New England Review

Four writers, one night in Middlebury

Monday, April 17, at 51 Main

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.

In there somewhere

Distance | Fiction by Glen Pourciau

Glen Pourciau

I’ve been watching you and listening to you. The voice you speak in is not your real voice. It’s a voice that sounds like the person you want people to think you are. You are not here, not completely. You live at a distance from yourself and others. When people speak to you, you put their words in a waiting room and seldom let any of them past the door to the other side. Even you don’t know half of what goes on beyond that door. You don’t want to see or hear most of it. You fear you won’t be able to order it in a way that suits your comfort. You want things to be easy on you, and why shouldn’t they be? Have you done something to deserve worse? On the other hand, have you not done something that would have made you deserve better if you’d done it? How do you experience a knock on your door? Are you disturbed to hear it, even when you’re expecting someone? Do you fear it’s someone who’ll see through you? As soon as they step inside are you already waiting for them to leave? You don’t like it when your perimeter is impinged upon. You don’t want any questions, nothing challenging you, no threatening words or images leaking through. Do you expect the world to apologize for intruding? You sometimes feel an urge to be seen and heard, but you resist the exposure. You use the actor you’ve created to make his appearances, but you’ve choked his spontaneity and his lines are more or less canned. He’s a mechanism impersonating something that shouldn’t be a mechanism. You’re holding yourself hostage, too gutless to show your face. When you try to sleep, what wakes you up? Churning in your mind, heads poking up through the ground? Where do they come from and what are they thinking or saying that won’t let you sleep? A familiar thought in your subterranean world is that life is one long exercise in self-control, but sometimes you come home and rave loudly, repeating to yourself that some people don’t know when to leave you alone. You sit down with a drink after burning through your adrenaline. Was it you rising up in the heat of your tirade, you wonder, or was it your anger trying to shout down the walls you’ve built around yourself? You are responsible for your own misery. Look no further, don’t tell yourself a different story. You want to know what I think your voice should sound like. You can’t be told the answer, but if you weren’t in there somewhere you wouldn’t be in conflict with yourself. The actor is trapped in your waiting room, and though the waiting room is something you created it is not you.

*

NER Digital is a creative writing series for the web. Glen Pourciau’s collection of stories Invite won the Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, the Antioch Review, Epoch, NER, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. 

 

The wrong chair

Glen Pourciau’s Invite

Glen Pourciau’s story “Sleep” appeared in NER 22.3 (2001):

“I don’t want to sleep, I can’t let myself sleep, they come for me when I’m asleep and take me away to be interrogated. They load me up in the back of a truck, my head covered for the trip, and the wheels turn under us down the road. I am not sure that I am always driven to the same place, but wherever it is, we go down steps and take elevators underground where the cover is removed from my head and I am led down long corridors with closed doors on both sides and almost no light. I hear voices behind some of the doors, other interrogations, but I never see the people, only hear them. The rooms I am led to are dimly lit and I am left alone in the room at first, sitting at a table with an empty chair on the other side, and two of them come in wearing suits, busy, moving quickly, giving me a look-over, their eyes on mine, no expression in them, but boring in. Whatever chair I am in they tell me I am in the wrong chair, get up and sit in the other one. I get up, sit in the other one, and the interrogator sits in the chair I had been sitting in and starts asking me questions. What is on my mind, what changes have I made since the last time they talked to me, how can I expect to improve when I refuse to make changes, why do I think first of defending myself. The men appear to be in disguise…”

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