The Meadow – 2009

The Meadow is an annual journal published by Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. Truckee Meadows students serve on the editorial board and represent the largest group of contributors to the magazine, although this issue’s contributors also include several MFA students from large universities and a few more seasoned writers. The centerpiece of the issue is an interview with novelist and memoirist Kim Barnes (A Country Called Home, Finding Caruso, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country, Hungry for the World), conducted by the journal’s fiction editor, Mark Maynard. They discuss the genesis of Barnes’s most recent novel, the importance of place in that book, her writing process, and her upcoming work.

The Meadow is an annual journal published by Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada. Truckee Meadows students serve on the editorial board and represent the largest group of contributors to the magazine, although this issue’s contributors also include several MFA students from large universities and a few more seasoned writers. The centerpiece of the issue is an interview with novelist and memoirist Kim Barnes (A Country Called Home, Finding Caruso, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country, Hungry for the World), conducted by the journal’s fiction editor, Mark Maynard. They discuss the genesis of Barnes’s most recent novel, the importance of place in that book, her writing process, and her upcoming work.

Most of the writing, poetry and fiction, in this issue has a decidedly casual tone, as exemplified by Kelly Ogilvie’s poem, “Alaskan/Firefighter/Psychologist,” which begins:

I went to the bar Friday night
to be alone.
And this Alaskan started talking to me.
He asked me if I was frustrated
because I had peeled the labels off my beer.
And then he asked me
if I wanted to peel the label off his.

Or Krista Benjamin’s “Dad,” which begins:

I don’t know which one of us snapped
the picture, but Dad is successfully ignoring
the photographer. He wears what we called
the “O” shirt: brown rayon covered
with little white circles, an endless, single-player
game of tic-tac-toe.

The nonfiction work, three personal essays, is the most memorable writing in the issue, in particular Linh Cao’s “The Ex-Camp Site,” which recounts a visit to Viet Nam where the author’s family still lives. The author’s father was imprisoned in Central Viet Nam in the 1970’s and a desire to understand that experience is at the heart of the essay.

A section of well-reproduced photographs by Abraham Abebe, Amy Alden, John Kett, Brandon Lacow, Joy Wong, and Naho Hasegawa, both color and black and white, rounds out the issue. All exhibit a thoughtful sense of composition and original ideas of how to frame a subject to optimize its unique stance in the world.
[www.tmcc.edu/meadow]