Issue 140

Summer & Fall 2011

  • Welcome to the third issue of TriQuarterly Online. In the year since we launched, we've attracted an enthusiastic audience from around the world, and can boast visitors from over a hundred countries on six continents. In this and every issue you'll find outstanding new fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, plus book reviews, interviews, commentary, and a lively blog. The electronic format also allows us to present work from TriQuarterly's extensive print archives. We look forward to receiving your comments and responses at triquarterlyonline@northwestern.edu.

    Managing Editor: Beth Herbert
    Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
    Copy Editor: Ruth Goring
    Graduate Fellow: Ari Bookman

    Book Review Editors: Charles Berret, Tal Rosenberg
    Assistant Book Review Editors: Leigh Arber, Karen Zemanick
    Fiction Editors: Danielle Burhop, Schuyler Dickson, Tedd Hawks, Sarah Kalsbeek, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
    Nonfiction Editors: Sarah Hollenbeck, Dana Norris
    Poetry Editor: Lana Rakhman
    Art Editor: Tien (Mimi) Nguyen

    Staff: Melissa Ackerman, Nataly Arber, Emily Ayshford, Rebecca Bald, Alex Bergstrom, Matthew Carmichael, Jen Companik, Katherine Defliese, Vincent Francone, Cathy Gao, Barbara Ghoshal, Katharine Gingrich, Dane Hamann , Noelle Havens, Russ Hicks, Adam Kovac, Jen Lawrence, Sambath Meas, Kevin McFarland, Amanda Morris, Anthony Opal, Hana Park, Lydia Pudzianowski, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Daniel Schuld, Virginia Smith, Leah Strauss, Megan Sullivan, Amanda Tague, Elizabeth Winkowski, Whitney Youngs, Matt Zucker

Nonfiction Lacy M. Johnson Nonfiction Lacy M. Johnson

White Scraps Like Beacons

[ white scraps like beacons ]

Even as we boarded the plane that night, humid summer air condensed in the seams of the aircraft’s wings, collected, and dripped onto the tarmac: a scorched field of parallel lines afloat on the surrounding marshland.

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Nonfiction Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer Nonfiction Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer

Say Yes! to Everything

Maybe it’s a good thing there was no Internet back when we were applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; we were spared the Workshop’s buzz-killing disclaimer currently on its Web site concerning what can or can’t be taught or learned there. Would we have been so enthusiastic, so positively gleeful about our bright prospects and what the future held when we got those acceptance letters if we’d read that the folks at the Workshop itself agreed "in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught"?

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Nonfiction Jacqueline Dougan Jackson Nonfiction Jacqueline Dougan Jackson

Four Episodes from "The Round Barn"

[Jacqueline Dougan Jackson’s Stories from the Round Barn and More Stories from the Round Barn (1997 and 2002, Northwestern University Press) were drawn from a much larger project, a third-person memoir and history of a Wisconsin dairy farm, and of dairy farming in America from about 1900 until about 1970.

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Nonfiction Yosh Golden Nonfiction Yosh Golden

Tales from the Willow Tree

June 1944: Desert Birth

My father, Yoshizo Yoshimura, born in Salt Lake City, was twenty-six at the time of my birth. My mother, Sachie, twenty-three, was born in Portland, Oregon. Both were American citizens, Japanese Americans—now confined to a camp in the California desert, Manzanar Relocation Center, surrounded by barbed wire and machine-gun turrets.

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