Daniel Hoffman’s poem, “A Stillness,” appeared in NER 1.2 (1978):
Each bead of the mist is burning
with the joy
of a resurrected soul.
A will within it,
draws it back from me a little—the cove,
a beach of shallow pools
behind the sandbars, and the bay
without motion
blending, somewhere
into the fog, the infinite empire
of floating fiery light.
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho reads from “Better Latitude” (Scribner’s, 2015) which appears in his debut collection Barefoot Dogs, at the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Barefoot Dogs won the Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction, was a Kirkus Reviews, San Francisco Chronicle, Texas Observer, and PRI’s The World Best/Recommended Book of 2015, and was published in Spanish, his own translation, as Los perros descalzos.
Ruiz-Camacho’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Texas Monthly, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Toluca, Mexico, he earned his MFA from University of Texas, Austin, has been an Elisabet Ney Museum writer-in-residence, and a fellow at the JSK Journalism Program at Stanford, the Dobie Paisano Program, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Yaddo.
All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available online. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.
People often ask us how to become a reader for NER, so we wanted to let you know that you can find information about our application process for fiction readers here.
If you have a strong interest in contemporary fiction, are familiar with NER, and can commit a few hours a month to reading, please consider applying!
Every day but Sunday he dresses in the uniform of his former profession: khaki-colored work clothes, steel-toed brogans, a thin windbreaker zipped to the Adam’s apple if there is a shadowy sweetness in the morning breeze. He rises before dawn, lights the pilot of the kerosene stove, lets the dogs out, careful not to slap the screen door. He sits at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee, black, for an hour until his wife rises and fries breakfast wordlessly in her housecoat. Neither of his sons wanted to take over the farm and his daughter moved up to Raleigh to work in a bank and he doesn’t understand a good three-quarters of the things he hears people say. Commercials on television perplex him. There doesn’t seem to be any logic to them, they begin in the middle and it’s never quite clear to him what it is they’re even advertising. He stands in the backyard looking out over the fields he leases now to an outfit out of, by God, Delaware, working a pick between his teeth, dogs at his feet. Maybe I have outlived time. Soon there will be no such thing as dew, the thing he once had to rouse himself early from bed to beat. Get it done before the sun burns the dew off. They’ll do away with that, too.
Michael Parker is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. A new collection of really short stories, Everything, Then and Since, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in fall 2017. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC Greensboro and lives in North Carolina and Texas.
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