Delmarva Review, Volume 13

By Delmarva Review

Welcome to the thirteenth annual Delmarva Review, an independent, nonprofit literary journal. Our editors have selected the new work of 64 authors that stood out from thousands of submissions during the year. In this edition, we are publishing 79 poems, 10 short stories, 11 creative nonfiction essays, and seven book reviews. In all, the writers come from twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and five foreign countries. Forty-two percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region, though the review welcomes the best new writing in English from all writers, regardless of borders.

The cover photograph, “Cedar Island Watch House,” by contributing photographer Jay P. Fleming, captures the feeling of nature’s power and suggests the increasing concern of climate change.

A number of human themes are represented in this issue. One, in particular, gives life to the others—change. We strive to deal with change in our daily lives. While change can be uncomfortable, often confronting personal denial, it finds its natural place in all forms of writing. After all, it is the change in a character’s life that creates the action of a good story...or in the narrative description that adheres to our strongest beliefs and emotions. As our lives change, we are forced to discover the truth to guide us on our journeys, or perhaps to make sense of where we have been. The search for meaning is the basis for the best of enduring literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Delmarva Review
• Release date: Oct 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005527495

Delmarva Review

Founded in 2008, Delmarva Review is a literary journal dedicated to the discovery and publication of compelling new fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction from emerging and established writers. Submissions from all writers are welcomed, regardless of residence. We publish annually, at a minimum, and promote various literary and educational events, to inspire readers and writers who pursue excellence in the literary arts.Delmarva Review is published by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund, supporting the literary arts across the tristate region of the Delmarva Peninsula, including portions of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Publication is supported by a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council, with revenues provided by the Maryland State Arts Council, as well as private contributions and sales.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Delmarva Review

Copyright

Preface

Nonfiction

FEATURED WRITER – NONFICTION – SUE ELLEN THOMPSON

Sue Ellen Thompson

Doris Ferleger

Orman Day

Chila Woychik

Tara Gilson Fraga

Kelly A. Dorgan

Michele Rappoport

Lynn Lauber

John Robinson

Caroline N. Simpson

Barbara Haas

Fiction

FEATURED WRITER – FICTION – GUILLERMO MARTÍNEZ

Guillermo Martínez

Erin Branning

Bohdan Dowhaluk

Anna Elin Kristiansen

Lisa Friedman

Patrick J. Murphy

John R. Murray

Celine Callow

Eric Smith

Mark Jacobs

Poetry

FEATURED WRITER – POETRY – LUISA A. IGLORIA

Luisa A. Igloria

Jason Gebhardt

Jennie Linthorst

Ann LoLordo

Mela Blust

Rustin Larson

Doris Ferleger

Katherine Gekker

David Salner

Anne Yarbrough

Frederick Pollack

G. Timothy Gordon

Wendy Mitman Clarke

Michael Salcman

Dom Fonce

Michael Brosnan

Carl Boon

Matthew Roth

Ed Granger

Douglas Collura

Tim Fab-Eme

Sepideh Zamani

Kevin O’Keeffe

Susan Roney-O’Brien

Lisa Low

Gwendolyn Jensen

Alex Aldred

Connor Drexler

Don Reese

Emma Wynn

Joan Drescher Cooper

Frannie McMillan

Donna Reis

Peter Waldor

Joshua McKinney

Michele Rappoport

Book Reviews

Review by Barbara Lockhart

Review by James O’Sullivan

Review by Harold O. Wilson

Review by B. B. Shamp

Review by Judith Reveal

Review by Mary Dolan

Review by Gerald F. Sweeney

Contributing Writers

Orders & Subscriptions

Delmarva

Review

Evocative Prose & Poetry

Volume 13

2020

Delmarva

Review

VOLUME 13

Cover Photograph: Cedar Island Watch House by Jay Fleming

Delmarva Review publishes evocative new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions annually. Designed to encourage outstanding writing, the literary journal is nonprofit and independent. It welcomes submissions in English from all writers. Please follow the submission guidelines, during the submission period, posted on the website: DelmarvaReview.org.

In addition to sales, we are thankful for the generous financial support we receive from individual tax-deductible contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Send general correspondence to:

Delmarva Review

P.O. Box 544

St. Michaels, MD 21663

E-mail: [e-mail]

Copyright © 2020 by the Delmarva Review Literary Fund Inc.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020920279

Paperback ISBN: 979-8-6957379-9-8

ebook ISBN: 978-1-0055274-9-5

Preface

Welcome to the thirteenth annual Delmarva Review, an independent, nonprofit literary journal.

Our editors have selected the new work of 64 authors that stood out from thousands of submissions during the year. In this edition, we are publishing 79 poems, 10 short stories, 11 creative nonfiction essays, and seven book reviews. In all, the writers come from twenty-one states, the District of Columbia, and five foreign countries. Forty-two percent are from the Delmarva and Chesapeake region, though the review welcomes the best new writing in English from all writers, regardless of borders.

The cover photograph, Cedar Island Watch House, by contributing photographer Jay P. Fleming, captures the feeling of nature’s power and suggests the increasing concern of climate change.

A number of human themes are represented in this issue. One, in particular, gives life to the others—change. We strive to deal with change in our daily lives. While change can be uncomfortable, often confronting personal denial, it finds its natural place in all forms of writing. After all, it is the change in a character’s life that creates the action of a good story…or in the narrative description that adheres to our strongest beliefs and emotions. As our lives change, we are forced to discover the truth to guide us on our journeys, or perhaps to make sense of where we have been. The search for meaning is the basis for the best of enduring literature.

There have been mega-changes in the last year, ones sharply affecting the human condition. Think about it. A worldwide pandemic is redefining how we live. Climate change is reaching into our lives with a growing number of wildfires, storms, floods and famine, leaving no territory on Earth immune. The division of beliefs, whether political, societal, or religious, has created a new search for truth, divined by reality or denial, with the birth of alternative facts leaving societal institutions in question or systematically torn apart. Those with differing views are frequently demonized rather than respected. Profound feelings of inequalityincluding racial, gender, and classare troubling. A new culture of haves and have nots is rising. Human values are questioned and tested, without compassion or empathy. These difficult changes affect each of us. They attract our attention like magnets, giving renewed purpose to the writer’s pen.

As a literary journal, we focus on what is at stake or at risk emotionally or intellectually in the author’s work. This is the bridge that connects with readers. The writer creates an authentic voice, which engages us. The work is written skillfully, often with the author’s courage to seek an uncomfortable truth.

In this issue, we are featuring three exceptional writers. They introduce the published work of the volume in three sections: fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. An interview with the featured writer opens the section, showcasing the author’s work in the genre followed by the evocative writing of other authors in the category. It is our hope that the interviews provide an interesting perspective of the author’s work, as well as the genre, for discerning readers.

This year’s selected writers feature Sue Ellen Thompson who opens the Creative Nonfiction section with her new memoir When Friendship Dies. Thompson, from Oxford, Maryland, is well known as an outstanding poet to readers and critics, alike. I interview Thompson to learn why she chose creative nonfiction over poetry, to reveal her story. We publish both the poem and memoir in this edition.

Introducing the Fiction collection, we are pleased to be the exclusive publisher of the first English translation of A Reversed Miracle, a short story by the prolific Argentinian writer Guillermo Martínez. Fiction editor Harold O. Wilson interviews Martínez about the background and depth of his story.

The Poetry section opens with poetry editor Anne Colwell interviewing Filipina American poet Luisa A. Igloria, the new Poet Laureate of Virginia and professor of English and creative writing at Old Dominion University. Dr. Colwell’s interview is an insightful introduction to seven of Dr. Igloria’s new poems.

In addition to the selection of poetry and prose for the 13th edition, we expanded the Book Reviews to seven new regional books. This is the section of the journal that is exclusive to regional writers or regional Delmarva-Chesapeake subjects.

As Delmarva Review enters its fourteenth year, it has become an established national literary journal open to the exceptional work of all writers, regardless of borders. The review was created to provide both established and aspiring writers with a valued venue to feature their best work in print at a time when many commercial publishers were reducing content or closing their doors. We also publish an eBook edition for electronic reading.

The submission period for writers’ new prose and poetry is open from November 1 to March 31, through our website: DelmarvaReview.org. Our editors are dedicated to your work and read all submissions. We do not charge reading fees. While we receive thousands of submissions, we respond to authors by May, if not before. Acceptance is competitive and a mark of literary achievement.

As a nonprofit literary journal, we are greatly appreciative of the funding support we receive from sales, individual tax-deductible contributions, and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with revenues from the Maryland State Arts Council.

Delmarva Review is available from regional book stores, and major online booksellers. We welcome all comments and suggestions from readers, by email or in writing.

Wilson Wyatt, Jr.

Editor

Email: [e-mail]

Nonfiction

FEATURED WRITER – NONFICTION –

SUE ELLEN THOMPSON

AN INTERVIEW, A MEMOIR, AND A POEM

About When Friendship Dies by Sue Ellen Thompson

Interviewed by Executive Editor Wilson Wyatt

Wyatt: As an accomplished poet, your writing has earned praise from discerning audiences and critics alike. Why did you decide to write about your friendship experience using nonfiction prose, specifically memoir, instead of your favored form, poetry?

Thompson: The end of a forty-year friendship was deeply disturbing to me; and when I’m deeply disturbed, I turn to poetry. But because the story of that unraveling was so complex, covering a number of years and several pivotal events, I knew that a traditional narrative poem—of which I’ve written many—wouldn’t be able to encompass it. So, I began writing a highly compressed poem that hinted at an underlying story but withheld its details. At the time, I thought that if I could provide the framework, readers would either use their imagination or fill in the rest from their own experience.

After a few weeks, as the poem began to approach its final form, I discovered that I wasn’t feeling the satisfaction I normally feel when I finish a poem. I kept rereading it and thinking how restrained it sounded—and of how much more meaningful it would be if the reader knew more about the roots of the friendship and how that final rift began to form. So, I thought that if I wrote out the whole experience in prose first, perhaps I could return to the poem and incorporate more detail and emotion. What ultimately happened is that I found I was much harder on myself in the prose version. Perhaps as a result, I discovered the satisfaction—that feeling of putting something to rest—that I had never quite gotten from the poem.

Wyatt: Would you agree that your memoir, as well as your poem, is ultimately about loss?

Thompson: Yes, I would. Friends are incredibly important to me, and I value loyalty in a friendship above anything else. So, the loss of a friend, to me, is a kind of death—something to be mourned. But there are many different kinds of loss, and to convey to a reader just how this particular one affected me, I needed to explain how the friendship was formed, why it survived for so many years, what began to erode it, and what triggered that final severing.

Wyatt: Did you think about the voice you were creating when telling this story?

Thompson: Not consciously. I was speaking with what I thought was my own, most natural voice and trying to tell my story in an honest, straightforward manner. But at the same time, I was thinking about how a stranger might respond to that voice: Did I sound whiny? unforgiving? self-righteous? I would re-read the essay every few weeks, each time trying to put myself in the role of a reader who knew nothing about me, always trying to discern those moments when I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming, where I was holding something back.

Wyatt: Was your memoir truly nonfiction? It reads like a well-formed story. Is that by accident or design?

Thompson: Yes, it is truly nonfiction. The facts are as I remember them, of course, but I never deliberately stray from them. Not having written much in the way of nonfiction or memoir before, I was afraid that if I granted my imagination too much latitude, I would lose sight of my original purpose, which was to trace the history of a friendship and to understand why it came to an end. If it reads like a well-formed story, that’s probably because I spent more than a year trying to make it exactly that.

Wyatt: What are the qualities from poetry that you employed in writing this memoir?

Thompson: Nothing is more important to me as a poet than craft: how an experience or an emotion is not only expressed but shaped and presented on the page. By using short lines and an interlocking, puzzle-like rhyme scheme in the poem, I hoped to compress the emotion of the experience and avoid falling prey to self-pity or self-justification.

The memoir had to be shaped as well. I had to decide where to begin, where to end, what incidents to include, and how to achieve the right tone. The latter was my biggest challenge. I didn’t want to sound accusatory or absolve myself completely from blame for what happened. So, I did what I do when I write a poem: I focused my attention on form, imagery, and diction—on delineating the arc of the narrative and finding just the right words to describe each incident or encounter. And then I revised it—over and over, for months on end. The process was really very similar to what I go through when I write a poem.

Wyatt: Memoir is a form of creative nonfiction. There are purists in support of all writing forms, but the word creative is meant to give writers (and readers) poetic license. Some will argue that memoir is a search for truth or for meaning, as opposed to writing a detailed nonfictional narrative. Writing critics will maintain there is an unwritten contract between the writer and reader, and that needs to be obeyed at all costs. How do you feel about the memoir as a form? How has it worked for you?

Thompson: I’ve always been a bit confused about those boundaries, which is probably one reason I haven’t written much nonfiction—creative or not. But I like thinking of memoir as a search for truth or meaning. I knew what had happened, but I hadn’t been able to make sense of it. I was hurt, I was angry, I was shocked by the realization that my friendship could be of so little value. But I didn’t want to use my friend’s real name or do anything that would embarrass her personally. I simply wanted to tell the story from my perspective, hoping that in the process, I could arrive at a deeper, clearer understanding of what had occurred and why. In that sense, memoir has worked well for me.

Wyatt: Now that you have spent more than a year writing a poem about how friendship dies and completing a memoir about the same experience, do you feel satisfied? Has the writing process enabled you to put the feelings of loss behind you?

Thompson: I’ve had a couple of chance encounters with this friend recently, and what I feel afterward might best be described as resigned sadness. I recover quickly, but there’s a lingering depression—along with a painful awareness of how long it took me to acknowledge what I should have perceived much sooner. In the memoir, I mention shared values as being the bedrock of a good relationship. My friend and I never had that, so perhaps I should have expected our friendship to fail at some point. But it wasn’t until I put my experience in writing that I realized the degree to which our differences—particularly in terms of our upbringing—had shaped our values and set us off on paths that would eventually diverge.

After the memoir was accepted by Delmarva Review, it suddenly occurred to me: How would I feel if my (former) friend read it? I don’t think that’s likely to happen...but I can live with the possibility. In the end, what matters is how honest I was with myself and how successful I was in finding the right words to tell the story of our friendship. That is all, as a poet or a memoirist, I can do.

Sue Ellen Thompson

WHEN FRIENDSHIP DIES

Memoir

SO MUCH SNOW FELL DURING THE WINTER OF 1970-71 in Lincoln, Vermont, that when I looked out the window in the morning, I often thought my car had been stolen. Or that I’d forgotten to set the emergency brake, and it had rolled back down the steep mountain road where I was living in a charming but dilapidated farmhouse with another young woman who had just graduated from Middlebury College. It was so cold during the month of January that our pipes remained frozen for weeks, and we had to haul water for flushing the toilet and brushing our teeth by chopping a hole in the ice covering the river that ran through the backyard—something we often did in the pitch dark, in parkas over flannel nightgowns, with bare feet in unlaced boots. She was a teacher in a two-room schoolhouse; I was marking time as a legal secretary between summers at The Bread Loaf School of English, where I was studying for my M.A. We hadn’t been that close in college, but we both needed a place to live and wanted to stay in Vermont. The harsh confines of that winter turned us from survivors into friends—and, by the time the ice on the river began to buckle and the faucets ran freely again, into something more like sisters.

We both married Middlebury men, had daughters eight months apart, and pursued careers that involved teaching and writing—she in upstate New York, Hawaii, and North Carolina, while I settled in southeastern Connecticut. But distance never mattered. For twenty-three summers we spent two weeks in July with our kids at her cabin in Maine. When she and her husband were living in Hawaii during the Kilauea eruptions of the early 1980s, my husband and I flew down to visit and from their deck watched the lava fountain and tumble, hissing, into the sea. During the more than three decades I lived in Mystic, Connecticut, we saw each other whenever she visited her mother in Newport, Rhode Island, where we cruised the shops on Bannister’s Wharf and drank wine in the bar at the Viking Hotel. Eventually we both gravitated back to Vermont: I bought a small cottage for weekends and vacations just over the mountain from Middlebury, while she and her husband found what would become their retirement home just north of town. Our friendship was a given. It would endure as long as we did.

DECEMBER 2018

You’re not really going to East Middlebury today, are you? my husband asked, staring out the window of our Vermont cottage, watching as rain spread a gauze of ice over the snowy street.

I hesitated before admitting why I was determined to drive to The Waybury Inn, thirteen treacherous mountain miles to the west, for lunch. It’s taken me this long to pin her down, I told him. If I cancel now, I may never find out why she did it.

She was the friend of forty-eight years I’ll call Jane, and it was not to invite me to her second wedding, which had taken place six months earlier; in fact, she never even told me she was going to remarry. After her first husband, whom I’ll call John, died in 2013, I thought she was headed for a prolonged period of mourning. To my surprise, she flung herself almost immediately into an affair with a man she’d known for years, who took full advantage of her weakened emotional—and robust financial—condition. It didn’t last long, but she shared enough—how he persuaded her to buy an expensive boat so that he could sail it, how she discovered he was still involved with another woman—to make me feel relieved it was over. Then, just as it seemed she might be ready to explore the complicated grief she had postponed—for a husband who suffered from depression and had long since ceased to make her happy, but whom she had steadfastly refused to divorce—she met another man, a New England blueblood, the kind of man her mother might have chosen for her when she was a young Newport debutante. He was well dressed, well-mannered, and a former commodore of the New York Yacht Club. We socialized with them a number of times during their two-year courtship, but I was completely blindsided by her blunt text, We got hitched. Who, with adult children and grandchildren to please and provide for, gets married at our age? Given the fact that he had been divorced twice, I assumed they had opted for a quiet civil ceremony.

I was wrong. When I asked for details, she admitted they’d had a church wedding in Middlebury with thirty-five guests. She sent me a few photos the next day, and I could make out the faces of several mutual acquaintances and former classmates. Why was I—the maid of honor at her first wedding and, I thought, her closest woman friend—not among them? The rejection and bewilderment I felt were visceral.

After vacillating between hurt and anger for several days, I wrote her a long and very frank email describing my reaction and asking what I had done to provoke such treatment. Had I said something to upset her? Had I excluded her from some facet of my own life? Was she afraid I would judge her for re-marrying so soon after her husband’s death or probe her motivations too deeply? Perhaps I let my anger get the best of me, because all I received was a curt reply informing me that no explanation would be forthcoming. We both fell silent after that, but six months later she invited us to her annual Christmas party as if nothing had changed. What should I say? I asked my husband when the invitation arrived. Say we’re not coming was his advice. But I couldn’t do that—not without asking her face-to-face why she hadn’t told me about her wedding until it was over.

She was already seated when I arrived at the Waybury, her arms folded tightly over a voluminous wool scarf. She didn't move to embrace me.

As we waited for the waitress to bring our food, Jane fired questions at me about everyone in my immediate and extended family. As an only child, she’d always been interested in the lives of my four siblings and their offspring. I gave brief answers—relieved, I suppose, not to have to broach the subject any sooner than was absolutely necessary. But when our food arrived and the questions kept coming, I wondered if she had any idea why I’d asked to have lunch with her. Jane, I said, when she stopped talking long enough to blow on her soup, I have to know why you didn’t invite me to your wedding.

I was braced for a spirited self-defense. Instead, she declared flatly, It’s not about you—a common enough phrase whose full meaning I had yet to grasp. She went on to explain that her wedding had been an extremely emotional occasion—the implication being, I suppose, that it was too emotional to share with me. I wanted to interrupt with, But haven’t we shared dozens of ‘extremely emotional’ experiences over the years? Wasn’t I the first friend you told when your husband found out he had myelofibrosis? Weren’t you the one I called before dawn when my mother died? And didn’t you call me, weeping, from the highway when you didn’t reach your father’s bedside in time? Weren’t you still at the hospital when you called me to say your husband was gone? Haven’t we, in fact, shared almost every extremely emotional experience we’ve been through since our early twenties? I understood that a marriage ceremony is about two people, but when you have a church wedding with a few dozen guests, it would seem that you have chosen to let others share that very personal moment. Objections swirled in my head, but words deserted me.

It’s not about you—she kept falling back on this phrase as I continued my probing and her side of the conversation floundered. It was typical of Jane to hide behind an all-purpose scrap of language when a more honest response required too much introspection. Another favorite was Of course you do—a phrase that could easily be modified to suit almost any context. A few years earlier, when I dropped what I thought would be a bombshell—that my husband was interviewing for a job in another state—her comment was Of course he is, the implication being that she had foreseen this turn of events and needed no further details. She often employed such conversational drop shots, if only to mask her unwillingness to engage at any greater depth. So, at first, I assumed that It’s not about you meant It’s not about anything you did to upset me. But when I asked her, with some embarrassment, about one of the faces I’d glimpsed in the wedding photographs she’d sent me—a woman I knew was only a casual friend—Jane blurted out that she’d run into her at the grocery store the day before and had invited her on the spur of the moment. I couldn’t help but think, You invited someone you ran into by chance, but not a friend who has stood by you for forty-seven years? Again, I was too incredulous to say anything.

It wasn’t until we were waiting for the check that I realized It’s not about you—which Jane had said at least a dozen times in response to my repeated attempts to unearth her motivations—meant neither You didn’t do anything to provoke me nor Stop trying to draw attention to your own hurt feelings. She meant it quite literally: Sharing her decision to remarry—let alone inviting me to the wedding—had simply never crossed her mind. I had seen her cut people off before—most recently her stepbrother, after a dispute involving the distribution of family heirlooms. I had seen how quickly she put her forty-year marriage behind her. Did she associate our friendship with those decades she’d spent married to a man who had been a hero to both of us in our twenties but with whom she’d ended up locked in a relationship characterized by competition and conflict—a man she would never leave but who, mercifully, set her free by dying at sixty-two?

I interrupted her rambling about how happy she was in the new life on which she had embarked. So, what you’re telling me is that you want to leave everything and everyone associated with your old life behind, and that includes me? She hesitated for just a moment. Yes. Basically.

So that was it: I was part of the skin she was trying to shed.

MAY 2013

This wasn’t the first time Jane had shut me out. The day her husband died, she called me from the hospital, sobbing. Can you find me that poem that ends with the line about ‘your one wild and precious life’? I immediately went to the Mary Oliver books on my shelf and copied The Summer Day into an email.

A couple of weeks later, as we talked on the