Embedded Files
Here are some of the amazing things our students and alumnae have published! These materials and others are available in Shattuck 111 for your reading pleasure.
In January 2024, Sarah Twombly '07's piece "The Difference Between Life and Death" was published in the Winter 2023-24 issue of Ploughshares. Sarah has been awarded the Maine Literary Award for short nonfiction, the Glascock Poetry Prize, and the Katherine McFarland Prize for fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire Magazine, CRAFT, and the Rumpus, among others. After years in NYC and LA, she now lives in the Maine woods with her wild family and very tame dog.
In February 2023, Gina Pasciuto '23 had a piece published in Beloved, a new butchfemme zine. Tthe team behind Beloved worked really hard, and the result of this wonderful project is a gorgeous exploration of lesbian identity. Copies are available at https://www.belovedzine.com for digital download or physical purchase (along with t-shirts, tote bags, and other delightful merch!). As a contributor, Gina also has a code for half-off of a digital download, which anyone can email them to receive.
In December 2022, the students of Andrea Lawlor's ENGL-219CH Climate Changes Everything class published a beautiful chapbook of poems entitled Climate Changes Everything.
In Shadowed Dreams is the debut novella of SJ Bernstein '19. Nine months ago, in New York City, Raven vanished. Not even a body was left behind because Raven’s body is still moving. Its new inhabitant is a fictional assassin summoned from the pages of his own world by Raven’s magic and desperation as she fought to escape a trap meant to take her life.
Now those who hunted Raven have returned to kill again and Alex must unravel the mystery of his best friend’s magic and disappearance before she is lost forever.
In Shadowed Dreams is a Queer Urban Fantasy Novella perfect for fans of Every Heart a Doorway and Inkheart.
From the Dog Shelter to the White House by Kalea Martin '19
How did a German Shepherd from Delaware go all the way from the Dog Shelter to the White House? For Major Biden, the American Dream is alive and well, and it’s full of hope, freedom, and of course, puppy love.
In May 2023, a debut collection of poetry by Holly Mitchell '13, entitled Mare's Nest, will be published by Sarabande Books. Link here for more details. Holly majored in English at MHC, and the seed for the book traces back to their senior thesis with Prof. Nigel Alderman.
A Natural History of Transition by Callum Angus '11 is a collection of short stories that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation. Like the landscape studied over eons, change does not have an expiration date for these trans characters, who grow as tall as buildings, turn into mountains, unravel hometown mysteries, and give birth to cocoons. Callum Angus infuses his work with a mix of alternative history, horror, and a reality heavily dosed with magic.
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith '11 follows two young womenwho go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge. 1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber planation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed. 2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.
The Magic of Lenka's Wool Socks by Magdalena Georgieva '10.
Lenka is young girl who loves to wear her mismatched outfits and the socks her grandmother Nana knitted her. When she is wearing her handmade socks, magical things happen to her. However, one day she puts them in the dryer and they shrink. No longer able to wear them, Lenka feels like her life has lost its previous magic. She tells her grandmother about the accident and Nana gets to work to knit a new pair of socks. Just before she finishes, she puts a spell on the yarn to protect her granddaughter.
Daughter of Fire: Conspiracy of the Dark by Karen Frost '08, book one (1) of the Destiny and Darkness series.
A compelling, original, evocative young adult fantasy novel for all ages.
For Aeryn, a girl born to the remote, wintry Ice Crown region of Ilirya, the outside world is a fantasy: a series of wonderful stories told by occasional passing travellers. She never imagines anything for her life beyond following in her parents’ footsteps.
But the discovery that she has the rare gift of magic shatters her isolated world. Aeryn can create and tame fire. It’s an intoxicating, raw, and thrilling power, but it also sets her apart. And her gift attracts attention.
The Death Spiral by Sarah Giragosian '06, a book of poetry.
"Giragosian's fierce, gorgeous poems embody our role as one in body and mind with other peoples, plants and animals--living and extinct--arguing a familial connection integral to the survival of species including our own: 'he is a thrashing turtle / on a bone hook, speaking from otherwhere / of his apartness. I point to hearth, to kin...'. These poems hope we won't find ourselves with, 'Nothing left on Earth to love or fear,' as they invoke the beauty around us, and in us."
—April Ossman
Material Ambitions: Self-help and Victorian Literature by Rebecca Richardson '05.
What the Victorian history of self-help reveals about the myth of individualism.
Stories of hardworking characters who lift themselves from rags to riches abound in the Victorian era. From the popularity of such stories, it is clear that the Victorians valorized personal ambition in ways that previous generations had not. In Material Ambitions, Rebecca Richardson explores this phenomenon in light of the under-studied reception history of Samuel Smiles's 1859 publication, Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. A compilation of vignettes about captains of industry, artists, and inventors who persevered through failure and worked tirelessly to achieve success in their respective fields, Self-Help links individual ambition to the growth of the nation.
The Girl Who Talked to Paintings by Shannon K. Winston '03, a book of poetry.
“The first poem from Shannon K. Winston’s The Girl Who Talked to Paintings associates Joan Miró’s Triptych Bleu with the beginning of a relationship. Trekking back and forth between her house and her lover’s, the speaker explains, “The sidewalk appeared / like black ovals // beneath my feet / where the snow / had melted. These // tiny openings.” These ekphrastic poems brilliantly open and open into the speaker’s story. What struck me, over and over again, is how far beyond the artwork, how far beyond the story Winston’s words ventured in this deeply moving collection.”
—Blas Falconer
Liquid Song by Adeline Carrie Koscher '97.
"Set in the heat of summer in a tiny bar in Provincetown on Cape Cod, these sensual poems are replete with sea air and moonlit skin. This book is a moonflower, blooming on the surface of a watery meditation.
The collection inhabits a narrow space between two people and the intensity of their magnetism. The poems explore the experience of diving blind into the mystery of another.
In it we dissolve into longing, balancing at the edge of ourselves. The elemental fire, water, air, and earth will bring you into and out of your body, balancing between weight and weightlessness, light and dark, the real and the imagined.
In this slim volume boundaries blur. The transformative quality of love, obsession, and longing is at once deeply physical and transcendent.
A beautiful song has been summoned in Adeline Carrie Koscher‘s new collection Liquid Song. This book of poetry brings the reader to a place where 'travelers become restless to crest the mountain, to swim the ocean–while dreaming of the faraway land.' I implore the reader to join in this journey."
—Leah Huete de Maines
In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross '97 transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it.” Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.
In her award-winning second book, Anna V. Q. Ross '97 transforms motherhood into a lens, examining narratives of girlhood, migration, trauma, and inheritance. Compassing home and horizon, this tightly woven, image-rich collection plumbs the political within the domestic and traces the routes of the past within everyday life. A bruise becomes a flower and then a flag planted to claim an adopted land; the hull of a Viking ship becomes the fuselage of a plane carrying an immigrating mother home; the daily routines of carpools, math homework, and bedtime stories are interrupted by memories of abuse and reports of school shootings and environmental collapse. But at heart, these are poems of reclamation, reminding us that “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it.” Wary and watchful, never resigned, Flutter, Kick maps the spaces for compassion we carve in a dangerous world.
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