The Literary Issue, Spring 2017 UCI Magazine

Spring 2017

MAGAZINE

The Literary Issue

Take a Hike Made verdant by record rainfall, the 62-acre UCI Ecological Preserve provides a scenic view of the campus and city skylines. Recently installed interpretive signs offer visitors a guided tour, highlighting such native fauna as the coastal cactus wren and the flora in which it nests, namely prickly pear and cholla cacti.

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Steve Zylius / UCI

Contents

Spring 2017 Vol. 2, No. 2

The Literary Issue

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14 “The Upright Revolution”: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s fable on how humans learned to walk on two limbs Plus: A Q&A with the self-professed “language warrior” (page 12)

My Favorite Read: Several well-read Anteaters share their top book picks

D E P A R T M E N T S FLAS H BACK

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PRISM

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SPOT L IGHT

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S PEC T RUM

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Chapter and Verse: UCI’s renowned M.F.A. program in creative writing continues to churn out heavyweight talent Plus: A Faculty Who’s Who

P E R S PE CT I V E

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R E FLECTIONS

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A NT OURAGE

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The Written Word: A selection of poems and literary excerpts from 12 M.F.A. Programs in Writing alumni, ranging from a debut novelist to a Pulitzer Prize winner Plus: More From UCI’s Card Catalog

PA RT ING ZOT !

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Letter From the Editor The Power of Language For more than half a century, UCI’s storied M.F.A. program in creative writing has been graduating some of the top authors and poets in the nation, from best-sellers Michael Chabon and Alice Sebold to New York poet laureate Yusef Komunyakaa.

While there are creative writing programs that are older, they were often added years – if not decades – after the universities were established. UCI, however, began its program with the very creation of the university’s English department – a much rarer start that can be directly attributed to founding English department chair Hazard Adams’ vision that the study of literature should provide an “understanding of the writer’s point of view.” But it’s not so unusual a development when you consider UCI’s pioneering spirit and its inherent principle of encouraging faculty and students to think differently.

In this special literary issue of UCI Magazine, our cover story, “Chapter and Verse” (page 18), provides a glimpse into the history, mechanics and culture of the Programs in Writing. Alumni share how faculty members over the decades have mentored them to find their own voices and writing styles. (“A Faculty Who’s Who”can be found on page 23.)

Perhaps channeling the campfire storytellers who once dotted the ranchland on which UCI stands, M.F.A. students, faculty and alumni are a free-spirited bunch. Says author and 1998 alumna Aimee Bender: “There was real appreciation and support for my weirder writing, the writing I thought would be dismissed.”

We are pleased to share, starting on page 27, six excerpts from new works of fiction by veteran and debut authors along with five poems from the class of 2016 and a much-lauded one from Komunyakaa.

In addition to highlighting the works of M.F.A. alumni, we are delighted to include the first U.S. printing of Kenyan author Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright” (page 14). A UCI Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature and a repeat contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, Ngũgĩ shows the power of writing in the fable – from its peaceful message of working together while recognizing the beauty of individuality to its translation into more than 60 languages. That makes it “the single most translated short story in the history of African writing,” according to publisher Jalada. (Read more in a Q&A beginning on page 12.)

In an era in which writing has often been reduced to quickly cobbled statements of 140 or fewer characters, it feels more important than ever that UCI’s English department faculty – particularly those in creative writing – continue to foster the artistry and craft of genuine storytelling.

Says M.F.A. fiction co-director Michelle Latiolais: “What we do daily in the Programs in Writing is try to remain fully conscious every minute of the ability of language to render the world’s atrocities, its staggering idiocies and its beauties.”

Marina Dundjerski Managing editor, UCI Magazine

UCI Magazine Vol. 2, No. 2 Produced by the University of California, Irvine Office of Strategic Communications & Public Affairs Chancellor Howard Gillman Associate Chancellor, Strategic Communications Ria Carlson Interim Director, Media Relations & Publications Tom Vasich Managing Editor Marina Dundjerski Design Vince Rini Design Visuals Steve Chang and Steve Zylius Copy Editor Kymberly Doucette Editorial Advisory Committee Jennie Brewton, Katherine Hills ’83 (alumni), Janice Hopkins, John Mouledoux, John Murray (health) and Janna Parris (development) Contributing Writers Rosemary McClure, Roy Rivenburg, John Westcott and Janet Wilson Digital Media Tonya Becerra and Kien Lai Contact Have a comment or suggestion?

Address correspondence to: UCI Magazine UCI Office of Strategic Communications & Public Affairs 120 Theory, Ste. 100 Irvine, CA 92697-5615 949-824-6922 • ucimagazine@uci.edu communications.uci.edu/magazine UCI Magazine is a publication for faculty, staff, alumni, students, parents, community members and UCI supporters. Issues are published in winter, spring and fall.

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We Want to Hear From You When submitting a letter to the editor, please include your full name, UCI graduation year or affiliation (if applicable), mailing address, city of residence, phone number and email address. Submissions that do not include this information cannot be published. Contact information is for verification purposes only – not for publication or commercial use.

Letters should be 150 words or less and may be edited. They become the property of UCI/the UC Board of Regents and may be republished in any format.

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To submit a letter via email, send to: ucimagazine@uci.edu Include “Letters to the Editor: UCI Magazine” in the subject line.

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F L A S H B A C K

UCI Libraries, Spe cial Collections

& Archives

Capote on Campus

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lmost 40 years ago, Truman Capote, media darling and pioneer of the true-crime novel, celebrated the grand opening of the UCI Bookstore. The author, screenwriter and playwright best known for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood read from some of his early works to a packed house on Sept. 28, 1977, at UCI’s Fine Arts Village Theatre and responded to a standing ovation with two flamboyant bows. He later stood autographing more than 100 books in the new store and answering “about as many questions,” according to Marty Trujillo, who covered the event for New University. “Yes, he tries to write every day; no, he doesn’t worry about writer’s block; yes, he does read quite fast, about one book a day.” Capote also offered some warm words: “I wish the bookstore a great success, which I’m sure it’ll have, and you [in] your years here.”

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News

P R I S M

$30 Million Donated for New Convergent Science Facility The Samueli Foundation in April provided $30 million to help fund a state-of-the-art convergent science building on campus, expanding UCI’s ability to conduct large-scale, collaborative and cross-disciplinary research in engineering, computing and physical sciences. Construction of the 100,000-square-foot facility could begin as early as this fall and be completed in three years.

In a significant private-public partnership, the Samueli donation has enabled the university to obtain $50 million in legislative funds allocated by the UC Office of the President.

An additional $40 million in UCI funds brings the total budget to $120 million.

“Addressing today’s grand challenges in society requires collaborative research across a multitude of disciplines, aligning with our STEM ecosystem concept,” said Henry Samueli, co-founder of semiconductor giant Broadcom Corp.

“We hope this gift to UCI can be a catalyst for accelerating cross-disciplinary research and scientific innovations that benefit society.”

Potential ideas include developing chemical and material sensors to better diagnose and treat cancers; using big data, environmental engineering and organic chemistry to improve water supply or solar energy; testing driverless vehicles; and having cybersecurity coders and mathematicians work together on military or medical challenges.

The structure will be located near Frederick Reines Hall, off Bison Avenue and East Peltason Drive. It will accommodate more than 50 faculty members – including high-profile new hires – and hundreds of students. A community observatory with a powerful telescope may be built on the roof.

Susan and Henry Samueli

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Race to the Future

SpaceX founder Elon Musk visits with UCI’s HyperXite crew and inspects its entry at the Hyperloop Pod Competition earlier this year at the spacecraft company’s headquarters in Hawthorne. The Hyperloop, first proposed by Musk in 2013, is a mode of extremely high-speed, energy-efficient transportation that would propel a pod-like vehicle through a near-vacuum tube. Thirty teams – including university students and independent engineering groups from around the world – were invited to build and test prototypes. UCI’s vessel is designed to float on “air skis” and to brake using both a hydraulic system and electromagnets. While the competition model is roughly 14 feet long and 4 feet wide, the full-scale pod would fit 28 passengers. The HyperXite team didn’t bring home any awards, but it will have another chance during the second part of the competition this summer.

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Ben Liebenberg / Associated Press

Anteater Refs Sensational

Super Bowl

UCI alumnus and NFL referee Carl Cheffers ’82 prepares for the opening coin toss during Super Bowl LI in Houston on Feb. 5. Cheffers, whose father was a Pac-10 referee, started officiating intramural sports at UCI before moving on to high school games. In 1995, he began the first of five seasons with the Pac-10 before being hired by the NFL. He was elevated to crew chief in 2008. Cheffers and his seven-member crew officiated the first-ever Super Bowl game to be decided in overtime (the New England Patriots beat the Atlanta Falcons, 34-28).

UCI Ranks No. 4 in Upward Mobility The New York Times has named UCI the No. 4 university in the nation for propelling low-income students into the middle and upper-middle classes post-graduation. Based on new data from the Equality of Opportunity Project, 81 percent of UCI students from the bottom fifth of income distribution ended up in the top three fifths. The study was based on anonymous income tax and financial aid records from millions of college graduates. “This data indicated what we in academia have known all along: Public universities often serve as a catalyst for low-income students,” said Chancellor Howard Gillman. “UCI has been a steadfast leader in empowering students from all backgrounds to equip themselves with knowledge and reach their highest potential.”

“The politics of respectability, that elusive set of guidelines that dictate how racialized Americans ought to conduct themselves in public, were complicated this week when a 69-year-old Asian American doctor was forcibly dragged off a United Airlines flight.”

Jennifer Lee, Chancellor’s Fellow and professor of sociology NPR April 14, 2017

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Critical Theory Is

No. 1

UCI’s critical theory program is No. 1 in U.S. News & World Report’s annual graduate school rankings. The campus is one of the world’s leading centers of scholarship in the multidisciplinary field and has been home to such eminent practitioners as Murray Krieger, J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida. A philosophical approach to culture – and especially literature – that seeks to confront the social, historical and ideological forces that produce and constrain it, critical theory at UCI is taught by faculty from the comparative literature, East Asian languages & literatures, English, film & media studies, anthropology, political science, art and drama departments. The campus shares the U.S. News top ranking with the University of Chicago.

UCI Medal Bestowed on Drakes Chancellor emeritus Michael V. Drake and UCI’s former first lady Brenda Drake were awarded the campus’s most prestigious honor, the UCI Medal, on March 30. “The Drakes truly embody the University of California’s mission of teaching, research and public service, and their transformational legacy at UCI continues to be seen today,” said current Chancellor Howard Gillman. “Brenda and Michael’s commitment to academic excellence, diversity and opportunity is renowned, and together as a team they ensured that UCI would become one of the country’s leading public research universities, as well as a leading engine of upward mobility.” During Michael Drake’s tenure, from 2005 to 2014, UCI’s four-year graduation rate increased by more than 18 percent, and the university added schools of law and education, along with programs in public health, pharmaceutical sciences and nursing science. He became president of The Ohio State University in 2014.

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“In Vietnam, they have basically written us out of the history books – those who left the country – and in America, they write about the war from the American side, particularly the veteran side, but very little about Vietnamese Americans.”

Linda Trinh Vo, professor of Asian American studies, on the significance of UCI’s oral history project “Viet Stories” Los Angeles Times March 24, 2017

Extraordinarius Feted Gary Singer ’74, senior adviser to RSI Holding and RSI Development and a UCI Foundation trustee, has received the Lauds & Laurels Extraordinarius Award – the UCI Alumni Association’s highest honor – for his commitment and extraordinary level of support to the campus. After earning a J.D. at Loyola Marymount University, Singer practiced corporate, business and securities law throughout his career, retiring as managing partner of O’Melveny & Myers LLP in 2013. Giving to UCI since 1979, he is or has been a member of the Chancellor’s Club; the Dean’s Leadership Society at the School of Social Sciences; the Board of Visitors and the Dean’s Executive Board at the School of Law; and the UCI Alumni Association’s board of directors.

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S P O T L I G H T

Steve Zylius / UCI

Dance of Legends

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CI dancers bring the magical ebb and flow of Lar Lubovitch’s “Legend of Ten” to life at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in February. The piece – choreographed to music by Johannes Brahms played by the UCI Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Stephen Tucker – has both slow and quick movements for 10 dancers. “‘Legend of Ten’ is not an easy dance to do,” says Lubovitch, who joined the Claire Trevor School of the Arts’ dance department last July as a Distinguished Professor. “The dancers have to execute uniquely demanding physical tasks and ornate spatial configurations. Without question, the UCI dancers rose to the challenge and gave a thrilling and lucid account of the choreography. As a new faculty member, it was a deep learning experience for me as well as the students, each in our own way trying to break new ground.”

The piece was part of Dance Visions 2017, which displayed a broad mix of modern dance and traditional ballet with restagings of two pieces from Lubovitch and George Balanchine along with three new dances from UCI Distinguished Professor Donald McKayle, associate professor Molly Lynch and assistant professor Chad Michael Hall.

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S P E C T R U M

Lut Desert, Iran

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In Search of Water This March, UCI environmental engineer Amir AghaKouchak headed to Iran’s Lut Desert, where temps can climb to 159 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer (the hottest satellite reading of ground temperature ever).

Many assumed that any form of existence in the Lut would be impossible, but AghaKouchak and fellow researchers from around the world have found a fascinating web of life there, including insects, reptiles and foxes. They think migratory birds felled by the heat may be a key food source and, perhaps most surprisingly, discovered shallow water just beneath the desert’s surface.

Via the fieldwork and satellite data, AghaKouchak, a hydrologist, is exploring the origin of the water and how it contributes to the ecosystem in the desolate Lut. One of the team’s main objectives is to understand how species cope with rising temperatures and extreme environments.

It’s also an amazing part of the planet. “The sky is beautiful, and the landscape is astonishing,” AghaKouchak says, describing the wind-formed pillars known as the Kaluts. “It’s nice and quiet.”

Amir AghaKouchak

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Q&A

P E R S P E C T I V E Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature

Daniel A. Anderson / UCI

The Language Warrior Celebrated UCI writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is in high spirits.

He’s talking about a project he’s passionate about, a short story he wrote that so far has been translated into 63 languages, 47 of them African dialects.

The piece, “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright,” has become the single most translated short story in the history of African writing, according to its publisher, the Pan-African writers’ collective Jalada Africa.

Ngũgĩ, as he’s known, a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature, won the 2013 UCI Medal and has been a top contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. He’s also Kenya’s best-known writer. His devotion to his homeland is one reason he’s so pleased with the multiple translations of “The Upright Revolution.”

Although there are millions of African speakers, not

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much has been written in their indigenous languages, he says: “Being able to read literature in your own language is empowering.”

Ngũgĩ (pronounced GU-gi) originally wrote “The Upright Revolution” in his mother tongue, Gĩkũyũ, and then translated it into English himself. The 2,200-word fable (which begins on page 14) tells the story of how “humans used to walk on legs and arms, just like all the other four-limbed creatures,” but eventually the legs managed to stand and walk upright by working together with the other parts of the body. It’s a reminder, Ngũgĩ says, that in our togetherness we have the power to transform the future.

He sat down with Rosemary McClure for UCI Magazine to discuss “The Upright Revolution” and his championing of literature in native languages.

Q: In what language do you usually write?

Ngũgĩ: There was a time I wrote in English, but now I often write in my language, Gĩkũyũ [spoken by almost 7 million Kenyans], and translate it back into English. It’s more of a challenge for me.

Q: What sets “The Upright Revolution” apart from your other work?

Ngũgĩ: I describe myself as a language warrior for marginalized languages. Much of the intellectual production in Africa is done in European languages: English, French, Portuguese. The people in Africa speak African languages. They have a right to cultural products written in their language. Translation is an important tool that makes it possible for different cultures to borrow from each other.

Q: What are some examples of cultural borrowing?

Ngũgĩ: The Bible and the Koran. People can read them because they’re available in their own languages. Here at UCI, we’re able to discuss Hegel [Georg Hegel, German philosopher, 1770-1831] because his works have been translated. We don’t have to understand the German language to learn from his works. The same is true with Greek mythology; we can learn from it without knowing how to speak Greek. Translation becomes a process whereby languages can talk to each other.

Q: Is that why you’re enthusiastic about the translations of your short story?

Ngũgĩ: I became excited about this story because Jalada picked the story up, produced a translation journal that included it and worked with many translators to make it available in many languages. It makes me feel very happy to see young people picking up these languages and showing that it can be done. I’m very proud of the project and that my story has been part of this phenomenon.

Q: In 1977, you were imprisoned for a year for critical works about neocolonial Kenya. How did you cope?

Ngũgĩ: For a writer, it was difficult. You were not allowed to write. You were not allowed to do anything, even ask, “Is it raining outside today? Is it sunny outside?” So the only way I could actually, literally, deal with my prison conditions – maximum-security prison for doing nothing – was by writing secretly. I wrote a novel, Devil on a Cross, in Gĩkũyũ on toilet paper with a pen they had given me to write a confession.

Q: One of your plays, “The Trial of Dedan Kimathi,” was set in a prison and was staged at UCI in 2014.

How did the production here differ from others?

Ngũgĩ: The play, which is about the leader of the Kenyan liberation struggle, has been staged in Kenya and in several other countries. I wrote it jointly with Micere Githae Mugo of Syracuse University. I think this was the first staging in the United States. For me, it was the very best production of the play anywhere. It was a joy to me.

The director [Jaye Austin Williams, Ph.D. ’13] transformed the theater into a prison. Audience members were inspected by guards upon entering and treated as if they were really entering a prison. So they became part of the experience. It was captivating.

“The people in Africa speak African languages. They have a right to cultural products written in their language.”

Q: For at least the past five years, you’ve been rumored to be a front-runner for the Nobel Prize in literature. How does it feel to be considered?

Ngũgĩ: I really appreciate that people think my work is worth considering. It’s very humbling to me. And it has created some humorous moments. One year the rumor was so strong that the newspapers sent reporters and photographers to my house at 4 a.m. to wait outside my front door for the announcement and press conference.

But when it came, another writer had won the prize.

When my wife and I opened the door to tell them, they were very disappointed, because they’d come out at 4 a.m. and had no photos or story. My wife made them coffee, and we consoled them.

Q: What is the message you hope readers take away from “The Upright Revolution”?

Ngũgĩ: Life is connected. We are all connected; we depend on each other.

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The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright

By Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (For Mũmbi W Ngũgĩ, Christmas 2015, Irvine. Translated from Gĩkũyũ by the author.)

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long time ago, humans used to walk on legs and arms, just like all the other four-limbed creatures. Humans were faster than hares, leopards or rhinos. Legs and arms were closer than any other organs. They had similar corresponding joints: shoulders and hips; elbows and knees; ankles and wrists; feet and hands, each ending with five toes and fingers, with nails on each toe and finger. Hands and feet had similar arrangements of their five toes and fingers from the big toe and thumb to the smallest toes and pinkies. In those days, the thumb was close to the other fingers, the same as the big toe. Legs and arms called each other first cousins.

They helped each other carry the body wherever it wanted to go: the market, the shops, up and down trees and mountains, anywhere that called for movement. Even in the water, they worked well together to help the body float, swim or dive. They were democratic and egalitarian in their relationship. They could also borrow the uses of the product of other organs, say, sound from the mouth, hearing from the ears, smell from the nose, and even sight from the eyes.

Their rhythm and seamless coordination made the other parts green with envy. They resented having to lend their special genius to the cousins. Jealousy blinded them to the fact that legs and hands took them places. They started plotting against the two pairs.

Tongue borrowed a plan from Brain and put it into action immediately. It began to wonder, loudly, about the relative powers of Arms and Legs. Who was stronger, it wondered. The two cousin limbs, who had never been bothered by what the other had and could do, now borrowed sound from Mouth and began to claim they were more important to the body than the other. This quickly changed into who was more elegant; Arms bragged about the long, slim fingers of its hands, at the same time making derisive comments about Toes being short and thick. Not to be outdone, Toes countered and talked derisively about thin fingers, starving cousins! This

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Sara Tyson

went on for days, at times affecting their ability to work together effectively. It finally boiled down to the question of power; they turned to other organs for arbitration.

It was Tongue who suggested a contest. A brilliant idea, all agreed. But what? Some suggested a wrestling match – leg and arm wrestling. Others came up with swordplay, juggling, racing, or playing a game like chess or checkers, but each was ruled out as hard to bring about or unfair to one or the other limb. It was Tongue once gain, after borrowing thought from Brain, who came up with a simple solution. Each set of organs would come up with a challenge, in turns. Arms and Legs agreed.

The contest took place in a clearing in the forest, near a river. All organs were on maximum alert for danger or anything that might catch the body by surprise, now that its organs were engaged in internal struggle. Eyes scanned far and wide for the tiniest of dangers from whatever distance; Ears primed themselves to hear the slightest sound from whatever distance; Nose cleared its nostrils,

the better to detect the scent of any danger that escaped the watchful Eyes and the listening Ears; and Tongue was ready to shout and scream “Danger!�

Wind spread news of the contest to the four corners of the forest, the water and the air. Four-legged animals were among the first to gather, many of the big ones holding green branches to show they came in peace. It was a colorful crowd of Leopard, Cheetah, Lion, Rhino, Hyena, Elephant, Giraffe, Camel, long-horned Cow and short-horned Buffalo, Antelope, Gazelle, Hare, Mole and Rat. Water-dwellers Hippo, Fish and Crocodile spread their upper parts on the banks, leaving the rest in the river. The two-leggeds, Ostrich, Guinea Fowl and Peacock, flapped their wings in excitement; birds chirped from the trees; Cricket sang all the time. Spider, Worm, Centipede and Millipede crawled on the ground or trees. Chameleon walked stealthily, carefully, taking its time, while Lizard ran about, never settling down on one spot. Monkey, Chimpanzee and Gorilla jumped from branch to branch.

Even the trees and the bush swayed gently from side to side, bowed, and then stood still in turns.

Mouth opened the contest with a song: We do this to be happy We do this to be happy We do this to be happy Because we all Come from one nature

Arms and Legs swore to accept the outcome gracefully – no tantrums, threats of boycott, strikes or go-slow.

Arms issued the first challenge: They threw a piece of wood on the ground. The leg, left or right or in combination, was to pick up the piece of wood from the ground and throw it. The two legs could consult each other at any time in the contest and deploy their toes, individually or collectively, in any order to effect their mission. They tried to turn it over, push it; they tried all sorts of combinations, but they could not pick it up properly. And as for moving it, the best they could do was kick it a few inches away. Seeing this, Fingers borrowed sound from the mouth and laughed and laughed. Arms, the challenger, paraded themselves as in a beauty contest, showing off their slim looks, and then in different combinations picked up the piece of wood. They threw it far into the forest, eliciting a collective sigh of admiration from the contestants and spectators. They displayed other skills: They picked tiny pieces of sand from a bowl of rice; they threaded needles; they made little small pulleys for moving heavier wood; made some spears and threw

them quite far, moves and acts that the toes could only dream about. Legs could only sit there and marvel at the display of dexterity and flexibility of their slim cousins.

The arms of the spectators clapped thunder in admiration and solidarity with fellow arms, which upset the legs a great deal. But they were not about to concede: Even as they sat there looking a little bit glum, their big toes drooling little circles on the sand, they were trying to figure out a winning challenge.

At last, it was the turn of Legs and Toes to issue a challenge. Theirs, they said, was simple. Hands should carry the whole body from one part of the circle to the other. What a stupid challenge, thought the arrogant fingers. It was a sight to see. Everything about the body was upside-down. Hands touched the ground; the eyes were close to the ground, their angles of vision severely restricted by their proximity to the ground; dust entered the nose, causing it to sneeze; Legs and Toes floated in the air. Nyayo juu, the spectators shouted and sang playfully.

Nyayo Nyayo juu* Hakuna matata Fuata Nyayo Hakuna matata Turukeni angani But their attention was fixed on the hands and arms.

Organs that only a few minutes before were displaying an incredible array of skills could hardly move a yard. After a few steps, the hands cried out in pain, the arms staggered, wobbled, and let the body fall. They rested and then made another attempt. This time they tried to spread out the fingers, the better to hold the ground, but only the thumbs were able to stretch. They tried cartwheels, but this move was disqualified because its completion involved the legs as well. It was the turn of the toes to laugh. They borrowed thick throatal tones from Mouth to distinguish their laugh from the squeaky tones the fingers had used. Hearing the scorn, the arms were very angry, and they made one last desperate attempt to carry the body. They did not manage a step. Exhausted, the hands and fingers gave up. The legs were happy to display their athletic prowess: They marked time, trotted, ran, made a few high jumps, long jumps, without once letting the body fall. All the feet of the spectators stamped the ground in approval and solidarity. Arms raised their hands to protest this unsportslimbship, conveniently forgetting that they had started the game.

But all of them, including the spectators, noted something strange about the arms: The thumbs which

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had stretched out when the hands were trying to carry the body remained separated from the other fingers. The rival organs were about to resume their laughter when they noted something else: Far from the separated thumb making the hands less efficient, it enhanced their crasping and grasping power. What’s this? Deformity transformed into the power of forming!

The debate among the organs to decide the winner went on for five days, the number of fingers and toes on each limb. But try as they could, they were not able to declare a clear winner. Each set of limbs was best at what they did best; none could do without the other. There began a session of philosophical speculation: What was the body anyway, they all asked, and they realized the body was them all together; they were into each other.

Every organ had to function well for all to function well.

But to prevent such a contest in the future and to prevent their getting in each other’s way, it was decided by all the organs that thenceforth the body would walk upright, feet firmly on the ground and arms up in the air.

The body was happy with the decision, but it would allow children to walk on all fours so as not to forget their origins. They divided tasks: The legs would carry the body, but once they got to the destination, the hands would do all the work that needed making or holding tools. While the legs and feet did the heavy duty of carrying, the hands reached out and used their skills to work the environment and ensure that food reached the mouth. Mouth, or rather its teeth, would chew it and send it down the throat to the tummy. Tummy would squeeze all the goodness and then pour it into its system of canals, through which the goodness would be distributed to all the nooks and crooks of the body. Then Tummy would take the used material into its sewage system, from which the body would deposit it in the open fields or bury it under the soil to enrich it. Plants would bear fruit; hands would pick some of it and put it in the mouth. Oh, yes, the circle of life.

Even games and entertainments were divided accordingly: Singing, laughing and talking were left to the mouth; running and soccer largely left to the legs; while baseball and basketball were reserved for the hands, except that the legs were to do the running. In athletics, the legs had all the field to themselves, largely. The clear division of labor made the human body a formidable bio machine, outwitting even the largest of animals in what it could achieve in quantity and quality.

However, the organs of the body realized that the permanent arrangement they had arrived at could still bring conflict. The head being up there might make it feel

that it was better than the feet that touched the ground or that it was the master and the organs below it were servants only. They stressed that in terms of power, the head and whatever was below it were equal. To underline this, the organs made sure that the pain and joy of any one of the organs was felt by all. They warned the mouth that when saying “my this and that,” it was talking as the whole body and not as the sole owner.

They sang: In our body There’s no servant In our body There’s no servant We serve one another Us for Us We serve one another Us for Us We serve one another The tongue our voice Hold me and I hold you We build a healthy body Hold me and I hold you We build a healthy body Beauty is unity Together we work For a healthy body Together we work For a healthy body Unity is our power

This became the “All Body Anthem.” The body sings it to this day, and this is what tells the difference between humans and animals, or those that rejected the upright revolution.

Despite what they saw, the four-legged animals would have none of this revolution. The singing business was ridiculous. The mouth was made to eat and not to sing.

They formed nature’s conservative party and stuck to their ways, never changing their habits.

When humans learn from the net-work of organs, they do well; but when they see the body and the head as parties at war, one being atop of the other, they come close to their animal cousins who rejected the upright revolution.

*Up with legs There’s nothing to worry about Follow the legs There’s nothing to worry about Let’s fly in the sky Reprinted with permission. First published in 2016 by the Jalada Africa Trust in its inaugural Translation Issue.

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My Favorite

Read

Looking for some additions to your summer reading list? For this special literary issue, UCI Magazine asked several well-read Anteaters to tell us about their most-cherished titles.

Megan Cole

Editor-in-chief, New University What is your favorite book?

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion Why? Joan Didion’s writing style is completely inimitable, but she’s always great to read for inspiration. I go back to this book all the time. I admire the way Didion writes about California in this collection. Even 50 years after the book was written, in the midst of the late-’60s counterculture movement, her observations about our state are timeless.

When did you first read it?

Fittingly, I read it all the way through for the first time last year, on a reporting trip to San Francisco.

.....................................................

Howard Gillman Chancellor

What is your favorite book?

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy Why? It’s flawless and timeless and captures an extraordinary range of human experience with unparalleled empathy for the human condition.

When did you first read it?

In my late 30s, with just about enough life behind me to appreciate Tolstoy’s accomplishment

.....................................................

Shanaz Langson

Trustee, UCI Foundation What is your favorite book?

The first two installments of the Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants and Winter of the World, by Ken Follett Why? I loved the first two volumes for how they depicted the globe’s interconnectivity and shared the destinies of people from the five countries in the story.

When did you first read them?

I read them both in 2014.

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Gary Lynch

Professor of psychiatry & human behavior What is your favorite book?

Ulysses, by James Joyce Why? Nothing else quite captures for me how a sense of mystery enriches the human experience. I go back to it for a jolt of perspective, excitement and optimism when the daily grind starts draining color from the world.

When did you first read it?

I first read Ulysses in college – after that, it was a different novel each time I picked it up. Magic!

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Lorelei Tanji

University librarian What is your favorite book?

The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui’s Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory,

by Julie Checkoway

What is your favorite book?

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Why? This book tells the true story of a teacher who trained several students, who were children of Hawaiian sugar cane plantation workers, to become world-class swimmers by swimming in irrigation ditches. The book describes the discrimination, racism, fear and economic hardships that immigrants and local people faced during the period before, during and after WWII. So many of these issues are still relevant today.

Why? Reading this book is like sharing time in person with one of the most interesting Americans who has ever lived.

Imagine you had the chance to have dinner with Benjamin Franklin, and after dinner you asked him to tell some of his experiences and the life lessons learned.

When did you first read it?

I read it last year, after Alison Regan, UCI’s assistant university librarian for public services, gave me a copy.

Both of my parents were born in Hawaii, so this book was particularly meaningful. After I read it, I passed it along to my mother. All good books should be shared!

.....................................................

Jack Langson

Trustee, UCI Foundation

When did you first read it?

In my youth

Spring 2017

17

Chapter and Verse

UCI’s renowned M.F.A. program in creative writing continues to churn out heavyweight talent

By Roy Rivenburg

I

Photos by Steve Zylius

t’s like attending your own funeral, one former student says: “Everyone is talking about you like you’re not there – and you can’t respond.”

Another compares the experience to standing naked while classmates examine your body with a magnifying glass.

“A wonderful crucible” is the metaphor used by a third alumnus.

What they’re describing is the half-century-old ritual that anchors UCI’s storied M.F.A. program in fiction and poetry writing. Each week, a dozen students file into a small classroom and cluster around a conference table.

Then the siege begins. Joined by an instructor, the aspiring scribes meticulously dissect each other’s prose or verse.

“It’s no baby shower,” says Michelle Latiolais, a professor of English who graduated from the program in 1988 and now co-directs its fiction workshops. “When you walk into that room, there’s a force field in the air.

It’s intense.”

Over the years, the charged atmosphere has transformed a variety of students – a professional Frisbee player, a Vietnam vet, a forensic scientist and a dyslexic locomotive engineer, among others – into literary luminaries. Three have won Pulitzer Prizes. Some

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have conquered best-seller charts or landed movie and television deals.

The lineup includes “Game of Thrones” co-creator David Benioff, poet Yusef Komunyakaa and novelists Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones), Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt) and Richard Ford (Independence Day).

“UC Irvine has nurtured a wide array of America’s most recognized and most accomplished writers,” says David L. Ulin, former book editor at the Los Angeles Times.

“It’s a great and essential program.”

But M.F.A. officials play down any focus on their famous alumni. “It’s not that we don’t love all of them,” Latiolais says. “But we have so many new writers of note who deserve attention.”

Showcasing Future Wordsmiths As a lazy cat snoozes near the window of a tiny Long Beach bookshop, a woman in a flower-print dress reads aloud from a manuscript in which “particles hover in the afternoon light” and youngsters shed tears “like sprinklers.” When she finishes, a sandy-haired poet who grew up in an Arkansas religious sect takes her place.

While a crowd of three dozen listens intently, he recites a piece about Beach Boys maestro Brian Wilson enduring a nervous breakdown. Next, a former psychotherapist weaves a narrative that ends with surgeons cutting open her father to remove a blood clot.

The readings are part of a UCI series in which M.F.A. writers share their works in progress at public venues around Southern California.

Sometimes, agents drop by to scout for fresh talent, but “we tell students to resist any offers until after graduation,” says fiction program co-director Ron Carlson. “If they concentrate on their writing, they’ll have a stronger chance of survival later.”

Latiolais agrees. “Some schools bring in agents and editors,” she says. “We purposely avoid any marketing talk until a student’s third year, when we send them to Squaw Valley,” a venerable writers conference near Lake Tahoe. Mystery writer Oakley Hall, who helmed UCI’s M.F.A. fiction division from 1969 to 1990, co-founded the Squaw Valley group.

“That’s where I got my agent,” says journalist and author Hector Tobar, M.F.A. ’95, whose best-selling account of Chile’s mining disaster miracle, Deep Down Dark, inspired a movie. “I owe my entire career as a writer to UCI.”

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Novelists Michelle Latiolais and Ron Carlson co-direct the Programs in Writing’s fiction division.

Surfers and Scholars When UCI rolled out its graduate writing experiment in 1965, only about a dozen such programs existed nationwide. Today there are nearly 400.

Irvine was ahead of the pack, says David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, a national group that promotes college creative writing instruction. It was another two or three decades before the concept really caught on, he says.

Credit goes to Hazard Adams, UCI’s founding English department chair. Bucking academic tradition, “I thought the study of literature ought to involve some effort at understanding the writer’s point of view,” Adams recalls.

So he offered a creative writing minor for undergrads and an M.F.A. for professionals. To shepherd both, he hired novelist and short-story virtuoso James B. Hall, who had mentored One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey and established a creative writing venture at the University of Oregon.

The first batch of grad students included a foreign correspondent-turned-Surfer magazine editor, a stage actress and a Welsh immigrant who once wrote speeches for a U.S. senator. The initial curriculum required classes

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“UC Irvine has nurtured a wide array of America’s most recognized and most accomplished writers.” in music, art or dance, plus a final exam on literary history and theory. Both elements were eventually shelved, as were a playwriting option and plans to add specializations in television, movie and technical writing.

Some early alumni went on to publish novels, history books and poetry collections of mild renown. Several embarked on careers as college professors or filmmakers.

“Somehow the fact that we were fledgling didn’t keep us from getting applicants who were quite good,” says James McMichael, a founding English professor who co-directed the M.F.A. program’s poetry workshop from 1969 to 2011. (Before that, poets and novelists usually studied together.)

Notable Plot Points in M.F.A. Writing Program History

1965: English department chair

Hazard Adams and novelist James B. Hall establish the UC system’s first M.F.A. creative writing program, at UCI. A handful of students enroll.

....................................

1967:

Dora Beale Polk, former speechwriter for a U.S. senator, becomes the program’s first graduate.

Three others in her cohort finish in subsequent years. Polk goes on to teach creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and publish mass-market romance novels, poetry and a California history book.

....................................

1969:

After James B. Hall departs for a provost job at UC Santa Cruz, the M.F.A. writing workshop is split into two branches: poetry, led by founding professor of English James McMichael and poet Charles Wright; and fiction, led by author Oakley Hall, who was later joined by founding professor of English Donald Heiney (aka MacDonald Harris).

....................................

Still, nobody achieved stardom right away. “There isn’t always a correlation between who’s the most celebrated and who writes the best,” McMichael says. Even Pulitzer winner Ford, who graduated in 1970, didn’t have a breakout novel until 1986’s The Sportswriter.

Then lightning struck. In March 1987, student Chabon’s thesis project, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, sold for $155,000, a record sum for a novice novel. Overnight, applications soared and Anteater fever swept the publishing world, opening doors for M.F.A. alumni old and new.

To this day, “saying that you went to UCI in a cover letter is often enough to ensure that an editor or publisher will give your manuscript a look,” says Michael Andreasen, M.F.A. ’07, whose debut short-story collection, The Sea Beast Takes a Lover, is due out next year (and is excerpted on page 36).

1970: Future Pulitzer Prize-

‘Flawless Parodies’ and Dickinson’s Dictionary

....................................

An “avenging unicorn” action figure – with a plastic mime impaled on its horn – sits on a shelf in fiction professor Latiolais’ book-crammed office as she and Carlson discuss the nuts and bolts of UCI’s writing academy.

Every year, several hundred people vie for the program’s 12 open slots: six in fiction, six in poetry. “We look for writing that has reach and fire,” Carlson says.

“And different voices,” Latiolais chimes in, explaining UCI’s aversion to producing authors who sound alike, a problem at some other campuses.

Novelist Bender, a 1998 grad whose prose has been likened to “Hemingway on an acid trip,” is a

winning novelist Richard Ford graduates.

1977:

Prose poet Killarney Clary, whose first collection becomes an international sensation, graduates.

....................................

1984: Kem Nunn, M.F.A. ’84, writes Tapping the Source, an acclaimed surf noir novel.

....................................

1987:

While still a student, Michael Chabon sells his thesis for a record-setting amount for a first novel, catapulting UCI’s program to national fame. Applications double the next year.

....................................

1992: Newsweek says UCI has

“the hottest writing program in the country.”

M.F.A. students launch Faultline, a literary and art journal.

poster child for the emphasis on diverse styles. “There was real appreciation and support for my weirder writing, the writing I thought would be dismissed,” she says.

That support is augmented with a financial package that covers tuition and pays students $20,000 a year in exchange for teaching one undergraduate writing course per quarter.

The benefit is more than monetary, says Walker Pfost, a newly minted poetry alumnus: “Teaching forces you to articulate what makes a good poem or story. It was hugely formative for my own writing.”

Throughout their studies, M.F.A. students learn to scrutinize words and phrases backward, forward and inside-out. For example, Michael Ryan, who directs the poetry division, keeps a copy of the 1828 Noah Webster dictionary used by Emily Dickinson so he can more precisely interpret her work during lessons.

“We once spent an entire quarter, in class, analyzing fewer than 100 lines of published verse, diagramming sentences and counting how many times each part of speech appeared,” says Sarah Cohen, a 2009 poetry alum. “The writing workshop applied the same laser-like focus to our own works, so that by the end of two years, we could produce flawless parodies of one another’s styles.”

Originally, students were supposed to earn diplomas at the end of their second year. But as time wore on, officials added three quarters. The idea was to give folks more time to polish their thesis project – a novel, short-story collection or book of poems. During the extra months, students continue to teach but no longer attend M.F.A. workshops or classes. The revised format paid off, says McMichael: “Remarkable things often happen in that third year.”

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1994: Poet Yusef Komunyakaa,

M.F.A. ’80, wins the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Neon Vernacular.

....................................

1995: Whitney Otto ’87, M.F.A.

’90, sees her best-seller How to Make an American Quilt adapted into a film.

....................................

1996: Richard Ford, M.F.A. ’70, collects a Pulitzer in fiction for Independence Day.

....................................

2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, M.F.A. ’87, wins the Pulitzer in fiction.

....................................

2002: The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, M.F.A. ’98, debuts as one of the best-selling first novels in American publishing history. A film version is released in 2009.

....................................

2007: The Atlantic ranks UCI’s M.F.A. writing program among the nation’s top 10.

Bonfires, Proms and Mr. Grumpy Grammar Keeping enrollment small inspires family-style bonds and traditions – sometimes literally. A few students have married classmates. More often, they form lasting friendships and networking ties. Alumni frequently drop by for school social events.

“I still feel very connected,” says novelist Charmaine Craig, M.F.A. ’99, a onetime film and television actress who served as a model for Disney’s animated Pocahontas character.

Touched by Latiolais’ support for her new book (Miss Burma, excerpted on page 27), Craig adds, “It’s so warming to have that 18 years out of the program.”

Incoming class members are initiated to the clan each fall with picnics and retreats. “My first year,

....................................

2011: Novelist and screenwriter

David Benioff, M.F.A. ’99, co-creates HBO’s “Game of Thrones” series.

....................................

2012: “The Art of Waiting,” a

first-person essay on infertility by Belle Boggs, M.F.A. ’02, goes viral and later appears in book form.

....................................

2016: Yusef Komunyakaa is

named state poet by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

IFC Films releases “Certain Women,” based on short stories by Maile Meloy, M.F.A. ’00.

....................................

2017:

Pretend I’m Dead author Jen Beagin, M.F.A. ’11, wins a Whiting Award for emerging writers. Past recipients include Danzy Senna, M.F.A. ’96, and poetry workshop professors James McMichael (emeritus) and Michael Ryan.

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M.F.A. poetry workshops are led by professor Amy Gerstler and poetry program director Michael Ryan.

we went to Ojai and stayed in a big house together and bonded with late-night dance parties and chats,” says 2016 poetry grad Liz Meley, who describes good verse as “a mixture of fact and magic” (see page 40 for her poem “Winter Religion”).

At Halloween, students write ghost stories, read them around a bonfire at Huntington Beach, then toss them into the crackling flames, says Rebecca Schultz, who expects to finish her fiction degree this year.

Perhaps the most entertaining ritual is “prom,” an end-of-the-year costume party and roast of the graduating class. “One year, the theme was hubris, so people wore crowns and gold glitter,” says Pfost (whose writing appears on page 37).

The extracurricular friendships sometimes help in the classroom, softening the sting of workshop critiques. “You realize the person

taking apart your story is doing so because he or she cares about you and wants it to be the best it can be,” Schultz says.

Even so, the process can fray nerves. To cushion some of the blows, poetry professor Ryan shifts into an alternate persona, “Mr. Grumpy Grammar,” when pointing out syntax errors in student verse. But many learn to value the feedback. “Sometimes the most useful criticism is also the harshest,” Andreasen says. Jill Kato, a third-year fiction apprentice, says, “Once you get over the initial pain, it always makes your piece better.”

Instructor Carlson concurs. “The discussions are very honest and very serious,” he says. “By the end of three hours, everyone usually has their equilibrium back.”

But just in case, Latiolais adds, “we always go to the pub afterward.”

“When you walk into that room, there’s a force field in the air. It’s intense.”

A Faculty Who’s Who Behind every great writer is … often another great writer. One key to the prowess of UCI’s M.F.A. program is the caliber of its faculty and visiting lecturers.

The fiction professor hall of fame starts with founding director James B. Hall, a wordmeister whose pre-UCI protégés included Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion. In 1969, the torch passed to Western and mystery writer Oakley Hall, an ex-Marine whose most famous books (The Downhill Racers and Warlock) were turned into movies. He was later joined by founding English professor Donald Heiney, a novelist who wrote under the pseudonym MacDonald Harris.

They were followed by Australian author Thomas Keneally, whose Booker Prize-winning Schindler’s Ark inspired Steven Spielberg’s film, English-born writer Judith Grossman, and acclaimed novelist and biographer Geoffrey Wolff. The current fiction regime consists of Michelle Latiolais, a 1988 M.F.A. alumna whose debut novel, Even Now, won a gold medal from the Commonwealth Club of California (putting her in the company of John Steinbeck and Ray Bradbury), and Ron Carlson, whose short stories have been adapted into a film (2008’s “Keith”) and featured in Esquire, in The New Yorker and on National Public Radio. Latiolais began teaching at UCI in 1997, co-directing the fiction branch with Wolff until he retired in 2006 and was succeeded by Carlson, the former chief of Arizona State University’s creative writing program.

The M.F.A. poetry program also began under James B. Hall, then spun off into a separate wing piloted by poets Charles Wright, who later won a Pulitzer Prize and became the U.S. poet laureate in 2014, and James McMichael, a founding professor of English and National Book Award finalist who has been honored with multiple awards and fellowships. After Wright departed in 1983, future poet laureate of New Hampshire Cynthia Huntington filled the gap until 1990, when Michael Ryan came on board. Ryan’s credits include teaching stints at Princeton and the University of Iowa, as well as five poetry books, a memoir, an autobiography and a slew of awards. His most recent poetry collection is This Morning. In 2011, McMichael retired and was replaced by Amy Gerstler, whose poetry, nonfiction and journalism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The American Poetry Review. Her poetry anthology Bitter Angel won a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Rounding out that lineup, UCI has attracted a stellar parade of visiting lecturers. Ragtime author E.L. Doctorow, who arrived in 1969 and finished The Book of Daniel while teaching here, was one of the first fiction instructors. Others include P.D. James, Ann Patchett, Ann Beattie, Wilton Barnhardt and Robert Stone. The visiting poet roster began in an Iowa bar, where James B. Hall offered Wright, a recent University of Iowa writing grad, $3,500 to spend a year in Irvine.

“I said I wouldn’t do it for less than $4,000,” says Wright, whose visit evolved into co-directing UCI’s poetry writing program. The poets-in-residence list has since grown to feature the likes of Robert Pinsky, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, C.K. Williams, Galway Kinnell and Carol Muske-Dukes.

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An Eclectic Showcase Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Faultline is UCI’s well-regarded literary and art journal. M.F.A. fiction and poetry students edit the magazine, which features the work of new and established writers and artists from UCI and beyond. Launched in 1992 with such contributors as novelist Thomas Keneally, artist Richard Wyatt Jr. and poet Thomas Lux, Faultline was the successor to a string of campus literary publications.

The granddaddy of UCI highbrow journals was Synapse, which debuted in 1966 as an independent forum for poetry, fiction, one-act plays, essays, photography and artwork, including pieces by M.F.A. writers. Synapse stopped firing in the early 1970s. Later Anteater literary magazines included Prodigal Sun, published from 1980 to 1982, and Point West, which appeared on and off between 1983 and 1989.

Shown here (clockwise from upper right) are Faultline covers from 2014, 2013 and 2012.

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176 pages, full color, hardcover

Bright Past. Brilliant Future.

UCI’s 50th Anniversary Book

Who said in 1965? “The traditional library is dead as the dodo.”

Find out in the pages of UCI: Bright Past. Brilliant Future.

Donate $50 or more to UCI and receive your complimentary copy of this beautifully illustrated coffee-table book featuring the campus’s colorful history and vision for the future.

To donate and receive your copy of UCI: Bright Past. Brilliant Future., visit uci.edu/50Book.

University of California, Irvine Shine brighter.

.edu Contributions exceeding the value of the book ($29.95) may be tax-deductible.

The Written Word

S

ince its founding in 1965, UCI’s renowned Programs in Writing has been inspiring and nurturing the next generation of American writers. In that time, more than 500 students have earned the prestigious M.F.A. degree in creative writing, and the majority of graduates have gone on to publish

volumes of poetry, novels, short stories or nonfiction books.

On the 15 pages that follow, we are pleased to share six excerpts from new or upcoming works of fiction by M.F.A. alumni – from Max Winter’s debut novel, Exes, a study of grief and love in the aftermath of suicide, to Charmaine Craig’s Miss Burma, based on the life of her mother, a beauty queen and actress who became a rebel leader for the Karen people in the country known today as Myanmar.

You will also find five poems from members of the class of 2016, along with a seminal piece by Pulitzer Prize recipient Yusef Komunyakaa, M.F.A. ’80, on the former U.S. Army correspondent’s first look at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (accompanied by keen introductory insights from Michael Ryan, director of UCI’s poetry program).

For further reading, an online compilation of many of the novels, poetry collections and nonfiction books published by M.F.A. writing program alumni is available at http://sites.uci.edu/mfapublications.

We would like to extend our thanks to the poets, authors and publishers who granted UCI Magazine permission to reprint these works and hope you enjoy them.

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Miss Burma

By Charmaine Craig

A beautiful and poignant story of one family during some of the most violent and turbulent years of world history, Miss Burma is a powerful novel of love and war, colonialism and ethnicity, and the ties of blood. Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be, and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom.

K

hin had seen him before, the young officer (an Anglo-Indian?). She had noticed his hands, strong and clenched by his sides, and the restless way he charged from one end of the seaport to the other, as if he were trying to expend something combustible stored within him. One afternoon, she had watched as he’d ridden a launch out toward a ship anchored in the bay; he’d stood at the bow, leaning into the wind, arms crossed over his chest. Was he so sure of his balance? she wondered. Or did some part of him hope to tempt fate, as she sometimes darkly did when she ventured out to the very edge of this jetty, where she stood now, in September 1939, with the boy who was her charge.

She had come to Akyab four months earlier to work as a nanny for a Karen judge, who made a practice of hiring people of their own persecuted race, or so he said. His six-year-old son often drew her out to the port, where from the jetty they could look out over the fitful water and watch the beautiful seaplanes landing and taking off.

She loved the planes as much as the boy did, loved their silent sputtering grace—though her love was distressed.

Sometimes she saw a plane swerve and imagined it falling like a bird shot out of the sky.

The boy pointed up to the silvery body of a plane ascending toward a cloud, and she shuddered, drew him sharply from the rotting end of the planks giving way to the sea.

“Time to go,” she told him.

“I want to watch until we can’t see it anymore,” he said.

He hadn’t been told that Japan was at war with China, that Germany had invaded Poland, or that France and Britain had declared war on Germany. His innocence made her feel guilty, as though by encouraging his fidelity to the planes she were somehow betraying him. But she was being silly, she knew, imagining that these planes were doomed. “War will never come here,” the sessions judge had told her, after listening to his nightly English radio

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program. “It’s Malaya the Japs want.

There’s no penetrating our territory but by sea, and when it comes to the sea the British are unsinkable.”

“I have a surprise for you at home,” she lied to the boy. She shielded her eyes from the glare and tried to give him her most convincing smile.

The boy studied her for a moment.

“What surprise?” he said.

“I’ll tell you when we’re there.”

There was no surprise, of course, and as they stumbled back toward land over the splintered planks (as she stumbled away from the unbidden image of her body slipping into the shivering waves), she kept her eyes on her feet and searched her mind for some small treat the boy might deem acceptably unforeseen.

He was already beginning to doubt her reliability. Perhaps the maid had bought a few cream puffs from the Indian who came around on Wednesdays.

She was halfway to the shore again when she looked up and saw the officer watching her intently from the other side of the wooden gate leading to the jetty. His white hat cocked to one side, he leaned against the rickety gate as though to block her path back to land. Even across the distance, she could see he didn’t hesitate to scrutinize her hips, her hair. If any other man had stared at her in such a way, virtually eating her with his eyes, she would have— well, she would have laughed.

The officer suddenly shouted at her, coming out with a confusion of English words of which she clearly caught only “not”— something he said with great emphasis and at least twice. He was surely instructing her to steer clear of the jetty (the way he further cocked his head and pointed away from the water told her as much), and his loudness and directness should have offended her;

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yet there was something mellifluous, some kindness, in his baritone voice.

She stopped five feet from the gate, taking the boy’s warm hand in hers, and steadying herself against a fresh assault of wind and sea spray.

The officer’s gaze narrowed now on her eyes, and she felt herself blush as she absorbed the full force of his face—the heavy jaw, the mouth too full to be truly masculine, the ears that stuck out beneath the brim of his hat. There was nothing extraordinary about his version of handsomeness, about his large features (though he did have something of the elephant about him!); there was nothing unusual about his authoritative claiming of the port (all the officers seemed to claim Burma, as if they were not also subjects of His Majesty the King of England).

But she had to admit that he was more striking than she had imagined him from afar. What was so very unforeseen (what she must have noticed without noticing) was the expression of meekness in his eyes, markedly in contrast to his obvious physical strength. Even the smile

that he now leveled at her own lips, and that she unwillingly returned, seemed aggrieved.

“Are we in trouble, nanny?” the boy asked. “Perhaps,” she said quietly.

Again, the officer began to speak, to express something to her in English, while beside them a seaplane revved its engine.

“Look!” the boy said, pointing to the plane that started to skip over the waves.

For a moment all of them stood in mute wonderment, watching the plane lift off into the vivid blue sky, where it banked and peaceably headed northwest, as though a war were not raging somewhere beyond the horizon.

“Beautiful,” she heard the officer say over the whistling wind.

He had stepped back from the gate. And when their eyes met again, she felt so embarrassed that she yanked the boy forward, yanked open the gate, and hurried past the officer and his spontaneously stricken face.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from Miss Burma,

by Charmaine Craig (Grove Press, 2017).

Charmaine Craig, M.F.A. ’99, is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. A former actor in film and television, she studied literature at Harvard College. Her UCI graduate thesis project, the novel The Good Men, was a national best-seller translated into six languages.

If there is such a thing as a famous contemporary poem, this is it. Political poetry is notoriously difficult to write well because the writer already knows what s/he thinks of the subject, and these personal opinions often preclude discovery for the writer and, therefore, for the reader. But Yusef Komunyakaa, M.F.A. ’80, understands the kind of poem he’s writing here and plays against the genre’s inclination to be tendentious by welcoming the oppositions and self-corrections within the speaker, from “I’m stone. I’m flesh” to the poem’s stirring, dramatic final sentence: “In the black mirror/ a woman’s trying to erase names:/ No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.” As he faces Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he manages to speak movingly and articulately about the charged subjects of race and war by allowing us into a profound inner drama in which all feelings are shadowy, elusive and ambiguous – except grief, which, in vivid contrast, is absolute. To fully experience what you learn and feel through the agency of this remarkable poem, I suggest you listen to Komunyakaa himself read it on the Poetry Foundation website: http://bit.ly/ucimag_spring2017_FacingIt.

Michael Ryan Director, M.F.A. Program in Poetry

Facing It

By Yusef Komunyakaa My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite.

I said I wouldn’t dammit: No tears.

I’m stone. I’m flesh.

My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way – the stone lets me go.

I turn that way – I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference.

I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.

I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash.

Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall.

Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s wings cutting across my stare.

The sky. A plane in the sky.

A white vet’s image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window.

He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Reprinted with permission from Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, by Yusef Komunyakaa (Wesleyan University Press, 2001).

Yusef Komunyakaa, M.F.A. ’80, was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. He served in the U.S. Army as a correspondent during the Vietnam War and was managing editor of the Southern Cross newspaper, for which he earned a Bronze Star. He received a B.A. from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs on the GI Bill and an M.A. in writing from Colorado State University. Komunyakaa has published 16 books of poetry, including Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems, which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. He has taught at the University of New Orleans, as well as at Indiana University and Princeton University, and is currently Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s graduate creative writing program.

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New People

By Danzy Senna

New People is a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America. Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, “King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom.” They’ve even landed a starring role in a documentary about “new people” like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. But everything isn’t perfect. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

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filmmaker arrives at their apartment that weekend to interview them at home. She’s making a documentary about “new people.”

That is actually the working title of her film: New People. Her name is Elsa. She has frizzy blond hair and golden brown skin and green eyes. She stands in the foyer, glittering with snowdrops. In her strong teeth Maria can see the Scandinavian half of her heritage. She introduces the others she has brought with her – an Asian-American cameraman named Ansel with hair down to his waist and a white woman with a buzz cut named Heidi. They crowd in the hallway, damp and smiling.

Elsa is older than Maria and Khalil. She is well into her forties. Maria does the math. This means she would have been born in the 1950s, the Era of Mulatto Martyrs – which Maria knows from the history books was a whole other scene. Maria and Khalil were each born in 1970, the beginning of the Common Era. Elsa says that when she met Khalil at a party uptown, she knew he was perfect for the film. He wanted Maria to meet Elsa before they committed themselves to it.

Khalil and Maria sit on the couch now while Elsa’s crew hovers in the background, filming their conversation. Elsa wants them to talk naturally, to be spontaneous. They tell jokes and share stories they have told before, stories that already feel like lore. His parents met at Freedom Summer and Maria’s mother was once a member of SNCC. Khalil says: Sometimes she teases me about acting Jewish. You know, like my rabbinical hand gestures.

Sometimes I tease her about acting WASPy. The way she says “duvet” instead of comforter. We’re like a Woody Allen movie, with melanin.

Elsa scribbles notes. After the interview she and her crew film Maria and Khalil walking hand in hand through Prospect Park. It is only late afternoon, the snow has melted, and it is nearly dark. The longer Elsa films, the more Maria and Khalil have to pretend they’re having a conversation. Her mind is elsewhere. She is tired of being

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on camera already. She wants to be back in the library under the artificial lights with her papers spread out around her, the headphones playing the children’s voices in Guyana, singing, Jonestown, a mystery about to be solved.

But back at the apartment, Elsa and her crew stick around. They film Maria and Khalil chopping vegetables in their kitchenette, making a Moroccan tagine while Ornette Coleman plays on the stereo. Afterward, the couple signs forms agreeing to be in the movie. Khalil seems happy about it and Elsa, grinning, tells them how thrilled she is to have them on board. She says they are exactly the subjects she has been looking for.

Maria goes through the motions, smiles along, but she is aware of a pain in her chest, a tightness to her breathing.

Acheiropoieta

By Alex Dupree The knot of the oak tree, the burnt toast, the tortilla, things keep generating images. Uncast shadows keep appearing.

A hurricane destroyed the bridge, now pilgrims gather in the clearing. Things keep speaking for themselves.

Even after fascination, after we’ve gone, ungraven images spontaneously keep appearing.

The woodgrain, the oil slick, the cloth with godly likenesses are leering. Things keep speaking for themselves.

Even our bodies stupefied still move unbidden, persevering.

Things keep speaking for themselves. Uncast shadows keep appearing.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from New People,

by Danzy Senna (Riverhead Books, expected publication in August 2017).

Danzy Senna, M.F.A. ’96, is the Los Angelesbased author of five works of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Caucasia, which she wrote while at UCI, was a national best-seller and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her other books include the novel Symptomatic, the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

A Personal History and the short-story collection You Are Free. A recipient of the 2002 Whiting Award and the 2017 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Senna has had her work published in Vogue, The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Alex Dupree, M.F.A. ’16, is a musician and teacher living in Los Angeles. He earned a B.A. in English at the University of Texas and is a lecturer in UCI’s Composition Program.

He won Southern Poetry Review’s 2016 Guy Owen Prize, and his work is forthcoming in Field magazine.

Spring 2017

31

Exes

By Max Winter

For Clay Blackall, a lifelong resident of Providence, Rhode Island, the place has become an obsession. Here live the only people who can explain what happened to his brother, Eli, whose suicide haunts this heartbreaking, hilarious novel-in-fragments. Full of brainy detours and irreverent asides, Exes is a powerful investigation of grief, love and our deeply held yet ever-changing notions of home.

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y landlord didn’t want to call the cops.

For five years he’d been shuffling me from empty place to empty place while he fixed up the thirty or so eyesores my grandfather sold him. He felt bad about my brother, but bad only gets you so far. Smith Hill was the end of the line. Two babies had fallen out of windows that year alone, and now a guy was walking around with a sword. If you touched the stove and the refrigerator at the same time, you got a shock that felt like a punch in the heart. I’d wet my hands and grab hold and come to in another room.

I told him I needed one more month – for Eli – and he just shook his head.

“I could get six bills for this place, easy,” he said. “Seven even.” He cracked a window, zipped his jacket. He went to open the kitchen cabinets, which held what one expects to find in kitchen cabinets, but also other things.

“Five years is a long time,” one of us added.

“Ah, hell,” my landlord said – in a different voice. He was breathing through his nose, for one thing. “Your grandpa used to tell me I was like a Jew. ‘Luongo,’ he would say, ‘in my eyes, you’re a Jew.’ And from him, I took it. ‘I’ll take it,’ I’d say, like it was the first time he told me.”

His eyes were wet, like men’s sometimes get near the end.

He toed an unplugged cord to see where it led and shook his head when he did. “Jesus, Clay, this is your icebox. You were supposed to take care of things, keep an eye out.”

“That’s two different jobs,” I said.

A couple minutes later, and he was still shaking his head. I watched him through the bedroom window. For two blocks I could hear his truck rattle. No wonder Grandpa Ike liked him. He’d always known his grandkids weren’t cut out for the family business, but still.

My kid brother Eli’s first car crash into that house at the foot of Jenckes had wiped out his inheritance. His second crash wiped out mine. Now I only had a month or so left of walking-around money, and another year of eating money, maybe. But if I also had to make rent, forget it.

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Our sister, Libby, was doing okay, I guess, but I hadn’t seen her since Eli’s shivah.

“This is my fault?” I asked when she made it clear she didn’t want to hug me.

“I was here for him,” she said.

“Where were you?”

“He didn’t want to see me,” I said.

I thought about it. “I reminded him of him?”

“Eli looked up to you.”

“He hated mirrors,” I said, touching the sheet on the one in the hall.

“Why can’t you see things for what they are?” she said, making a face that even I could get.

And now it had been five years.

How many Mays are there in five years? May is always hard, but this one was cold and wet, like March.

Maybe this was just what spring is for us now.

Origin Theory

By Lynn Wang I think early on I was dropped here by a spaceship and that’s why my brain is full of sharp red light instead of words and why no amount of air can make me catch my breath. Maybe my ship beamed me down under the pretense that it needed to make a private call or see if the transporter was working or blast around looking for soda and cigarettes. Maybe I believed it. Either way I must have waited a while on the ground, checking the sky until human hearthurt, that quick black mist, claimed me as its own. And now I’m found in strange tall places in the middle of the night, blindly climbing trees as if my life depended on it. As if climbing to someone who depended on my life.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from Exes,

by Max Winter (Catapult, 2017).

Lynn Wang, M.F.A. ’16, earned a B.A. in English at UCI in 2011. Her poems have been published in The Journal and Zócalo Public Square. She lives and works odd jobs in Los Angeles.

Max Winter, M.F.A. ’07, lives in Providence and is a two-time recipient of the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fellowship in fiction. His writing has appeared in Day One and Diner Journal.

Spring 2017

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Fever Dogs

By Kim O’Neil

Fever Dogs is a fictional biography of three generations of women. It begins at the turn of the 21st century with Jean, a young woman at an impasse. Romantically adrift, in a dying profession, she decides that to make herself a future, she must first make herself a past. Starting from a bare outline that includes an unspoken death, a predatory father and a homeless stint, Jean reconstructs the life her mother, Jane, might have lived.

I

—Cambridge, 1967—

was a green-eyed, bee-hived gorilla. I was the wild girl of Brighton. Nobody knew. I had a nineteen-inch waist and a D cup; they called me the Shelf; I cannot account for you girls. After your Gramp broke my nose and my arm, I moved. I lived at the Y. By day I kept up at Girls’ Latin. I kept up my grades, the scholarship – nobody knew. We had uniforms, white and navy. Kneesocks and ascot. I kept mine pressed and clean because I loved them. When I met your father, it was easy not to tell him things. He never told me things, too. About money he in effect lied. It takes one to know one, but that applied to me, not him. The year was ’67. Men like that never saw themselves as prey.

When I met him, did I think house? Did I think bedsheets, yard, breakfast nook? Did I think patio? That, and dog and guinea pig and cat and hamster and turtle and dwarf rabbit and, with some luck, horse. I wanted animals. I wanted a brass knocker and a singing doorbell, the melody “Que Sera.” A wreath of baby gourds for Thanksgiving, gooseberries for Christmas. There would be a mantel and on it seasonal elves. The Easter baskets would be excessive. I’d litter the house with fat foil eggs, each one oozing a gold sugar yolk. Underfoot for months they’d be. I did, yes, think so, very much. I thought ballet lessons like everyone else thought but also roller skating lessons and ice skating lessons and painting lessons, and a Formica bar in the basement where a person could paint – I don’t know why I thought you paint at a bar – and naturally, then, my thoughts needed you.

You ask about your father. That is half what I thought when we met.

When we met I nursed Dicky Lucy. At nineteen Dicky Lucy rolled a Chevy going eighty. The break was C1, the highest vertebra. When his mother, Mrs. Lucy, hired me on, I didn’t know I was the fifth. I was volunteering with quad vets then, answering phones at Doody Diapers. I wanted weekend work. I’m not a nurse, I said on the phone, I got through one term but then what happened –

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Do you chatter? Mrs. Lucy said. His best topic is boxing. Dicky hates world affairs, and when you come wear three-inch heels if you’re under five five, a Cross Your Heart brassiere if you’ve got it, and stockings with seams. Show your figure, but not tarty. Are you any good with a gun?

I fed Dicky Lucy deviled ham on white rolls and floretted his pickles.

I maneuvered his straw. I got him from his chair to the tub with the aid of a board. I scrubbed him and shaved him with sting-free kiddie soap. He had such a lot of hair. He was like my father in that. I combed his duckbill with a greasy grab of Vaseline and held a hand mirror to him, combed it four, ten times, until he was well pleased. We played Chinese checkers. I moved his marbles, illegal moves at his word and his voice that drill. My job was to lose and bemoan the loss. My job was to cut pictures from magazines and paste them in an album with rubber cement and no wrinkles at all: muscle cars and Ursula Andress.

If the picture bubbled anywhere, Dicky Lucy said burn it. My job was to shoot Dicky Lucy’s pump gun out the window at squirrels in the oaks.

How humanly they shrieked. How the cantilevered limbs groaned with their running and sometimes fell.

I missed and I missed. What else could I do? Dicky Lucy’s get hims and my aim so poor. My sympathy lay with anything furred.

Dicky Lucy stayed midweek at a hospital in Weymouth, but on weekends he got dropped at his mother’s. She lived back-to-back to Idy Bridges. Their porches faced off across a shared plot of knotweed that Idy was hard-set and illequipped to kill. Ray, Idy’s youngest, was the last at home, work-study at Northeastern. He had a cherry Ford he tinkered with, Dicky Lucy

knew well. At four every Sunday, Dicky Lucy made me dial. I hated telephones then the way I now hate cameras. A liar piece, my voice coming at you and pitched all wrong.

Like with a gun, I could never seem to aim straight. Even my breathing on the phone to me sounds like a lie.

Why, hello, Ray, I’d say. It’s Jane, at Dicky’s. We were just wondering if you happened to be heading out, if it was not too much out of your way – Weymouth was on the way to nowhere and Dicky Lucy was a hardship.

Dicky Lucy was vain.

And always, yes, your father would come.

Studious Ray; student of how objects transfused power, one to the other, a particulate sharing, like the transfusions, one to the other, blood or germ, of the living. (Ray would correct me on this. Electrical engineering isn’t like that, he’d say.)

And the way Ray hefted Dicky Lucy from his chair at the door to his Ford at the curb, the way Dicky Lucy needled him – someday, I’ll let you work on my toaster, smart guy – that worked on me too.

It was the other half of my thinking.

It began the way things begin for men, with cars.

Before cars it would have had to have been horses. Before that, what? What else can men own and strap on and make be fast?

They were neighbors, Dicky Lucy and Ray, and they had gone to grade school and high school together but were not friends. Dicky Lucy was two grades ahead. This was when Rindge and Latin was two schools.

Latin trained kids for college. Rindge trained kids for typing and plumbing, woodwork and metalwork and engines and babies. Ray had won some fame in his grade school days as the local whiz kid TV repairman, but it was Dicky Lucy, not Ray, who went on to Rindge. Mrs. Lucy gossiped with the indiscretion of the long-term lonely.

Sundays Ray would say just I’ll be over.

He was, and took Dicky, and I’d take the train home.

But that day, for no reason, he said my name. And how it feels to hear a person say your name is only one of two things – happy or sick. The body keeps its decisions streamlined like that.

He said, Jane. You feel like taking a ride?

Then as now a man of small economies.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from Fever Dogs,

by Kim O’Neil (Triquarterly, expected publication in August 2017).

Kim O’Neil, M.F.A. ’09, teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is a senior lecturer in English and assistant director of the Writing Center. She earned an M.Ed. at Lesley University and has worked for a decade as creative director of a Boston animation studio, where she created art for the Cartoon Network’s “Home Movies” and ABC’s “Science Court,” among others. Her short stories have appeared in the Packingtown Review and Orange Coast Review.

Spring 2017

35

Bodies in Space

By Michael Andreasen

In “Bodies in Space,” a carefully planned extramarital affair is rudely interrupted by an alien abduction. The piece appears in The Sea Beast Takes a Lover, a collection of short stories examining odd love, strange faith and wild metamorphoses in a world of doomed sailors, misguided saints, inept time travelers, predictably monstrous humans and surprisingly humane monsters.

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eanwhile, under cover of snow and wind and moonless night, a huge, handsome alien spacecraft, broad and sleek and lit up like a supermarket, drifted through a warm bath of ozone and began its delicate negotiations with the earth.

Whoa there, said the planet.

Relax, said the craft.

Relax nothing. You’re not of this earth, said the earth.

We’ll only be a minute, the craft promised from its oh-so-patient hover. Superquick. In and out. Just need to pick up a few things.

Mine is the sky, the earth said. The waters, the mountains, the trees. Mine are the little ants in their anthills, the little birds in their nests, the little people in their homes. There is nothing you could possibly take that isn’t mine.

Come on, said the craft.

Get lost, said the earth.

Hey, the craft said sweetly, casually easing closer.

You’ve got all kinds of people! We’re after one, maybe two at the most. You can spare two. How many billions will that leave you?

Somewhere overhead, shadowed and nervous, the new moon slid by.

Imagine the feeling of an orbit. It’s no carnival ride, no waltz around the maypole. It’s more like falling, in a circle, all the time. Not to mention the fact that even the smallest gravity well can invite all kinds of unwanted attention from weapons-grade debris, constantly exposing whole ecosystems to the threat of total annihilation with one meteoric smack.

This can make a planetary body anxious. Even a little paranoid.

Seriously, said the earth. Take a hike.

All right, the craft said. We were hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but it’s worth mentioning: we’re designed to navigate black holes and white dwarfs, quasars and pulsars and gas giants and nebulae. Your little tug is

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child’s play to us. We’re trying to be polite, but the bottom line is: you haven’t got the mass to stop us.

The planet furrowed its tectonic plates, sloshed its oceans, hunched in its spin. The craft sat frozen in its landing sequence, waiting for the inevitable to sink in.

Don’t get too comfortable, the earth said, and rolled over, and over, and kept rolling.

For real, five minutes, said the craft, which was more than it took to collect the Volvo and its two passengers, now naked as day and moments from consummation, from the snowy shoulder of the road before jetting effortlessly up, beyond the influence of bodies in space, until the craft’s vulgar brightness was just another grain of white sand stuck in the asphalt parking lot of night.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from “Bodies in Space” from The Sea Beast Takes a Lover, by Michael Andreasen (Dutton, expected publication in March 2018).

After a Day in the World

By Walker Pfost I am sad when the sun goes down without any kind of fight when it nods at the roads and houses full of car wrecks and divorces when it slides into its black sleeping bag head first – I am also sad when the sun tries to hang on

Walker Pfost, M.F.A. ’16, graduated from Furman University and then taught English for two years to middle schoolers in South Korea. He is now pursuing a career as a writer in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Euphony, Angle and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern.

clawing red streaks down the side of the sky when it says wait Michael Andreasen, M.F.A. ’07, grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and earned a B.A. in English at Marquette University. He taught English at a junior high school in Japan and accepted a slot in UCI’s M.F.A. program from a payphone in Okinawa. His work has been published in The New Yorker, Zoetrope: All-Story and Tin House. He is currently a full-time lecturer at UCI.

let me go back I can help them

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The Lockpicker

By Leonard Chang

In The Lockpicker, jewel thief Jake Ahn gets involved in a burglary in Seattle that turns violent when his partner tries to double-cross him. Escaping to San Francisco, Jake looks up his brother, Eugene, and finds himself in the middle of Eugene’s marital and career problems, while gradually becoming attracted to Eugene’s wife, Rachel. The brothers’ painful memories of their childhoods are awakened with this visit, and Jake eventually turns back to his criminal pursuits, involving Rachel.

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ockpicking is a dead art. Make no mistake about it. Those movies of gentlemen thieves, the Cary Grantish dapper tuxedoes leaning politely down and picking a lock one-two-three-zip-zap – those are full of crap. That’s fantasy. Reality is brutal. Lockpicking has been shoved aside by crowbars and jacks that wedge open door frames, by messy saws and drills, by a meaty shoulder and a running start.

Doors are barriers, but they need not be broken through with stripped cylinders, sawed-off bolts, and splintered wood littered on the Welcome mat. Doors and locks are puzzles to solve, mazes to navigate, questions to answer. It’s a subtle touch – not a slamming fist – that provides access to a locked apartment, a quiet click freeing the secrets behind a small piece of metal from Medeco or Corbin factories.

Consider this door Jake appraised. He first made sure the door was in fact locked. Once he had begun working on a door only to discover that it had been open all along. This door, his brother’s, was secure. He ran his fingers lightly across the stiles, feeling the grooves in the wood, until he reached the center. He pressed in, checking how much action there was – how tightly the door stayed sealed in the doorjamb. If the door was too tight, then he’d have trouble, since the latch assembly would be wedged against the jamb; he’d have difficulty feeling the nuances in his tension wrench. This door was snug, but not too snug. A small enough gap to work smoothly.

He peered closer, smelling the greasy metal. There was a simple pin tumbler cylindrical lock in the door handle, and an additional tubular deadbolt above it, which might or might not have been engaged.

Jake sighed. Wasn’t life much simpler when all he had to think about was opening a lock? He stood, stretched, and looked up and down the hallway. It was quiet. He thought he heard the TV news coming from an apartment a few doors down. He returned to the task at hand.

These days, most gorillas trying to break through a door might try one of the common, cruder methods.

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They might drill into the cylinder, destroying the pins. This is akin to a blindfolded dentist using a claw hammer to get rid of cavities. Or a gorilla might use a high-grade screw to bore into the keyhole, then yank out the entire cylinder with a pair of pliers. If the pliers are really strong, a gorilla could simply grasp the entire cylinder itself, violently twisting it until it broke. Even worse, and Jake really objected to this method, was the gorilla way of jacking or crowbarring the door frame apart, exposing the lock, then sawing off the lock bolt. Sawing!

You might as well ram a truck through the house.

Jake tried to be neater. First, he took out his snapping wire, which looked like a large safety pin and was simply a shortcut first attempt before using his picks. He inserted the snapping end along with his tension wrench into the keyhole.

Using the spring action of the wire – pulling it down and letting it snap up and lightly hit the pins inside the lock – Jake then tried to force the pins into place by applying pressure to his tension wrench, turning the cylinder. He was in effect jamming the pins up to their correct opening positions. It wasn’t as pure as using his picks, but it was easy and fast, and worked about half the time.

There were even pick guns that worked on the same principle, everything mechanized and loaded into a small pistol-shaped tool, and pulling the trigger snapped a small wire in the lock. But Jake never bothered with those. They were bulky and expensive. The snapping wire, just one long piece of thin metal bent into a curly “u” shape, was disposable, simple, elegant.

With the wire, it was still about touch, about feeling the slack in the cylinder, the tension wrench clicking into place. He worked quickly,

snapping the wire, then checking the wrench. The tension wrench wasn’t a “wrench” in the toolhead sense – it was another small piece of metal wedged into the keyhole and twisted while picking. It duplicated the turning action of a key.

That was all. Very straightforward.

Very easy.

Snap, click. Snap, click. After a few more snaps he felt the wrench give a little, and he slowly turned the cylinder, unlocking it.

Ahhh. Here we go, he thought.

Question: Which way do you turn?

Clockwise or counterclockwise?

Answer: Doorknob locks almost always turn clockwise. As for padlocks, Master locks go in either direction. Yale locks clockwise.

But here’s a tip: before you begin anything, use the wrench to test both directions. You’ll feel the pins engage when you turn the lock in the correct direction. In the incorrect direction, you’ll feel solid metal resistance.

Jake tried to push open his brother’s door, but the deadbolt was engaged.

Good for Eugene. Jake had always warned his brother to use both locks. The deadbolt was a wonderful invention. Security is very important, you know.

He tried snapping the deadbolt the same way, but was unsuccessful.

The deadbolt looked newer than the door handle, with fewer scratches around the keyway, the brass shiny; there might not have been enough leeway in the shear line.

No problem. He looked through his small pack of tools, and selected his rake pick, which used a similar principle as snapping. Here he used the jagged pick head and raked (or “scrubbed” as some people termed it) the pick back and forth, trying to force the pins up to the correct height. Yes, it was another rough

and quick method, but he would be derelict if he didn’t try these methods first. There was a procedure he liked to follow, moving from simple to intricate, quick to methodical.

The raking didn’t work either. A decent lock. This was not unexpected.

He unsheathed his diamond pick, one of his favorites. Unlike the zig-zagged rake pick, the sharp hook pick, or the bulbous ball picks, the diamond pick had a simple triangular head, and yet it opened so many different kinds of locks.

Pin tumblers, disk tumblers, wafer tumblers, double wafers, warded locks, lever locks. You name it, the diamond pick – in the right hands – can open them all. Hell, he could even use the diamond to emulate other picks, such as the ball pick, by turning it upside down. Beautiful.

He used to practice with this one, keeping his fingers in shape. He’d wear down the head so quickly that he’d always have a couple of spares.

Jake settled down in front of the deadbolt. He looked up and down the hallway. Where was everyone?

It was past six. Possibly dinner.

He set in his tension wrench and inserted his diamond pick, feeling the contours in the keyhole, pushing up each individual pin inside the lock, essentially imitating a key one notch at a time. He used the tension wrench to feel if he had clicked the pin above the shear line.

It was all about touch. A delicate, sensitive touch.

He couldn’t see anything inside the lock, of course, and the only indication of progress was the tiny twitch of the individual pin “breaking” at the shear line, the point at which the pin allowed the lock to begin turning. He felt it in the tension wrench, a fraction of a fraction of a millimeter. The turning pressure helped keep the clicked,

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spring-loaded pins in place, so the slightest movement in the wrong direction could change their position and force him to start over. It was like balancing spinning plates. He couldn’t forget the other plates as he spun a new one.

He worked on the five pins, moving from back to front, setting the pins in place while keeping the wrench at the right pressure.

Then, after the last pin, Jake felt the wrench loosening as he turned the cylinder, now freed from the pins, and he slowly unlocked the bolt.

Jake always felt a pleasant rush when he picked a difficult lock, even if this one was his brother’s. It was the feeling of satisfaction mingled with surprise, that he could actually do this, bypass locks meant to keep him out. He touched the deadbolt,

then pressed his index finger over the keyhole, letting the small gap indent his fingertip. It was a superstitious gesture that he had started years ago – he wasn’t even sure how or why he began doing this – but now, after a diamond pick job, he let the lock pinch his finger. Thank you.

He put away his picks, and pushed open the door slowly, listening. He waited, but didn’t hear anything, and slipped in. He immediately checked for an alarm control unit, and relaxed when he found nothing.

The apartment was dark, silent.

He stood still, and smelled beer. He heard a clock ticking. For the first time in days he felt relatively safe.

He patted his backpack and stepped forward. Welcome, welcome.

Leonard Chang, M.F.A. ’94, is the author of eight novels, including Crossings and Triplines. He wrote for NBC’s “Awake” series and FX’s “Justified” and is currently a writer/co-executive producer for the FX drama “Snowfall,” about the early days of the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, premiering this summer. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Harvard University.

Reprinted with permission. Excerpted from The Lockpicker,

by Leonard Chang (Black Heron Press, May 2017).

Winter Religion

By Liz Meley Disciple to the trees, the tall silent fir, I am not romantic in my faith. I understand muteness does not equal majesty, nor majesty sustain mystery.

Bring me a Lord I can chop down and burn, then listen for in the crackling of my fire.

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Liz Meley, M.F.A. ’16, graduated magna cum laude from Franklin & Marshall College in 2013 with a B.A. in creative writing. Her poems and reviews can be found in Sink Review, Cicada and The Asian American Literary Review, among other publications.

She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

If a Friend of Yours Has Died and You Find Out in an Email

(For Joe Krall)

By Husayn Carnegie Dream yourself as cardboard. Still your mind. Stiffen then dream yourself as rain. Let the softest tension hold yourself together as you fall.

These selves are just formalities what is one way from another?

Dream yourself a wounded boar tusks wet with hunter’s blood.

Dissolution comes in many forms.

Dream yourself a friend. Heavy, draped in cotton.

Dream of that embrace from their perspective.

How hard they hold you how hard they love you.

Dream yourself a graceful constellation how hot you are how cold the blackness where you live.

Apologize for who you are, for everything you have ever done for failing through sheer force of will to keep them with you.

Sing yourself a poem. The only poem that there is, about death – ours and those we love rewritten over centuries, refigured and reworked.

A language we fall into, a language we let fall over us.

More From UCI’s Card Catalog Interested in reading more Anteater authors? In addition to M.F.A. writing program alumni, some of whom are highlighted on the preceding pages, UCI is alma mater to several other accomplished novelists. Among them: Best-selling author T. Jefferson Parker, a 1976 English graduate, writes mystery and crime fiction set in Southern California, including Laguna Heat and The Fallen. Neal Shusterman, a 1985 psychology and theater major, has authored dozens of young adult novels. One of his newest, Challenger Deep, won a National Book Award.

Nevada Barr, who graduated in 1978 with an M.F.A. in drama, is best known for her mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon, a law enforcement ranger for the U.S. National Park Service. And Chelsea Cain, a 1994 political science alumna, has penned humor books, Marvel comics and popular gory thrillers, including Heartsick.

Husayn Carnegie, M.F.A. ’16, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Maine.

He completed his undergraduate studies at New York University and was a Presidential Honors Scholar. His poems have been published in Poetry International and on The Academy of American Poets’ website. He lives in Seattle, where he writes and plays elite-level Ultimate Frisbee for the Seattle Sockeye.

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Courtesy of the Big West Conference

Polo Powerhouse The UCI women’s water polo team clinched both the Big West Conference regular-season title (its seventh in nine years) and the Big West tournament title (its sixth in nine years), improving its winning streak to 14 games and overall season performance to 23-6. In the championship game, senior goalkeeper Annika Nelson (shown above during an earlier match against UC Davis) recorded a career-high 15 saves for the second consecutive game. At press time, the No. 4 Anteaters were scheduled to face off against UC Berkeley during the first round of the NCAA tournament on May 12 in Indianapolis.

Glen Feingerts / UCI Athletics

R E F L E C T I O N S

Escorting Vonnegut ..............................................................................................................

F

By Gregory Benford

or decades, starting in the 1970s, I was UCI’s default escort for visitors and speakers a bit out of the ordinary. This usually meant science fiction writers with a large audience, though not always. I was an sf writer too, but with real-world credentials as a professor of physics, which some thought qualified me to mediate between the

real and the imaginary.

The most striking writer I hosted, in the early 1990s, was Kurt Vonnegut.

The university leaders asked me to walk him around campus, have dinner with him and host his public talk in our largest center, where he drew well over 1,000 people.

With his curly hair askew, deep red pouches under his eyes and rumpled clothes, he looked like a part-time philosophy professor, typically chain-smoking, coughs and wheezes dotting his speech.

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To my surprise, he knew who I was. “Sure, I’ve read – ” and he rattled off six of my titles, starting with Timescape and through my Galactic Center series, then incomplete.

He was affable, interested in the campus, and wanted to talk about sf. “I live in Manhattan and go to the literary parties, but I don’t read their books. I read just enough reviews to know what to say, then look enigmatic.”

Vonnegut reminisced that his mother, Edith, had had the greatest influence on him. “She thought she might

make a new fortune by writing for the slick magazines.

She took short-story courses at night. She studied magazines the way gamblers study racing forms. All to little avail. I think she envied me later.”

He said his favorite writer was George Orwell, tried to emulate him. “I like his concern for the poor, I like his socialism, I like his simplicity.” Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World heavily influenced his debut novel, Player Piano, in 1952. He defended the sf genre and deplored a perceived sentiment that “no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works.”

“From his soft, ironic comments, I gathered he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress.”

He had grown up reading and then writing sf but shed the label of science-fiction writer with Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969. Its subtitle, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, told its intent, refracted through an sf lens.

After the book appeared, Vonnegut told me, he went into a severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. Suicide was always a temptation. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol, and failed.

Smoking seemed to be a half-measure in that direction, I thought, watching him light one cigarette from the butt of the previous. Yet he was a man of mirth – perhaps the other side of the same coin?

His novels since Slaughterhouse-Five had been an ironic stew of plot summaries and autobiographical notes.

Often, Kilgore Trout was a character, plainly a stand-in for Ted Sturgeon; I asked him about this, and he nodded. “If I’d wasted my time creating new characters, I would never have gotten around to calling attention to things that really matter.”

He remarked that he could easily have become a crank, but I said that was impossible because he was too smart.

From his soft, ironic comments, I gathered he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress. To me, he

could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing, he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre plot twists, science fiction – whatever it took.

In his remarks that day and evening, I felt from Vonnegut a deep, dark despair. I mentioned that when Kilgore Trout finds the question “What is the purpose of life?” written on a bathroom wall, his response is, “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.” Trout’s remark, I said, was curious, seeing that Vonnegut was an atheist, so there is no Creator to report back to. In The Sirens of Titan, there is a Church of God the Utterly Indifferent; that seemed to be his true position.

That night he said, “The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. People don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats.”

In the end, he said, he believed that “we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Some years later, he nearly died in a fire started because he fell asleep smoking. In 2007, he died, age 84, of brain injuries incurred several weeks prior from a fall.

As usual, he had a great exit line. In 2006, he sardonically said in a Rolling Stone interview that he would sue the makers of the Pall Mall cigarettes he had been smoking since he was 12 years old for false advertising.

“And do you know why?” he said. “Because I’m 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package, Brown & Williamson promised to kill me.”

Of all the odd people I escorted, Vonnegut seemed the most in touch with the world he struggled to describe.

It gave his remarks an immediacy I relished. In my hours with him, he revealed a tenderness at the center of his comic cynicism, softening his satirical criticisms of our species’ persistent foolishness.

The last thing he said to me was that anything that persuaded people that they were not leading meaningless lives in a meaningless universe was good.

“So keep writing.”

Benford has been a professor of physics at UCI since 1971.

A two-time Nebula Award winner, he is the author of more than 30 novels.

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Lunar Luck Social sciences dean Bill Maurer (right) and alumni Henry Huang ’97 (center) and Larry Tenney ’83 (left) assist in the dragon parade, part of the Lunar New Year street festival held in Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway Plaza. More than 2,000 individuals attended the event, which ushered in the Year of the Fire Rooster and was sponsored

by UCI’s John S. & Marilyn Long U.S.-China Institute for Business, Law & Society in partnership with several schools and South Coast Plaza. “Dragons are believed to bring good luck to people,” Huang says. “Therefore, the longer the dragon is in the dance, the more luck it will bring to the community.”

Steve Zylius / UCI

A N T O U R A G E

Steve Zylius / UCI

The Change Agent Nearly 25 years after inspiring the Freedom Writers, alumna Erin Gruwell now shares lessons worldwide ..............................................................................................................

By John Westcott

A scrap of paper passed from student to student in a Long Beach high school English class. They chuckled as the caricature of a classmate bounced around the room, scribbled with oversized lips and the words “PASS-ME.” Laughter erupted as it reached Sharaud, the intended victim. His expression melted.

Swiftly intercepting that note was an unpaid, 24-yearold student teacher and recent UCI graduate from Newport Beach, whom her pupils labeled “preppy.” Erin Gruwell ’91 then began a small discussion that grew into a big mutiny against traditional education.

Those familiar with Gruwell know the story (which was made into a major motion picture, with her role

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played by Hilary Swank). She compared the racist note to Nazi propaganda leading to the Holocaust. None of her students knew what the Holocaust was. Abruptly, she dumped her meticulous lesson plans and made tolerance for other people the new focus of the class.

Woodrow Wilson Classical High School in 1993 was a volatile mix of white students from relatively wealthy neighborhoods and many others bused in from communities beset by poverty, drugs and violence. A year after the Los Angeles riots, anger and mistrust were everywhere.

When Gruwell took her class to see “Schindler’s List,” security officers at a nearby grocery store patted down several students for weapons. It made the newspaper.

Some teachers groused that she was making them look bad.

In her second year – her first as a paid employee – Gruwell began imploring administrators to let her retain 150 new students for all four years of high school. They later called themselves the “Freedom Writers,” after the Freedom Riders, civil rights activists who challenged segregated seating on public buses in the South.

Gruwell wanted to make an impact on their lives. She succeeded – but not without constant conflict. “I had to struggle to keep my students every year,” she recalls.

“It was a battle to stay with them.”

“Making a commitment to change is a cornerstone of the Freedom Writers.”

Each year, she handed the teens journals and asked them to write anonymous entries about themselves.

Gruwell learned that many led lives of desperation, ducking gunfire and losing friends and relatives to drugs and gang warfare.

“It allowed them to tell us what they could not tell anybody,” she says of the journaling.

One girl wrote that she had been sexually assaulted by an uncle near a Christmas tree. After her entry was read to the class, Gruwell recalls, “50 girls said, ‘That’s not my story. But it is my story.’”

One of her students, Sue Ellen Alpizar, joined the Freedom Writers as a junior transfer. “She was incredibly engaging,” Alpizar says of Gruwell. “She saw each student as an individual.” The teacher soon realized that the newcomer was dyslexic and paired her with classmates who could help. “I was a D-average student,” Alpizar says.

“I wasn’t on track to graduate. But by my last report card, my semester GPA was a 4.0.”

Gruwell also snagged such guest speakers as Miep Gies, the woman who had helped hide Anne Frank and several other Jews from the Nazis during World War II; and Zlata Filipovic, who as a girl had diarized the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. “Gies told the Freedom Writers, ‘I simply did what I had to do because it was the right thing to do,’” Gruwell says. “I aspire to follow in her humble footsteps and do the same.”

Today, the 47-year-old educator still fights the good fight. Her life is a whirlwind of teaching and presentations.

Her globetrotting has taken her to Palestine, Croatia,

Taiwan and many other places where people yearn to hear her story – and any wisdom she can impart. She has written four best-selling books, including Teach With Your Heart.

In March, she flew to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with other finalists winnowed from 20,000 nominations worldwide for the Global Teacher Prize. (The winner was Maggie MacDonnell, who teaches in an Inuit village in the Canadian Arctic accessible only by air.)

Many of the 150 Freedom Writers, all of whom graduated from high school, are now teachers, principals, counselors, veterans, architects and tech employees.

Some work for the Freedom Writers Foundation that Gruwell established to cut high school dropout rates through the use of the Freedom Writers method. It has taught the progressive curriculum to more than 500 other instructors.

“Making a commitment to change,” Gruwell says, “is a cornerstone of the Freedom Writers.” Her personal commitment to change occurred while she was a UCI student, watching on television as a young Chinese man faced down a tank in Tiananmen Square. In that moment, she decided to become a teacher “to stand up for kids who felt invisible, who didn’t have a voice, who were on the fringe and the margins.”

Gruwell remains active as an alumna. She serves on the UCI Alumni Association board of directors and has given dozens of presentations on campus. Last year, she was the commencement speaker for the School of Humanities.

“By fostering an educational philosophy that values and promotes diversity, Erin has transformed her students’ lives and those of many others,” said humanities dean Georges Van Den Abbeele at the 2016 event. “She encouraged them to rethink rigid beliefs about themselves and others, reconsider daily decisions and, ultimately, rechart their futures.”

Though Gruwell left Woodrow Wilson High after five years, she has continued to teach at California State University, Long Beach; Long Beach City College; and Massachusetts’ Bay Path University.

The crucial interception of a scrap of paper that started it all happened almost a quarter-century ago. Gruwell’s plans for the future include helping to educate children in Jordan’s refugee camps and becoming a global force in teacher training.

Where did that young teacher, initially typecast by her students, find the courage to blow up the tidy boxes of education?

“I was lucky to find my voice at UCI and was encouraged to follow my passion,” Gruwell says. “I was exposed to unbelievably enlightened people, and now I’m just hungry to keep that light burning.”

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Class Notes

Al Encinias ’72, Spanish and Portuguese

Lenette Posada Howard ’90, economics

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What do “Pokemon Go,” the CIA and Google Maps have in common?

Answer: Lenette Posada Howard. The connection begins in 2003, when Howard was director of software delivery for Keyhole, a threedimensional aerial mapping startup that attracted media fame (and CIA funding) for its dramatic flyover images of Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq. A year later, Google bought the company and used the technology to create Google Earth and Google Maps. In 2012, Howard joined Niantic Labs, a Google unit that a few years later spun off into a separate company and launched “Pokemon Go.” Howard, an Encinitas native who worked her way through UCI as night manager at an Alpha Beta supermarket, serves as vice president of operations at Niantic. The first member of her working-class, Mexican American family to attend college, she also mentors other Latinas in the tech industry.

Nikki Iravani ’86, biological sciences

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Thrown into a Tijuana jail for attempting to smuggle contraband across the border, Al Encinias assumed his academic career was toast.

Instead, Chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich Jr. and two professors showed up to bail him out after learning of the arrest from other students, he recalls.

“I owe my life to UCI,” says the East L.A. transplant, who credits the university with setting him on the straight and narrow. After graduation, Encinias taught English as a second language to Santa Ana eighth-graders, became a Newport Beach cop for nearly a decade, then returned to teaching. Now retired, he recently established an endowment – named after his parents, José and Susana, who never learned to read or write – that provides scholarships to students in UCI’s M.F.A. creative writing program. “I wanted to pay back my alma mater,” says Encinias, who is part Mescalero Apache and goes by the nickname Dream Dancer because he sometimes grooves in his sleep.

When she posted a sign three decades ago about forming a campus club for aspiring optometrists, Nikki Iravani expected one or two classmates to show up. Instead, 88 students flocked to the inaugural meeting of UCI’s U See Eyes group. After graduating, she earned a Doctor of Optometry degree at the University of Houston, became a contact lens industry executive and later launched EyeXam, a mobile app that tests users’ vision and directs them to nearby eyesight specialists. With nearly 2 million downloads and national media coverage, the app now has a brick-and-mortar spinoff in Santa Clara. The center features virtual reality eyewear and other high-tech optical products, as well as an optometry clinic where Iravani cares for patients. Off duty, she serves on several boards, including the Francisco J. Ayala School of Biological Sciences’ Dean’s Leadership Council.

Christopher Elliott ’90, humanities In his first brush with fame, he was known as “The Crabby Traveler,” a popular columnist for ABCNews.com. Later, he donned a superhero cape and neoprene suit for a television commercial promoting his USA Today travel advice feature. He also began helping angry consumers seek redress from cable television operators, retailers and corporations. Raised in Vienna by traveling evangelists, Christopher Elliott started his journalism career as an undergrad at Biola University and UCI, polished his skills with a master’s degree from UC Berkeley, then wrote for a string of newspapers before finding his niche as a travel industry watchdog and syndicated columnist. He has penned two books: How to Be the World’s Smartest Traveler (and Save Time, Money & Hassle) and Scammed: How to Save Your Money & Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles & Shady Deals. In keeping with his travel persona, he roams the U.S. and Canada as many as 300 days a year with his three children, who are homeschooled by Elliott and his wife.

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Lisa Alvarez, M.F.A. ’92, creative writing Andrew Tonkovich, M.F.A. ’93, creative writing To alumni Lisa Alvarez and Andrew Tonkovich, Orange County is a mecca for fine writing.

For their new anthology, Orange County: A Literary Field Guide, the husband-and-wife team compiled descriptions of the county’s natural and manmade environments by more than 60 acclaimed authors – including Joan Didion and Michael Chabon, M.F.A. ’87. The couple met in a “Women in Literature” class at California State University, Long Beach. They later moved to Orange County to earn graduate degrees from UCI’s prestigious M.F.A. Programs in Writing, where the pair were thrilled to study with two of the program’s early directors, Don Heiney and Oakley Hall, whose work is also excerpted in the collection. Tonkovich is now a lecturer in UCI’s Department of English and the longtime editor of the Santa Monica Review. Alvarez is an English professor at Irvine Valley College and runs the summer writing program at Squaw Valley begun by Hall in 1969. “A large part of our ambition – in life and in this book – is to build a sense of community,” Tonkovich says. “I hope [it] instills an appreciation for the quirks, legends and places of Orange County.”

Andrea Lo ’13, chemistry Inside a high-tech kitchen laboratory in Corona, Andrea Lo experiments with ham glazes, bacon seasonings, cheese sauces and other flavor concoctions for restaurants, private food labels and retail companies. Part chemist, part chef, she formulates and taste-tests recipes for Saratoga Food Specialties, a research and development firm that supplies ingredients to Taco Bell and other clients. Lo stumbled across food science at UCI, where she served as president of the chemistry club. After graduation, she earned a master’s degree in the subject at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, then developed healthy snacks for Disney and pastas for a food manufacturing outfit in Vernon. When not tinkering with spices, measuring pH balances or gauging titratable acidity, she enjoys hiking and travel. The latter is a holdover from UCI study abroad programs that took her to Great Britain, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

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Ferial Govashiri ’05, political science She met the pope and Miss Piggy, kept President Barack Obama on schedule and taught the leader of the free world how to “Zot!” For three years, Ferial Govashiri served as the commander in chief’s personal assistant. In January, when the Oval Office changed hands, she returned to civilian life and began plotting her next act, which includes writing a children’s book about the history behind some of Washington, D.C.’s monuments. The Iranian-born Anteater also does speaking engagements about her White House exploits, which included playing chess with the president, riding in 100-car motorcades (“the coolest thing ever,” she says), encountering such celebrities as George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, and accompanying Obama when he delivered UCI’s 50th anniversary commencement address.

Working in the White House was the experience of a lifetime, she says: “It isn’t often you get a front seat to history.”

In Memoriam Charles D. “Chuck” Martin, trustee Chuck Martin, a UCI Foundation trustee, died March 28 at the age of 80. He was well-known in the Orange County business community.

His company Enterprise Partners managed funds for top investors, and his private equity firm, Westar Capital, acquired and built 25 companies. Most recently, Martin served as the chairman, CEO and chief investment officer of Mont Pelerin Capital.

He also wrote Orange County, Inc.: The Evolution of an Economic Powerhouse, which was published last year. At UCI, his contributions are legendary. He helped institute and served as chairman emeritus of The Paul Merage School of Business Dean’s Advisory Board. He helped create the Chancellor’s Advisory Council and led the initiative to establish a UCI honors college. A trustee of the UCI Foundation for almost two decades, Martin was awarded the prestigious UCI Medal in 2013. “Chuck’s role as a friend and adviser to our campus is irreplaceable,” said UCI Chancellor Howard Gillman. “His dedication to attracting the best students and giving them the best education will remain an inspiration.”

To submit or view additional class notes, go to engage.alumni.uci.edu/classnote.

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P A R T I N G

Z O T !

Say ‘Cheese’ Two Anteaters take old-fashioned “selfies” in a retro photo booth featured at this year’s homecoming festivities in February. More than 3,550 alumni and friends attended the Party in the Park, and the line for a chance to snap a pic in the converted VW bus went on all day and into the night.

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Steve Zylius / UCI

Thank you!

We made a mountain out of an anthill!

Thank you for supporting students, research and innovative programs across campus. #ZotZotGive On April 12, 2017, we: raised over

$1.4 million from

1,824 gifts in just

24 hours

IRVINE BLVD. PEDESTRIAN BRIDGE

DELIVERED AS PROMISED In a world where commitments are often unfulfilled, we view a promise differently.

When one is made, we will not rest until that promise is delivered. From the way we connect people with roads, bridges and walking trails to neighborhood parks, sports complexes and 21st century schools, we’re making Orange County a better place to live.

BEACON PARK

FivePoint is delivering, as promised.

O.C. GREAT PARK SOCCER STADIUM

BEACON PARK SCHOOL