Tag: Spring

Life Span

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Molly Giles is a novelist and short-story writer. Her books include the novel “Iron Shoes” and “Creek Walk and Other Stories.” She has been awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and taught at San Francisco State University. A former professor at the University of Arkansas, Giles has recently retired and moved back to the Bay Area.

Her story in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA, “Life Span,” could be looked at as a work of homecoming. It’s a meditation on a life rooted in Northern California, one in which the Golden Gate Bridge looms large in the narrator’s memory, becoming a steady presence throughout the many changes detailed in the story. The following is an excerpt.

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The Chinese Barracks

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A native of Davis, California, Rebecca Rukeyser is a creative writing instructor at the University of Iowa. But before landing in Iowa City, Rukeyser had lived and worked in Istanbul, in Kawasaki, Japan, and in Ulsan, South Korea, and Santa Cruz, California.

Her story in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue, “The Chinese Barracks,” tells the tale of a group of young people slogging through the salmon cannery season in Alaska. The work is dangerous, not least because of the sleep deprivation suffered by the men and women working the cannery floor. “The Chinese Barracks” marks Rukeyser’s first story in print. The following is an excerpt.

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L.C. Smith and Bros., Makers of Fine Guns and Typewriters, Advertise

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Alexandra Teague is assistant professor of poetry at the University of Idaho and the author of Mortal Geography (Persea), which won the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award for poetry. Two of her poems appear in the Spring/Summer issue of ZYZZYVA.

The poems come from her manuscript in progress, The Wise and Foolish Builders, which, Teague says, “branches out from the story of Sarah Winchester, Victorian heiress to the rifle fortune, and the six-acre house she build in San Jose, California.” The poem “L.C. Smith and Bros., Makers of Fine Guns and Typewriters, Advertise” takes its verses from the sort of advertising copy employed by various companies of the era (e.g., Remington) to sell their typewriters and firearms. The following is the poem in full.

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Clear as Cake

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Lori Ostlund is the San Francisco author of the story collection The Bigness of the World (University of Georgia Press), which was awarded the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

As she points out in her bio, Ostlund “took a rather circuitous route to becoming a writer. I did not do an MFA program, though my intention was always to be a writer.” Her story, though, in ZYZZYVA’s Spring/Summer issue is set in an evening writing class at a Minnesota college. At a recent reading of “Clear as Cake” at Vesuvio, Ostlund had the crowd shaking with laughter. The story, we think you’ll find, is not only hilarious, but wise, too. The following is an excerpt.

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