Stonecoast Review
The Official Literary Journal of University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA
CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Giudizio Dolce
By Sydney Lea This guy from the Netherlands grated on me and on all our doctoral peers whenever, with his heavily accented but perfect English, he held forth in our European Literature class. It didn’t matter whether his arguments were lofty or feeble (we all tended toward the latter appraisal); we knew they’d be protracted. So whenever he began, I cooked up ploys to distract myself until he wound down. Counting the faux gas lamps outside on the quad was among the simpler ones… Read More
Silent Night
By Ariel Ambers
I know what a church pew feels like; to sit on, to touch, to be watched by. I know that even the most comfortable of pews can feel cold. Just because it’s been a while, just because the church has done renovations and now these seats are cushioned, doesn’t mean I don’t know; it doesn’t mean I don’t remember.
I was once a regular at this church. Always pulled by my mother’s influence, dressed up in my very best in a near-empty building. But this time around, everything’s different. I now carry secrets I’ve yet to disclose to those around me.… Read More
Smoke out of the Jar
By Nuala O’Connor
In my childhood home, difficult things were stored like smoke in a tight- lidded jar. Hurts, ills, and problems were a visible miasma through the glass, but they would sit in there, dense and palpable, not to be disturbed. As we— the seven children—got older and poked at the lid, tried to prise it off, to let out at least some of the smoke, we were told to set down the jar. Alternately the response to any prising was, What jar? What smoke? We knew we had issues, but we preferred murkiness to clarity; we maintained a commitment to our whatever-you-say-say-nothing culture. This was the Ireland I was born into in 1970.…. Read More
Things I wanted to Say are Locked Behind the Uvula
By Juheon Rhee
So when I didn’t say the things I wanted to say, I had hoped you would know. Do you remember? You’ll shake your head. We’ve become all too predictable.
It’s already a summer-like February because we live in the Philippines. But we keep going back to that second week of December.
I look golden-tan under the Starbucks light. This is the first thing, you later told me, you notice when you walk in. I’m reading a book, Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence, that I won’t ever finish.….. Read More