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Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Best American Short Stories.
A Premonition: Recollected
MANY years later, Mor will think back to her vision of two gunmen, whom she will not remember murdered her brothers, and she will see the gunmen in the night, in the snow, huddled at the base of a mulberry tree, at the end of a pathway, waiting for two orbs of light, orbs like spirits, like twin souls, floating through dark and snow, falling snow, and she will see the cold mist of their breaths, the frost collecting at the tips of the strands of their black beards, and she will see their chapped lips, their gentle eyes watering, and for a moment or two she will wonder why the gunmen in her vision won’t go home and huddle in the warmth of an old blanket sewn, perhaps, by a long-forgotten mother, just a girl when she married, a child, kidnapped and beaten and forced into the bedroom of her husband, made to conceive two sons she could never wholly love, before dying in the thousandth bombing of a benevolent American invasion, her boys left behind to be raised by a war that will inevitably lead them to the mouth of an alley in the heart of Logar, and Mor will see their eyes seeing the headlights of her brothers’ Corolla tumbling down upon clay and ice and shadow, and she will see the gunmen step out from under the cover of ancient branches into snowfall, into halos of light obscuring the faces of innocent men destined to be martyred for crimes they could never imagine, and she will see the tips of their fingers, already bitten by frost, inch toward the warmth of the trigger.
They must have been so cold, she will think to herself, having forgotten all else.
From https://www.saaganthology.com/article/a-premonition%3B-recollected
Torsa Ghosal is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her short fiction has won prizes from Berkeley Fiction Review, The Brooklyn Review, and is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. Her essays and translation have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle, and she was named runner up for the Jules Chametzky Translation Prize. She is an associate professor of English at California State University, Sacramento.
Excerpt from "Camp City"
"Your friend shows you photos of trees cloaked in spiderwebs when you go on a smoking break. You are among the lucky men who have landed jobs this summer, repairing the boundary fence that separates Camp City from the rest of Nadia district.
Between taking drags on your beedi, you pinch the screen of your friend’s phone to enlarge the photo. The spiderwebs are unbroken, enormous, like the nets your neighbors cast in the Churni river to catch fish. Only here, the nets have caught trees. Dense crowns smothered in thick mesh bring back the stifling nights of childhood, when three generations of your family lay on the dirt floor under one mosquito net. Your grandmother used to snore beside you. The pungent odor of mustard oil coming from her hair remains stuck in your nose, though she is long gone."
Upcoming Events |
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2024 | |
9.14 | Jamil Jan Kochai and Torsa Ghosal |
10.12 | Lawrence R. Smith and Dave Boles |
11.9 | Joshua McKinney and Susan Kelly-DeWitt |
12.14 | Judie Rae and Judy Crowe |
PAST EVENTS
2024
August 17 Alice Templeton and Christina Lloyd
July VOICES 2024 Reading D. R. Wagner Memorial Issue
June 8 Sally Ashton and Cami DuMay
May 11 Rick Robbins and William O' Daly
April 13 Luisa Giulianetti and Terri Dawn Kent with Frank Gioia
March 16 Danny Romero and Nancy Aidé Gonzalez St. Clair
February 24 Frank Gioia and Beverly Parayno
January 13 Dan Rounds and Richard Lopez
February 24 Frank Gioia and Beverly Parayno
March 16 Danny Romero and Nancy Gonzalez St. Clair
2023
December 16 Matthew Cooperman and Aby Kaupang
December 9 Molly Fisk and Tricia Caspers
November 11 Paul Aponte and JoAnn Anglin
October 14 Gail Entrekin and Stewart Florsheim
Septermber 30 Camille Norton and Stella Beratlis
September 9 Mary Mackey and Joshua McKinney
August 12 Judie Rae and Ensemble
July 22 D.R. Wagner and Dave Boles
June 10 Terry Ehret, John Johnson and Susan Cohen
May 20 Lois P. Jones and William O' Daly
April 29 Elizabeth Robinson, Randy Prunty and Alexandra Mattraw
April 22 Tim Kahl and Eugene Berson
March 25 Alice Pettway and Lara Gularte
March 11 Bill Gainer and Todd Boyd
February 11 Rooja Mohassessy and Tamer Mostafa
January 14 Brad Buchanan and Gary Kruse
2022
December 10 Jeff Knorr and Jeanine Stevens
November 12 Linda Jackson Collins and Kim Kralowec
October 29 Yuyutsu Sharma, Katy Brown and Allegra Silberstein
October 15 S'more Poetry & Song at The California Railroad Museum
October 8 Lara Gularte and Dianna Henning
September 10 Linda Scheller and Gary Thomas
August 12 Emmanuel Sigauke and Aeisha Jones
July 21 Paco Marquez
July 9 Catherine French and Lisa Dominguez Abraham
June 11 Stan Zumbiel and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
June 5 Poetry Picnic in McKinley Park
May 14 Jon Davis and Greg Glazner
April 27 Doug Rice, Jamil Jan Kochai, Tristan Beach
April 9, 2022 Zia Torabi and Bob Stanley
March 26, 2022 Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Albert Garcia
Mar 17, 2022 Bin Ramke (a Discussion with Joshua McKinney)
Dec. 4, 2021 Four for the Quarter: O' Daly, Halebsky, Straight Out Scribes
Sept. 25, 2021 Four for the Quarter: McKinney, Knorr, Levine, Gourdine
July 24, 2021 Evan MyQuest and Lelania Fowler
July 10, 2021 Sue Daly and Lara Gularte
June 26, 2021 Bill Pieper and Julie Woodside
June 19, 2021 D. R. Wagner reads from DISTANT LIGHTS in Sacramento
June 12, 2021 Jeff Ewing book release for Wind Apples
May 27, 2021 Lucille Lang Day Literary Lectures: Native American Poetry: Traditional and Contemporary Visions and Themes
May 13, 2021 Jennifer Sweeney [Literary Lectures] To Remain in Perhaps: A Deeper Look at the Lyric Poem
May 7, 2021 Natasha Sajé and Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas
April 24, 2021 D.R. Wagner Live in Locke book release reading for DISTANT LIGHTS
April 22, 2021 Literary Lectures with Maxine Chernoff
April 16, 2021 Jennifer and Chad Sweeney
February 25, 2021 Steve Cirrone: Shakespeare as Science Fiction
February 11, 2021 Bob Stanley: The Poetry of Carolyn Forché
January 28, 2021 Karma Waltonen speaks about Margaret Atwood
January 14, 2021 Frank Stanford: A Talk by John Amen, Greg Brownderville, & John Erwin
2020
November 31, 2020 MALDEF Reading