July 2018

Why We Chose It

BY SERGEI LOBANOV-ROSTOVSKY, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

“Guy Stuff,” by Robert Long Foreman, appears in the May/June 2018 issue of KROnline.

It was then that her wet lips met his wet lips and the frenching began. Here’s a question for our times: How do you write about sex—bad sex, confusing sex, teenage sex—in the age of Trump and Weinstein and Weiner and, well, pretty much every dude everywhere? How do you write about sex if you are a dude, and that pen you’re clutching suddenly looks . . . kind of obvious?
Read the rest of “Why We Chose It.”

New Grant Boosts Diversity in Summer Workshops

A $15,000 grant from the Amazon Literary Partnership is funding a pilot program to increase diversity among adult participants in the KR Writers Workshops. With funds from the new grant, KR is providing partial scholarships to seven talented writers from traditionally underrepresented groups in the 2018 program.
Read the rest of this article.

For Your Summer Reading: the July/Aug Kenyon Review

The latest issue of the Kenyon Review is out, offering an extraordinary range of voices. The poets featured in this issue include Victoria Chang, with her haunting, evocative “Obit,” and Natalie Scenters-Zapico, whose recipe-poem, “Receta en el cajón,” after listing ingredients, begins, “When your macho comes home gurgling a bottle of mescal, begin the menudo.” You’ll also find stories by Mahreen Sohail, Anjanette Delgado, and Charles Johnson, part of a fictionalized journal from a new collection of zuihitsu by Kimiko Hahn, as well as a fascinating essay by Rodger Kamenetz, called “Natural Dreamwork and the Poetic Imagination,” about “the healing potency in dream images.” Subscribe or order a print or digital copy today!

A Trio of Prizes

Congratulations to KR’s incoming fellows, who have all won major prizes within the past year. Misha Rai, who begins a two-year stint in August as the fellow in prose, has won the Nonfiction Prize from Dogwood, a journal produced at Fairfield University, for her essay “To Learn About Smoke One Must First Light a Fire.” Keith Wilson, who will be the fellow in poetry for 2018-19, received the Rumi Prize in poetry from Arts & Letters, the journal at Georgia College, for two poems, “letter begun to my future niece” and “Long Tail.” Molly McCully Brown, the poetry fellow for 2019-20, received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. She plans to spend a year in Bologna, Italy. To read the full story, click here.

Summer Snapshots

Why do writers wax rhapsodic about the KR’s summer workshops? Here are a few photos from the 2018 KR Writers Workshops—glimpses of writers at work and play. Look closely and you’ll see imaginations igniting.

New in KR Podcasts

KR Editor David H. Lynn speaks with Lewis Hyde about his best-selling book The Gift, personal and cultural forgetfulness, and Hyde’s twenty-nine-year career at Kenyon. In addition to The Gift, Hyde is the author of Common as Air, Trickster Makes This World, and many other books. Listen to it!

From KROnline: “When You Call My Body An Odd Thing”

BY SALLY ROSEN KINDRED

Once I was the sonnet inside you.
Fetal, compressed. Remember our thirst?—
And what you wanted, garnet words turning
in their beds. This was back when you held weather
before you felt it break . . .
Read the poem.

From the KR Blog: “Mix-Tape V: Featuring CantoMundo Poets”

BY ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

June 13, 2018

I’ve written many times . . . about how CantoMundo [a fellowship organization dedicated to Latinx poetry and poetics] changed not only my writing, but also gave me happiness in writing, which I’d lost during graduate school. I look at the poems and prose I’m writing now, the kind of risks I’m taking, the elation in experimentation, and can trace back quite clearly just where this began, at a CantoMundo retreat. I also engage in poetry with an even greater passion than I’ve ever had before . . . I’ve learned most of all that gratitude is a practice and a continuous giving-back. Read the essay.

A Micro-Conversation with Reginald Dwayne Betts

Betts’s poem, “Parable of the Groundhog,” appears in the May/June 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.

What was your original impetus for writing “Parable of the Groundhog”?

“Parable of a Groundhog,” it’s mostly true, in the way all good lies are true. Visiting a prison, someone told me the story of this groundhog and it stayed in my head.

What drew you to this poetic form, four-line stanzas with the third indented? Is there an intention to give off a sense of disorientation and displacement as the piece is traversed?

It’s really a bootleg ballad. I kind of honed the line based on a sound that I was chasing. But I don’t think I was chasing disorientation or displacement as much as song and movement. Read the rest of the interview.

JULY 2018
CONTENTS
Why We Chose It
Grant Award to KR
July/Aug 2018 Issue
Awards to KR Fellows
Writers Workshop Photos
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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