New England Review

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
    • Vol. 43, No. 1 (2022)
    • Vol. 42, No. 4 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 3 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 2 (2021)
    • Vol. 42, No. 1 (2021)
    • Vol. 41 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 4 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 3 (2020)
      • Vol. 41, No. 2 (2020)
      • Black Lives Matter
      • Vol. 41, No.1 (2020)
    • Vol. 40 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 4 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 3 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No. 2 (2019)
      • Vol. 40, No 1 (2019)
    • Vol. 39 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 4 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 3 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 2 (2018)
      • Vol. 39, No. 1 (2018)
    • Vol. 38 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 4 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 3 (2017)
      • Vol.38, No. 2 (2017)
      • Vol. 38, No. 1 (2017)
    • Vol. 37 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 4 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 3 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 2 (2016)
      • Vol. 37, No. 1 (2016)
    • Vol. 36 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 4 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 3 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 2 (2015)
      • Vol. 36, No. 1 (2015)
    • Vol. 35 (2014-2015)
      • Vol. 35, No.1 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 2 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 3 (2014)
      • Vol. 35, No. 4 (2015)
    • Vol. 34 (2013-2014)
      • Vol. 34, No. 1 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, No. 2 (2013)
      • Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4 (2014)
    • Vol. 33 (2012-2013)
      • Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 2 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012)
      • Vol. 33, No. 4 (2013)
    • Vol. 32 (2011-2012)
      • Vol. 32, No. 1 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 2 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 3 (2011)
      • Vol. 32, No. 4 (2012)
    • Vol. 31 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 1 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 2 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010)
      • Vol. 31, No. 4 (2010-2011)
    • Vol. 30 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 1 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 2 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009)
      • Vol. 30, No. 4 (2009-2010)
    • Vol. 29 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 2 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008)
      • Vol. 29, No. 4 (2008)
    • Vol. 28 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 1 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 2 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 3 (2007)
      • Vol. 28, No. 4 (2007)
    • Vol. 27 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 3 (2006)
      • Vol. 27, No. 4 (2006)
    • Vol. 26 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 1 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 2 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 3 (2005)
      • Vol. 26, No. 4 (2005)
    • Vol. 25 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 3 (2004)
      • Vol. 25, No. 4 (2004)
    • Vol. 24 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 1 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 2 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 3 (2003)
      • Vol. 24, No. 4 (2004)
  • About
    • Masthead
    • NER Award Winners
    • Press
    • Award for Emerging Writers
    • Readers and Interns
    • Books by our authors
    • Contact
  • Audio
  • Events
  • Submit

Summer 2021

New Books by NER Authors

August 6, 2021

With seven new and forthcoming titles, summer continues to be a busy publication season for our NER authors.

In his second collection of poetry, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press), Kaveh Akbar “takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed.” Akbar most recently contributed to NER 42.2 with his poem, “In Praise of the Laughing Worm / The Value of Fear.”

Yoon Choi‘s debut story collection, Skinship (Knopf Publishing Group), is “centered on a constellation of Korean American families” and “suffused with a profound understanding of humanity.” Through her prose, Choi “explores where first and second generations either clash or find common ground, where meaning falls in the cracks between languages, where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment, where displacement turns to heartbreak.” Choi served at NER for several years as a staff reader in fiction after her short story, “The Art of Losing,” was published in NER 38.2.

Shara McCallum, author of six books published in the US & UK, released No Ruined Stone (Alice James Books), “a verse sequence rooted in the life of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns.” NER 41.3 features three poems included in No Ruined Stone: “Story, the First,” “Inheritance,” and “At the Hour of Duppy and Dream Miss Nancy Speaks.” Read our Writer’s Notebook with McCallum where she delves into the process behind creating her latest book of verse.

Prepare Her (Catapult) by Genevieve Plunkett is a haunting debut collection that “tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power.” Set in the backdrop of rural Vermont, “this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering.” Plunkett’s short stories have appeared in NER 36.3 and 37.4; her O. Henry Award–winning “Something for a Young Woman” was featured in our podcast, episode 6.

A journalist, playwright, and former restaurant critic, Lou Mathews released his latest novel, Shaky Town (Tiger Van Books). In it he weaves together “complicated, conflicted, and disparate characters bound together by place” to create a “timeless novel of working-class Los Angeles.” Mathews’s contributions to NER include his short story “Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others” in NER 35.2 and “Tutorial” in NER 41.2.

Kirk Wilson, who published fiction in NER 41.3, has just released Songbox (Trio House Press), a collection of poems that won the 2020 Trio Award. Songbox has been praised as “a testament of a mature poet confronting the dissolution of American assumptions, the precarious nature of identity, and the alchemical strangeness of experience.”

Frank Meola‘s debut novel Clay (Green Writers Press) is “a coming of age story that also chronicles a coming to awareness at a time of social, racial, and environmental unease.” Meola’s piece of cultural history, “Emerson Between Faith and Doubt” was published in NER 32.3.

You can shop these titles and more on the New England Review’s Author Books Summer 2021 Bookshop page.

Filed Under: Featured, NER Authors' Books, News & Notes Tagged With: Frank Meola, Genevieve Plunkett, Kaveh Akbar, Kirk Wilson, Lou Mathews, Shara McCallum, Yoon Choi

Four writers, one night in Middlebury

Monday, April 17, at 51 Main

March 27, 2017

Nash, Plunkett, Pourciau, Stone

New England Review’s Vermont Reading Series is pleased to present fiction writers Glen Pourciau and Genevieve Plunkett, poet Bianca Stone, and Middlebury senior Hannah Nash, representing the student-run Frame magazine.  They will all read from their recent work at 51 Main at the Bridge in Middlebury, VT, on Monday, April 17, 7 pm.

This reading is co-sponsored by the Vermont Book Shop and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Light refreshments will be served, and books, cocktails, and other beverages will be available to purchase. The event is free and open to the public.

Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist, who lives in Goshen, Vermont. She is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades, 2016), and the illustration edition of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012), a collaboration with Anne Carson. Bianca runs the Ruth Stone Foundation & Monk Books with her husband, the poet Ben Pease.

Glen Pourciau, who joins us from Plano, Texas, is the author of two story collections. His new book, View, was just published by Four Way Books. His previous collection, Invite (University of Iowa Press, 2008), won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, Antioch Review, Epoch, Little Star, New England Review, Paris Review, and others.

Genevieve Plunkett, from Bennington, Vermont, has recently published her second story in New England Review. Previous stories have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Willow Springs, Crazyhorse, and Mud Season Review.

Hannah Nash is a senior at Middlebury College from Boston, Massachusetts. An English and American Literatures major, she is currently writing a series of short stories for her thesis. She is honored to read on behalf of Frame magazine, a handmade staple-bound booklet featuring highlights from a student-led creative writing workshop.

Filed Under: Events, NER VT Reading Series Tagged With: Bianca Stone, Genevieve Plunkett, Glen Pourciau, Hannah Nash

New England Review Award for Emerging Writers

Finalists announced for 2017

February 2, 2017

New England Review announces, with enormous pleasure, the finalists for the third annual New England Review Emerging Writers Award.

DSC_3006Please join us in congratulating our six finalists for 2017:

Alex McElroy (37.4)
Amy Meng
(37.4)
Kate Petersen
(37.2)
Genevieve Plunkett
(37.4)
Christine Robbins
(37.1)
Alan Rossi
(37.4)

The winner, to be announced later this month, will receive a scholarship to the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Congratulations to them all—we are proud to have published such strong work from emerging writers in all three genres.

Filed Under: NER Community, News & Notes Tagged With: Alan Rossi, Alex McElroy, Amy Meng, Bread Loaf Emerging Writer's Award, Christine Robbins, Genevieve Plunkett, Kate Petersen

Genevieve Plunkett

Behind the Byline

November 9, 2015

NER Author Genevieve Plunkett

 

Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which we share conversations with our current NER writers in all genres. The writer and NER fiction reader Lori Ostlund spoke recently with author Genevieve Plunkett about her first publication—the story “Something for a Young Woman“—which appears in NER 36.3.

 

LO: Both times I read this story, I was struck by how sure of itself the writing feels, so I was surprised to learn that this was your first accepted story. Can you talk about how and when you started writing?

GP: I started college thinking that I wanted to be a songwriter. At the time, it was the only kind of creative work that I was able to sustain, because the process of singing the lines and picking the notes on my guitar was instantly gratifying. All other forms of writing were agonizing. I felt that I could never keep up with my ideas and my insecurities about grammar were endless.

When it came time to choose classes my freshman year at Bennington, I took a chance on something with which I had no prior experience and signed up for a screenwriting class. I thought that I could handle it because, like songwriting, there was a word limit. Everything had to be spare. Every word had to keep the story moving.

My first assignment, I was too self-conscious to write dialogue, so I wrote a script where no one spoke. My professor loved it and read it aloud to the class. It was that professor who would later urge me to study literature and become a writer.

LO: I love this idea of a script where no one speaks, and in this story I noted your judicious use of dialogue, notably between Allison and her husband, which almost always takes place over the telephone and is generally restricted to his comments about his work as a science teacher. This contrasts beautifully with that section on page 67 when she thinks about all of things that he does not ask her. Can you say a bit more about some of the decisions you made in this story, both in terms of the dialogue that you chose to include and the conversations that you withheld?

I don’t usually think of it in terms of when to add or withhold dialogue. For me, speech, in both literature and life, often presents itself as an atonality, words comprised of a different substance than the rest of the text. In the story, it was important to show that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with Allison’s husband or their marriage, only that he represented just one more part of her life that was off key. The easiest way to do this was to hear his voice.

When Allison receives the necklace from her boss, it comes without explanation. The shop owner, in a sense, gives her a role—a young woman—and she takes it, whether or not it was consistent with her own understanding of what that means. These small exchanges in power are almost never spoken about, which is what can make them so hard to resist or even examine. Staying away from dialogue in this instance felt true to the nature of that power exchange.

LO: Another interesting aspect of this story is the way that you evoke such a clear sense of place without ever really naming that place. There are allusions to “the city” and moving “back north.” Did you have in mind specific places when you wrote the story, and can you discuss your reasons for not naming them?

When I was a teenager, my dad would bring me for rides on his motorcycle through the countryside. We would pass through small towns in upstate New York like Cambridge, Salem, and Schuylerville. There is something immediately different about the scenery once you cross the border from Vermont into New York. It is more sprawling and agricultural. In Vermont, there is a sense of containment because of the mountains, as if the towns are all settled into little bowls, but New York just keeps going: cornfields, sagging barns and farmhouses with blue tarps taped over the windows, the dirty hides of dairy cows, followed by sudden stretches of wealth—big houses up on hills with shiny horses in the fields. I imagined Allison’s first home with her husband to be in one of the more rural areas of moderate wealth. She moves back home to a larger town—like Glenns Falls—where her mother’s more modest house would be in walking distance of the shop owner’s affluent neighborhood.

I tried naming specific places in my first draft, but it felt awkward. It did not seem to match my choice to leave almost all of my characters unnamed. It is also how I am used to people speaking where I live in southern Vermont, even though there might be some disagreement on whether “the city” refers to Albany or New York City. (It almost always means New York City.)

LO: Can you discuss how you came to write this particular story? Do you recall how it started, where the idea for it came from? Can you describe the process of writing it? Are you someone who knows the trajectory of a story when you begin, or did you discover the story as you wrote?

I submitted this story in December and it had been through quite a lot of revision, so I must have started writing sometime in February or March of 2014. My daughter was nine or ten months and would often be sleeping in my arms on the couch in the evenings while I balanced a notebook and a pen. The story has been described as being “quiet” by some and I wonder if there wasn’t some subconscious “don’t wake the baby” vibrations at work.

I am still trying to figure out what my process is in general. I have been writing seriously for just over two years. During that first year of writing stories, I accepted that they would be bad (they were), but plowed through with the extremely hopeful idea that they would start getting better if I simply did not stop.

“Something For a Young Woman” was born of my decision (as if I could just decide such a thing) that I would start writing with more conviction, that I would let no sentence stand that I could not support completely. This meant that some nights I worked only on one sentence. Sometimes I had no choice, because the kids would be sick and not sleeping, or I would be too exhausted from the day. Due to these circumstances, I cannot say that I ever really knew where the story was going. All I knew was that part of what I wanted to do was to demonstrate the more subtle exchanges of power that can set people (especially women) into roles that are not completely subordinate, but disappointing, if not suffocating.

The only part that is autobiographical is when Allison falls off the horse and experiences the strange rush of déjà vu. This may not have been the take-off point of the story, but was something that I knew I wanted to include. Also, while the beginning of the story went through many changes, once I had written the last sentence, I knew that that was my ending and didn’t really touch it during the revision process.

LO: Finally, how would you place this story within the context of your work and themes overall? Does this story reflect your writing interests, themes, and preoccupations? What else are you working on?

I have five short stories that I am hoping to publish and two going through revisions. Add the two that were recently published and I have a body of work staring back at me with some obvious similarities. First, I write about horses a lot. Throughout college, I had a job at a horse barn where I was barn manager, horse trainer, riding instructor, and trail guide. The physical labor involved left me with a store of vivid memories and it also provides a great setting for characters—there are always chores to be done and accidents waiting to happen. In addition to this, horses are powerful and sensitive creatures that respond differently to their environment than humans. They have a unique psychology that lends itself to explorations of self, morality, and—another common theme for me—mental illness.

When thinking about what I have written and what I plan to write, I am shocked at how prone my characters are to acts of deviance and bad behavior. Kidnapping, escaping hospitals, voyeurism, harming others through negligence. I don’t say crime, because I consider that to be a separate category involving law enforcement and in my stories, so far, there is never much aftermath. Nor are the stories about some inner struggle between right and wrong. The acts are presented as something surprising, but inevitable.

Originally, I had wanted Allison’s near-stalking of the shop owner to be more manic and deviant in nature. I almost gave her a real diagnosis, but then found it to be unnecessary. It took away from the reality of the force that brought her back to him, that seeking of validation.

I’d say that “Something For a Young Woman” was written with more patience than is usual for me. I allowed myself to follow ideas and moments to completion without all the familiar anxieties: Will this lose my reader? How would [insert famous author] do it? I submitted it without having shared it with anyone and, of course, had no way of knowing if anyone would read it, much less like it. There is a certain innocence to that that I am trying to hold onto as I move on to future projects, writing for truth instead of a particular audience.

♦♦♦

Genevieve Plunkett is a graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Vermont with her husband and two young children. This is her first piece of published fiction.

 

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Genevieve Plunkett

  • 1
  • 2
  • Next Page »


Vol. 43, No. 2

Subscribe

NER Digital

Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

Sign up for our newsletter

Click here to join our list and receive occasional news and always-great writing.

categories

Navigation

  • Subscribe/Order
  • Back Issues
  • About
  • Events
  • Audio
  • NER Out Loud
  • Emerging Writers Award
  • Support NER
  • Advertising
  • The Podcast

Categories

Copyright © 2022 · facebook · twitter

 

Loading Comments...