#plain china

[adirabennett2-blog]

Thank you so much to national literary anthology plain china for publishing my photograph, Girlhood! Click the link above to check out Girlhood, which accompanies the written work Wings by Aubrey Asleson.

[willatbton]

The Bro - plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing 2013

I can fit four other people in my car. Sometimes Jack fights Ellen for shotgun but Ellen usually wins. Steph and Louis always sit in the back because they’re juniors. The juniors have check-in at ten on weekends, because boarding school is stupid. We’re at Five Guys tonight. Their burgers are awesome, but we don’t …

Oy! Will here. Check out this piece (and then others) from plain china, a journal of undergraduate literature from students all over the country; the journal is edited by Bennington students. I'm an editor for the poetry section, and the work I've helped edit and select won't be up for another few months, but you'll hear about that when it comes. Until then--last year's plain china selections!

/\Will

[plainchina]

'River Mammals’ had close competitors, but I was persuaded by its rich imagery, its dynamic use of language, its apt and expressive metaphors, its complete vision of the strange world created, and the ease with which it moved from scene to scene.

Lydia Davis on our Fiction Winner, "River Mammals" 

[plainchina]

Laughter on the Streets of Istanbul

As a student completely addicted to photography, Anna Blue likes to think that she observes the world through a wide-angle lens. On the side, she studies international relations and marine biology, and hopes to spend her days after college capturing her travels around the world through photography. Her work first appeared in Stanford’s journal, Leland Quarterly.

[plainchina]

of women and gods (of learning how to pray)

"II. There is an Indian woman who lives across from our house, I see her in between the gates: she is wearing a purple shirt, taking out the trash, her hair up in a bun, and a red bindi on her forehead. She is so so big, colossal, I cannot stop looking, I think, she must be God. (even after all these years, I hope she is, still.)"

-From "of women and gods (of learning how to pray)" by Lily Jamaludin of Grinnell College. Read the whole thing here.

[plainchina]

On October blacktop poured over limestone, the hard ghost of an inland sea, farmland, then floodplains now emptied by whistle, we tumble, small and tough under wind. Over me, Jacob Dearborn is all stonewashed jeans and potato hands, but I, too, am a scuffling-hard kid

-Read the rest of "Missouri Shells" by Clara Lee of the University of Minnesota 

[plainchina]

"Untitled" by Megan Gildea of the University of Pittsburgh

[plainchina]

I was seven when my father told me that Sodom and Gomorrah deserved to be burned down. There had been a deal with God, didn’t I see? But there were kids there, I said. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Anyone under five living there was corrupted, he said. Five is when your values grow. Like a garden, I guessed, all the carrots nodding politely to each other. It’s a lot to hold in your head when you are seven. You twist it and turn it like a key or a lock or a rock just slightly too large to skip with one hand. Something is too big about a statement like that. That there is a course set for you before five that you have no hand in, but your parents work hard to make sure you do not steal or break or hurt. It seems impossible. This is what I think of when my seventh-grade history teacher says, Manifest Destiny.

-Read more of "Ceelie" by Bryce Bortree of Susquehanna University