Rebecca McClanahan has published ten books of nonfiction, poetry, and writing instruction. Recipient of the Wood Prize from Poetry Magazine, a Pushcart Prize, and the Glasgow Award for nonfiction, McClanahan teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University–Charlotte and Ranier Writing Workshop. She was the 2015 writer in residence at Hollins University. Website: www.RebeccaMcClanahanWriter.com
Nonfiction
Nov/Dec 2020
Excerpts from
On Eighth Avenue, a young man stumbles toward me, something dark and feathered bundled in his arms. He looks up — red eyes, distillery breath: “You know anything about pigeons?” “No,” I […]
Poetry
Mar/Apr 2018
Sacrament
And it came to pass, in a small kingdom of walker and cane and bedside commode, that a certain daughter found herself kneeling before her father. She had arrived from […]
Nonfiction
May/June 2016
Tears, Silence, Song
There are three aspects of mourning: with tears, that is the lowest; with silence, that is higher; with a song, that is the highest. —Hasidic saying September 11, 2001 What […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2013
Everywhere at Once, 1903
Author’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change (Indiana University Press, Spring 2013), a hybrid nonfiction text […]
Nonfiction
Summer 2012
Ginkgo Song
A one-legged man could make a killing on this street, a left-footed man, anyway, who wears a standard size. He could pluck that suede loafer, the two-tone saddle or dress […]
Nonfiction
Winter 2009
The Tribal Knot: Ties That Bind and Break Us
No living member of our family has ever seen it. Nor did Bessie or her siblings ever speak of such an object. But informants insist that an ancestral “hair picture” […]
Interview
Fall 2007
A Conversation with Rebecca McClanahan
Rebecca McClanahan’s most recent books are Deep Light: New and Selected Poems 1987-2007 and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, which won the 2005 Glasgow Award for nonfiction. She has […]
Nonfiction
Summer 2003
‘And We Shall Be Changed’: New York City, September 2001
Friday, September 7 We’re at the breakfast table, the cat Leila curled on the chair between us. Donald has almost finished his bagel, but I’m still groggy—the second cup of […]
Poetry
Summer 1998
Communion
The old man having lost so much and moving each day closer to the first infancy stirs on the couch where I have propped his body and spirit, mind having […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1996
The Riddle Song: A Twelve-Part Lullaby
I gave my love a cherry that had no stone Holly enters the room, panting. “Sorry I’m late,” she says between gasps. “I wanted a good uterus to show you.” […]
Poetry
Winter 1996
To the Absent Wife of the Beautiful Poet at the Writers’ Conference
I know that nothing happened, and everything that might have is now sewn into the hoop of Arizona sky that stretched above our heads that shy evening of talk when […]
Poetry
Winter 1996
This Side
for Melanie Early on, your passion was The Nude, your paintings a delight of flesh gone to flesh, the sag and droop of gravity seducing our bodies back to […]
Fiction
Spring 1992
Somebody
He is not dying. If he were, they would not be in this mess. Doris pulls the pillow over her head. “I’m dying! Help me. Somebody!” She is the only […]
Nov/Dec 2017
Even now, two months dead, you get more mail than I do. Last week, a Christmas card from an old Marine buddy who hasn’t heard from you in a while, […]
Spring 2016
Women’s Hour, YMCA
Early morning three times a week we gather at the shallow end, young and old and not-quite-old, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Noreen and Vivian and True Love (yes that’s her true name, you can’t make this stuff up) and the ones I rename in my mind: Little Engine, Beauty, Lioness, Bright.
Winter 2010
To the Absent Wife of the Beautiful Poet at the Writers’ Conference
I want you to know that nothing happened, and everything that might have is now sewn into the hoop of Arizona sky that stretched above our heads that shy
Fall 2008
Our Town, His: Paul Newman’s Curtain Call
This thoughtful tribute to Paul Newman is part of a larger essay by Rebecca McClanahan, one of the nation’s finest practitioners of the literary essay and a long-time contributer to […]
Rebecca McClanahan
Rebecca McClanahan’s tenth book, The Tribal Knot: A Memoir of Family, Community, and a Century of Change, a multigenerational memoir, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press in 2013. She has […]
Rebecca McClanahan
A Conversation With Rebecca McClanahan by KR fiction editor Nancy Zafris Transcript Nancy Zafris: You’re one of the few writers who can write exceptionally well in all genres: poetry, fiction, […]