Crab Creek Review: Notes on Contributors: Spring/Summer 2002

STEVEN BARZA, Richmond, Virginia, is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Richmond. His work has appeared in Passages Northwest, Writers Forum, The Black Warrior Review, New Letters, Wisconsin Review, Lynx Eye, Slant, Yemassee, Ascent, and Potpourri, among others. "I conceived 'Just Up' when I was just up, in the first moments of the day's consciousness."

EDWARD BEATTY, Franklin Grove, Illinois, a retired literature and philosophy teacher, has work just out or forthcoming in Willow Review, River Oak Review, Sunstone, Borderlands, Cider Press Review, Small Pond, Potpourri, The Kerf, and Sulphur River Literary Review. "A couple of years and my imagination transformed a rather sentimental poem written on the occasion of a colleague's retirement into this one about a person my friend might not recognize. Or maybe she would!"

ACE BOGGESS, Huntington, West Virginia, has appeared in Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, and Antietam Review, among others. A fellowship recipient from the West Virginia Division of Culture and History, he is currently seeking publishers for a poetry collection and literary novels. "Since 1999, I've been writing what I call 'responsive' poems in which I take a news headline or phrase from a horoscope and use it to induce a meditation on whatever image or idea it calls up. These two are examples of that method."

MARION BOYER, Mattawan, Michigan, teaches Communications at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlanta Review, The MacGuffin, Driftwood Review, and Midnight Mind, among others. Recently, her poems won "Best Writing of the Issue" in Educational Travel Review. "Science tells us that the moon is, by these small measurable degrees, moving away from the earth. My father has Alzheimer's, which is, too, a slow slipping away from family, from self, from life."

ANITA K. BOYLE, Bellingham, Washington, graduated from Western Washington University in 1998, with majors in graphic design, illustration, and creative writing. She is the proprietor of Egress Studio, a graphic design and illustration business, and Egress Studio Press, which has published five poetry chapbooks. "Daily Defamations is written in a fractal style, where certain parts recur several times, but each usage is very different than the others."

ALAN CATLIN, Schenectady, New York, has been publishing for over 25 years. He expects his Selected Poems from Pavement Saw Press in 2002. "'Frozen Cornfields in the Winter'" is part of an informal series of poetic responses to artworks, part Breughel, part natural art."

CARA CHAMBERLAIN, Lakeland, Florida, has most recently appeared in The Southern Review, The Chattahoochee Review, The Chariton Review, and South Dakota Review. "For several years I lived in a small Wyoming town. Every summer, migrant laborers came to work the sugar beet fields. They lived, often, in substandard housing and were generally shunned by most permanent residents. It's ironic that they worked so hard and lived in such poverty to produce sugar."

MARTHA CLARKSON, Kirkland, Washington, is a commercial interior designer. Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, Slipstream, and gumballpoetry.com. "I kneeled at the hearth and I scraped and I listened-to our new home."

BRAD CLOMPUS, Medford, Massachusetts, teaches at the Arlington Center for the Arts. His work has appeared in Passages North, The Journal, West Branch, Pet Lore, and Tampa Review, among others. "Usually my nature poems are more focused on landscape details, but here I was trying to deal with the question of vulnerability, both personal and collective."

NICK CONRAD, Sylvania, Ohio, has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cumberland Review, Green House, The Jacaranda Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Literary Review, Stone Country, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. "'The Brothers' was written within days of the actual round I played on a putting course with my father and my uncle. The round took place against the backdrop of the circumstances described in the poem. Though I have spent a fair amount of time in the Southwest, 'Arroyo' came to me in a nearly finished form during a March in the Midwest. At the time, the poem seemed to be more of an expression of a particular interior 'landscape' than of the season."

MARY JANE GRINSTEAD, Chicago, Illinois, writes poetry, short fiction, and has recently completed her first novel. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin, The Comstock Review, Reader's Break, Pangolin Papers, RE:AL, The Rockford Review, Half Tones to Jubilee, The Orange Willow Review, and Inkwell. "The drama in a little town is found in the day to day. I adore Miss Gloria and her play within a play."

WEBB HARRIS, JR., Winter Springs, Florida, is a teacher. His stories and essays have appeared in Teaching Tolerance, The Orlando Sentinel, The Crescent Review, and Talebones, among others. "I take no exception to the maxim that fiction generally arises from character, but 'Lucidity' arose from setting. The honors student, his teacher, and Grandpa Mendros, in my imaginings, were actually preceded by Botswana."

THERESA HENSON, Seattle, Washington, is a sculptor and poet. "The routine of household chores eventually becomes a kind of ritual performed to exalt the home, emphasize togetherness, and enjoy well-being. The home is also its own universe of dynamics and occurrences. Similarly, the sestina etches out its own realm. Through its intricate repetition of everyday words, the poem becomes a kind of incantation. I think it's an appropriate form to honor a regular ol' day at home."

KATHRYN HUNT, Port Townsend, Washington, is a writer and filmmaker who devotes as many hours as possible to her garden, just now abloom with daphne, hellebore, and Tarda tulips. "We recently observed the 15th anniversary of my mother's death with an improvised and lovely ceremony on the beach at Alki, in Seattle, for family and friends. I suppose I was thinking of her when I wrote this."

MELANIE JENNINGS, Jamul, California, lives in the high desert of Southern California where she is currently working on a manuscript about Dust Bowl Okie literature. Her work has appeared in Spelunker Flophouse and In the Groove. "I love this character! Thinking about her makes me feel sane."

BERNADETTE MARIA JOOLEN, Seattle, Washington, was born in Amsterdam. She spent her early school years in Lawrence, Kansas and her later school years in Los Angeles. She has just finished her first novel, Winter, about a Dutch immigrant family. Previous work has appeared in Clinton St. Quarterly and Other Voices. "This story is from my just-finished novel called Winter. The train ride I wrote about continues to be one of the most romantic memories of my childhood."

ROBERT KING, Greeley, Colorado, has fiction forthcoming in Ascent and Cream City Review. His fourth chapbook, Naming Names, appeared last year from Palanquin Press, as did a short fiction in the Baltimore Review. An emeritus professor for the University of North Dakota, he currently lectures at the University of Northern Colorado. "I think we all have memories that stick in our minds for some reason, and I know that no setting is more intimate or more dangerous than the close darkness of the marriage bed."

DAVID LEE lives quietly in St. George and/or Pine Valley, Utah with Jan, Jon, and JoDee, where he scribbles and wanders the country roads and trails, all at about the same rate and pace. "The poems are from a new manuscript with the ironclad tentative title, So Quietly the Earth. The manuscript is a collection of landscape meditations with a focus on our killing of our planet."

JENNIFER MADRIAGA, resides in Cumberland, Rhode Island, with her husband. "There is a theory that the dream is about wish fulfillment, but it seems that the line between real life and what can never be actualized is made more resonant and poignant during the subconscious."

STEPHEN MALIN, writes full time in Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives in humidity denial. His verse was selected for the half-century anthology, Southwest Reader; more was translated into Russian and reprinted abroad in Amerika Illustrated. Several other anthologies and above fifty literary journals have housed his work, most recently Antioch Review. "I was an early and inveterate reader and cannot remember a time when the world constituting itself from the page was not magical. That same transformative power abides these decades later, and from somewhere in this recognition the poem bubbled up, easily and in few drafts."

JENNIFER McCOY, Denver, Colorado, has published in such web and print journals as The Melic Review, Stirring, Niederngrasse, Dry Creek Review, and has work forthcoming in Horsethief's Journal and the anthology, The Best of the Melic Review. Her first chapbook, Elton: A Poem in Episodes, is imminent from Chester Creek Press this spring.

ROBERT NAZARENE, Chesterfield, Missouri, has appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Callaloo, Indiana Review, and Ploughshares, among others. A graduate of The School of Business Administration at Georgetown University, he is Editor-&-Chief of MARGIE/The American Journal of Poetry. "Regarding Zion-''Tis strange-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction.'-Byron"

JULIE PASCHKIS, Seattle, WA, is a painter and illustrator. Books she has illustrated include Night Garden: Poems from the World of Dreams by Janet Wong, and Head, Body, Legs: A Story from Liberia by Won-ldy Paye and Meg Lippert.

JEREMY PATAKY, Bellingham, Washington, graduated from Western Washington University in June 2001. He read for The Bellingham Review for two years and worked as a co-editor of Arbutus On-Line Literary Journal. He has been published in Jeopardy. He will spend the summer of 2002 traveling to Alaska by sailboat.

FERNAND ROQUEPLAN, Olympia, Washington, has new work out or forthcoming with The Chaffin Journal, Chiricú, Philomel, Many Mountains Moving, and the Penwood Review. "I'm not a 'practicing' Catholic anymore, but I still fast, and the poem began after tasting snowflakes on an empty stomach and saying aloud, 'Damn, these are delicious!'"

DEREK SHEFFIELD, Aurora, Oregon, lives between a forest and the pasture of a champion barrel-racing horse named C.J. He teaches at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City. His book of poems, A Mouthpiece of Thumbs, was published by Blue Begonia Press. "'Interview' was triggered when I arrived at a radio station in Leavenworth, WA, to be interviewed. Guess who the other dummy was? That's right, Elvis."

YOUNG SMITH, Houston, Texas, is a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston, where he received the 2002 James Michener Fellowship in poetry. His work has appeared in the New Orleans Review, the Chaffin Journal, and EKphrosis, among others. "'I Am Here to Say This' is one of those peculiar 'character' poems whose sources are hard to account for. I didn't particularly enjoy what this fellow had to say, but once I started listening, I simply had to hear him through."

MATT SORENSON, Seattle, Washington, born and raised, earns his living as a social worker. His work has appeared previously in 4th Street, and he acts as the Northwest correspondent for FightNews.com. "For every champion in boxing there are a thousand 'opponents.' They are not known or glorified, yet their being is grace in motion. They should be revered, not forgotten."

JOANNIE KERVRAN STANGELAND, Seattle, Washington, has appeared in Fine Madness, Cold Mountain Review, and Pontoon. Her chapbook, A Steady Longing for Flight, won the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. "This poem comes from a dream about the heirloom tomato plants given to me by a friend who has a much greener thumb than I."

JEFF VANDE ZANDE, University Center, Michigan, has appeared in College English, Passages North, Crab Creek Review, and The MacGuffin. In 2001, March Street Press published his chapbook, Transient. This year, Partisan Press will release another chapbook, Last Name First, First Name Last. He teaches at Delta College. "This story was inspired by all the traffic heading north on Fridays throughout the summer in Michigan. The drivers are usually headed to cabins for the weekend to escape their workweek, and I always wondered about a character who simply refused to leave."

BENJI WHALEN, San Francisco, California, is an artist and writer. "I have been the bully and the bullied. In this story, I tried to bring the two sides together."

KELLEY JEAN WHITE, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a Quaker, mother of three, and an inner-city pediatrician for more than twenty years. She has had more than 450 poems published in the past two years. "Just walking to work in the inner-city, I pick up scraps."