The writing is on the wall...and on websites, the blogosphere and Kindles; in grant proposals, newspapers and lesson plans; and in corporate communications, manuscripts and magazines like this one.
The following pages feature the diverse work of just a few of the students in Saint Joseph’s graduate program in Writing Studies. Though they hold varied positions as financial services writers, Web content editors, bloggers, high school English teachers, journalists, librarians, grant writers and public relations directors, all share a love of the written word, no matter what the genre.
Scott Maxwell '12 (M.A.) - "Rainbow Water"
In 1954
when my mother was six
she rode the train
from New York to Florida
with her mother.
They were visiting her father.
She did not understand
their separation.
Sometimes, her mother said.
People just don’t see eye to eye.
In the Florida train station
my mother soaked in
the furious rush of getting places.
Her ears received
the cacophony of echoes
caused by shoes and blended chatter.
Her nose inhaled
the sweat and languor
of Southern sun.
Her eyes fastened
on the word “colored,”
painted on a sign, hanging
above a drinking fountain.
It triggered her legs to race
toward in glee, while her mother
hurried behind hindered
by high heels. My mother
turned the fountain on,
though her smile abruptly left
when rainbow water
did not arc upward as pictured.
She understood even less
when her mother reached her,
grasped her arm,
pressing thumb
in bicep, and swung
her other hand
to slap her face.
Nadia Lambert ’12 (M.A.) - "Miss Virgie Killed Her Man" (Nassau, Bahamas, 1966)
The door swings open, and Virginia Rose jumps. Her husband, Neville, rarely comes home before 11 p.m. on Fridays. After getting his pay packet, he normally spends the night at the bar tossing back glasses of Cuban rum and losing at dominoes.
“Where’s my supper?”
His muddy boots leave tracks across the uneven pine boards. One look at his bloodshot eyes and the muscles at the base of her neck tighten.
He drops into a dining chair that strains under his nearly 300 pounds.
“Useless woman. Can’t work, but I can’t get a hot meal when I get in.”
He takes a swig from his hipflask and belches.
She rises from her chair, steps outside briefly to pump water to fill the kettle and puts it on the woodstove to heat. Virgie moves around as quietly as she can, pulling out ingredients to make cornmeal porridge.
Leaves, roots and vines are dropped into the kettle, filling the room with a mix of florals and bitters. Another pot with the cornmeal bubbles away. She keeps stirring the pot, desperate to look busy and avoid her husband's glare. As soon as the herbal infusion and porridge are ready, she brings them on a wooden tray to the table.
He gobbles up the porridge, then sniffs at the tea.
“What the hell is this, Virginia?"
She wipes her hands with a kitchen towel. “It’s tea. Pear leaf, love vine, life leaf, lime leaf and some ginger.”
He throws the mug at her. She dodges it just in time, the scalding hot liquid spraying the floorboards and not her skin.
“I tell you about them witch’s brews!” His eyes are wild. “You tryin’ to poison me, eh?”
He stumbles toward her, nearly landing in her arms. She helps him up and gets a left hook to the face for her troubles. She falls to the ground, holding her cheek.
“Wicked, evil woman. I gon’ get that devil outta you tonight!” He straddles her, his work-roughened ebony hands closing over her throat. She doesn’t fight back, tears leaking out of her eyes. She uses what little time she has left to pray.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
The seizure comes on suddenly, the jerking of her body causing Neville to lose his grip. Her arms and legs flail, her eyes wide and unfocused.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” he screams, stepping back. Her seizures always frighten him, despite the fact that his constant strikes to her head caused them in the first place.
The seizure ends quickly, as they always do, and she sits up, coughing and gasping. Her mind is still muddled so her instincts have to override her marital conditioning when he lunges again. She scrambles away on her hands and knees into the kitchen. The knife she used to chop the herbs sits on the edge of the counter. They reach for it simultaneously, but Neville's longer arm span gets him to it a fraction sooner. He swings it wildly as she runs for the door. Her throat is too injured to squeeze out a scream. He yanks her by her short Afro and she goes down again. She can feel another seizure building and tries to focus on survival. She kicks at his groin and misses, but manages to hit his thigh. The knife slips from his hand. She closes her fingers around it and makes a slashing movement right before the seizure hits full force, plunging her into darkness and fear
Nikki Philpot ’13 (M.A.) - Game Day Feature - Taylor Trevisan '13
Last November [2011], Taylor Trevisan and his teammates walked into Hagan Arena ready for the home opener, just as he had walked into Hagan Arena during so many home games the prior season. Something set this game apart from the others, however.
This game marked the first time Trevisan stepped onto the floor as a scholarship player for the Hawks.
To him, the feeling was indescribable.
“Every day I'm reminded of how lucky I am,” Trevisan beams.
The then-junior guard earned his scholarship in the same way every player earns a scholarship — through practice and hard work. Tons of hard work. And hard work has played a remarkable role in Trevisan’s career, considering where his journey began.
You see, Trevisan did not come to Saint Joseph’s as a freshman walk-on or scholarship player like his current teammates. He had the choice of receiving a good amount of playing time at small Division III schools or receiving the level of education he desired at a school like SJU. He ultimately decided that he was too competitive for the level of Division III basketball and credits his mother for stressing the importance of a good education from the time he was young. And so, Trevisan came to SJU as a freshman and tried out for the men’s basketball team. The outcome was not favorable, but Trevisan was too determined to be stopped.
“Giving up was never an option,” he says.
Suzanne Cotter '12 (M.A.) - "Fog"
The soggy air around us is so loud — so swollen, stormy, soft like cotton — that we’re individually contained, momentarily deafened to each other.
Sitting in the surf below where Mom paused behind me, I invite that wind and that water to plug up my ears, my eyes.
That’s how it is sometimes: side by side, enclosed.
We see out, beyond our eyes, pushing past the stratosphere and penetrating the ocean. But we gather the sound and pull it like a hood around our heads, tying the drawstring tight and setting the mind to float on cloudy water.
Behind me on the sand in a widebrimmed hat, hands on hips, dress waving regal, she stands drilling a hole on the horizon with her eyes. I bring my knees to my mouth to watch the wake flood around my ankles, my sapphire bikini bright within the grey water. I’m 11.
And always, our ears swallow this particular water, wind, sun.
Family vacations give us time and space, but most of all fog. The sound. The way it slowly drips inside and fills our heads.
After high tide, brothers, stepfather, strangers leave to shower in the pastel homes behind us. And we stay there. We step inside the pool of peachy filtered sun and stretch our arms and legs inside of it.
She lives that way often. And I do, too. On any given day we resist the urge, the suction, the lure of grey matter and of white noise.
Like in the wet quicksand of that surf, I sink and sink. Water comes across and leaves my body, pulling sand over my legs, enfolding me. My lethargic mind a sponge to it.
I lean down on one elbow and stretch out, rolling to my stomach and coming back again to face the water. With pressed ankles and knees I make a mermaid tail, my long wet hair wrapping around and constricting my neck.
This way, I make friends with the water, that booming power that always scared me before. I can lay my head back, trusting, to fill my eyes with the clouds.
Leaning to one side, I check. She’s still there, though, moments before, trapped inside the wind, I'd forgotten. She’s squatting now, resting on her heels, arms across her knees. She’s watching me, barely smiling.
I sit up to rest my weight back on my arms, uncrossing my feet and bringing my knees up to my mouth again.
She looks away, casual, back toward the water.
And I look back, too.
I see us on video together at eighteen, one year after she died.
I'm on a plastic float in the pool, seven years old. She's leaning over the side, elbows against the edge, those hands interlaced and hanging down.
Watching me — like she did.
People walk and swim and splash around us. I'm frantic and she's very, very still — the way it always was.
I tug and pull against the float's edges, trying hard to spin around, working fast to move across the water. My brother pulls on one side of my float and I scream sharp and long. I reach one arm in the air and it shakes as my scream turns raspy. My brother pulls his hand away but pushes the float hard before retreat.
I pound one fist against the plastic. Thud.
Her eyes narrow on me.
Kicking, pulling water with my arms, scrunching my face, I'm frantic again. I pull and pour into the corner in peace, away from the splashing. My body relaxes, resting down on my knees. My arms soften.
The camera moves then to focus on her side of the pool. She's still looking out with narrowed eyes and hanging hands. The camerawoman laughs at something happening in the background. I must be stirring again because Mom sees something.
“Suzanne,” she yells out, always commanding. “Be. Careful.”
The sound of it, so familiar and strong, alive and affective — striking me in the gut.
I hear it all the time. Be. Careful. It swims around and clots inside my mind.
Except it’s not right anymore. It's slow, strange, exaggerated now, like a broken tape that runs too slow.
Suzaaaaaaaaane.
It repeats in thought, sleep, while gazing out the window and watching nothing. It's the same voice, stronger pigment.
Beeee. Caaaaareful.
It's grown and morphed, formed gradually into something vivid, more immediate than reality. It follows me around like a dark spot in my periphery.
It haunts me.
Patricia Allen ’12 (M.A.) - "The Night We Were Born"
I was ten years old when Mary Grace Marvel, the young Irish woman who lived in her aunt’s house across the street from us, told me that the night my brother and I were born, my father got drunk in a tavern across town while my mother labored in Germantown. Both my parents said it wasn’t true, but according to Mary Grace, my father took the trolley into Center City and walked down the alley to McGillin’s Old Ale House, a place he had been many times before. He sat alone at a table drinking beer until my mother’s younger brother, my Uncle Joe, found him and dragged him outside, punched him out of anger — knocking him out — and then drove him home to the house on Tacoma Street where my siblings lay sleeping in their beds.
Mary Grace knew this because she was at McGillin’s that night, sitting at a table across from my father’s. I hadn’t heard this story before. The only thing I knew about my entrance into the world was that it was unexpected. My mother told me that for nine months, I must have been hiding behind my brother, and I surprised everyone, the doctor included, when I arrived fifteen minutes after he did. Mary Grace’s story made me feel shaky inside, and a shiver went through me, even though it was the middle of July. My father and uncle had never gotten along, and I thought this story might explain why.
