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Spotlight on Coral Nardandrea

Mid-American Review would like to feature Winter Wheat Festival of Writing Coordinator and poetry editor, Coral!

Coral Nardandrea hails from Ocala, Florida, a small horse town landlocked in a state known for its oceans, swamps, and glades. She got her undergraduate degrees in creative writing and women’s studies, which complemented each other more than you’d think. She came to Bowling Green to get her MFA in poetry and to get to know another small, landlocked town. This year, Coral is coordinating Mid-American Review’s Winter Wheat Festival of Writing and serving as an assistant editor on MAR’s staff. She’s enjoying the other side of the country (and its seasons) so far, though she wishes there were more trees.

Q: What drew you to the writing world?

C: Just a love of stories, really. I started making up stories when I was pretty little—all of my toys had extensive, dramatic backgrounds. Each time I sat down to play, I had to decide what the story was—who was related to who, their likes and dislikes, where they were from, what their goals were. Eventually I started writing those things down, because acting them out wasn’t enough. I was always reading, too, and that really nourished my imagination.

That shifted a bit, of course. In college, I was converted from fiction writing to poetry, and my appreciation of words and what they can do is always growing. While I still lean towards the narrative—a good character, a good story—my understanding of how words shape that narrative is much deeper.

Q: How has your time in the MFA been?

C: I really enjoy the writing community we have here. Our cohort is very close-knit, and it’s amazing to be surrounded by people who are creatively wired, who can discuss the pros and cons of Sylvia Plath’s rise to fame over a beer or two, and who will make time for a road trip to see Rita Dove in the middle of a school week. My writing has also really improved from being immersed in poetry and connected with people who love it.

Q: What makes you want to accept a submission?

C: I’m always looking for something that makes me perk up a little. If the language can make me say, “Oh, that’s different from the fifty other submissions I’ve read today,” I’m perking up. Also, the fiction writer in me always loves a good narrative. Poems have to matter. You have a short amount of time to pack a punch, to tell me something important, and I want to feel changed by the time I’ve finished your poem.

Q: What’s your favorite story/poem MAR has accepted?

C: This is hard! “Lesson” by Christina Duhig was a poem I fought hard for when we discussed its publication, so it has a special place in my heart. But I think my all-time favorite has to be coming up in Volume 37: Matthew MacFarland’s “Mosaic Floor Depicting the Rape of Persephone, Uncovered at a Tomb in Amphipolis, Greece, October 2014.” There’s just something so quietly haunting about it. It’s a powerful poem. I’m so excited for everyone to read it.

Q: What’s the best advice a writer has given you?

C: I’m lucky to have a lot of mentors in my life who give amazing advice. Probably the most helpful thing I’ve ever been told is to be kinder to myself. To stop saying “should.” There’s enough rejection in the writing business without adding my own doubts before I can submit a packet to a journal or print a poem off for workshop. I’m still working on this, but respecting my poetry for what it is has helped make me a more confident writer.

Q: Best experience in Bowling Green so far?

C: Honestly, each week has been its own grand adventure. Spending time with those in my cohort, whether we’re watching trashy television, staking out the Black Swamp Festival, or riding every coaster at Cedar Point, has always left me with a story to tell or an inside joke to reference. The people have made my experience here, and I’m glad to know them.

Chapbook Review: dear girl: a reckoning by drea brown

dear girl: a reckoning by drea brown. Gold Line Press, 2014. 47 pages. $10.00, print.

drea brown’s dear girl: a reckoning is the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and a hauntingly beautiful glimpse into the Middle Passage and the life of Phillis Wheatley. brown’s poetry attempts to envision not only Phillis Wheatley as the poet, but also Phillis as the girl aboard a slave ship struggling to understand not only her situation, but also her new identity as someone’s property.

Each of brown’s poems deals with a specific moment in the harrowing journey across the ocean and the themes of haunting, rememory, and giving voice to the dead. This theme of rememory, a term which brown borrows from Toni Morrison, is one that occurs in each poem and calls into question how memory itself influences not only an individual, but also perhaps, an entire group of people. brown tells Wheatley’s story not only to show how portions of the poet’s identity were erased or unacknowledged, but also to address how the girl in her poems could embody not only Wheatley, but also countless unnamed girls.

brown asks readers to reimagine, remember and employ rememory to give voice to the dead and through doing so, exorcise some of our own haunted, unacknowledged pasts and shared histories. The chapbook opens with a poem emphasizing the voices of the dead, but end’s with a similar request successfully closing the narrative. brown’s rich imagery, variety of poetic forms and narrative tells readers that the dead will have their stories told: “the dead will have their due. they will speak from graves or whisper into the ears of poets or search oceans, to begin here or rupture or capture loss” (45).

-Chelsea Graham, MAR

Pets with MAR: Smaug

Last week you met some adorable cats, and this week MAR brings you a new pet–a bearded dragon, owned by the great Lisa Favicchia.

Lisa Favicchia is the Managing Editor of Mid-American Review and a second-year MFA candidate in poetry at Bowling Green State University. When she is not reading or writing, she is busy pampering the dragon whom she affectionately calls Smauggles (much to his chagrin).

And now, meet Smaug!

Smaug is a bearded dragon and Mid-American Review’s honorary Office Lizard. While his ancestors came from the harsh deserts of Australia, Smaug prefers spending his days in air conditioning with the Mid-American Review staff, preferably sitting on somebody’s shoulder or keeping a close eye on office proceedings from his perch on the back of his owner’s chair. He enjoys digging around in office mail, licking things, and running circles around laptops. He has been very graciously received not only by the staff members ofMid-American Review, but by the BGSU community as a whole, much to the joy of his owner who loves to bring him everywhere she goes.

Smaug has come a long way since his days as a starved, abused, and abandoned baby dragon to the illustrious Office Lizard you see before you today. His memoirs relating the tales of his difficult childhood and his struggle up the corporate ladder are forthcoming.

Chapbook Review: Candy in Our Brains by Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas

Candy in Our Brains by Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas. Missoula: CutBank Books, 2014.

Anne Barngrover and Avni Vyas recently collaborated to co-author Candy in Our Brains, a humorous and raw take on life and relationships told through a collection of poems. Full of unlikely combinations, and using a series of poems following “the heroine,” Barngrover and Vyas take the reader through the struggles of love. In the poem titled, “It’s My Party and I’ll Implode If I Want To” the authors pair interesting combinations such as, “You show up with a cake and moths fly out when I slice it” with the gritty thread of thread of dissatisfaction, “For your birthday: / heavy petting and a cake with your name in purple, gouged as if by my nails.”

Barngrover and Vyas pursue turmoil in nature in “The Heroine Shamwows Her Way Through A Hurricane” where “The fissures in our youth show up in our faces…tiny mushrooms breaking out in a rash: this / could be the tumor in my happiness swelling. This is my joy split wide open.” In “Fossils,” the language of forest and animal combine: “We were together, a cawing / battalion” and later, “How could we / have foreseen how much to camouflage in bruise and how much to coddle?” A collection that is unified by startling and vivid language, the turmoil of our relationships seeping through metaphor and everyday reality, Candy in Our Brains makes for a powerful collaboration.

Teri Dederer, Mid-American Review

Pets with MAR: Chloe and Lucy

Welcome back to Pets with MAR. Meet two adorable cats, Chloe and Lucy, owned by our Winter Wheat Coordinator and editor on the poetry staff, Coral Nardandrea. Her fellow MFAs designated her a crazy cat lady even though she only has two cats. (And a cat pillowcase. And a cat blanket. And a cat wine rack.) Coral is finishing her second year at BGSU’s MFA program and plans to go into the business of publishing.

First up, meet Chloe!

Chloe has been training her human for twelve and a half years now. The human has since figured out which blanket is her favorite, which meows signal hunger, and the list of the few movements allowed when being sat upon. Once a hunter of bottle caps, hair ties, plastic bags, and flip flops, Chloe has since retired, and can rarely be persuaded to play by any toy except her old tennis ball. To earn her favor, hopefuls must be impressed by her snore and respectful of her disdainful expression.

And now, Lucy!

Lucy is the most recent addition to the family, much to Chloe’s displeasure. A little round, simple-minded, and unable to meow, Lucy likes her life just the way it is, with a lot of food and even more sleeping. She’s preferred her quiet lifestyle since getting stuck in a chimney for a week when she was a kitten under another human’s care, and certainly avoids traipsing over roofs several years later. She can be distinguished from her sister by her often-dazed expression and signature waddle.