purpose. There are politicians who are famous. There are famous actors and then there are men who are not only beautiful and charming but are born with something extra.