Sara Crickenberger

I am a third-year student concentrating on fiction in the MFA program.  I have been heavily influenced by my Appalachian roots, rural upbringing, and strong ties to family and the land.  I also find that the Pacific Northwest, where I lived for several years, works its way into my writing.  Resilient women, an intense sense of place, and food tend to be recurring motifs in my work.

As a fiction writer, I’m interested in character driven stories.  I’m continually asking:  Why do people do what they do?  What are each person’s motivations?  What happens when the expectations of society and culture clash with one’s individuality or eccentricities?  What does it take to propel someone to risk change?  I like to study the interplay of the sacred and profane, irony and coincidence.  As I examine these questions and issues, I also enjoy rolling in the sensuousness of language.  Ah, words!

Poetry. Fall 2007 Managing Editor of The New River.

Poetry. Spring 2007 Managing Editor of The New River.

As a poet, my interests change daily, and trying to point toward one dominant notion or obsession is like trying to pick a favorite song on Pet Sounds — it changes each time I revisit the record.  And what draws me to poetry is that same lack of definition, that bizarre act of sifting through the mind’s strange ether and searching for links between the seemingly unlinkable.  I found poetry through Larkin, Levine, and Matthews, and I still carry the interest in narrative they first fostered for me.  Now, however, I enjoy reading and writing poems that wander and wade through things equally surreal and sentimental.  And while I’m currently in love with a poem that is fractured and obtuse, tomorrow might find me engaged with a blank-verse investigation of the soul.  Poetry’s unique breadth of style and subject embraces the unknowable, and it keeps me returning to the page.

Mimi McDonald

I love teaching composition and creative writing.  I’m primarily a poet, but I continue to write short stories and plays.  Upon graduation, I plan to find a job teaching in the Southwest, my first home.  My academic interest is in translation, particularly Southeast Asian, eighteenth-century poetry by women.  My own poetry is narrative and centers on the dreams, actions, and dilemmas of a woman searching for redemption.

Fiction.