Articles

Novelist Ann Tyler says that she reads so that she can live more than one life in more than one place. I write for the same reason. My character Marlene Mae lives a brash, reckless life, quite unlike my own more careful and calculating existence. I thought I was done with Marlene Mae in 2013 when Dancing Girl Press published the chapbook How Marlene Mae Longs for the Truth, but she (and her mother) just keep on re-appearing in new poems, including “Marlene Mae Talks About Denial” and “Marlene Mae’s Mother Turns Seventy-Six and Her Physician Asks If She Is Still Sexually Active.”

The poems “Faith’s Other Shapes” and “Her Risk” explore reinvention, and the impossibility of emotional, physical, and relational wholeness in a culture that values fragmentation and isolation.

Writing is my way of being in the world. I am entirely at ease and fully “dialed in” when I am writing. Forming ideas and arranging them on the page is how I make sense of my surroundings and myself. Because of that, I continue to write—it’s never about the outcome as much as it is about the process, and the discoveries I have about myself while I am composing.

I wrote “Breakfast in a Thin Land” during my sabbatical in Valparaiso, Chile. It lyrically recounts the breakfasts my stepson, Scott, and I had immediately following the sixth worst earthquake ever seismographically registered.

A few weeks ago I visited the on-campus Western Gallery with editor-in-chief Brenda Miller, as well as several other MFA students and Bellingham Review editors, in order to view the Dianne Kornberg exhibit, Madonna Comix and Other Collaborations.

Ron Pattern is a signature member of the Northwest Watercolor Society and an associate with the National Watercolor Society. He calls his paintings a “visual diary” of his life. work on his website: patternart.net. Pattern’s next show, “Places & Things,” opens November 7th at Allied Arts in Bellingham, WA.

While Bellingham Review publishes quality literary work from across the continent, our featured visual artist for the Fall 2014 online edition lives right here in our rainy bay town. In each of his paintings, Ron Pattern honors a locale or scene we know well. It is our pleasure to share his art in this issue so that you, far-flung readers, can picture our place.

My partner made me ears from old suede gloves the color of charred brimstone. She pasted fake sheep’s wool in the center; an illusion of depth. I glued the ears to cardboard and pinned the ensemble to a headband.

Hearing seared me: my neighbor’s spit dissolving venison between its teeth, the cat on the first floor breathing on the window’s glass, a rustle in the crisp leaves below the old alder across the way.

I robed my neck in a fur stole, painted my face with whiskers, felt a coarse growl fill the low space of my throat. Just under my chin I fastened the GPS tracking collar, a hand-forged mechanism made from a headlamp and tinfoil. I left quietly, a cloud slipping over the moon.

“Coyotes” is set in rural Maine, where I grew up. I originally drafted it in 2007 as part of a short story series centered on a theme that I have returned to many times in my fiction: the pressure of unsaid things. While the family this story describes is fictional, aspects of the plot were inspired by real problems that we had with coyotes in my area when I was a child.

I am probably nine years old, barefoot and balanced on a mossy rock in the middle of the Brandywine River. My two older brothers and I are stepping across the river, rock by rock. Our ears are full of the rushing sound of water, tumbling over and around the rocks in frothing, coffee-colored cataracts, roiling with mud.

I was little when the coyotes came back. They’d been gone so long, people had almost forgotten about them. But they started moving south from Canada again when I was eight or so—shadows, slipping in and out of the woods, elusive gestures of high-held tail and then nothing but the swaying movement of tree branches. We knew they were there.