Issue 2

Date

Talk

Tomatoes

 

Marc Awodey

Excerpts from ‘Rain’

 

Greg Delanty

Even Now

Stranger

To a Girlfriend of Twenty Years Ago

 

Ariel Wengroff

Untitled

Sheep in Fog

 

David Budbill

Now

The End of November

 

Estefania Puerta

Santa Maria de las Flores

Naturalization

 

FICTION:

 Peter Bruno

Crazy Ceal

 

TRANSLATION:

Ladi Maruss

Boy Painting Rainbow by Milan Rúfus

 

Phyllis B. Katz

On the Train to Cambridge

 

Laura Davis Foley

Resilience

 

Angela Patten

Lonely Planet

Visitations

Getting Yourself Sorted

 

Melissa Hotchkiss

Stumble

 

Elizabeth Powell

Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances

Care Package with Riddle as Missive

 

David Symons

Four Haiku

 

THEATRE:

Dana Yeaton

You Gotta Go First

 

FICTION:

Meredith Martinez

An excerpt from the novel, Tri-State View 38

Editor’s note:

 

Submerged in the dark waters of Lake Champlain while a concert lit up the Burlington waterfront, I mentioned to a friend how closely the lush suburbias north of our small city resemble another planet. She responded that, when one looks at it correctly, the entire city, and by extension, everywhere, is composed of corners and backalleys that might as well be planets, fecund and alien. Her words struck a chord, and in meditating on their significance for literature and the perspective of the outsider which the writer must assume in order to view his or her own home places with new eyes, I came upon the image of each of the writers who make up this magazine marooned on a separate planet, the infinitely solitary but thrillingly communicable planet of each writer‘s creation. Most of us share Vermont as our home world, though some voices come to us broadcast across greater spaces, and for their presence we are grateful. But each of us reports on similar surroundings in a voice made strange by its transmission across the vast distances of the mind and heart – by reading these transmissions we hope you come to see your home worlds as new and alien, dangerous and marvelous places. Here we continue the ongoing mission of The Salon to place promising newcomers beside writers whom more readers know, but who, like familiar places viewed with interloper eyes, are still capable of surprising. We hope you enjoy these missives from the alien world we all, somehow, call home.

 

–        Robert McKay, Associate Editor

 

 

 

Contributors’ Notes

 

MARC AWODEY is an artist and poet. His poetry collections include Telegrams from the Psych Ward, New York; A Haibun Journey, and Senryu and Nudes from Kasini House Books. He is also author of the collection of essays, Art and Machine: 95 theses, discussing his poetry vending machine project of the late 1990s. He resides in Burlington, VT, and serves on the faculty of Burlington College, Community College of Vermont, and Johnson State College. Awodey has written over 500 reviews for Vermont’s alternative weekly Seven Days. He was also one of the first Vermont Justices of the Peace to perform civil unions in 2000.

 

PETER BRUNO writes stories, makes art, and teaches high school English and theatre in Rutland, VT. ‘Crazy Ceal’ is taken from Garibaldi Avenue, a collection of linked stories set in New Jersey. Peter is proud to have his work in The Salon, published by his former student Ben.

 

KEVIN BUBRISKI’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the International Center of Photography; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Asian Cultural Council, Bubriski worked for nine years in Nepal, and has photographed his journeys to India, Tibet, and Bangladesh. He is the author of Portrait of Nepal (Chronicle), which won the Golden Light Documentary Award in 1993, and Power Places of Kathmandu: Hindu and Buddhist Holy Sites in the Sacred Valley of Nepal (Inner Traditions). Bubriski lives in Vermont with his wife.

 

DAVID BUDBILL is a poet and a playwright. His most recent play is A Song For My Father, which premiered at Lost Nation Theatre in Montpelier in the spring of 2010, and will have its second production at Old Castle Theatre Company in Bennington, in August and September. His most recent book of poems, Happy Life, will be

published by Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2011. David lives in the mountains of northern Vermont.

 

GREG DELANTY‘s most recent books are The Ship of Birth, The Blind Stitch, and The Hellbox. His Collected Poems 1986-2006 is out from the Oxford Poet‘s series of Carcanet Press. He has received many awards, most recently a Guggenheim for poetry. The magazine Agenda has just devoted its latest issue to celebrate Greg Delanty‘s 50th birthday. The National Library of Ireland has recently acquired his papers up to the end of 2012.

 

ANNIE DORAN was born in coastal South Carolina, left home at sixteen to study writing in Boston, and continued north to Vermont after that. You’ll often see her biking to the waterfront or staring off into the woods from her stoop. The first poem she wrote was about a turtle and she gave it to her fourth grade teacher, who claims to have it in a file to this day. Annie has written many poems since, and she‘s grateful to everyone who reads poems, any poems.

 

LAURA DAVIES FOLEY is the author of two books of poetry, Syringa and Mapping the Fourth Dimension; she has won the Atlanta Review Grand Prize and been awarded a Fellowship from the Frost Place. Her work has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bloodroot, The Georgetown Review, and others. One of her poems has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is currently a chaplain intern with New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and lives on the wide banks of the Connecticut River in Cornish, NH.

 

MELISSA HOTCHKISS‘s first book of poems, Storm Damage, was published by Tupelo Press. Her poems and prose have appeared in numerous publications such as failbetter.com, The American Poetry Review, LIT, the New Virginia Review and the anthology Poets for Palestine. Melissa is one of the editors of Barrow Street and lives in New York City with her dog Jesse.

 

PHYLLIS B. KATZ lives in Norwich, VT. She has published poems in The Anthology of New England Writers, The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Frost Place, Vol. II, Lifelines, The Connecticut River Review, Ekphrasis, and Bloodroot.

MEREDITH MARTINEZ is a fiction student in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She received her BA in English Literature and BFA in Dance Choreography from Arizona State University in 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Contrary Magazine and in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010 anthology. She grew up in Brattleboro, VT, and currently lives with her husband in Mesa, AZ.

 

LADI MARUSS, originally from Slovakia, now resides in Burlington, VT. He is the owner of Four Corners of the Earth on Pine St, and is one of the founding members of The Barn Owl Poetry Extra.

 

(Associate Editor) ROBERT MCKAY‘s criticism recently appeared in Visions of Joanna Newsom from Roan Press. He is an alum of Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Robert lives in Burlington, VT.

 

ANGELA PATTEN is a native of Dublin, and author of Reliquaries and Still Listening, both from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review; Prairie Schooner; Michigan Quarterly Review and Poetry Ireland Review and in anthologies—Cudovista Usta (Marvellous Mouth) Slovenia; Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007; The White Page/An Bhileog Bhan: Twentieth Century Irish Women Poets and Onion River: Six Vermont Poets. She teaches at the University of Vermont.

 

ELIZABETH POWELL is the author of The Republic of Self, winner of the New Issues First Book Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Missouri Review, Post Road, Ploughshares, and Slope, among many others. She is Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature at Johnson State College, where she is also Editor of Green Mountains Review.

 

ESTEFANIA PUERTA is a local artist in Burlington, VT. Her work has been featured in various spaces around Vermont including the Fleming Museum. She is co-founder of the Barn Owl Poetry Extra, a local monthly poetry publication. She draws most of her inspiration from her upbringing as a Colombiana in the U.S and revels in the exquisite beauty of identity crisis both internally and internationally.

MILAN RUFUS (1928 – 2009) was a Slovak poet, essayist, children’s writer and academic, born in Závažná Poruba, in the Zilina region. Rúfus published his first poems in the 1940s and his first collection, Až dozrieme (When We Grow Mature) in 1956. Another 20 poetry books followed. A children’s book, Modlitbičky (Little Prayers) has been called his most successful work. Toward the end of his life he also published Báseň a čas (Poem and Time) and Vernosť (Fidelity).

 

DAVID SYMONS is a performer and teacher of Yiddish music, an accordionist, singer, cornetist, arranger, composer, band-leader, actor, and activist from Burlington, Vermont. He founded and led the bands Black Sea Quartet, Inner Fire District, and The Salt Wives, and was a founding member of Berlin’s The Painted Bird. He teaches Klezmer music at the Summit School in Montpelier, VT.

 

DANA YEATON is the recipient of the Heideman Award from the Actor‘s Theatre of Louisville and the ‗New Voice in American Theatre‘ award from the William Inge Theatre Festival. His plays include Midwives, Redshirts, and Mad River Rising, which received the Moss Hart Award. His new, two-person musical, My Ohio, just premiered at Vermont Stage Company. Dana teaches at Middlebury College and was founding director of the Vermont Young Playwrights Project.

 

Born in Chicago, ARIEL WENGROFF now lives in Burlington, VT, where she is a writer and political organizer. Working for the Vermont Democratic Party, she spends most of her time in the South End, where she is also a co-founder of The Barn Owl Poetry Extra. Ariel’s work has recently been seen in Trapeze, The Melancholy Dane, and Vantage Point.