I'd Like to Talk About the Bigger Stuff

via Phoebe

An essay by RBM that questions relationships among Coloradoans, the Kyrgyz, and our animals has won Phoebe's inaugural nonfiction contest, judged by author (and screenwriter) Shauna Cross. The essay will appear in the George Mason University journal's fall issue (volume 40). An excerpt:

Dinner and a bowl of kumis, or fermented mare’s milk, prompts another tale, this one about the melting of the snows. “I was born in the mountains,” says Salmorbek, his whiskers flaring around the words. From here in Kant, the Tian Shan range looms impossibly high, stretching all the way to China and 10,000 feet above the Rockies. Somewhere up there, in celebration of the equinox, points Salmorbek, through the kitchen window, men mount horses and compete in a sort of airborne wrestling match. Instead of a ball, they fight for a dead sheep. “I too rode a horse,” he adds with pride. “But I was better at riding a tank.”

That night, locked among the carpets, I find “Reviving the Kyrgyz Horse” in the guidebook Kyrgyz Republic. “For centuries, the horse was vital to nomadic life,” reads the entry. I swallow hard at what comes next. The author quotes a French historian dismayed by a Soviet plan to civilize the Kyrgyz: “‘The shepherds were in tears,’ says Jacqueline Ripart. Some of the horses went into giant Soviet stud farms but most were killed for their meat.’”

For Phoebe's current nonfiction and other genres, visit the journal's blog, which for a limited time is offering an entire issue as a free download. You can also follow Phoebe on Twitter and Facebook.

via Phoebe

Update -- "I'd Like to Talk" is now available at PhoebeJournal.com along with contest results and artwork for Phoebe volume 40.2. Congratulations to fellow winners and HMs Aja Gabel and Dwight Holing (fiction), Mark Wagenaar and Grace Curtis (poetry), and Jessica McCaughey (nonfiction).

RBM Joins USD

By R.B. Moreno

Earlier this week I accepted an invitation to join the University of South Dakota English Department's PhD program, where I look forward to studying creative writing, publishing nonfiction, and teaching composition, among other courses. From USD.edu, a thumbnail sketch of the degree:

The Ph.D. program is built around the English Department's seminar offerings in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and in creative writing, and is supplemented by independent study courses ... Within these specializations, you'll construct your own plan of study to reflect your interests.

The Department also offers a list of FAQs about its PhD and a news blog. USD's literary associations include South Dakota Review, edited by Brian Bedard and Lee Ann Roripaugh, the Dakota Writing Project, and the Vermillion Literary Project, which is hosting a reading next week.

USD is the state's oldest university and its 216-acre campus in Vermillion currently serves about 10,000 students. Ten governors have graduated from USD along with William "Doc" Farber, Tom Brokaw, Al Neuharth, Ernest G. Bormann, and embattled Greg Mortenson, among other alumni.

Vermillion was founded on the banks of the Missouri River shortly before the Civil War but was largely destroyed in an 1881 flood. The reconstructed seat of Clay County now sits on higher ground whose earliest admirers included the Lakota ("Red Stream," they called the area), Pacific-bound Lewis and Clark, and in 1843, John James Audubon.



April in Vermillion looks cold and wet, a boon for checkered farmland visible from Google Earth. And somewhat more tranquil than the forecast for RBM's last departure from Colorado.

via Google

Communication Can Save Lives

via Janice Mount for the Coloradoan

A guest column by RBM about the Crystal Fire, which has destroyed homes near Colorado State University, raised questions about air and water quality in the region, and made national news, but received no mention in the university's communications with students, appears today in The Coloradoan. An excerpt:

The Crystal Fire has reminded me, an instructor at CSU, of an embarrassing, even dangerous breakdown in communication. I live on campus, and like my neighbors, I woke up about 5 a.m. on Sunday thinking my building might be on fire. Nope. But the smell of burning wood was palpable, if not overwhelming. So I went online.

"Safety Information: Report of Possible Peeping Tom." This March 30 e-mail, about yet another man leering at women on campus, is still the last advisory I've received from CSU's "Public Safety Team." Thinking I must be missing some mention of the fire, I left my inbox for ColoState.edu. "Teeing Up for Golf's Greatest Tournament," read the news at the university's homepage, about former CSU golfer Martin Laird.

What gives, CSU Public Safety Team? I don't like telling people how to do their job, but I'm also bothered by something I've learned from watching the past decade's string of terrorist plots and natural disasters. It's that robust communication can save lives, reassure parents and prevent similar mayhem. That's where I feel CSU staff missed the mark on Sunday.

This isn't to say that apprehending peeping toms isn't important, or that the Crystal Fire has put CSU students in danger. That's beside the point. What I am saying is that CSU can better utilize the tools at its disposal to inform the campus community, in real-time, about the status of emergencies that affect us all.

You can find the full text of RBM's column on page A6 of today's paper and at this permalink.

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Update (May 17, 2012) -- One year later, the university's public safety team has posted a helpful advisory on the Hewlett Gulch Fire, another pernicious blaze blackening the hills northwest of campus.

The View from Copper Mountain

Above: a clear day for dog training and suntanning atop Colorado's Copper Mountain, where the T-Rex Grill offers lunch at 10,500 feet.

Exposure Time

An essay by RBM involving travels along Colorado's Horsetooth (pictured above), through Cartagena de Indias, and above Osh, Kyrygzstan (below), appears on Matter Daily newsstands this month.

Matter Daily/Matterhorn is a publication of Wolverine Farm and Matter Bookstore. An excerpt from "Exposure Time":

Sulayman rises from an old city on the Silk Road and an arid expanse of farmland, and looks something like Horsetooth. Still, its five hills are made of quartz and lime, not sandstone, and I feel conspicuous in my shorts and trainers. This a place of pilgrimage, where colored prayers dangle from bushes and women in veils slide down a certain rock said to impart fertility.

Get on with it. What’s a foreigner doing in a cemetery?

The sun has nearly set but I want to find a running trail I can trust -- and get a look at the summit. I don’t know how to get there, but the path that snakes around some military barracks, on the west side, seems less taken. I work myself higher and higher along switchbacks, feeling my heartbeat climb into familiar territory. Burs rake at my legs as I lose the path, but the exertion is exquisite (and hard to find on the campus where I teach). I pass boulders covered in Kyrgyz and Russian graffiti, some with blue numerals that signal older markings -- hunters and the hunted, most predating the Qur'an. Finally, the path enters a draw and shoots straight up, toward a plateau where the sky seems brightest.

RBM's last dispatch from Osh can be found elsewhere on this blog and over at NPR.org.

An Interview with Peggy Shinner

Top row: Nathan Leopold, ca. 1924 (via Wikipedia)

RBM's final post this week for Colorado State's Center for Literary Publishing engages Colorado Review contributor Peggy Shinner in a conversation about her fall/winter 2010 essay "Leopold and Shinner." The essay centers on a letter her mother received from Nathan Leopold, one of two University of Chicago students convicted in what newspapers called the “Trial of the Century” in 1924. An excerpt from the interview:

RM: “The letter was an artifact,” you tell us, “like her wallet, wristwatch, key chain, social security card, also put away in a drawer -- a memento of my mother.” What compelled you, 29 years after her death, to examine it anew?

PS: I’ve had this letter for a long time, and from the very beginning was intrigued, puzzled, and moved by it. I’ve attached a certain amount of longing to it, my own longing. What did it mean? Who was the woman on the receiving end? The questions, the same questions, don’t stop coming. I tried writing about it before, but to no avail. I had nothing to push against the letter, no context or resistance or countervailing force. It wasn’t until I started searching for her letter, and immersed myself in the other letters, that something began to shift, that I could sense a gathering of momentum within myself, and simultaneously that I could go beyond myself, in fact needed to go beyond myself, to investigate the place or places where this personal history intersected the history of the larger world, which was very important for this essay. That’s the boundary I find interesting -- where personal concerns nudge or collide against the larger polis.

For the rest of the interview, an excerpt from Shinner's essay, and RBM's earlier posts, visit the CLP Editor's Blog.

New Offering from NewPages

Today's post by RBM over at Colorado State's Center for Literary Publishing examines a new source of information about contests and calls for submission. An excerpt:

Ambitious storytellers, like the graduate students who keep our English Department’s printing lab busy at night, can soon have all kinds of literary magazines and blogs crowding their computer monitors. And when we read, after browsing Khimaira’s website, that our 30-page, Tolstoy-inspired novelette isn’t eligible for the journal’s 2011 Fantastiki Fiction Contest, whose guidelines call for a story of fewer than 5,000 words set in Ancient Greece, we may feel led astray.

NewPages.com's LitPak can help writers avoid getting lost. Find this post and another by RBM at the CLP Editor's Blog.